Did Exeter College Boat Club Invent the Tie?

At the Tuft’s college boathouse, I spotted a book - “Rowing Blazers” by Jack Carlson. Naturally, having spent the past year rowing for Exeter College Boat Club (ECBC) at Oxford (and experiencing many of the traditions which go on there including blazers) I was interested. I found the Exeter College page: Wow! We invented the tie??? I had never heard of this before. Asking my friends on the team, they had also never heard this story. Digging a little deeper, the ECBC Wikipedia page supports this idea:

The first known use of a tie in club colours was by members of Exeter College eight. In 1880, they took the ribbons off their boaters and tied them around their necks as a way to identify with their college.[9]

Ok, and what is this source? A wayback machine record of a silk tie designer’s article on the history of formal wear. It says:

In 1880, the rowing club at Oxford University’s Exeter College One men’s club, invented the first school tie by removing their ribbon hat bands from their boater hats and tying them, four-in-hand. When they ordered a set of ties, with the colours from their hatbands, they had created the modern school tie. School, club, and athletic ties appeared in abundance. Some schools had different ties for various grades, levels of achievement, and for graduates.

There is probably a grain of truth here, so I wanted to dig deeper. Deep research time. This returned more sources in support of ECBC’s invention of the first college or club tie. The tie as an element of fashion had existed, but ECBC rowers appear to have been the first to use a tie in their colors as a marker of identity. Further sources supporting this claim are an Oxford Student article about the Bear Inn (where there are ties on the ceiling), ECBC’s own website, and two more pages on the history of neckware.

Now I wonder how these sources are related. If all but one of them blindly copied the one, then my confidence in this idea should not be strong. But if these sources are independent in that they do not copy each other but place one of many trickled-down paths from history onto the Internet, then my confidene is strong. By default, I do believe this is true because of Occam’s razor.