Bullingdon Club
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Bullingdon Club is a socially-exclusive student dining society based at Christ Church, Oxford, famous for its members' wealth and destructive binges.
The club was founded about a hundred years ago. Previous members have included the seventh Alan Clark MP, Boris Johnson MP, David Dimbleby, Darius Guppy and the Marquess of Bath. Members traditionally dress for dinner in white tie, including specially-made tailcoats with royal blue satin lapel facings.
The Bullingdon is satirised (as are similar student dining societies) in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall (1928), where it has a pivotal role in the plot: the mild-mannered hero gets the blame for the "Bollinger Club"'s destructive rampage through his college and is sent down (expelled).
Tom Driberg claimed that the description of the Bollinger Club was a "mild account of the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in Christ Church. Such a profusion of glass I never saw until the height of the Blitz. On such nights, any undergraduate who was believed to have "artistic" talents was an automatic target." (Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).
No doubt Waugh also had the Bullingdon in mind in the meeting of the two principal characters in Brideshead Revisited, when after a drunken society dinner Sebastian Flyte vomits through the window of Charles Ryder's college room.
External links
- Cherwell Online (http://www.cherwell.org/?id=422) An Oxford student magazine reviews riotous Oxbridge dining and drinking societies
- Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/03/nsesh03.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/03/ixhome.html) A recent (December 2004) Bullingdon rampage
