The secret world of gentlemen's clubs
AN allegation about a club losing £500,000 through
embezzlement of accounts sheds rare light on an often forgotten, and very
British, institution
By SIMON EDGE
PUBLISHED: 23:11, Mon, Feb 24, 2014
In their heyday clubs were all male bastions for the very
wealthy Pictured Billy Zane in Titanic In their heyday clubs were all-male
bastions for the very wealthy. Pictured, Billy Zane in 'Titanic' [20TH CENTURY
FOX]
Not long ago a female friend was a guest at a wedding
reception held at Brooks’s, the gentlemen’s club founded in the 18th century by
the Earl of Strathmore, ancestor of the Queen Mother, and his aristocratic
chums. It remains an all-male bastion where women can attend as guests but
can’t be members.
Normally, those ladies who do penetrate the club’s defences
– via a side door, not the main entrance – are provided with lavatory
facilities at the rear of the building. But on this occasion the women guests
were invited to use a gents’ at the front. Some of them were alarmed to see the
father of the groom blundering into their toilet sanctum. Assuming he was un
aware of the temporary change, they gently tried to usher him back out but he
was having none of it. “I’ve been using this lavatory for 50 years,” he roared
with the ferocity of PG Wodehouse’s irascible magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett.
“And I’m not about to stop now.”
The ladies could have screamed for help and had him ejected
but mindful that the old chap was footing the day’s bill, they reasoned it was
better to keep the peace. Thus Sir Watkyn (as we’ll call him) had his way,
nature’s call was answered, and half a century of personal tradition went
uninterrupted. That is pretty much the way things are meant to be in the
genteel clubland of St James’s and Pall Mall.
This world of gruff old coves snoozing in wing chairs after
lunches of dreadful food and excellent claret is familiar to lesser mortals
through Wodehouse’s sparkling comedies featuring aristocratic Bertie Wooster
and his trusty butler Jeeves which we now enjoy on our screens as TV dramas.
These tales were mostly set between the wars, so you might
think that the leather-upholstered watering holes they featured, where
newspapers are ironed, coins are plunged into boiling water to disinfect them
and the waiters are all called by the same name to avoid confusion, are a thing
of that past.
But the allegation that some ne’erdo-well in the finance
department of The East India Club – once the haunt of Prince Albert, Lord
Mountbatten and Lord Randolph Churchill – has transferred more than £500,000
from the club’s online bank account into his own is a reminder that, however
archaic these places may seem, they are very much still with us.
The oldest and
most exclusive is White’s, established as a chocolate house in 1693 by Italian
Francesco Bianco. He anglicised his name to Francis White and a century later
the venue was the unofficial HQ of the Tory Party, vying with the Whigs’ Reform
Club down the road.
Regency dandy Beau Brummell helped seal the reputation of
White’s for high-stakes gambling. In the early 1800s he won £20,000 at cards
from another member in one evening. It was also here that Lord Arlington bet
£3,000 on which of two raindrops would reach the bottom of the club’s famous bow
window first.
Taking over the role previously played by coffee houses, the
clubs tended to unite a group of “gentlemen” – we would nowadays call them the
upper and upper-middle classes – with some aspect in common. Today the
Athenaeum Club still has an intellectual reputation, while the Garrick has a
theatrical and literary bent. Clubs were designed to be used as second homes in
which members could relax, mix with friends, play games, get a meal and
sometimes stay overnight.
Boodle’s was named after its head waiter while Pratt’s takes
its name from William Nathaniel Pratt, steward to the Duke of Beaufort. The
Duke called in at Pratt’s Green Park townhouse with a group of friends one
night and had such a good time he kept coming back.
The clubs tend to charge fees of around £1,000 a year,
although if you’re someone like David Trimble, former First Minister of
Northern Ireland, you can charge the taxpayer via House of Lords’ expenses
(Lord Trimble paid the money back when the story came to light).
They also have a strict code of honour based on discretion.
In 1965 the Duke of Argyll was made to resign from White’s after he wrote
articles in the press about his wife Margaret (although his misdemeanour may
have been a convenient excuse used by fellow members embarrassed by reports of
a scandalous photograph of the duchess).
Clubland famously has its own word for the process whereby
members decide they don’t like the cut of another fellow’s jib. Jeremy Paxman
was “blackballed” from the Garrick on the grounds that he was “rather full of
himself”. It has also emerged that the members of the Athenaeum were horrified
when Jimmy Savile was elected, on the grounds that the tracksuit wearing DJ
“would not be a natural habitué of a club that has counted Sir Winston
Churchill, Lord Palmerston and Lord Curzon as members”. The only reason they
didn’t veto him was because he was nominated by Cardinal Basil Hume, the
Archbishop of Westminster, and Hume would have had to step down if his nominee
was blackballed.
A crucial part of
the traditional clubland ethos was also to provide the peace and quiet offered
by exclusively male companionship. This has proved an embarrassment to
politicians attempting to project themselves as modern figures: David Cameron
quietly resigned from White’s, of which his father Ian was once chairman,
because of its hostility to admitting women members. A long-standing ban
on women as full members of the Carlton Club, the bastion of the Tory
establishment, also proved embarrassing to the party’s leaders. An exception
was made for Margaret Thatcher when she became Tory leader and she was the
Carlton’s only full female member for three decades. The ban was abolished in
2008 and Daily Express columnist Ann Widdecombe became the first female full
member under the new rules.
But hard-core clubmen defend the all-male policy without
embarrassment. Conservative grandee Sir Max Hastings wrote recently: “I have
belonged to Brooks’s for more than 30 years. I do not merely like the place, I
love it. As with so many men of my age and kind, it is a second home. I love
the company of women but I would vote against admitting them because they would
fundamentally change Brooks’s character. It would become just another West End
brasserie.”
Although he insists that he is not a dogmatic social
conservative, Hastings is swimming against the social tide on that one – and
perhaps surprisingly, nobody seems to care that much. My female friend at that
wedding where the host insisted on using the ladies’ loo thought it was all
rather a hoot, taking the view that if it matters so much to the silly old
codgers, they should be allowed to get on with it.
Another way these institutions have defied the fl ow of
history is in the sphere of communications. It has always been the hallmark of
the smartest clubs that they don’t post their names outside – if you’re not
posh enough to know where it is, you’re not posh enough to go. In the age of
the internet, the mark of a really grand gentleman’s club is that it doesn’t
have a website. And in an era where virtually no walk of life is immune from
the mobile phone camera or the unguarded remark on Twitter, the code of
clubland discretion remains impressively unbroken.
As The East India Club chairman wrote to members when
informing them of the latest allegations: “I shall be grateful for the support
and discretion of everyone in avoiding speculative discussion or comment on the
matters, pending the conclusion of our investigations and the criminal
proceedings.” It’s almost unbroken, anyway. I won’t tell you how I got my copy
of that letter. If I did, a poor
member might have to be chucked out.
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