"Where eagles daren't"
Ben Fenton
Watching members of the Dangerous Sports Club relax by running along a St Moritz bar-top, then diving into a large plastic dustbin filled with iced water, it occured to me I was probably not membership material after all.
Earlier that day in 1982, a group of us who drove from Oxford to the Swiss Alps, with a punt strapped to the top of our Land Rover, had steered our vessel down a 600 yard black slalom slope in a little over a minute. Other members of the DSC made the same trip in equally unlikely ways - on a lavatory fitted with skis, a baby grand piano, a rowing eight, a kitchen chair. The last of these vehicles, piloted by an Old Etonian called Hugo, won the "race" by recording a time of just over 17 seconds.
As Hugo and his chums emerged dripping from the plastic dustbin that evening, I realised that the difference between us was that I had not been able to eradicate from my mind a simple question - why am I doing this? If you ask yourself that when you are poised to slide down an ice-wall on a loo or throw yourself off the Clifton bridge attached to an elasticated rope, you should not be there.
St Moritz was my only appearance as a member, albeit an associate member, of the Dangerous Sports Club. Now, of course, everyone is at it. Bungee-jumping has become a commercial activity. People hurtle down ski slopes on items resembling ironing boards and even MP's can aspire to paraplegia by hurling themselves off mountains.
And now Lembit Opik, a Liberal Democrat MP has been unfortunate enough to suffer face and abdomen injuries after a paraglide went wrong. Paragliding is the bastard son of parachuting and hang-gliding.. Its enthusiasts launch themselves into thermal currents off cliffs with nothing but a piece of silk between them and oblivion.
Its a relatively new method of suicide manque, but it would have been eschewed by my DSC contemporaries as rather dated. To them, the point of doing really dangerous things was to be the first. The inaugural "event" of the DSC was announced on a gilded invitation sent to a small group of friends. It read simply "Tea. Rockall. Black tie." Everybody invited made it to the top of that inhospitable Atlantic islet to take part in Rockall's first tea party......."
[ N.B. The full account will be in David Kirke's forthcoming book, but just to set the record straight, it was far from the DSC's inaugural event, invitations had the black edge of funeral cards, and it was a cocktail party with dancing, supper and a parking problem designed to be reasonably distant from London. Many of those invited found excuses not to go, which lead to a club hobby of occasionally posting invitations to those who ought to know better for the amusement of their excuses. Ben Fenton continues with a fundamental point most people miss).
........The DSC was the first to bungee jump,
(incidentally the word is spelt "bungy" and all the information we have read so far on the internet about the origins and use of this word is inaccurate, and again, all will be explained in David's book including other "firsts")
the first to hang-glide off Kilimanjaro and Olympus, the first to ski downhill on a Louis XV dining suite and the first, not surprisingly, to cross the Channel in the pouch of an inflateable kangaroo. Its members trod in the footsteps of well-educated and threateningly affluent young Britons of another era - those who transformed skiing from everyday transport for Alpine farmers into a breakneck leisure pursuit and who, when that too became dull, built the Cresta Run in pursuit of speed.
But even more than its predecessors, the DSC belonged to a point in history when the bulk of geographical exploration had either been done, or was now open only to those who could rely on government cheque books. Both poles had been reached , the sound barrier breached, Everest climbed and the Moon walked on. Challenges were to be found only in the exploitation of odd avenues. Extremes of speed cost money, but anyone can be the first to jump off a bridge with an elastic rope.
The DSC had taken a small logical step beyond a "because it is there" approach to human endeavour, to a "because no one else has done it" school of adventure. Perhaps this gives a hint to the psychology of this kind of behaviour. The Dangerous Sportsmen and their forebears were largely, though not exclusively, the products of Englsih public (private) schools and Oxford.
Whatever else this kind of education had done, it had not undermined their self confidence. To a man they had about them the air of Invincibles, and they took part in their japes with blind enthusiasm because none suffered for a second the dread that he might die as a result.
The emblem of the DSC, a wheelchair, gave a respectful nod in the direction of Fate, but then again it was not a coffin. The DSC cocked a snook at death and simultaneously what one of the club's founders called "the boredom of everyday life" - you and me, in other words.As the development of technology has made hang-gliding and bungee-jumping safer, so the daredevilry of the DSC has become more accessible to others and duller to its inventors. But areas of lunacy still exist , where only a few can assert themselves by fiddling on the edge of disaster. Paragliding is one. Perish the thought that an MP would consider himself better than the rest of us, but when you are soaring with eagles, the world below can seem terrifyingly small."
Dave Turnbull, Mr. & Mrs. Hugo Simpson-Wells, and Ben Fenton going down the ski slope on a punt. Dangerous Sports Club ski race. St. Moritz. 1983. |
Mike Fitzroy diving into an ice bucket. Hotel bar in St. Moritz the night before the Dangerous Sports Club Ski race. 1985. |
More photographs of the Dangerous Sports Club.
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