Walter Bradford Woodgate

As a fresh-faced Brasenose fresher, he appeared as Lady Barbara in the College play, partook liberally of the wine and four kinds of punch at dinner afterwards, woke in his petticoats, and attended chapel with the rouge still on his cheeks.

A larger than life character, he once wagered he could walk the fifty-seven miles[1] from Stones Chop House in London's Panton Street (near Leicester Square) to Brasenose in time for breakfast.

"[5] So he and his friends made Vincent's selective ("a magic number – 100 – to give prestige") and offered beer, tea, and coffee, all for free lest the proctors intervene were drinks "for sale".

He loathed the Union, which he felt made only a pretence at selectivity, and finally he gathered forty of his friends and rented rooms at 90, High Street, above Vincent's, the printer's and publisher's shop.

Smoking was also allowed, again in contrast to the Union, and dogs were admitted to the clubroom, presumably to accommodate Woodgate's fox terrier, Jenny, a notorious shredder of trouser legs.

[citation needed] As well as providing the rowing coverage in Vanity Fair for most of the years there was any to speak of, Woodgate had several books published: He contributed to The Field for half a century, frequently "produc[ing] the leading article in a curious but flexible English, which was quite unmistakable.

"[7] Woodgate's writing attests to his clerical family background, classical Greek and Latin schooling, years of lawyering, and an unsuppressable urge to tell stories, laced with legalisms and couplets from Horace.

He could, wrote T. A. Cook, who rowed for Oxford in 1889 with Vanity Fair's Guy Nickalls, "write anything from a curate's sermon to a leading article on the Torts of Landlords or a racy description of a prize fight and a sculling match.