Pitt Club

The University Pitt Club, popularly referred to as the Pitt Club, the UPC, or merely as Club, is a private members' club. Membership is open only to male students at the University of Cambridge.HistoryThe 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 intended 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 among 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'.