The prolific sport historian JA Mangan explains that the process originated in the great public schools, and all the emulators that burst into life during the Victorian era. The 18th century Etons and Harrows were riotous, violent places, and during the Victorian era, a series of reforming headmasters realised that sport could help keep pupils under control. It was an outlet for energy and built community spirit. Athleticism became a cult, and sportsmen were heroes in their little worlds.

When the public schoolboys went up to the ancient universities, they found very similar little worlds, down to the widespread disregard for book-learning, and they brought their games with them. Again, sport could help a college exert control and win prominence (Jesus College, Cambridge, consciously used its rowing process to lure undergraduates), but there was a major problem to be overcome: the schoolboy sportsmen were stymied by the fact that they all played different games.

Rules emerge

The public schools, for instance, each played their own version of football. An Eton man would be shocked when an Old Rugbeian picked up the ball with his hands. Compromise was needed. A famous early attempt to produce a set of football rules took place at Trinity College, Cambridge, attended by Eton, Harrow, Shrewsbury, Winchester and Rugby, but it wasn’t until the formation of the Football Association in London in 1863 that something like the modern game was organised. Melvyn Bragg recently chose the scruffy little book which emerged from "this meeting of a few Victorian Oxbridge graduates in a pub in Lincoln's Inn Fields" as one of the 12 books that shaped the modern world.

Other games also needed agreed rules, and Oxbridge men were prominent in writing them down, even in games that would seem to have little Oxbridge connection. Three Cambridge men, including two who had attended Trinity when the 1848 football meeting took place, were among the four most prominent members of the committee which codified Australian Rules Football in 1859. Australians don’t thank you for pointing this out.

The influence of the two universities went beyond rules-making. The governing bodies of cricket, golf and horse racing all tightened their control during this period, and all prominently featured Oxbridge alumni.

A new era

There were great non-Oxbridge factors in the sporting explosion, including ease of transportation, increase in leisure time and disposable income, and the aspiration of the middle-classes to ape the sport-mad aristocrats.

Some idealists hoped football might help control the working-class, as if they were public schoolboys, but working-class sporting culture often resisted centralisation, and although the FA continued to govern football, money, fans and professionalism took the game beyond Oxbridge control. Oxbridge-run bodies such as the Amateur Athletics Association and Lawn Tennis Association reacted by insisting on amateurism in other games, though this was often a fig leaf at best.

Oxbridge’s main influence was that a collection of youngsters who loved playing games needed the rules that would let them carry on playing each other, and were influential enough to write them and set up organisations to enforce them.