The extraordinary life of madcap maverick David Kirke, the world’s first bungee jumper

He was an oddball intellectual and founder of the Dangerous Sports Club, cheating death as he hurtled down Mont Blanc on a grand piano or threw himself off the Golden Gate bridge with the flimsiest of ropes (and often prodigiously inebriated). Harry Mount recalls the life of the naughty schoolboy who never grew up

David Kirke before a bungee jump from Bristol’s Clifton suspension bridge (Adrian Sherratt/Shutterstock)

In 78 years of wild, danger-addicted life, David Kirke cheated death hundreds of times.

A pioneer bungee jumper, he preferred to jump with a bottle of champagne in his hand – without checking the rope first. He leapt off Cheddar Gorge, hang-glided off Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Olympus and hurtled down the Alps – on a grand piano or sitting at a Louis XIV dinner table.

How astonishing, then, that Kirke has just died, peacefully, in bed in his Oxford flat – not dangling at the end of a bungee rope or at the bottom of a ski slope.