Following correspondence between the two clubs, the Cambridge Review announced on December 1, 1880 that: “… an Inter-University Cross-Country run will be held on Dec. 3rd, the preliminary arrangements having all been satisfactorily settled between the rival clubs. We may state amongst the more important regulations, that the length of the course fixed on is about eight miles, and that the competitors will be five in number. This year the run will be held at Oxford, on the date above mentioned.” December was chosen so the athletes could rest and recuperate before track season.

From there a fixed format was chosen. Five runners per team to score became the established norm, and venues alternated every year between the two universities. Eventually two changes became part of the event’s legacy: the first was the eventual acceptance by the Oxford University Athletic Club to “invest” in the sport of cross-country in the autumn and winter months with their best athletes, and the second was the adoption of a neutral course to run the contest, as a few hiccups and inconsistencies plagued the visiting teams any time the event was held away from familiar territory.

Cambridge and Oxford decided on Wimbledon Common, at Roehampton, the venue used by the oldest cross-country club in England, the Thames Hare and Hounds. Using a modified 12km route (7.5 miles), the race started at the King’s Head Inn, on the road, before breaking into the moors and trails on the common proper. The building itself — an essential backdrop to the varsity match — was described in Athletics and Football as “…a quaint old wooden-built inn, squatted behind a great wych elm, covered with creepers, and in the middle of real open country…” a more modern take described it as such:

The first time I climbed the narrow wooden staircase that led to the dressing room of the Thames Hare and Hounds it was like stepping back 100 years in time. A steamy, half-lit, big-beamed room was full of men, some of them incredibly old it seemed, scraping mud from their legs and clambering into Victorian hip baths. In one corner, two enormous cauldrons bubbled and steamed, and from them a boy attendant drew huge enamel jugs full of boiling water which he ladled into the baths. The floor was littered with an array of muddy studded shoes and discarded clay-caked socks, and the walls were adorned with fading photographs of men running, their wire-thin legs covered with shorts to the knees, or striking poses in groups, 19th century style, all whiskered and straight-backed for the serious business of photography.

The description for the course gave an inside look at what to expect: “One of the very best…There is very little road, plenty of good stiff slope, plough of the heaviest, a brook of fearsome depth (it nearly drowned the Cambridge crack some years ago) and a glorious two miles to finish up with over Wimbledon Common.”

In America, the sport of cross-country running was just beginning to catch on in the Ivy League. Yale and Harvard experimented with hare-and-hounds in the 1870s, the same decade that those universities and eight others formed the IC4A (the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletics of America), which governed national championships for collegiate sports in those days.

Intercollegiate varsity cross-country matches, like those between Oxford and Cambridge, did not occur until Cornell and Penn raced each other (casually) in the 1890s. At that point the sport was still very loosely organized, and without much attention; most colleges had informal cross-country meetings in the autumn between rowing and track seasons.

That changed when Cornell team captain Walter Yeatman began to organize a cross-country sanctioning body. His successor, Cornell captain Arthur Sweet, made it happen. With the blessing of the Cornell athletic government, Sweet wrote to Penn, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard. A conference convened in New York in April, 1899, with all but two colleges taking part. Seven months later the first championship of the Intercollegiate Cross-Country Association took place in Morris Park in New York City. Cornell was the inaugural team champion and winner of 13 of the next 15 editions. In 1907 the IC4A took ownership of the championship.

J.B. Smith, Columbia; J.F. Cregan, Princeton; J.P. Adams, Yale; A.J. Sweet, Cornell; A. Grant, Penn; XC Collegiate Captains photographed in “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News”, 1899.

Three noteworthy changes happened in the orbit of these events. The first was the arrival of a very influential coach for the Cornell University athletics program. The Cornell Alumni News, shared:

John F. Moakley came to Cornell as track coach in the fall of 1899. Before the end of the year they were calling him Jack. That is to say, the members of the track squad referred to him among themselves as Jack, but deferred to him always as Mr. Moakley…Before Jack came to Cornell, such an idea as winning the Intercollegiates was scarcely entertained in Ithaca. The old-established lords of track: Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania and Princeton, were invincible. Tradition was too strong. But in 1901, only a little more than a year after Moakley arrived, Cornell was up among some kind of first four or big four. True, the place was only fourth, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ahead in the order named. Yet in that year Princeton was beaten in a dual meet; and a special intercollegiate meet at the Buffalo Exposition was won handily by Cornell with Chicago, Georgetown, and Pennsylvania in the next three positions. Coincident with his coming there began a marvelous series of victories in cross country, seldom interrupted in the earlier years nor interrupted then for long periods… Mr. Moakley’s success with distance men has been so outstanding that it threatens somewhat to overshadow the success he has had with other specialized forms of track and field competition.

Second, American colleges began to accept invitations for international track and field meetings as it was a more established sport at schools on both sides of the Atlantic. In a meeting between Harvard and Yale against Oxford and Cambridge at the Queen’s Club track in July 1898, Harper’s Weekly devoted a full-page writeup to the occasion:

The international games this afternoon between Oxford and Cambridge and Yale and Harvard were most brilliant and exciting. They will go far towards giving Englishmen a better understanding of American athletics, and should be welcomed as such by all true sportsmen in America; for, though defeated, the manly bearing and courage which the Americans showed in every contest were prominent and praiseworthy, and impressed the vast concourse of Britishers present.

The track, three laps for a mile, was packed to bursting with an “immense throng,” with the Prince of Wales and Duke and Duchess of York in attendance. There was also a swarm of Ivy League fans present, and the flags of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn flew in the grandstand area marked for the American teams. The host Oxford-Cambridge squad had superior athletes and were expected to win. They did, but it was close. They had to claw back after falling behind early, and entered the final event, the three mile run, with the score tied. There, Cambridge’s top runner Workman won by 150 yards and the scene at the finish was “without description.”

Finally, the third change worth noting was the arrival of England’s Alfred Shrubb — “The Little Wonder” — to America. Shrubb was so good that England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales agreed to push back the first international Cross-Country Championship in 1903 to accommodate his schedule.

Shrubb won numerous cross-country titles, locally, nationally, and internationally, but was also a terrific athlete on the track, where he set all amateur records from six to eleven miles, and all professional records from eight to eleven miles. His personal bests of 4:22 for the mile, 14:51 for 5,000-meters and 30:51 for 10,000-meters were all set in a single season in 1904.

An illustration by ST Dadd showing Alfred Shrubb winning the English XC National in 1901.

Between 1908 and 1911, Shrubb was instrumental in improving the Harvard cross-country team as a coach in the fall, as he toured North America in the spring and summer competing professionally. Harvard finally usurped Cornell in 1912 to become collegiate cross-country champions, after Cornell had won 10-straight team titles until that season. But Shrubb’s greatest contribution may have been helping to orchestrate the return of an Oxford relay team to the Penn Relays in 1920, after they became the first team from outside the United States to compete in 1914.

The 1920 Oxford-Cambridge-Cornell Cross Country Championship

At the conclusion of the First World War, the varsity cross-country championship between Cambridge and Oxford was reinstated. Both teams resumed the match over the 7.5 mile course at Wimbledon Common and, despite a six-year hiatus, effectively picked up where they left off, racing in December, 1919. Winner of that varsity match was Evelyn Aubrey Montague: captain of the Oxford squad, President of the Oxford University Athletic Club, and future participant of the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.

Simultaneously, that fall of 1919 also saw Alfred Shrubb become the first paid track and cross-country coach for Oxford, which had been staunchly amateur until that time. Rob Hadgraft wrote about the coach’s contribution the following spring: “Shrubb led a combined Oxford and Cambridge University team across the Atlantic to the famous Penn Relays at Franklin Field, Philadelphia. His star-studded team rewarded their coach by breaking the world record for the 4 x 880 yards relay, an occasion that gave Shrubb as much pleasure as any other in his long career.”

On this trip to the United States, Montague proposed that Oxford and Cambridge might host Cornell for a cross-country race in the winter. After the two English squads visited Cornell following their participation in the Penn Relays, Montague with his counterpart, William Seagrove of Cambridge, put the proposal to a committee vote for approval on the boat ride back to England. The response was positive, although, as Seagrove pointed out to Montague, Cambridge “…could not undertake any financial responsibility.” With an agreement in principle, the two captains formally wrote to Cornell to invite them to a race between a combined Oxbridge team. In June, on receiving Cornell’s acceptance, the two set about finalizing the arrangements.