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

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.