You didn’t really join the Dangerous Sports Club; it was more a loose affiliation of people at Oxford University who enjoyed doing silly, slightly illegal things. They invented bungee jumping, with the world’s first jump off the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol on 1 April 1979. And they famously held a cocktail party on the island of Rockall. The first thing I got involved in was an attempt to do something with balloons at Beachy Head – I’ve forgotten what. I didn’t do anything dangerous until my first bungee jump, off a crane at a county fair in Winchester.
One of the most fun times we had was our first skiing event at St Moritz. I cooked up an idea with a DSC member, Tommy Leigh-Pemberton: to go down the Matterhorn on bicycles attached to skis, with parachutes on our backs, which we’d engage on the steeper bits.
But the club’s founder, David Kirke, wanted to expand it into an event with all sorts of things on skis. The most memorable was a rowing eight. I’d hired the boat from my college club for £25, with a £75 deposit – the chap knew he wasn’t going to get it back. It was mounted on skis, and stood three feet off the ground: eight rowers and me, the cox. It didn’t get far before it turned over, but I righted it, jumped back in and made it to the bottom of the slope, travelling backwards. We also went down seated at a grand piano; I had seen Elton John in concert and spent the evening working out how I could attach skis to a piano’s legs.
This photograph was taken at a DSC tea party held at the Gloucestershire home of the Dutch ambassador Robbert Fack; his twin sons, Jerome and Jack, were good friends. By our standards, it was pretty tame, although we did catapult people across the lawn in a wheelchair, using a bungee rope strung between trees. Nigella Lawson is playing croquet; her boyfriend at the time was Hubie Gibbs, who is next to me at the back.
We always wore formal dress, because it added to the spectacle. And we had quite a riotous time. But there was a distance between us and other Oxford clubs, such as Piers Gaveston and the Bullingdon: our people never overlapped. We were once referred to as “renegade bluebloods”, and I suppose most of us were from public schools (I went to Eton) but almost nobody was 100% British; I’m half Australian.
I was studying engineering at Oriel College, and the appeal of the club for me was dreaming up stunts that were beautiful, challenging and theoretically possible. We never tested anything, so the calculations I did beforehand were key. It was a formative experience: under those circumstances, there is huge pressure on you to keep a cool head when your gut instinct says you’re going to die. So you work everything out, and check everything before you set out. I did get scared, but I never thought I’d get hurt.
After I left university, I designed and built racing cars, mostly as a way of improving the efficiency of engines. But my passion has always been the environment, and I now build cars which run on hydrogen fuel cells. I don’t miss the adrenaline of those days, because it was never about that for me; it was about pushing boundaries a bit further. I guess I’m still doing that.
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