PETER JACKSON

EXACTLY 150 years ago last Thursday, Oxford beat Cambridge in the inaugural Varsity match under the captaincy of a teenager who would have been accorded superstar status in today’s celebrity-driven society.
Charles Bulpett, from Chertsey in Surrey, became a man of many parts: a barrister, traveller, big-game hunter, explorer, war correspondent and county cricketer. Somewhere in the midst of managing all that, he proved himself a man way beyond his time.
To what extent, if any, he had been influenced by a trans-Atlantic contemporary, the prototype American promoter,...