The Gridiron Club (Oxford University)

The Gridiron Club, popularly referred to as the The Grid, is a club open to male and female students at the University of Oxford. In the past the club's membership was solely drawn from major public schools and, although this is no longer technically a criterion for membership, it is still largely true. Members of other clubs, such as The Bullingdon Club, The Piers Gaveston and The Stoics, are usually chosen from among existing Grid members.^[1]

The club was founded in 1884 and, as with other beefsteak clubs of the 18th and 19th centuries, the traditional grilling gridiron is the club's symbol. The gridiron symbol appears on the club tie (white gridirons on an Oxford blue field) and on the sign outside its current premises in The Golden Cross. References have been made to the Gridiron Club in many works, including Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Compton MacKenzie's Sinister Street and Ferdinand Mount's Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes.^[2]

The Gridiron's reciprocal club at the University of Cambridge is the Pitt Club; the club also has reciprocal arrangements with the Travellers Club in London. Comparable societies in the United States include Skull and Bones at Yale and the Porcellian Club at Harvard, Ivy Club at Princeton, Sphinx Society at Dartmouth, and Cap and Skull at Rutgers, as well as Trinity College's Episkopon in Canada.

Notable former members of the club include John le Carré, Alexander, 7th Marquess of Bath, Lord Michael Pratt (a former Secretary of the Grid), Jolyon Coates (President of the Grid 2013-2014, and creator of the Di Motta pizza), and Prime Minister David Cameron (President of the Grid 1987–1988).^[3][4][5]

The Gridiron has a board of trustees, the members of which are usually former members of the club. In addition, there is at least one Senior Member who supervises the running of the club and is invariably a don at the University of Oxford. Day-to-day management is handled by an undergraduate committee consisting of a President, Treasurer, Secretary and a small number of other members 'without portfolio'. During the undergraduate years of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne, the Senior Members of the Grid were the distinguished historians Jeremy Catto of Oriel College and Maurice Keen of Balliol. Sports journalist Sally Jones and Lord Salisbury's daughter Lady Georgiana Campbell both gained notoriety by separately standing for election to the all-male club (Lady Georgiana famously doing so in male clothing).^[6]

References