The English love to get together and sit apart. That explains the private club. The Reform was founded by Whigs. The Carlton is for Conservatives, the Athenaeum is for bishops and antiquarians, the Garrick is for lawyers, actors, and writers, Brooks and Boodles are for aristocrats, the Travellers is for spies, and the Oxford & Cambridge is obvious.
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Seth Thevoz’s London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious is an exuberant, suave, and discreetly indiscreet user’s guide to clubland. The perfect companion to his clubland history Behind Closed Doors (2022), it tells you everything you need to know if you are visiting a club for the first time or using one as a reciprocal member (clubs in different countries accept each other’s members). The first half of the book is a detailed directory. The following two sections, “Club Culture” and “Food and Drink,” brace you for what happens once you’ve made it past the front hall. This is not trivia. It is social history.
The directory divides into ancient and modern and then by character, to casino clubs for gamblers, gastronomical clubs for foodies, astronomical clubs for CEOs, sports clubs — the Wimbledon tennis championships are held at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club — and so on until you reach the Houses of Parliament, with one club each for the Commons and the Lords.
There are club songs (“The shebeen has my socks and shoes/The tavern has my coat and breeches” was a big hit in the early days at Boodle’s), a list of clubs in the movies (the Reform doubled as the fictional club of Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft, The Diogenes, in the 1976 Holmes spin-off The Seven-Per-Cent Solution), a list of red-light conversational turns (“No, I’m not an actual lord, I just put it on my business cards”), and a list of British prime minister’s clubs. Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill belonged to 10 and 16, respectively. Keir Starmer is the first prime minister since 1763 to have no known affiliation. In 2022, a “groping spree” in the Carlton’s bar by an incredibly named member of parliament called Chris Pincher precipitated the fall of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.
There were about 400 clubs in London in the high Victorian Era, almost all men-only. The twofold origins of clubs reflect the paradoxes of English sociability. There were dining and drinking clubs for the new urban professions, and then there were homes-from-home for the aristocracy who ran the country. The model for the former is The Club, meeting weekly at the Turk’s Head in Soho from 1764, with members including Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon. The model for the latter remains White’s in St. James’s, the world’s oldest members club, founded in 1693, and quite possibly the snobbiest too.
Ian Fleming of Boodles’s used his club as the model for James Bond’s Blades. The chaps at Boodle’s enjoy “hunting, shooting, fishing” when they’re not in town, though sometimes they bring their hobbies to the club, like the member who shot himself in what is now the billiard room. In the 1830s and 1840s, most of the Cabinet and more than half of Whig and Liberal MPs were Brooks’s members. The Turf has a “fine collection of paintings of racehorses” and took down its website because “none of their members used it.” The Travellers was once known as the Foreign Office canteen and is consequently associated with spies and homosexuals.
Clubs are now more widespread in London than at any time since the 1920s. Though the gender barrier has almost entirely collapsed, clubland’s historic divisions, functions, and geography survive. The “old clubs,” most of them Victorian palaces in Pall Mall and St. James’s, absorbed the casualties of the Blitz (the Reform hosted the Carlton from 1940 to 1943) and economic contraction (the Flyfishers have successively lodged with the Garrick, the Junior Carlton, the Bath, and now the Savile). The other kind of old club, the Turk’s Head kind, still survives in Soho, in the semi-criminal basement ambience of Gerry’s and up the wonky Georgian stairs to the Academy, which Auberon Waugh founded; club rules included “No poets.”
The words “London club” elicit images of an aristocratic Victorian gentleman snoozing in his leather armchair, not the jabbering self-publicists of the new media clubs and the hobbyists of the sporting clubs. Yet the new growth is in professional clubs, many of them in Soho, such as the Groucho, the Soho House chain, and, in another revival of a bygone age, private nightclubs, mostly in Mayfair. London Clubland’s second half focuses on the old-school pleasures and pitfalls, though an entire page is required to list the 23 clubs, old and new, in which the actor Stephen Fry admits to having taken cocaine, as he was wearing a jacket and tie throughout, no one noticed. The new sort of clubs are for explicit networking (Soho House has a 98,000-person waiting list) rather than implicit networking (the civil servants in Yes Minister do their best work in a club based on the Athenaeum).
Most clubs require a jacket and tie. Should your host have remembered to leave your name in the book in the front hall, the porters will send you to the Coffee Room — unless you are meeting for coffee, in which case you go to the Bar. Here you meet your fellow inmates: the hearty fellow, “nose streaked with throbbing purple veins;” the uncloseted fascist who calls himself a “traditional Tory;” the left-wing contrarian in a “near-constant argument with all the other members;” and, though it may be a superfluous category, the eccentric.
In the Coffee Room, guests receive a menu without prices. Your host writes the order on a slip of paper. No cash changes hands; everything goes against your account, and instead of tipping, you give to the Christmas Fund. The food is good, rarely great, but only surprising if it is bad. There is seasonal game lately massacred in Scotland, and a different roast every day with the same vegetables. Recipes here for signature dishes include Athenaeum’s gooseberry pie, which is really awfully good, and the Oriental Club’s mutton curry, which is almost certainly like eating an old shoe.
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On Sundays, the waiters may heave a silver trolley to your table and carve perfectly pink beef. A three-tier dessert trolley that looks like it was retrieved from the Titanic carries pies, cakes, wobbling jellies, and towers of whipped cream. An ancillary cheese trolley has a massive wheel of Stilton and “savouries” such as cheese on toast and prunes in bacon. Some of the savories have lain undisturbed on the trolley since 1939.
The club claret, selected by a committee of hardened boozers and bought in oceanic quantities, is cooled by the cellar and cheaper than the gut-rot in the pub around the corner. Some of the ports and sherries are even older than the head waiter. The conversation is cheery but muted, though I did once see one old man kick another in the shins under the table, causing him to howl, “You bastard!” The victim hobbled off to the lavatory. When he returned, they resumed chatting as if nothing had happened.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.