When I sit down to interview second-year Ancient and Modern History student Robin Munday, he happens to be wearing his Swiss Glacier Pistol Club fleece. The Oxford University Pistol Club (OUPC) captain is right to sport his discipline with pride. In his first year at the club, the team beat Cambridge twice: in an official varsity match in Hilary, and an unofficial competition in Switzerland during the long vacation. A few further victories against other university teams in the summer also contributed to OUPC’s “moderate success” last year, he tells me.
This year does not look set to disappoint either. Competition has not started yet, but since an appearance at Freshers’ Fair, the club’s weekly training sessions at Iffley Road Sports Centre are fully booked, and its group chat has over 200 members. “There are some very talented freshers,” Munday tells me. “By and large most have never touched a gun before, but some of them have and are very promising shots.” Munday mentions how some of the new members are getting to grips with trickier techniques, like aiming at targets that collapse when the bullet hits.
The incoming pistol shooters could not be in safer hands. “I’d always grown up around shooting,” Munday says. “The first time I was on a shooting range I was a few weeks old, and I started shooting aged five, with an air pistol I got for Christmas. When I was six, I was on centre-fire, more powerful revolvers.” Munday started competitive shooting at the 2015 Swiss Federal Shooting Festival aged ten, the youngest of around 35,000 competitors. He went on to win the under-21 division of the Swiss Feldstich contest in 2024, and a year later placed third.
His affiliation with OUPC, though, started well before its recent successes. Munday’s parents met at OUPC as undergraduates. His father served as “one of the early captains” after the club broke off from the Rifle Club in 1976, and his mother became captain a few “generations” later. He still owns and occasionally wears a size XS OUPC polo shirt which the club gave his parents as a gift for him.
“For a very long time, I’ve wanted to become captain of the OUPC – I’m proud partly because I’m following in my parents’ footsteps,” Munday tells me. The club’s events lined up for this year will certainly make his tenure an exciting one. “In a couple of weeks there’s the Oxfordshire Rifle Association Gallery Rifle Championships, and, like every year, there’s the Faded Blues.” In part of the latter event, Munday tells me, OUPC alumni compete against current members, who, he adds, “are almost always defeated”. Whatever the case, there cannot be anyone better placed than Munday, with his unique overview of OUPC’s history, to take part.
