Bullingdon Club

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The Bullingdon Club is a socially exclusive student dining society at Oxford University, without any permanent rooms, famous for its members' wealth and destructive binges. Membership is by invitation only, and prohibitively expensive for most.

The Bullingdon Club was founded over 150 years ago, originally as a hunting and cricket club, as the club's crest shows [1]. It now exists primarily as a dining club with a vestige of hunting in the support of the point to point. The club traditionally meets for an annual breakfast at the Bullingdon point to point, and a club dinner, as well as smaller initiation dinners, before which the rooms of new members are wrecked.

Members traditionally dress for their annual dinner in specially made tailcoats in royal blue with ivory silk lapel facings, brass monogrammed buttons, and a mustard waistcoat.

Previous members have included Alan Clark MP, Boris Johnson MP, David Dimbleby, Darius Guppy, leader of the opposition David Cameron MP and the 7th Marquess of Bath.

The Bullingdon is satirised 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. The director of the TV series certainly did, as Anthony Andrews who played the part of Lord Sebastian Flyte and his group were all dressed in the famous Bullingdon tails.

[edit] External links

• Oxford hellraisers politely trash a pub, Daily Telegraph, Richard Alleyne, 3 December 2004