Welcome back to Sir Rod Eddington

It is always a great delight to be able to give a Dark Blue welcome home to many lifetime Members of the Club, and with Vincent’s buzzing again this year we’ve been very fortunate to see many book in for lunch, a drink at the bar or attending our events.

Having once run the world’s favourite airline, amongst a plethora of business achievements, we were very pleased to welcome back Sir Rod Eddington to the world’s favourite Club for lunch with his wife and friends.

Sir Rod, who visited us during a visit to the UK from his home in Australia, is a former Club President (1977) and played First Class Cricket for Oxford University while completing his DPhil in the Department of Engineering Science.

Staying with the Southern Hemisphere theme, we also had a visit from former Oxford Rugby Union Blue, Julian Malins. Julian was hooker in the Oxford team, captained by former All Black, Chris Laidlaw, that famously beat the touring Springboks in 1969 at Iffley Road in the Club's Centenary Year.

The tour was mired in controversy with the game at one point being considered to be held under armed guard at the United Services Ground.

As Julian recalls in an interview with The Rugby Paper, “We didn’t really expect to win it but we knew we had as good a team as Oxford had had for decades and realised that by half-time we had a real chance.

“It was one of the best games I have ever played and the rest of the team desperately wanted to strike a blow against the Springboks partly because of the misgivings we all had about what that team represented. The Springboks were genuinely shocked by the extent to which we ran them round.”

As a result of the victory, the South Africans presented the team with a Springbok head commemorating their loss to one of Oxford’s finest university sides.