WRESTLING was big way before the likes of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks stepped into the ring, according to a University of Bol-ton academic.

In 2013, social historian Dr Bob Snape had a paper published in The International Journal of History about the popularity of the sport in Bol-ton - and its ability to attract 20,000-strong audiences - to the then Bolton Stadium in Turton Street on a Monday evenings.

According to Dr Snape, of the Centre for Worktown Studies, it was the cocktail of excessive violence, theatrical ostentation and a challenge to the meaning of “sport” which lay behind the popularity of all-in wrestling.

And he explored how all-in wrestling’s own take on sporting behaviour, which often included flagrant disregard for rules, quickly established it during the 1930s.

Along with speedway, greyhound racing and the cinema, all-in wrestling provided working-class entertainment during a time of long-running economic depression and high unemployment, Dr Snape said.

The new sport was criticised by the media claiming English audiences would not accept its “brutality and excess”.

But its popularity grew rapidly and it became a national television weekly feature from the 1950s.

All-in wrestling challenged perceptions of what sport should be, exploiting its commercial entertainment value with gimmick matches, bizarre personas, women’s wrestling and mud wrestling.

And then there was the antics in the ring, which Dr Snape said included: “Crowd-pleasing horseplay such as the secreting of weapons in costumes, wrestlers emptying buckets of water over each other, tying each other up in the ropes, throwing the referee out of the ring and hit-ting opponents with corner stools.”

Dr Snape concluded that professional wrestling in Britain evolved from a traditional sport to sports-based entertainment due to changes in sport consumption led by industrialisation, urbanisation and the commercialisation of leisure.

He said: “Professional wrestling in the 21st century displays continuities of performance and consumption through sensationalised role-play and the crowds’ transcendence of social constraints.”