As long as there was an unusual object between yourself and the piste not normally to be found in a ski resort, you could enter. Fellini-inspired surrealist gatherings included ironing boards, coffins and sculptures on skis, on which these blue-blooded renegades would ride with parachutes to help with the really steep bits. One of the highlights of the ‘season of danger’ was their regular assault on the Alps. He’d ring me at 11pm and say to meet him at Beachy Head at dawn.” There was never much notice given, when it came to David. A young Nigella Lawson played croquet from a sedan chair supported by four members of the club. “I first met David Kirke at a Piers Gaveston party at Oxford, and then went to see the gang in action at the Gloucestershire home of the Dutch ambassador. Photographer Dafydd Jones recorded their jaw-dropping activities. This was twenty years before Jackass and energy drinks companies licensed such tomfoolery. Membership, which included Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, swelled throughout the 1980s as the Dangerous Sports Club attempted BASE jumping in top hats and tailcoats, hang-gliding off mounts Olympus and Kilimanjaro, taking the Cresta Run in shopping trollies, and skateboarding during the running of the bulls. He was a mixture of Biggles and Jean-Paul Sartre,” says Lord Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, ex-DSC and now a top lawyer in Beverly Hills. The abiding principal on all these outings, Kirke says, was “one-third recklessness of innocence, tempered with two-thirds recklessness of contempt.” The Falstaffian Kirke and his merry young men spent that afternoon in a police cell dreaming up more audacious stunts, and things escalated quickly over 80 white-knuckle capers in more than 40 countries that broke limbs as well as laws. Thus began the legend of the DSC, and a thorn in the side of constabularies around the globe. Testing it first wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous.” As Kirke, now 75 and the eldest of the group, notes: “We were called the Dangerous Sports Club. One might say he was mad, as were the three other ex-public schoolboys who jumped down after him, home-made cords connecting them to the bridge by untested elastic. He swung his legs over the railing and dove head-first towards the River Avon, 80 metres below. The first student to take the plunge had a scarf over his bearded face and was clutching a bottle of champagne. They were about to invent bungee jumping. Calling themselves the Dangerous Sports Club, they had prepared with a night of partying and assembled atop the bridge well past the prescribed hour. Morning dress.įorty years ago, a group of Oxford University post-graduates were about to make history. April Fool’s Day, 1979 Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol. The printed invitations had already been posted, so there could be no chickening out. Jumping off a bridge attached to untested elastic, riding down a mountain on a grand piano and crossing the English Channel suspended from a helium-filled kangaroo all sound like insane pastimes, but they’re all in a day’s work for the Dangerous Sports Club, reports Adam Hay-Nicholls
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