Why defiling pigs’ heads is FAR too tame for today’s Oxford toffs
After THAT story about the PM, the jaw-dropping debauchery of the Piers Gaveston Society’s modern sybarites
A SIGHT for sore eyes could be observed outside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford shortly after 7pm on Wednesday, June 24 this year. Gathered on the pavement, waiting for a fleet of coaches, stood no fewer than 300 students in fancy dress outfits that had supposedly been inspired by The Roses Of Heliogabalus — a 19th-century Dutch oil painting that depicts a Roman orgy.
Some wore togas with nothing underneath, while others dressed as scantily clad centurions carrying leather whips in place of swords. One young man sported a red velvet cape along with a vast floral headpiece a foot high, made from pink and white roses.
Many members of this clique, both male and female and with an average age of around 20, wore fishnet tights, brightly coloured bodices, and almost nothing else.
They included a selection of girls with cut-glass accents who, seemingly oblivious to the fact it was broad daylight, milled around in PVC hot-pants, see-through brassieres and leather dog collars.
‘It felt a bit like everyone was going on a school trip, except half the people waiting for the bus were wearing lingerie and S&M kit,’ is how one female guest, an English student, recalls it.
‘Also, not very many school trips get specifically organised so that people can take illegal drugs and have casual sex.’
Each of them had paid £90 to attend one of the most notoriously debauched events in Oxford University’s social calendar: the annual summer party of a secretive dining club called the Piers Gaveston Society.
Founded in 1977, and named after the purported gay lover of King Edward II, the Society boasts just a dozen full-time members at any one time. Most are former public school boys of a bohemian persuasion.
Famous alumni over the years have ranged from the actor Hugh Grant to billionaire financier Nat Rothschild, the society conman Darius Guppy, and many more besides.
At their regular formal dinners over the past three decades, Piers Gaveston insiders have worn either black tie or effeminate fancy dress and called each other by such assumed titles as ‘Lord High Spanker’ and ‘The High Priest of Pain’.
They’ve also drunk to hideous excess, indulged in homosexual horseplay and generally lived up to their Latin motto: ‘ Fane non memini ne audisse unum alterum ita dilixisse,’ which roughly translates as: ‘Truly, none remember hearing of a man enjoying another so much.’
Then, with the end of each summer’s exams, has come the Society’s main event.
It sees every Piers Gaveston member invite between 20 and 30 liberally minded friends to a clandestine, all-night bash, traditionally held in the grounds of a stately home or country estate.
Though each party is different, they all share a common purpose: to allow freshfaced Oxford students to drink, dance, take class-A drugs, and indulge in casual sex in conditions of utmost secrecy.
‘Participants are whisked away by coach to a field in the middle of nowhere and promised lots of sex, music, free drink and illicit substances,’ is how a 2003 guide to Oxford’s social calendar put it.
‘ Cross- dressing is as likely to feature as speed-laced jelly. It’s part-bacchanal, part-orgy and the rules are simple — there are none.’
Piers Gaveston parties have been attended by many young students who went on to achieve prominence in industry, the media, finance, law and politics.
They range from Nigella Lawson and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop to actresses Liz Hurley and Emily Mortimer — and Tom Parker Bowles, stepson of Prince Charles.
While not all these former guests have admitted to (or been accused of indulging in) immoral or illegal behaviour, their celebrity status has been enough to ensure the Piers Gaveston Society’s enduring notoriety among the metropolitan chattering classes.
This week, however, this once-secretive dining club suddenly found itself more widely known than ever before.
In fact, it became an international talking point.
To blame was an extraordinary claim — aired in Lord Ashcroft’s new biography of David Cameron — that the future Prime Minister not only ‘ got involved’ with the Society while at Oxford in the late Eighties, but also ‘ took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony’, at one of its events, ‘involving a dead pig’.
The book, serialised by the Mail this week, claimed that a ‘distinguished Oxford contemporary’ had watched the young Mr Cameron ‘insert a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth’ during the incident.
What is more, it added, this individual ‘claimed to have seen photographic evidence of this disgusting ritual’.
It should, at this stage, be pointed out that Lord Ashcroft’s claim with regard to the pig has been vigorously disputed by Downing Street sources.
Although the story has dominated the news, the supposed photograph that would prove his guilt has yet to materialise. For the Prime Minister’s reputation, it is, perhaps, just as well.
Indeed, take a long, hard look at the Piers Gaveston Society — and its history — and you could be forgiven for concluding that an obscene initiation ritual involving a farmyard animal is one of the organisation’s least appalling traditions.
Consider, f or example, t he organisation’s famous summer party. While it doubtless sounds like a fabulous night out to some young undergraduates — made all the more exotic by the Latin mottos and references to art and classics on the Society’s literature — the reality of the occasion, I have discovered, is rather less edifying.
Invitations to this year’s event — held in a Cotswold field owned by a scion of a brewing dynasty — carried a quotation from the Marquis de Sade: ‘Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannises.’
In keeping with this theme, guests were escorted on arrival into a large marquee containing a bar, red suede sofas and glass-topped coffee tables — designed, they were told, to aid drug-taking.
They were greeted by one of the Society’s 12 members — an old boy of Marlborough College, the £34,000-ayear boarding school once attended by the Duchess of Cambridge.
‘ He was standing on a table, welcoming everyone to the party,’ recalls the English student.
‘Then all of a sudden, two men got on their knees in front of him, lifted up his toga and began performing a sex act while he was still speaking.
‘There must have been 60 or 70 people in the room and most of them were pretty shocked. You could hear some of them saying: “Oh my God!”
‘It brought home the reality of what we’d actually signed up for.’
After this welcome, revellers explored the rural party venue, which consisted of four marquees.
Aside from the drinks tent, there was a rave tent, which boasted strobe lighting and a DJ playing dance music, and the VIP tent, which contained a lavishly decorated lounge for Society members and their special guests.
The f ourth tent was slightly removed from the others. ‘It was completely empty,’ recalls a 21-yearold male law student who attended.
‘We were told that it was where people could go if they didn’t want to be in public. It was described, quite simply, as the sex tent.’
In some nearby woods, meanwhile, was a clearing littered with carpets, rugs and cushions and lit by candles. In the centre were naked fire-eaters and burlesque dancers and a large man who organisers had invited to be the party’s ‘official’ drug dealer.
‘He was selling two products: cocaine and MDMA powder,’ adds the law student. ‘ People began buying and taking quite silly amounts, snorting huge lines of powder openly from the tables, f rom the f l oor and f rom each other’s bodies.
‘A friend of mine spoke to the security guys. They are trusted to turn a blind eye to all the drugs and keep it completely secret.
‘In fact, if a nybody gets dangerously drunk or overdoses, they drive them 20 minutes away before calling the police.’
Quite how this dovetails with ensuring the health and safety of attendees is anyone’s guess.
But vast quantities of drugs certainly help loosen inhibitions —
‘They snorted powder off each other’s bodies’
‘One marquee was described as the sex tent’ ‘It got wild thanks to all the drugs and booze’
indeed, within a few hours, the party had degenerated into what one guest describes as ‘essentially, a mass orgy.’
He recalls: ‘People began having sex with complete strangers. It got progressively wilder, thanks to the social lubricant of alcohol and all the drugs in the world.
‘In the tents there were whole piles of people, writhing around on top of each other.
‘The next day, a male friend of mine admitted to having sex with 27 different people.’
Outside, things were barely different. ‘By the early hours of the morning, the sex tent was full and you could hardly move without tripping over groups of boys and girls fumbling, hallucinating and j ust drifting around,’ r ecalls another guest.
‘I saw couples pouring bags of drugs into each other’s mouths during sex, girls being led around by nipple clamps, completely naked. It just went on and on.
‘Eventually, coaches turned up at about 5am to take people home. But mine was delayed by a load of posh girls who kept saying that they’d “lost Finbar’s ketamine” which was “wrapped up in a copy of the Daily Telegraph”.
‘They refused to let the driver leave before they’d found it.’
All of which was, if nothing else, squarely in keeping with the Piers Gaveston’s upper-class tradition.
One of the Society’s original founders was Valentine Guinness, a brewing heir whose father was Lord Moyne and whose mother was Blackshirts political leader Oswald Mosley’s former wife Diana Mitford.
It was initially conceived as a vehicle for helping mal e undergraduates to hook up with their female peers.
‘The idea was to throw these really high camp fancy-dress parties to get all the girls to dress in very little,’ Guinness later recalled. ‘ Even though it pretended to be very camp, it was really heterosexual.’ From the outset, the Society had six principle members, known as ‘masters’, who assumed titles such as Poker, Dispenser and (more recently) Britney Tears.
Each master has a ‘ minion’ — a younger student — who moves up in rank once he graduates. In the meantime, they are supposed to pick up tips on party organising.
They are almost always male, though a few years ago the Society ‘tapped up’, or elected, its first female member: an undergraduate called Jess Ruben.
Though initially unknown outside of Oxbridge circles, the wider public became aware of the Piers Gaveston Society in 1983, when a young photographer called Dafydd Jones won a prestigious prize for a collection of striking black- and-white images of xford dining clubs.
It included several shots of the young Hugh Grant wearing a leopardskin vest and hotpants at a Gaveston Society ball at the Park Lane hotel in 1983. Also there was Nigella Lawson.
‘ Piers Gaveston now has a reputation for being debauched, but at the time its events were quite civilised,’ Jones now recalls.
‘There was never any music, it was instead a lot of excited, young university students in fancy dress.
‘There was no open sex or anything like that, and while people did get quite drunk, they stayed pretty respectable.’
The Society’s first brush with notoriety was not, as it happened, until the summer of 1986, when its high- profile member Count Gottfried von Bismarck — the 22-year- old great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Prussia’s famous Iron Chancellor — awoke one morning to find the body of a female student in his room at Christ Church.
She was Olivia Channon, a 22year- old socialite whose father, Paul, was a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet.
A post- mortem examination revealed that she had choked on her own vomit, having overdosed on heroin.
Newspaper coverage of the scandal was illustrated with pictures of Gottfried — who would die of an overdose in 2007 — dressed as a nun at a Piers Gaveston party.
It also included group photos with his close university friend Viscount Althorp [now Earl Spencer] the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Ov e r the ensuing years (coincidentally, the period David Cameron was at Oxford) the Society remained below the radar.
But by the early Nineties, its increasingly lavish events had once more become a fixture of the gossip columns.
In 1993, for example, the Evening Standard reported that ‘200 giddy youths — many of them brandishing such necessary accessories as bullwhips and chains’ had attended its summer party at Sir Francis Dashwood’s West Wycombe Estate.
Guests included Toby Rowland, son of the entrepreneur Tiny, who was wearing a studded dog collar and a skirt, wrote the newspaper.
As to the party? ‘ It’s a cross between the Bacchic orgies of ancient Greece and a Caracas brothel,’ its correspondent reported, adding that: ‘Toby helped entertain a ripe young woman teasingly clad in leopardskin hotpants.’
These days, Rowland is a wellknown technology entrepreneur who co- founded the firm that invented the hugely successful Candy Crush smartphone game.
The following year, the Evening Standard reported that ‘ Lord Rothschild’s boy Nat led the way’ at the bash, ‘giving an exemplary performance as the High Priest of Pain, in so doing delighting Emily Mortimer [ daughter of Rumpole author John, and now a Hollywood actress]’.
Today, Rothschild is a billionaire famed for being thrashed with birch twigs while sharing a sauna with the t hen EU commissioner Lord Mandelson during a 2005 trip to Russia. Perhaps he got the idea from one of the Gaveston bashes.
Other guests during the mid-Nineties included the future Tory MP Rory Stewart.
In 1998, meanwhile, the event was infiltrated by two undercover reporters from the News of the World. ‘Depraved, drunk, some half-naked, others squeezed into rubber bondage gear, many drugged to the eyeballs — the nation’s future leaders showed their true colours,’ read its report, describing ‘an orgy of kinky sex’ fuelled by ‘cocaine, ecstasy and booze’.
At the turn of the century, tickets for the event cost £30. Today, it’s three times as much.
Guests this year were required to wire £90 to an unnamed organiser’s bank account in order to secure a place at the party.
In recent years, money from ticket sales has been spent securing the services of a troupe of burlesque dancers from Torture Garden — a London nightspot that dubs itself ‘the world’s leading fetish club’.
It has also helped ensure evermore lavish decoration to marquees. To this end, a recent Piers Gaveston party had the theme ‘banquet of chestnuts’, after an ancient Roman feast.
‘The whole venue, including paths leading to the marquees, was decorated with severed pigs’ heads,’ says one of the hired staff who helped to set up.
‘Some were on spikes, others just left on the ground.
‘Given this week’s events I must stress, however, that I never saw a si ngle guest doing anything unmentionable to one of those pigs’ heads.’
In this, if nothing else, the gilded youths who attend this most debauched of annual events appear to be less adventurous than their illustrious forebears.