Pitt Club - History

History

The Pitt Club was founded in Michaelmas term 1835 and named in honour of William Pitt the Younger, who had been a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge. It was originally founded as a political club, 'to do honour to the name and memory of Mr William Pitt, to uphold in general the political principles for which he stood, and in particular to assist the local party organizations of the town of Cambridge to return worthy, that is to say, Tory, representatives to Parliament and to the Borough Council'. From the start, however, there was a social element as the Club's political events were combined with 'the pleasures of social intercourse at dinner, when party fervour amoung friends, dining in party uniform, might be warmed towards a political incandescence by the speeches to successive toasts'.

Over the course of the Pitt Club's first few decades, the political element diminished whilst the social element increased. By '1868, at the latest, the Pitt Club ceased from all political activity and . . . elected members to its social advantages without any regards whatever to considerations of political party'. Though the Club's raison d'être changed in its early years, it 'was from the first, and has always remained, an undergraduate organization'.

The Pitt Club has been in almost continuous operation since its founding. During the First World War, however, the Club's existence became increasingly tenuous as more Cambridge men joined the forces. It temporarily closed in October 1917 but reopened in early 1919. By 1920, the Club had 'become nearly normal again, "the only real trouble", according to the Minutes, "being the horrible scarcity of whisky'".

The Pitt Club's equivalent Oxford club is the Gridiron Club. Several other universities also have comparable establishments, including the Skull and Bones at Yale, The Ivy Club at Princeton and the Porcellian Club at Harvard. The Pitt Club maintains reciprocal relations with the Oxford and Cambridge Club and Oxford's Gridiron Club.