William Delafield Arnold was a British author and colonial administrator. He was the fourth son of Thomas Arnold who was the headmaster of Rugby School. His older brothers included the poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the literary scholarTom Arnold. Not long after his father's death during 1842, William, a pupil at Rugby School, was part of a committee of three, Arnold, W. W. Shirley and Frederick Hutchins, that drew up the first written rules for football at Rugby School. These rules were approved in August 1845 and published that same year, becoming the first known published set of rules for any code of football. Later, William served as an educational administrator in Punjab, in British India; as the first director of public instruction in the Punjab, he was responsible for implementing "Halkabandi" in that province. One of his most significant achievements was to enact a law separating church and state in public schools. As a result, Hindu pupils who attended these schools were no longer required to study the Bible or the Koran in public schools. This policy would later influence public schools in England as well. While working in India, William wrote several articles for "Fraser's Magazine," mainly concerning "the India question". During 1853, William published a novel of Anglo-Indianlife, Oakfield; or, Fellowship in the East, which explores commonalities between spiritual traditions of the East and the West, while also predicting the "mutiny" that would occur soon afterward. The main character of Oakfield is dying of disease contracted in India; its author was afflicted with the same disease. William died aged thirty-one, at Gibraltar, on his way home from India. Matthew Arnold's poem "A Southern Night" mourns his early death. William's orphaned children were adopted by his sister Jane Martha and her husband William Edward Forster. His eldest son Edward Penrose Arnold-Forster was a manufacturer in Yorkshire and deputy lieutenant for the West Riding. Another son, Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster, became a Cabinet minister in Arthur Balfour's government.
