The airline pilot was not hallucinating. There was indeed a giant kangaroo heading straight towards him at 10,000ft. Bulging out of the pouch was David Kirke, who was attempting to navigate the kangaroo (suspended by helium balloons) across the Channel. Kirke gave a solemn salute as the pilot diverted the aircraft to avoid a collision.
The founder of Oxford University’s Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) had originally attracted the public’s intrigue, and experienced one of his many brushes with the law, in April 1979 when he performed the first ever bungee jump from Clifton Suspension Bridge. Kirke had been inspired by television pictures of young men in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu performing a rite of passage that involved jumping off an 80ft platform with vines tied to their legs that would break their fall just before they hit the ground.
He swapped vines and a grass skirt for elasticated rope used to tie down jump jets and a top hat and tails, and leapt off the bridge in Bristol while clutching a bottle of Bollinger. “We hadn’t tested it,” recalled Kirke who named his feat bungee jumping after the old West country word for bouncy. “I was confident though. Alan Weston went on to be head of development at Nasa and told me it was going to be OK.”
Nevertheless his three friends, including Weston and Simon Hunt (younger brother of the Formula One driver James), still needed Kirke to show them the way. Seeing their leader flying back towards them, tails flapping and yelling “whoopee” was their cue. “All of the chaps told me that they waited to see what would happen to me and when I started bouncing up again they all jumped.”
Kirke described the spirit of the DSC as a “fairly easygoing casual recklessness”, but not everyone agreed. The sister of one of Kirke’s fellow jumpers phoned the police the night before and pleaded with them to apprehend the jumpers before their planned leap at 8am. However, the DSC arrived late and hungover, by which time the police had left, suspecting that the whole idea was too far-fetched to be true.
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The constabulary were in attendence by the time Kirke and his associates were hauled back up, charged with a breach of the peace and put behind bars. “They were very good humoured,” recalled Kirke, who added that in the cells they were even reunited with the bottles of wine they had opened to give them Dutch courage before the jump.
Fined £100, Kirke cheerfully told the magistrate that it would all be worth it if he had started a new craze. Press stories about the “human yo-yos” were picked up by AJ Hackett, a New Zealander who would later popularise bungee jumping, get rich in the process and acknowledge the debt he owed to Kirke.
Six months after his first jump, Kirke was flying head first off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and he garnered more headlines in 1980 when his attempt to fly to Paris on a microlight was terminated by a collision with a tree in the garden of a house in Surrey. “I heard a terrible rumpus and then all I saw were these legs in jodhpurs hanging out of my tree,” said Betty Witty of Surrey. “He was very apologetic. He was going to Paris I believe.”
Later that year Kirke did make an unlicensed microlight flight over the French capital while being hotly pursued by a gendarme helicopter. He landed on a farm 30 miles south of Paris that, as luck would have it, was owned by a veteran member of the French Resistance. Jean Labouille was only too happy to hide another Englishman. “He was marvellous. He stowed it [the microlight] in a barn. Everyone in the village kept quiet about it because they knew I would be in trouble with the authorities if they found out,” Kirke said in 1980.
The two stipulations for the succession of DSC stunts that followed over the next decade was a certain insouciance of the English eccentric allied with pure anarchism — if the two were not already one and the same thing.
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An early morning black tie cocktail party was therefore held on the tiny island of Rockall, 190 miles off the Scottish mainland. “It took us five days to get there and to leave we had to haul ourselves from this rock in our dinner jackets,” recalled Kirke, who luckily had the constitution for inebriation in stormy weather on the high seas. “We were so drunk on the way back that we actually set off 180 degrees in the wrong direction towards Newfoundland.”
At the Swiss ski resort of St Moritz the prejudices of some straitlaced locals, who already took a slightly dim view of the English in ski gear, were only entrenched by the sight of a DSC grand piano sliding down the slopes to the sound of a duet by Chopin. It was followed by a carousel horse on skis ridden by a young man in hunting pinks, an Oxford punt, a fully laid table and chairs complete with wine waiter. Kirke brought up the rear in a Sinclair C5 on skis, travelling faster than it ever had done before.
Never one to worry about a joke wearing thin, Kirke also skateboarded in front of the bull at the annual Pamplona fiesta, ate a sit-down meal on the rim of the erupting Soufrière volcano on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, and closer to home raced motorised shopping trollies through the streets of Oxford.
Kirke was hopeless with money and his adventures were often sourced from the pockets of his well-heeled associates. By the end of the Eighties all he had to show for a decade of dangerous escapades were a few bruises, but many DSC members who had since married were firmly instructed by their spouses that further association with their leader’s madcap plans was verboten. Kirke’s luck ran out in 1989 when he broke his spine in three places after being catapulted into the Atlantic from an Irish cliff.
He later claimed that his brain was also addled as a result of the accident, inducing a mania during which he stole a friend’s American Express card, borrowed money on the strength of the DSC’s non-existent assets and embarked on a spree, leaving a trail of unpaid debts.
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Kirke absconded to Spain, and having found out that a certain Detective Constable Sally Bowers was on his trail, sent her a signed copy of The Penguin Book of Liars. Bowers got her man in April 1991 and later that year Kirke was sentenced to nine months in prison for fraudulently running up debts of more than £60,000 by, in the words of the judge, “relying on your skill and connections to get goods and services without the prospect of paying for them” .
His one consolation was that his cell was six down from the one where Oscar Wilde had been incarcerated between 1895 and 1897. Unlike his literary hero, prison did not dent Kirke’s ebullience.
He returned to Oxford after his sentence just as much the tireless, some would say tiresome, maverick and more often than not forgiven for the rare sightings of his wallet in the city’s hostelries. Styling himself rather vaguely as an academic and having run out of contemporaries to sponge off, he became known as a sort of roguish uncle. Undergraduates who came into his purview were wont to get into trouble, but were guaranteed to have lots of fun in the process.
David Anthony Potter was born into a Catholic family in Shawbury, Shropshire, in 1945, the eldest of seven children of Arnold Potter and Fraye St George Kirke.
His father was a maths tutor at Wellington College and as an undergraduate at Cambridge had been a member of the original “Cambridge Night Climbers”, who left miscellaneous items atop the spires of college buildings they had scaled. Remembering his own high-spirited youth, Arnold was not entirely unsympathetic when his son was expelled from Wellington at 16 for a undisclosed misdemeanour and later professed to being “quite amused” by the exploits of the DSC.
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Kirke still managed to win a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to read English and philosophy, by which point he had adopted his mother’s maiden name.
He graduated with the traditional “gentleman’s third” and started working in publishing, editing a poetry journal in London. A more conventional life beckoned until he witnessed the death of a girlfriend, who fell and banged her head while alighting from a bus. Traumatised, Kirke returned to Oxford and became the spiritual leader of an unruly group of undergraduates with whom he formed the Dangerous Sports Club.
Some said that they noticed a mad look in his eye on first meeting him and that they believed he was motivated by a “death wish”, a claim that Kirke himself was to call an “oversimplification”. His family simply described him as “a free spirit who had, and needed, an iron constitution, led from the front and went where many feared to tread”.
Whatever the truth, many who had known and jumped with Kirke were pleasantly surprised to learn that he died peacefully in his bed.
David Kirke, dangerous sports pioneer, was born on September 26, 1945. He died on October 21, 2023, aged 78