turday, May 4, 2013
25 Television
20
Crossword
21
Sport
28-32
BULLER, BULLER! Bullingdon Club members hold a banner above Cameron’s polling station in 2010
fortable place in which to be wealthy - almost half of the undergraduates attended a private school - and as the recent Damien Shannon case illustrates, in which he sued the university for not allowing him to take up a place because he could not demonstrate that he had enough money to pay his living costs, an uncomfortable environment in which to be financially challenged. Yet still, to most Oxford students, the Bullingdon remains a mystery. When Posh, Laura Wade’s thinly disguised play about the club, was staged at the Oxford Un-
otwithstanding its es the media and ce to paint Oxford atic Shangri-la ion in 2011, it sold out fast. Oxford students were keen to get a sense of the debauchery, bigotry and destruction that allegedly goes on under their noses but so rarely bubbles to the surface any more. But sometimes it does. In February, an alleged member of the club walked into The Bridge nightclub and, according to the police report, set off “large fireworks”. He was
A load of old Bulls... A potted history of Oxford’s poshest drinking club
Brosi Johnson in his Bullingdon togs in 1987
thrown out of the club and later fined. Just a thoughtless prank? Not really, when you consider the consequences of a similar stunt in Brazil in January, in which 235 people were killed. The police report didn’t name the perpetrator. But the question was raised that had it been a comprehensive-schooled pupil who set off fireworks in a nightclub, endangering the lives of others, would he have been identified faster than the fiery thing took to fizzle out? None of the many nightclub witnesses would go on the record, even anonymously. Several were nervous about the sort of havoc a man who can afford a £3,500 suit might inflict on them, and therefore refused to offer an identification. The Bullingdon code of omertà - protecting each other - still persists. “We all do stupid things when we are young and we should learn the lessons,” is how David Cameron explained his Bullingdon days in 2011 to the BBC’s Evan Davis. The defence sat uncomfortably with the rest of the interview, a forthright attack on the rioters of that summer. What is the difference, Davis wanted to know, between a Bullingdon bash and the riots? “That the rioters were jailed,” Cameron might have answered, “whereas I became prime minister.” Likewise, when presented with his club photograph on Michael Cockerell’s BBC Two
The brat pack: David Cameron (top row, second left) and Boris Johnson (sitting) in 1987 documentary Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, screened last month, the London Mayor described his Bullingdon days as “great fun at the time… or was it? Actually the awful truth about all that business was… the abiding feeling was of deep, deep, deep self-loathing.” The Bullingdon class of 2013 may well include future business leaders and politicians. Members are intelligent, moneyed, well-connected and, crucially, ambitious enough to exploit all those advantages. But the same
is true of most of Oxford’s public-school network, only a minority of whom would ever wish to join the Bullingdon Club. The Bullingdon, notwithstanding its fringe status, gives the media and the public a licence to paint Oxford as an aristocratic Shangri-la. But the university doesn’t do its reputation any favours by drawing almost half its intake from just seven per cent of the country’s schools. The vast majority of students remain happy never to have encountered the Bullingdon
Club. What is a cause for concern is the way Bullingdon myths cripple attempts to improve access and change the university. On a tour of Oxford for state school pupils, a student access officer, Hannah Smith, was asked by a potential Oxbridge applicant from Newcastle whether the Bullingdon still existed. She told them that the club formed a negative aspect of Oxford’s social scene “but you can live life here without ever coming into contact with them”. She’s right. If only people knew.
Legend has it that the Bullingdon was founded in the 1780s as a horseracing and cricket club, comprising 30 chaps with enough cash to bankroll a jolly good meal after a day at the crease. Over the years the purpose of the club increasingly became bibulous roistering, and its membership was always top-notch, as The New York Times explained in 1913: ‘The Bullingdon represents the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the “young bloods” of the university.’ Its reputation for high-jinks doubtless contributed to Queen Mary’s reluctance to allow the future Edward VIII to become a member - he signed up anyway. The club’s golden age was the 1920s, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall, in which members of the Bollinger Club (geddit?) smash the windows of Scone College. The Second World War inevitably diminished the club’s activities, and in 1955 an episode in which 500 windows of Christ Church’s Tom Quad were smashed led to the club being banned within a 15mile radius of Oxford. Bullingdon went into hibernation during the egalitarian 1960s and 1970s, returning to glory in the early 1980s when the perfect storm of Margaret Thatcher, a resurgent City, the publication of the Sloane Ranger Handbook and Brideshead Revisited on TV made it OK to be obnoxious again. This was the era that saw Boris, Dave, George and the gang bashing each other over the head with bottles of vintage wine and rolling toffs down hills in portable loos. They have never been allowed to forget it.
A young Edward VIII