Cuthbert Ottaway

Cuthbert John Ottaway (19 July 1850 – 2 April 1878), was an English footballer. He was the first captain of the England football team and led his side in the first official international football match.

Representing his university at five different sports – a record that remains unmatched – Ottaway was also a noted cricketer until his retirement shortly before his early death at the age of only 27.

Cuthbert Ottaway was born in Dover, the only child of James Ottaway, a surgeon and former mayor of the town. He was educated at Eton (where he was a King's Scholar) and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he displayed a versatility as a sportsman matched only by his near-contemporary Alfred Lyttelton. Representing his school in the annual cricket match against Harrow, twice victor in the Public Schools' Rackets Doubles Championship, and winning Blues for representing his university at football (1874), cricket (1870–73), racquets (1870–73), athletics (1873) and real tennis (1870–72), Ottaway was – an Oxford newspaper remembered after his death – "a great cricketer... the best amateur racquet player of his time, a capital football player and a fair sprint runner. It has fallen to the lot of few amateur cricketers to attain greater popularity, and his reception on the day when he took his degree at Oxford was something to be remembered."

Ottaway read Classics at Brasenose, and, after going down, trained as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1873. He married, in August 1877, Marion Stinson of Hamilton, Ontario – whom he met, when she was just 13, while touring Canada with an England cricket team – and practised law until his death, in London, as a result of complications from a chill caught in the course of a night's dancing. The precise cause of death remains a matter of speculation. Diabetes ran in the Ottaway family, and this may have increased his susceptibility to respiratory diseases. It is also possible that he had earlier contracted tuberculosis.

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