Garrick could admit women after barrister U-turns
on club rules
Michael Beloff KC judged in 2011 that reference to
‘he’ excluded women but has now concluded opposite
.jpeg)
Clea
Skopeliti
Sat 16 Sep
2023 18.24 BST
One of
London’s last remaining gentlemen’s clubs, the Garrick, may be edging towards
admitting women after a barrister performed a U-turn on a previous legal
judgment ruling that they were ineligible for membership.
Michael
Beloff KC first concluded that women could not be proposed under the club’s
rules after Joanna Lumley was denied membership in 2011. He ruled then that
although the rules do not explicitly preclude women from joining, they state
that “no candidate shall be eligible unless he be proposed by one member and
seconded by another”.
The use of
the masculine article led Beloff to conclude that the rule could be interpreted
as referring to men only, while he also said the club’s objectives also refer
to “gentlemanly accomplishment and scholarship”.
But the
rule could now be scrapped in the club, which was founded in 1831 and counts
Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Kingsley Amis among its members, after the KC
wrote a new legal opinion, concluding the opposite.
Beloff
prepared a new legal opinion in November last year, the Times reports, stating
that there was “now a cogent argument” that the Law of Property Act 1925 means
“he” and “she” can be used interchangeably in contracts.
“If so,
there is no legal obstacle to the proposal of a woman for membership of the
club by one member, seconded by another; nor, if she obtains the support
required under the rules, any legal obstacle to her admission as a member of
the club,” the newspaper quotes Beloff as writing. He reportedly warned that
the club was “likely to provoke an expensive lawsuit” if it continued to
exclude women from membership.
Although
the opinion was delivered in November, many members only became aware of it
recently, as the committee had not shared the news of Beloff’s revised
judgment, the Times reports. Club members will share their views on women
joining in a survey next month.
Emily
Bendell, the chief executive and founder of a successful underwear brand,
launched legal action against the club in 2020, arguing that its men-only
membership rules are a breach of equality legislation, while Cherie Booth KC
joined a campaign to force the club to admit women the following year.
Members
including Stephen Fry, Damian Lewis and Hugh Bonneville have said they were in
favour of extending membership to women, as has Michael Gove, the former
justice secretary Ken Clarke, and broadcasters Sir Trevor McDonald, Melvyn
Bragg and Jeremy Paxman. Three former Conservative MPs and 11 KCs were among
those who said they would vote to continue to exclude female members.
The club,
which was founded in 1831, last voted on whether to include women in 2015, when
a majority of 50.5% voted in favour of introducing female membership. However,
the introduction of a new rule at the Garrick requires a two-thirds majority.
The Garrick
has been contacted for comment.
The Garrick
Club was founded at a meeting in the Committee Room at Theatre Royal, Drury
Lane, on Wednesday 17 August 1831. Present were James Winston (a former
strolling player, manager and important theatre antiquarian), Samuel James
Arnold (a playwright and theatre manager), Samuel Beazley (an architect and
playwright), General Sir Andrew Barnard (an army officer and hero of the
Napoleonic Wars), and Francis Mills (a timber merchant and railway speculator).
It was decided to write down a number of names in order to invite them to be
original members of the Garrick Club.
The avowed
purpose of the club was to "tend to the regeneration of the
Drama".[2] It was to be a place where “actors and men of refinement could
meet on equal terms” at a time when actors were not generally considered to be
respectable members of society.
The club
was named in honour of the actor David Garrick, whose acting and management at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the previous century, had by the 1830s come to
represent a golden age of British drama. Less than six months later the members
had been recruited and a Club House found and equipped on King Street in Covent
Garden. On 1 February 1832, it was reported that the novelist and journalist
Thomas Gaspey was the first member to enter at 11am, and that “Mr Beazley gave
the first order, (a mutton chop) at ½ past 12.”
The list of
those who took up original membership runs like a Who’s Who of the Green Room
for 1832: actors such as John Braham, Charles Kemble, William Macready, Charles
Mathews and his son Charles James; the playwrights James Planché, Theodore Hook
and Thomas Talfourd; scene-painters including Clarkson Frederick Stanfield and
Thomas Grieve. Even the patron, the Duke of Sussex, had an element of the
theatrical about him, being a well-known mesmerist. To this can be added
numerous Barons, Counts, Dukes, Earls and Lords, soldiers, parliamentarians and
judges.
The
membership would later include Charles Kean, Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm
Tree, Arthur Sullivan, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Wing Pinero, Laurence Olivier and
John Gielgud. From the literary world came writers such as Charles Dickens,
William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne (who on
his death in 1956 bequeathed the club a quarter of the royalties from his
children’s books),and Kingsley Amis. The visual arts has been represented
by painters such as John Everett Millais, Lord Leighton and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.
The club’s
popularity at the beginning of the 1860s created overcrowding of its original
clubhouse. Slum clearance being undertaken just round the corner provided the
opportunity to move into a brand-new purpose-built home on what became known as
Garrick Street. The move was completed in 1864 and the club remains in this
building today.
All new
candidates must be proposed by an existing member before election in a secret
ballot, the original assurance of the committee being “that it would be better
that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should
be admitted”. This exclusive nature of the club was highlighted when reporter
Jeremy Paxman applied to join but was initially blackballed, though he was
later admitted, an experience he shares with Henry Irving who despite being the
first actor to receive a knighthood had himself been blackballed in 1873.
When the
club was founded in 1831 Rule 1 of the Garrick Club Rules and Regulations
called for the "formation of a theatrical Library, with works on
costume". At a General Meeting on 15 October 1831, the barrister John
Adolphus suggested that members should present their duplicate dramatic works
to the club, and that these should go some way towards forming a Library. A
very valuable collection has thus come together over the years, and its special
collections are particularly strong on eighteenth and nineteenth-century
theatre.
James
Winston, the first Secretary and Librarian of the club, was one of the
principal early benefactors and his gifts included minutes from the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane, as well as his own Theatric Tourist. These presentations
formed the nucleus of a Library which now holds well over 10,000 items,
including plays, manuscripts, prints (bound into numerous extra-illustrated
volumes), and many photographs.
