Mr Peabody and I took the Wayback Machine to 1883 and 1890 to find
that DeDion and Daimler both had a primitive form of the running board
to tie the front and rear fenders together while others of the time
had no such feature. It happened to serve as a step to climb up into
(onto) the vehicles so the synergy was there from the beginning.
Fast forwarding to Malvern in 1935, the 4/4 prototype had no running
boards (the trikes prior to that did not either - step over and down,
not up) and the TT 4/4 had cycle fenders on the front. The Wayback
Machine electrics started fizzling (Lucas I suppose) so the first
production versions of the 4/4 couldn't be seen to confirm the running
boards. I'm certain there is SOMEONE out there in the ether that can
adequately answer that.
I suspect since most cars of the period had some tacit form of running
board and the long swoopy fenders looked smashingly rakish without
being an outright racer, the long form was adopted. For Bugatti and
others of the period, the racers usually had cycle fenders while the
tourers usually had long sweeping fenderlines.
My tuppence on the topic.
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