Dinners
The most important, and most notorious, events in the Buller calendar are dinners. Though food is involved, dinner itself is merely a footnote to the club’s wildest evenings. Attendance in the Bullingdon outfit is, of course, mandatory. Typically, a restaurant is booked under a pseudonym, and the club proceeds to drink the bar dry, in some cases take Class A drugs, and then trash the place. Glass is a favourite material for breaking, along with anything made of china. Despite the devastation, the Buller is renowned for paying its large bill along with any damage immediately, and in cash.
In its near-250-years of existence, the Bullingdon has had many such obnoxious evenings. The worst excesses are well-recorded, but even the more low-key dinners must live long in the memory of shuddering patrons faced with near-demolished premises. Among the most famous incidents took place at Christ Church’s Peckwater Quad which, on two occasions in 1894 and 1927, had the lights and each of its 468 windows smashed by the club. The University responded to the hooliganism by forbidding the club from meeting anywhere within 15-miles of the city. Appropriately, one Bullingdon motto is ‘I like the sound of breaking glass’.
On a balmy summer evening, having paid for all the damage to a restaurant, the ’87 class of the Buller decided to pay a visit to a fellow student. Pelting his window with anything that came to hand, and one even scaling a drainpipe to break in, matters swiftly escalated, and a flowerpot was mistakenly sent through the window pane of a restaurant below the student’s accommodation. The room’s frightened occupant called the police, and the jubilant Buller fled the scene. Some were located by police sniffer dogs, whilst two future politicians escaped altogether. Much more on them, later.
The most recent post-prandial calamity of note came in 2005. Unable to find a restaurant in Oxford willing to host their dinner, the Bullingdon managed to dupe the owner of a fifteenth-century inn in the village of Fyfield. Recounting the incident, the landlord gives an insight into the mode of the club: upon being received at the inn, members were astonishingly polite. Having finished their salmon starter, the Bullingdon proceeded to break everything and viciously fight one another. All in all, 17 bottles of champagne were smashed but, true to form, the Buller immediately settled for everything with the landlord.
Nevertheless, the landlord of the White Hart called the police, and four members, including Alexander Fellowes, Princess Diana’s nephew, spent the night in custody, and were fined £80 ($112 at the time of writing). Reflecting on the bizarre events, the landlord also observed that ‘each time I pulled one of them out of the melee they apologised to me and were extremely polite but then jumped right back in… it seemed like some kind of ritual’. This report makes it clear that vandalism is not merely an inevitable consequence of heavy drinking, but a mandatory part of a Bullingdon dinner.
