Bullingdon members ejected from KA
The King’s Arm Pub, where the Bullingdon Club have been officially banned for the last four years
Clients in the King’s Arms had their Sunday afternoon drinking interrupted last week when members of the notorious Bullingdon Club entered the pub and set fire to a picture of their rival organisation, the Stoics, that had hung on the wall.
Members of the exclusive drinking organisation have been banned from the pub for the past four years since they vandalised the small back room known as ‘The Office’, reportedly smashing an antique mirror, ruining floorboards, and smearing HP sauce over one of the walls. The ban was finally imposed after members of the club were caught engaging in sexual intercourse in the pub toilets.
“They are banned from meeting as a group,” the bar manager at the Kings Arm’s, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Oxford Student. “I just kept the same policy that if you’re banned, you’re banned, regardless of who you are, although coming in alone is still allowed.” One eye-witness, who did not wish to be named, was sitting in The Office last Sunday when a group of about five men walked in, flooding the floor with beer.
“They were wearing suits and matching ties, which I recognised as the Bullingdon Club ties, but they looked pretty dishevelled, and utterly drunk,” she said. After sitting at the back table for a few minutes, one of the members stood up and went to remove a picture from the wall, which he removed from the frame and slid into the grate. When the bar staff questioned what they were burning, one of the men is understood to have replied, “It was a racing card; we have just been racing.
However, when it transpired that it was not a racing card, but a picture, the manager was called over and the troupe was asked to leave. Although some members contested this decision, there was no violence, and the group departed without incident. A picture of the Phoenix Common Room also went missing last Tuesday, whilst all pictures of both groups are understood to have been removed from the bar.
The pub manager, although annoyed at the club members’ vandalism, said he would not press charges if he were to discover who was responsible for burning the picture. A King’s Arms barman told this paper, “As much trouble as they have caused us we didn’t want to get them all to get into difficulty.” The pub has recently changed hands, and the new manager suggested the Bullingdon Club tried to take advantage of this switch to overturn the ban.
“When I took over, they went to the assistant manager and asked him whether ‘if they gave him a backhander, would they allow him back in’.” The King’s Arms has this week imposed a new policy of refusing entry after 11pm, in the same week that the pub hit record profit levels, putting them £15,000 above the normal weekly target set by owners Youngs.
However, the manager denies this policy change relates to the Bullingdon episode, or to a spate of difficult incidents involving students, including a group who brought in shop-bought wine after closing time, and another set who played cricket with pint glasses. “This is entirely unrelated to recent events - there are simply too many people coming into the pub,” he said.
The Bullingdon Club is notoriously secretive, and two years ago its members caused extensive damage in the White Hart Inn in Fyfield. They threw glasses, plates and food around the cellar, antagonised waiting staff, and eventually left, offering 500 pounds in notes as a tip. Four of their members were arrested, and The Oxford Student revealed that one of their number was Alexander Fellowes, nephew of Diana, Princess of Wales.
None of the Bullingdon members contacted by The Oxford Student wished to comment.
2nd Mar 2006