What is the Bentham in the Boat Club?

If you don’t know University College London, then the next time you are in central London, you should take a trip to Gower Street. 

For in the college cloisters, hidden within the neo-Classical beauty of the quad, is one of London’s most bizarre and best kept secrets, which is also the inspiration behind the boat club name. 

The strange and distinguished life of one of UCL’s founders, Jeremy Bentham, may be well known to students of philosophy, but few may know about the strange end to his life, and about how he took his convictions to the ultimate extreme, by arranging for his body to be stuffed! 

Bentham believed passionately in the good of humanity, but had little time for religious promises of an after life. So, in his will he left precise insturtions for his body to be preserved, and requested that it should then be seated in a suitably learned position, and put on display. 

Visit Gower Street today and you will find him still sitting up in his chair in the college cloisters, watching UCL students as they occasionally watch him. And every year he is traditionally taken to a meeting of college council, with the minutes recording Jeremy Bentham as ’present but not voting.’ 

There surely can be no better inspiration for an alumni boat club name  – than the brilliant and unique college man who still plays a role in UCL affairs more than 150 years after his death!  

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