Mark Palmer talks about the Charity fundraiser at the ‘In
& Out’ on the 22nd May It’s not every day that the doors of a traditional London club swing open and the massed ranks of the general public are allowed to file in and wander about the place with an inquiring eye.
But, then, this isn’t an everyday sort of club and the occasion itself is no ordinary event. In fact, nothing of this kind has ever happened before and no one seems sure when it might happen again. Some Members not furnished with the full facts initially might be aghast at such an undertaking. A raffle? Take away food? Jaunty music? Celebrity appearances? As the late great Bill Deedes would have mumbled into his pint of Tetley’s: “Shome mistake, shurely?” But dear Bill and even the most orthodox of club land devotees couldn’t possibly harbour reservations about the Naval & Military Club (known to one and all as the “In & Out”) hosting an all-day extravaganza in support of Help for Heroes, the charity doing sterling work supporting injured soldiers, sailors and airmen whose lives have been brutally changed as a result of serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan.
From Noon to 8pm on Thursday May 22, the In & Out’s magnificent clubhouse overlooking St James’s Square will be transformed into a luxury bazaar. With some crucial help from Fortnum & Mason, the main rooms and corridors will be heaving with stalls and displays, selling everything from cotton boxer shorts to silk dressing gowns, balsamic vinegar to home-made chutney, wooden toys for younger children to state of the art electronic gizmos for rather more mature children.
There’ll be food and wine to sample and food and wine to buy; there’ll be a wide range of live entertainment, music and, yes, raffles galore, with various famous faces (Prince William and Prince Harry are enthusiastic supporters of Help for Heroes) promising to drop by and encourage everyone to punch in their pin numbers with unashamed abandon.
Tickets cost £50 and every penny will go to the charity. In addition, all stall holders have agreed to give 10 per cent of their takings to the cause. As the new mayor of London would put it: “stupendous stuff.” “Originally we were planning just to host a reception but then the arrangements for the day grew and grew and we found ourselves wanting to play a much bigger part,” says Ian Gregory, the In & Out’s Club Secretary. “This is exactly the sort of charity that strikes a profound cord with our Members and we are delighted to host the Festival for Heroes. It’s going to be a very special day.” Too true. And for a lot of people there’ll be the additional bonus of being allowed to take an unhurried snoop around one of the most famous and arguably the friendliest of London clubs. In fact, such is the history of the place that this breach of normal rules should be worth the price of admission alone. What’s more, a saunter around the In & Out will banish forever any lingering misconceptions about this being just another stuffy, maledominated institution colonised by current or former members of the armed forces.
For starters, you don’t need to have any links whatsoever to the army or navy to be a Member although you won’t feel comfortable if you don’t respect what they stand for. And while some clubs stick religiously to their men only creed, women have been welcomed here for more than 20 years. Stuffiness doesn’t get much of a look-in because the average age of new Members is under 40. Perhaps these thrusting 30-somethings are drawn as much by the swimming pool, gym, squash court and personal trainers as they are the superlative Club Claret (voted the best in Clubland, as it happens), the 49 en suite bedrooms, the Inigo Jones statue on the main staircase, the glorious courtyard (smokers welcome) and the private dining room that was once Lady Astor’s boudoir.
The Naval & Military Club was originally housed at 18 Clifford Street, after which it moved first to 22 Hanover Square and then to 94 Piccadilly overlooking Green Park, where it remained with its celebrated In and Out signs on the gate posts until 1999.
Historians will find plenty to feast upon at the present site. Number 4 St James’s Square was built originally for the 11th Earl of Kent in 1679. The second Viscount Astor and his family owned it from 1912-1942, when it was requisitioned by the government and became the headquarters of the Free French Forces.
For tickets to the Festival for Heroes, call Emma Whitehouse 020 7827 5730 or email: emma.whitehouse@navalandmilitaryclub.co.uk. For information about the Naval and Military Club, visit: www.navalandmilitaryclub.co.uk. For Help for Heroes visit: www.helpforheroes.org.uk. count and who you believe, had anywhere between 20,000 and 60,000. Outnumbered Napoleon may have been, but certainly not ‘vastly’ so. Pagden similarly claims that in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israeli forces were ‘vastly outnumbered’ (again, no figures provided) — but in fact even during the initial attack the Arabs, husbanding their meagre resources for internal security purposes, managed to field barely 21,000 troops against the Israelis’ 30,000. ‘Vastly outnumbered’, or words like it, is a phrase applied to Western forces in virtually all of the battles that Pagden describes, implying that the East is incapable of mustering anything other than a horde of untrained, ill-disciplined, slavish troops. Indeed, the repetition of the claim is ironic, for though Pagden declares (at least twice) that ‘history in the Muslim imagination is always doomed to repeat itself’, as his own book proves the Occidental imagination is little different.
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