Words: Kassia St. Clair
This article has been taken from The Boat Race 2026 Souvenir Race Programme. Access the digital version for free.
The provocative French artist Yves Klein was on to something when he claimed that “Blue has no dimensions”. “All the other colours”, he continued, “bring with them associations of concrete, material, tangible ideas.” He is far from the only one to believe this colour has an unknowable quality about it. While today it is often seen as trustworthy, the hue of uniforms and banks, this has not always been the case. For the Romans it was the colour of unchartered territory and barbarians. William Wordsworth connected cerulean with divinity, while for Wassily Kandinsky blue was the colour of “abstraction and immateriality”. All this seems apt when discussing the mysterious origins of Oxford and Cambridge’s blues, since they too, are somewhat obscure, emerging, as it were, rather out of the blue.
The beginnings of sporting rivalry
One thing we do know for sure is that Charles Wordsworth, the nephew of great poet already mentioned, was definitely implicated. He was an Oxford man. A Christ Church man, to be more precise. He was also a great sporting talent and a lover of organised fun. In June 1827 he arranged a two-day cricket match at Lords between Oxford and Cambridge, personally bowling out seven Cambridge batsman. At this contest, both teams wore white.
Flushed with success, Wordsworth arranged a ‘varsity’ boat race two years later, to be held on June 10th 1829 over the two-and-a-quarter miles from Hambleden Lock to Henley Bridge on the Thames. Since Christ Church fielded the majority of the rowers, they decided — according to his memoirs published seven decades later — to take the dark blue college guernsey as the model for the team’s uniform. Cambridge, meanwhile, wore white with scarlet or “hunting pink” ties or sashes in honour of their captain, a member of the Lady Margaret Boat Club of St John’s college. (Their team’s fiery red jackets, incidentally, are believed to be the origin of the word ‘blazer’.) Oxford, according to a report published days later in the Times, “won easily, to the dismay of their opponents and their friends.”
Cambridge Blue
Cambridge’s pale blue-green is believed to have appeared seven years later on June 17 1836 at the second, longer boat race, thanks to a last-minute trip to a Lambeth haberdasher to secure some coloured ribbon to tie to their boat’s bows. Stories about the chosen shade being tributes to either Eton or Caius colleges are doubtful. Not only do these accounts crop up decades after the fact, neither institution seem to have been associated with pale blue at the time of the race. Some degree of enigma, therefore, remains.
True Blue
One aspect of the selection of twin blues by the Oxford and Cambridge teams that may have amused contemporaries, but is rather lost today, is that blue was considered a decidedly feminine hue in opposition to reds and pinks. The Virgin Mary, the model for Christian womanhood, had been depicted using ultramarine, a vibrant, expensive blue pigment, since the 1400s. Red and its paler pink variants, meanwhile, were linked with military uniforms, fox hunting, blood, passion, lust and anger. In 1893 the New York Times asserted that you should “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl”, and as late as 1918 blue was described as “more delicate and dainty”, while pink was the “more decided and stronger colour”.
If ultramarine was responsible for blue’s feminine aspect, another colourant had a hand in turning the tide. This was indigo, a dye made from a rather pretty pink-bloomed shrub called the Indigofera tinctoria. These dyes have been around for millennia. A state robe buried with Tutankhamun in 1323BC was indigo. A tiny Babylonian clay tablet, held at the British Museum and dating to around 500BC, holds instructions for dyeing wool blue using indigo and traces of indigo cloth have been found in archaeological sites from Peru to Indonesia via Mali. Although the dyeing process is rather fiddly, it is very potent and the resulting colour can be both deep and extraordinarily light-fast for a natural dye. Indigo trade was big business, growing during the seventeen, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of the industrial revolution, imperial expansion and the slave trade. By the time a synthetic equivalent was brought to market in 1897, blue cloth was entrenched in the public consciousness as the colour of the working man. Mao’s suit, French bleu de travail, naval uniforms and Levi’s all owe their hue to this dyestuff.
How much of all this filtered down to the strapping young Oxford and Cambridge students on that fateful June day in 1836 is debatable. The truth is, they had their hands rather full at the time. Neither team, according to reports, were able rowers — “bad” was the word used by contemporaries. Perhaps it is best, considering the near-mythical acclaim that sporting blues have gained in the 190 years since, to draw an obscuring veil over such details. When it comes to blues, a little bit of mystery is perhaps no bad thing after all.