The Dangerous Sports Club: An archive of manuscripts and books
KIRKE, David.
Various . From late 1970s.
Description:
A small collection of books and manuscripts belonging to David Kirke, the founder of The Dangerous Sports Club (DSC). Starting with a bungee jump on April Fool's Day 1979, the DSC went on, over the next decade or so, to embark on high profile, hazardous acts such as skiing down a mountain on a grand piano (an attempt to do the same with a double-decker London bus was banned), hang-gliding from active volcanoes and early BASE jumping. The collection is as follows:
1. Notebook (196x128mm). Bound in quarter leatherette and red cloth. 316pp of manuscript. The contents of the book have become detached from the cover but this was David Kirke's principal notebook and so was heavily used. The front free endpaper describes it as the "Aviation notebook" and under Kirke's address in Oxford is written "Large Reward for Return". The notebook has a large number of names, addresses and telephone numbers. These are from across the world as Kirke plotted his global adventures and tend towards the rather grand: there are couple of princesses, a dissolute Marquess (Jamie Blandford), James Hunt and plenty of smart addresses plus some very dangerous contacts indeed, not least Jimmy Savile listed with his Stoke Mandeville Hospital phone number.
But the real interest of this book is Kirke's extensive notes for his dangerous sports projects. There are long entries about the Himalayas and clearly something was planned involving aeroplanes but we can find no record of a completed event. There are diagrams and sketches by Kirke including some sort of balloon and a catapult (based on a medieval trebuchet) for launching people into the air. This dates the book to around 1988 when the catapult idea was conceived for a (never made) Japanese television show. However, the invention eventually led to tragedy when, in November 2002, at an event run by an offshoot of the DSC, an Oxford undergraduate was killed when the mechanism misfired. By then the DSC's great days were behind it, but this accident seemed to mark the end of a culture of risk and danger and the beginnings of a new age of caution, health and safety.
2. Notebook (178x110mm) bound in red cloth with white label on front cover on which is hand-written History of the Dangerous Sports Club: Agreements. 24pp of manuscript (the rest of the book is blank). The first entry dated headed Minute Book. Dangerous Sports Club Film Co. and then sets out the minutes of a meeting on Monday June 8th [1981] which established the "Film Company" to publicise the DSC and arrange for the making and distributing of films and television programmes about the Club's activities. The last entry is dated December 1982 by which time it has become clear that the Film Company had disintegrated amidst personality clashes and financial chaos. There seems to have been much talk about television rights and raising money for film projects but in the end the largest sum paid out was to their lawyers.
3. Notebook (178x130mm) bound in green corduroy cloth. 50pp of manuscript. It is undated but, with its references to email addresses and websites, is from this century and certainly postdates the DSC heyday as it appears to deal mainly with the day to day running of a property. However, there are little DSC asides by Kirke such as the observation that "the only saloon worth drinking in is the last chance one".
4. WARHOL, Andy. Andy Warhol's Exposures. London: Hutchinson. 1979. pp[256]. Inscribed on title page, "To the dangerous sportsclub love Andy". There are two quick heartshaped sketches on the same page. Beneath the title is written "(But probably the only book in my whole collection I would call vulgar. D(avid) K(irke)". Black cloth and original illustrated dustjacket in plastic cover. This extensively illustrated book is Andy Warhol's hymn to the New York 1970s beau monde and their spiritual home, the nightclub Studio 54. The link between Warhol and the DSC was Tim Hunt, one of the Club's founders, who later became an agent for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
5. LYSTER, Martin. The Strange Adventures of the Dangerous Sports Club. London: The Do-Not Press. 1997. pp164 [10]. Paperback from David Kirke's collection and with Kirke's marginal annotations. These are essentially a series of crosses in pen or pencil. At the end of each chapter he counts up the crosses and then writes (for example) "33 errors". Each cross is an "error" and, helpfully, Kirke tells us that there are 401 errors and a further seven in the opening twenty line profile of Lyster. Kirke (who seems to have made enemies easily) was doubtless aggrieved that Lyster had got in first with his book. Kirke had a contract for a book from Penguin but he never delivered and so Lyster's is the only book length account of the DSC.
6. LAVIOLETTE, Patrick. Extreme Landscapes of Leisure. Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport. London: Routledge. 2016. Paperback. pp. xx [2], 204. Inscribed on the half title "Dear Captain K... And Professor Marsh bien sur. Happy reading, writing and so on. Much love Paddy xoxo". Although ranging widely on the subject of hazardous sports and adventure tourism, this academic book contains a chapter on the DSC and takes, as its front cover a now famous photograph of a man dressed in top hat and tails, holding a bottle of champagne and jumping off Clifton Suspension Bridge. This was David Kirke who, was making, on 1st April 1979, the first modern (and western) bungee jump. The clothes were crucial. With hindsight, the DSC looks like one of the last hoorahs for a type of English madcap adventure. Smartly dressed and expensively educated (the DSC was formed by a group of public school Oxford undergraduates) young men charging off, not to the colonial jungle, but to far-off mountain tops before throwing themselves off. With no empire to run, the sons of empire had to invent their own moral spaces to colonise. Also crucial was the choice of the Clifton Bridge for their first adventure. Well known as a UK suicide spot, throwing oneself off the Suspension Bridge is an act of desperation. And there was a dark, satirical, side to Kirke's antics: by doing the seemingly impossible, he was also saying the impossible, commenting on a world that was becoming tamer, safer and more constricted before his eyes. But there was also an element of anarchic performance art in Kirke's DSC. We see this in the machinations over filming the Club's activities and it is no surprise that Warhol and the DSC should have been linked (however tenuously). Although the DSC's taste for danger has fallen out of fashion, Kirke's strange relationship with fame (he claimed he didn't want publicity but for a while he seemed to go everywhere with a film crew) seems very modern. He would have been an Insta sensation. The pose of the DSC may have been reactionary but, in truth, they were very avant-garde reactionaries.
Description:
A small collection of books and manuscripts belonging to David Kirke, the founder of The Dangerous Sports Club (DSC). Starting with a bungee jump on April Fool's Day 1979, the DSC went on, over the next decade or so, to embark on high profile, hazardous acts such as skiing down a mountain on a grand piano (an attempt to do the same with a double-decker London bus was banned), hang-gliding from active volcanoes and early BASE jumping. The collection is as follows:
1. Notebook (196x128mm). Bound in quarter leatherette and red cloth. 316pp of manuscript. The contents of the book have become detached from the cover but this was David Kirke's principal notebook and so was heavily used. The front free endpaper describes it as the "Aviation notebook" and under Kirke's address in Oxford is written "Large Reward for Return". The notebook has a large number of names, addresses and telephone numbers. These are from across the world as Kirke plotted his global adventures and tend towards the rather grand: there are couple of princesses, a dissolute Marquess (Jamie Blandford), James Hunt and plenty of smart addresses plus some very dangerous contacts indeed, not least Jimmy Savile listed with his Stoke Mandeville Hospital phone number.
But the real interest of this book is Kirke's extensive notes for his dangerous sports projects. There are long entries about the Himalayas and clearly something was planned involving aeroplanes but we can find no record of a completed event. There are diagrams and sketches by Kirke including some sort of balloon and a catapult (based on a medieval trebuchet) for launching people into the air. This dates the book to around 1988 when the catapult idea was conceived for a (never made) Japanese television show. However, the invention eventually led to tragedy when, in November 2002, at an event run by an offshoot of the DSC, an Oxford undergraduate was killed when the mechanism misfired. By then the DSC's great days were behind it, but this accident seemed to mark the end of a culture of risk and danger and the beginnings of a new age of caution, health and safety.
2. Notebook (178x110mm) bound in red cloth with white label on front cover on which is hand-written History of the Dangerous Sports Club: Agreements. 24pp of manuscript (the rest of the book is blank). The first entry dated headed Minute Book. Dangerous Sports Club Film Co. and then sets out the minutes of a meeting on Monday June 8th [1981] which established the "Film Company" to publicise the DSC and arrange for the making and distributing of films and television programmes about the Club's activities. The last entry is dated December 1982 by which time it has become clear that the Film Company had disintegrated amidst personality clashes and financial chaos. There seems to have been much talk about television rights and raising money for film projects but in the end the largest sum paid out was to their lawyers.
3. Notebook (178x130mm) bound in green corduroy cloth. 50pp of manuscript. It is undated but, with its references to email addresses and websites, is from this century and certainly postdates the DSC heyday as it appears to deal mainly with the day to day running of a property. However, there are little DSC asides by Kirke such as the observation that "the only saloon worth drinking in is the last chance one".
4. WARHOL, Andy. Andy Warhol's Exposures. London: Hutchinson. 1979. pp[256]. Inscribed on title page, "To the dangerous sportsclub love Andy". There are two quick heartshaped sketches on the same page. Beneath the title is written "(But probably the only book in my whole collection I would call vulgar. D(avid) K(irke)". Black cloth and original illustrated dustjacket in plastic cover. This extensively illustrated book is Andy Warhol's hymn to the New York 1970s beau monde and their spiritual home, the nightclub Studio 54. The link between Warhol and the DSC was Tim Hunt, one of the Club's founders, who later became an agent for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
5. LYSTER, Martin. The Strange Adventures of the Dangerous Sports Club. London: The Do-Not Press. 1997. pp164 [10]. Paperback from David Kirke's collection and with Kirke's marginal annotations. These are essentially a series of crosses in pen or pencil. At the end of each chapter he counts up the crosses and then writes (for example) "33 errors". Each cross is an "error" and, helpfully, Kirke tells us that there are 401 errors and a further seven in the opening twenty line profile of Lyster. Kirke (who seems to have made enemies easily) was doubtless aggrieved that Lyster had got in first with his book. Kirke had a contract for a book from Penguin but he never delivered and so Lyster's is the only book length account of the DSC.
6. LAVIOLETTE, Patrick. Extreme Landscapes of Leisure. Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport. London: Routledge. 2016. Paperback. pp. xx [2], 204. Inscribed on the half title "Dear Captain K... And Professor Marsh bien sur. Happy reading, writing and so on. Much love Paddy xoxo". Although ranging widely on the subject of hazardous sports and adventure tourism, this academic book contains a chapter on the DSC and takes, as its front cover a now famous photograph of a man dressed in top hat and tails, holding a bottle of champagne and jumping off Clifton Suspension Bridge. This was David Kirke who, was making, on 1st April 1979, the first modern (and western) bungee jump. The clothes were crucial. With hindsight, the DSC looks like one of the last hoorahs for a type of English madcap adventure. Smartly dressed and expensively educated (the DSC was formed by a group of public school Oxford undergraduates) young men charging off, not to the colonial jungle, but to far-off mountain tops before throwing themselves off. With no empire to run, the sons of empire had to invent their own moral spaces to colonise. Also crucial was the choice of the Clifton Bridge for their first adventure. Well known as a UK suicide spot, throwing oneself off the Suspension Bridge is an act of desperation. And there was a dark, satirical, side to Kirke's antics: by doing the seemingly impossible, he was also saying the impossible, commenting on a world that was becoming tamer, safer and more constricted before his eyes. But there was also an element of anarchic performance art in Kirke's DSC. We see this in the machinations over filming the Club's activities and it is no surprise that Warhol and the DSC should have been linked (however tenuously). Although the DSC's taste for danger has fallen out of fashion, Kirke's strange relationship with fame (he claimed he didn't want publicity but for a while he seemed to go everywhere with a film crew) seems very modern. He would have been an Insta sensation. The pose of the DSC may have been reactionary but, in truth, they were very avant-garde reactionaries.