PIERS GAVESTON: Secrets of Oxford drinking club where anything goes
EVERYONE knows that there is more to university life than attending lectures and writing essays but the controversial case of Lavinia Woodward, pictured below, has shone a spotlight on a particularly racy event in the best connected Oxford students’ social calendar.
Woodward, 24, who was spared jail on Monday after being found guilty of stabbing her boyfriend with a bread knife while high on alcohol and cocaine, is said to have bragged about her behaviour at the annual bash organised by an exclusive drinking club.
“She went to the notorious Piers Gaveston party and spent the whole night in the orgy tent,” one friend told a newspaper.
So who is this Piers Gaveston and what makes his parties such a hot ticket? It turns out that we’re not talking about some public schoolboy studying geography at Balliol but a decadent14th-century aristocrat who was so garlanded with favours by Edward II that many assumed they were lovers.
Gaveston’s elevation so enraged the country’s most senior noblemen that they pressured the king to send him into exile and when he returned illegally in 1312 they had him killed.
I also stumbled into a sex tent filled with couples, threesomes and more
The society founded in his name was not established until more than 650 years later when the brewery heir Valentine Guinness and a group of like-minded friends set it up one day in 1977.
The society’s membership was initially restricted to just 12 male students who attended regular dinners where the dress code was either black tie or high camp, with some conducted in effeminate fancy dress.
Part of the point was to get plastered on fine wines and throughout the evening members address each other by assumed titles such as Lord High Spanker and the High Priest of Pain.
But the society’s midsummer party, held each year after exam season was over, soon became its main event.
“The idea was to throw these really high camp fancy-dress parties to get all the girls to dress in very little,” Guinness once recalled.
“Even though it pretended to be very camp, it was really heterosexual.”
Each member was entitled to invite 20 to 30 guests and in the early years these events were comparatively staid affairs, held either in a university college or at a central London hotel.
Indeed it was a set of photographs taken by a young snapper called Dafydd Jones at a Piers Gaveston Society ball at the Park Lane Hotel in 1983 that first brought the society to the attention of the public.
His prizewinning portfolio included several shots of a young Hugh Grant wearing a leopardskin vest and hot-pants.
“Piers Gaveston now has a reputation for being debauched but at the time its events were quite civilised,” Jones said.
In recent years, however, they have become a byword for excess.
Tales have emerged of female students being led around in nipple clamps and chains, of sex shows and wild orgies, all washed down with champagne.
In 2010 one party-goer described it as follows: “Guests all came by coaches and at a certain point the driver stopped and members removed all the guests’ phones, keys and ID. They blindfolded everyone and drove to a field where there were three marquees, one with trance music, one playing rock and one with a sign saying ‘Drugs’.”
The class-A narcotics on offer included cocaine, MDMA and LSD. Not surprisingly perhaps the night descended into a huge, ugly orgy. By 2015, there was even a marquee reserved for hanky panky.
“I also stumbled into a sex tent filled with couples, threesomes and more,” says one guest.
“People were pairing off everywhere, and if one couple were making out, boys and girls would join in as they fancied.”
An orgy tent, indeed.