The Gridiron Club (Oxford University)

The Gridiron Club, popularly called The Grid, is a private members' club open to male and female students[1] at the University of Oxford.

Not to be confused with Gridiron Club.

The club was founded in 1884 and, as with other beefsteak clubs of the 18th and 19th centuries, the traditional grilling gridiron is the club's symbol, which appears on the club tie (white gridirons on an Oxford blue field). References have been made to the Gridiron Club in many works, including Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Compton MacKenzie's Sinister Street and Ferdinand Mount's Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes.[2]

The Gridiron's reciprocal club at the University of Cambridge is the Pitt Club.

Notable former members of the club include John le Carré, Alexander, 7th Marquess of Bath, Lord Michael Pratt (a former Secretary of the Grid), and Prime Minister David Cameron (President of the Grid 1987–1988).[3][4][5]

The name of any prospective member is entered into 'The Book'. Current members may subsequently sign in approval of the proposed. If any current member disapproves of the proposed, they are given the opportunity to 'black ball' with proper justification. Members of other clubs, such as The Bullingdon Club, the Piers Gaveston Society and The Stoics, are usually chosen from among existing Grid members.[6][7]

The Gridiron has a board of trustees, the members of which are usually former members of the club. In addition, there is at least one Senior Member who supervises the running of the club and is invariably a don at the University of Oxford. Day-to-day management is handled by an undergraduate committee consisting of a President, Treasurer, Secretary and a small number of other members 'without portfolio'. During the undergraduate years of members Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne, the Senior Members of the Grid were the distinguished historians Jeremy Catto of Oriel College and Maurice Keen of Balliol. Sports journalist Sally Jones and Lord Salisbury's daughter Lady Georgiana Campbell both gained notoriety by separately standing for election to the then all-male club (Lady Georgiana famously doing so in male clothing).[8]

See also

References
  1. "Homepage". Gridiron Club website. Retrieved 2 February 2020.
  2. Mount, Ferdinand. Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes, The Sunday Times, 27 April 2008
  3. "Behind and Iron Curtain". The Independent. 3 August 1993. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
  4. "Obituary". The Telegraph. 8 September 2007. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
  5. Mount, Harry (30 April 2010). "My Cousin David Cameron". The Evening Standard. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
  6. "Lord Bath, Memoirs". lordbath.co.uk. 1999. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
  7. "A GQ student guide to Oxford University". gq-magazine.co.uk. 2017. Retrieved 12 April 2022.
  8. "The Saturday Profile Viscount Cranborne, Conservative Peer: The last true blue blood". The Independent. 21 November 1998. Archived from the original on 18 June 2022. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
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