Bullingdon Club
The Bullingdon Club is a dining society ( dinner party ) at the University of Oxford , which meets regularly to eat together. The club has no permanent premises and is known for its wealthy members and their excessive drinking . Membership is by invitation only and unaffordable for most students.
As its coat of arms shows, the Bullingdon Club was originally founded as a hunting and cricket club about 150 years ago . One of the events nowadays is a horse race . The club traditionally meets for the annual breakfast and dinner at Bullingdon point to point . Small meals are also held to welcome new members after their rooms have been vandalized.
It is traditional for members to appear at their annual meeting in custom-made midnight blue tails with an ivory silk lapel and brass buttons with an engraved monogram . Underneath they wear a mustard-colored vest, a dress shirt and a light blue bow.
Known members
In addition to David Cameron , British Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016, other well-known British members were also members of this club, such as the future Mayor of London , British Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Boris Johnson , as well as the future Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne . Cameron and Johnson were active there at the same time. Non-British students were also members of the club, according to the later Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski during his studies in Oxford.
reception
The Bullingdon Club plays a central role in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall ( German versions On the Inclined Plane or Decay and Fall ): The decent hero is accused of being responsible for the riot of the Bollinger Club (a satirical representation of the Bullingdon Club) and will therefore be expelled from the university. Allegedly, Waugh's account is grossly understated.
Undoubtedly Waugh had the Bullingdon Club also in mind when he was in his novel Brideshead Revisited ( Brideshead Head described the first meeting of the two protagonists). After a boozy dinner at the club, Sebastian Flyte throws up in the window of Charles Ryder's room. The director of the film also lets the actors of the club members wear the famous Bullingdon tailcoat.
The 2014 film The Riot Club by director Lone Scherfig also deals with an elite group of young aristocratic men - the fictional version of the Bullingdon Club. As in the accompanying theater piece Posh by Laura Wade , the youthful excesses of an Oxford student group escalate in a brutal way.
Web links
- Barney Ronay: Young, rich and drunk , in: The Guardian , May 9, 2008.
- Mark Davies: Just not cricket? , in: Oxford Times , August 20, 2009.
- Christoph Scheuermann: The Chosen , Der Spiegel , No. 42, 2015.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cameron as leader of the Slightly Silly Party , The Telegraph, February 14, 2007
- ↑ Krupp, Kerstin: fun without limits, hate without limits. In: Frankfurter Rundschau of October 9, 2014
- ↑ The Chosen , Der Spiegel 42/2015 , accessed on July 12, 2016
- ↑ The Riot Club - The elite of the hooligans. The time , accessed October 8, 2014 .