The Club Subscription By ROBIN McDOUALL C LUBS are adaptable. When
they started in the CLUBS century, their purpose was for friends to meet, eat, drink, gamble, hobnob. A Victorian gloom settled on them in the last cen- tury. Guests, if not barred, were discouraged. Members rarely spoke—certainly never to strangers. King Edward VII did much to break through the sound barrier, though here and there it survives. i once dropped a pin in the Kildare Street Club, Dublin, and heard it meet the carpet avec un bruit see. A friend of mine, breakfasting in his club, had this conversation : 'Do you care to speak, sir?"No, sir.' Thank God, sir.' The idea that a club should be as much like a member's home as possible—the food and wine for dinner ordered by the member in the morning, the dishes coming in on the left from the hands of a knee- breeched footman—has gone. Gone with the footman. For most members the opposite is now true : the club should be as unlike home as pos- sible, an escape- from the Esthonian maid, from bending over sink and stove. Retaining as much as they can of the atmosphere of the past, if only the decor and furniture, clubs are now the bolt- holes from the ardours of home life, the squalor of works canteens and city restaurants. They are primarily eating-places, where committees do their best to keep membership to people who know each other or, if they don't, wouldn't mind doing
SO.
I lunched recently at B—. The next day I saw a member of B at the C—. 'Who was your host yesterday?' he asked. 'So-and-So,' I replied, 'he's Master of the D—."Ah!' he said wistfully, 'in the old clays, half our members were MFHs; now seventy-five per cent. of them are stock- brokers.'
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New Year's Day is a holiday in Scotland— cold comfort to those who live south of the Border. For many it begins with a hang-over. For many it is a day of making resolutions in the humiliating knowledge that they will not be kept. For many it is the day of the banker's order : the house, its contents, the jewellery, the health, life and pension, the London Library, that 'little theatre,' the National Art Collections Fund and so on. And one's club. Too late now to resign : resignations must be in by December 31; the bank has already paid.
For most club members, the bank will be pay- ing at the rate which was increased on January 1, 1958. But for at least three clubs the bank pays at a new rate from January 1, 1959. For the re- mainder, January 1, 1960, looms threateningly ahead : not many who have not put up their sub- scriptions in the last two years will go on at the old rate for long.
It is surprising, reallyand only possible be- cause of the adaptability of clubs to changed con- ditions—that subscriptions are not higher. Before the first war, club subscriptions were ten or twelve guineas and the wage bill, according to the size of the club, £2,000 to £4,000 a year. Wage bills now range from £15,000 for a small club through £30,000 for a medium one to £60,000 for a really big one (I don't mean the 'RAC). I do not suggest that subscriptions should have increased in direct proportion, but one might have expected them to increase in relation to the cost of living. How much is a penny bun today? Threepence? One might expect to find a subscription that was fifteen guineas in 1939 forty-five guineas in 1959. Not at all : the fifteen-guinea club, after several years at twenty-five, is now moving to thirty-ish. (Similarly, the ten- to twelve-guinea one to twenty-five.) Clubs have been wise enough to accept the social revolution of our time, to dilute the social whisky (1 belong to two clubs I should never have aspired to join before the war), for subscription income—and that means numbers—is still the chief source of revenue. But they have realised that a second source is nearly as important : the profit on food and drink. Whereas in the old days no profit was made on food and drink, subscrip- tions paid wages and all the overheads, nowadays subscriptions are just enough to pay the wages; rent, rates, light, heating, redecorations have to be paid for by what members spend in the club. Though meals and drinks are much cheaper than in restaurants and even pubs, it is this income which enables clubs to keep going.
Though most of the lunchers are, as 1 have said, dodging the stove and sink or the city queue, there is a second kind of luncher filtering into clubs. The other day I took a woman friend to a famous fish restaurant. Over the prawns we were talking, and I didn't look round. During my sole Colbert I had a stare and observed that my guest was the only woman in the room. 1 realised that all these red-faced gentlemen were entertaining each other on expense accounts. Luncheon has almost ceased to be a social occasion. Clubs, deliberately or otherwise, accept this social change. Though all good clubs have a rule against using the club for business purposes, unless it is vulgarly done with blue-prints and balance-sheets spread out, how can it be detedted? Is the bishop at the Athemuum picking the physicist's brain for his sermon, 'Christianity and the H-Bomb,' doing business? Is the publisher at the Garrick, commis- sioning over luncheon a new translation of the Koran, infringing the rules? Clubs haven't got around to giving receipts, or club waitresses to selling them, but it would be unrealistic to pretend that a thin wedge has not been inserted.
The adaptability of clubs to changing social and economic needs may be regretted or applauded. The alternative would haVe been for some clubs to amalgamate, others to liquidate. In fact the only club to disappear since the war has been the Marlborough-Windham—and there are those who consider it could have gone on. But no club can face the future with pearly assurance : the doors must be opened wider, the prices for food and drink must go up, the bankers' orders must again be altered. Why do my countrymen prefer January 1 to Christmas?
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