ABSTRACT
It would be tempting to believe that Disraeli’s description of society in Sybil, or The Two Nations might be an account of a world that disappeared in the nineteenth century. However, such a thought is disabused by recently published photographs of some of the undergraduate members of the notorious 200-year-old Bullingdon Club at Oxford, whose £3,000 uniform comprises a tailcoat of dark navy blue with a matching velvet collar and brass monogrammed buttons, a mustard waistcoat and a sky-blue bow tie. The undergraduates depicted in these photographs are the current UK prime minister, David Cameron; chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne; and mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The Club was satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall (1928) as the Bollinger Club whose drunken revels were characterised by ‘the sound of English county families baying for broken glass’. After Club dinners in 1894 and 1927 Bullingdon members smashed almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater Quad at Christ Church, Oxford. However, the effects of social class on an individual’s educational and life chances are far from fictional and even less so humorous.
