David Kirke believed secure sport repressed individuals’s imaginations

It almost didn’t occur. The ladies, on this case two sisters of one of many would-be jumpers, had warned the police, and so they had staked out the bridge. The jumpers themselves, who had partied all evening and trashed a relatively elegant Bristol flat, didn’t really feel completely within the pink both. However the stunt needed to occur, as a result of the invites had been despatched: “April Fools’ Day, 1979, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol. Bungee-jumping at daybreak. Morning gown”.

David Kirke was able to go first. He was older than the others by a decade, closely bearded—although on that day swathed in a shawl, in case his mom recognised him when all of it hit the papers—and founding father of the Harmful Sports activities Membership (DSC) to which all of them belonged. He was due to this fact the chief, although concepts for stunts flowed generously between them as they caroused within the pubs and bars of Oxford. This explicit one got here from a TV documentary about younger males leaping off bamboo platforms in Vanuatu, with solely a vine tied spherical one ankle to interrupt their fall. Why shouldn’t Oxford college students show their manhood in the identical means?

Some intelligent individuals belonged to the DSC, all proud to sport the membership tie of a bloodied silver wheelchair on a black floor. One grew to become a rocket scientist at NASA, one other a Treasury minister. Apparently that they had labored out the false extension curves of the elastic ropes that they had tied to the bridge, 245 ft above the Avon, and felt assured. Their chief by no means bothered with a weight take a look at, on the straightforward precept that, if he did, what he was about to do wouldn’t be harmful. Whoopee! was his solely thought.

So he flung his morning-suited legs over the parapet, and dropped. He fell like a stone, and the wind took his high hat off, and he dropped his bottle of champagne, however he bounced again up; so the opposite three dropped after him. The police nabbed all of them of their jubilant state, and extracted a promise to not do it once more. They did it far and wide. So started a worldwide craze and, in New Zealand, a multi-million-dollar business.

Fame and fortune he dismissed, although. Fortune eluded him anyway, and he by no means held down a correct job; different individuals’s financial institution accounts propped him up, whereas he devoted his life to the pursuit of hazard, literature, crimson wine and the artwork of dropping his pockets when restaurant payments arrived. (“Uncle Dodge”, his pals known as him.) Adventuring was in his blood, with an Alpinist father who educated on the roofs and spires of Cambridge; recklessness was his character. He was pushed, too, by sheer scorn for formal sports activities, so hamstrung by directions that they had been now not enjoyable. In bungee-jumping, there have been no guidelines. It was pure artistry, a fantastic dedication of the physique to air and house. He felt the identical about hang-gliding and microlighting, different brand-new sports activities he might tailor to his wildest ideas, comparable to drifting in a gorilla swimsuit around the Homes of Parliament whereas enjoying the saxophone.

Cluster ballooning was one thing else he pioneered, piloting throughout the Channel in 1986 a large inflatable kangaroo held up by 4 helium balloons. He sat cosily within the pouch as he drifted over to some advantageous vin ordinaire on the opposite aspect. At 10,000 ft, a jumbo jet needed to take motion to keep away from him. As a Occasions editorial remarked, “If [the pilot] hasn’t acquired a everlasting cardiac murmur, a facial tic and a bent to wake screaming from his sleep, airborne kangaroos should be far more widespread over the Channel than most of us had hitherto supposed.” The police fined him £100 for flying with no licence.

Snowboarding was an particularly boring sport, till he utilized Surrealism to it. Every season from 1983 he inspired DSC members to swoosh down the slopes of St Moritz on no matter may do for a conveyance: an ironing board, a grand piano (whereas enjoying a duet), a Louis XV eating suite (with wine waiter), a carousel horse (ridden by himself in full searching pinks), a tandem bike and a totally crewed boat with oars. Federico Fellini was his inspiration. The Swiss authorities put up with the whole lot till the looks of a double-decker London bus.

As the primary bungee-jump confirmed, he appreciated to show stunts into formal events. Not all DSC members had been higher class, however sufficient had been to make it a very good branding machine. Black-tie and tails had been worn, and engraved invites despatched, for a cocktail get together on the rim of an energetic volcano in St Vincent and for an all-night Seaside Boys rave on Rockall, an uninhabitable chunk of granite 300 miles off the Scottish coast, to which that they had sailed of their sensible togs by way of Pressure 9 gales for 5 days. The romantic in him hoped to return at some point with two Wagnerian Heldentenors, one way or the other recording them in opposition to the stormy ocean. The identical romantic nursed a mission to fly on a large inflatable Pegasus from Mount Olympus into Libya, approaching the area the place his nice hero, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, had flown and disappeared. He needed to plan only one extra flying machine.

Steadily the DSC fell sufferer to the middle-ageing of its members, who married and, most of them, acquired grand jobs. He did neither. In his thoughts the membership was nonetheless going sturdy, helped, he informed Vainness Honest mysteriously, by Jesuits in western China. He was nonetheless “an odd little…walkabout spider” in the midst of an excellent net of individuals and the large piles of papers and pictures, stacked in his council flat in Oxford, which had been to be his memoir. His stunts, greater than 80 of them, had by no means been an adrenalin repair. He had finished them as a result of they had been new, enjoyable to look at, and confirmed his contempt for paperwork and the grimness of Thatcherite Britain. They declared a philosophy of absolute freedom to experiment, at private danger. Most individuals thought the DSC was a mad concept. Was it madder to leap off a bridge, or to stay a humdrum life?

Throughout that evening within the cells in Bristol, the police kindly introduced them the half-drunk bottles of wine that they had deserted by the Clifton bridge. It was a pleasant addition to his euphoria. He had dreamed for some time of the way it is perhaps to leap from a bridge and, as a substitute of dying, bounce again up. Now he had finished it, he now not feared assembly the Man Upstairs. He might bounce again. And bungee’s comfortable message was: anybody might. ■