David Kirke, a flamboyant British thrill-seeker who performed – and more importantly, survived – the first modern bungee jump, died on October 21 at his home in Oxford. He was 78.
His death was confirmed by his brother Hugh Potter, who said no cause had been established.
An irrepressible daredevil and prankster, Mr Kirke helped found the Dangerous Sports Club at Oxford University in the late 1970s. He inadvertently led this small group of eccentrics, plucked from the upper echelons of British society, in a historic dive from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, on April 1, 1979.
The inspiration came in part from a rite of passage on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu known as land diving, in which young men jump from tall towers and use vines to break their fall. Mr Kirke chose an elastic rope used by the military to help fighter jets land on aircraft carriers.
“We hadn’t tested it or anything like that,” Mr. Kirke said in a 2019 interview with the news site BristolLive. “We were called the Dangerous Sports Club, and testing it first wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous.”
Dressed in top hat and tails, with a bottle of champagne in hand, Mr. Kirke, nursing a hangover from an all-night party, was the first to take the plunge on that fateful day. The other jumpers – Alan Weston, Tim Hunt and Simon Keeling – “were waiting to see what would happen to me,” Mr Kirke said in a 2019 interview with ITV News. “When I started bouncing again, they all jumped.”
Police immediately arrested the jumpers, charged them with breach of the peace and briefly threw them behind bars before releasing them with a small fine. Prison was hardly a traumatic experience, Mr Kirke told ITV: “They were the only police force I’ve ever known who brought half-empty bottles of red wine, from the party, in a brown paper bag and gave them to us. jail.”
Little did they know that their playful prank would inspire a popular pastime around the world. A video of a dive from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge by members of the club in the 1980s inspired a New Zealander named AJ Hackett to develop controlled methods of bungee jumping (alternately spelled bungy) and build a thriving business that popularized the sport.
Fortune, however, was not the issue for Mr. Kirke, a writer by trade, whose work included writing a newspaper column for a politician. Instead, he would rise to fame with a life of extravagant stunts – each seemingly more bizarre than the last.
David Kirke was born David Antony Christopher Potter on September 26, 1945, in the village of Shropshire, in the West Midlands of England. He was the eldest of seven children of Arnold Potter, a schoolmaster, and Fraye (Kirke) Potter, a concert pianist from an illustrious military family. For reasons unknown, he adopted his mother’s maiden name as his surname while studying at Oxford.
Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Although not strictly upper class by British standards, the Potters led a more than comfortable existence. As Vanity Fair noted in a 2013 editorial: “The family wintered in Switzerland and wintered in France, employed fifteen servants and drove around in a vintage Rolls-Royce – all at the last moment of British history when it was possible to to enjoy such luxury. and are still considered middle class.”
In 1964, Mr Kirke enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied psychology and philosophy. After graduating, he went to work for the publishing house Calder & Boyars in London and edited a poetry magazine.
His life took a tragic turn, his brother says in an email, when his girlfriend was run over and killed by a bus. Mr. Kirke resigned and returned to the city of Oxford, where he encountered a particularly colorful crowd.
The idea for the club came about, Vanity Fair reported, during an adventurous trip with a friend, Edward Hulton, to the Swiss Alps, where they met a British department store scion named Chris Baker, who was into hang gliders. Mr. Kirke persuaded Mr. Baker to let him give the device a spin, and after his exciting flight the men began to muse over drinks about starting a club to explore new daredevil sports.
“What we hated was the way in formal sports all these small, important civilian instructors said, ‘You have to take five-part exams to do this,’” Mr Kirke told the magazine.
Straddling the line between dangerous sports and performance art, his stunts included steering a carousel horse off a ski slope in the Swiss Alps; piloting an inflatable kangaroo suspended from balloons over the English Channel; skateboarding among the running bulls of Pamplona, Spain; and arranging a meal on the edge of an erupting volcano on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent.
While his first jump in Bristol made him famous, Mr Kirke had little time to ponder questions of posterity. As he tapped off the bridge, he told BristolLive: “The main thing that went through my head was ‘Whoooppeee.'”