CLUBS AND CLUBS
By J. B. ATKINS
" SIR," said Dr. Johnson, " the great chair of a full and pleasant town club is perhaps the throne of human felicity." It was handsome of him to say so, because he had also said that the wit of man had contrived nothing more pleasing than a good inn or tavern. The fact was that Dr. Johnson could never find praise too high for any place where men talked together, talked well and could have their talk out. He would have judged the modern club to be the natural development of the coffee-house, which was the social centre of communicative men from Charles II to nearly the end of the eighteenth century ; and he would have held that opinion so long as he was not contradicted too much. Every man who loves his own club (which is of course the best) is proud of the whole genus, and is unaffectedly pleased when a club can prove its unbroken descent from a coffee-house or chocolate-house or tavern. The line then runs from shop to proprietary club, and so to a modern members' club.
There used to be some doubt about the age of the Union Club, but its new history* removes the doubt. Its birth can confidently be put back from 1805 to 1799 or 1800, when the union of the Irish and English parliaments was " in agitation." Cumberland House was then fitted out as a tavern, placed under a catering manager, and opened (only to subscribers) in honour of the union: It . was named the Albion Tavern, but was very soon popularly called the Union Club House. In 1805 the popular name was formally adopted. The dub had great days—or nights—before 1805. Gillray in a wonderful scurrilous print, dated 1801, satirised the imaginary orgies of the club ; in 1802 a " magnificent fete " was given by four peers to celebrate the Peace of Amiens ; and in 1802 there was also a " masquerade," which Gillray brilliantly caricatured with outrageous portraits of the Prince of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert and the younger Pitt. It is, of course, unnecessary to assume that these notabilities were there.
In 1825 the club was completely reconstituted as a members' club. This revolution was brought about chiefly by Colonel William Mayne, who had been told of the Duke of Wellington's remark that " if something cannot be done to change their tone, clubs will become like spouting-booths at a country fair." The Duke's ears, it was also reported, " had been deafened, and his whole being disgusted, by the echoes of party strife." Soldiers usually recoil from unneces- sary strife more sensitively than civilians. Mr. Rome acknowledges it this point the debt due to Castlereagh, who inspired the creation of the Travellers' Club in 1819 ; for he saw there the fulfilment of a desire for quiet living and friendliness to foreigners.
One wonders how many members of the Union today have ever - • Union C.,..lubc by- R. -O. Rome. - (Batsford,- 3 3s: - - - - - •
heard of Colonel Mayne. Is he celebrated there in legend ; is he preserved in portraits ? Probably not ; yet without him the club might never have become what it is. He was the sort of member who pays his subscription foi the privilege of doing an immense amount of voluntary work that passes unnoticed by most of his fellows. He is not pelted with compliments nor buried under grateful letters. He receives his utmost recognition by being included anonymously in a hurried vote of thanks, once a year, to the chairman and committee. But having reflected thus on the ways of clubs, I cannot help reflecting farther that it may be better so ; profuse acknowledgements would be so surprising as to seem un-clublike, un-English.
The reformed Union Club of 1821, hoping for many new members, cast what was then considered a wide and unconven- tionally accommodating net. It provided for " a copious infusion of professional men," the idea being to touch life at many new points. That certainly seemed to open up a more interesting club life ; but the immediate result was a blackballing war between the county gentlemen and the professions, which continued until it was ended by exhaustion or its own inanity—we are not told which. Such wars are kept under now by the almost universal substitution of election by committee for the general ballot. There are still remnants, however, of the old argument that there is usually some good reason if a candidate cannot win enough votes from a general suffrage, and of the equally old argument that the member who blackballed anybody he had not heard of (and everybody when the wind was in the east) was always a myth. On the whole it is felt that committee election is more civilised ; that it avoids unkind pub- licity and discourages common prejudices ; and that in particular it ensures reasonable treatment for anyone who has made some enemies in the course of an honest public life. Election committees fail when they do not get adequate responses to their continuous appeals for confidential information.
A notable point in the investigations of a modern election com- mittee is the absence of any attempt to use a candidate's occupation as a means of judging his eligibility. There is a tacit understanding that a man has to earn his living as he can ; the point is not what he does, but what' he is in himself, and how far he is likely to be congenial to the community he aspires to join. The idea of an " exclusive " club, election to which was, as John Buchan said, a stage in a career," and was secured largely by the accident of birth, was one of the untempered facts of Queen Victoria's reign. It was too unintelligent to survive.
The immensely expanded range of clubs justifies, in every instance, the verdict of the social philosophers that a club is always formed " for a purpose," even though the purpose be evasion of the law at the risk of an incursion by the police in the small hours of the morning. The limitation of the hours for supplying liquor, which was applied to clubs in 1921, required that all clubs should be subject to inspection alike ; discrimination would have been too invidious. But the resentment in highly respectable clubs has been proved unnecessary. Who can distinguish an inspector in plain clothes from an electrician or the man who winds the clocks ?
The latest movement even in old-fashioned clubs is for a bar. Young members are its chief supporters. There may be jolly assemblies at a bar, the hour being suitable ; but the characteristics of bars are a heightening of noise, and treating—by which old members of old-fashioned clubs are shocked. The feelings of the young, however, who desire that their one club should be a kind of all-purposes club, can be easily understood and therefore, perhaps, forgiven. Still, I cannot myself see what advantage a bar has over the old plan of sitting in an armchair and having drink brought to you, particularly since several friends can sit together in contiguous armchairs. If the bar-plan had come first, the armchair-plan would have appeared as the next obvious step in the advance of civilisation.
Mr. Rome deplores the disappearance of many " characters " in his club whose eccentricities he has found worthy of record. They have, he says, no successors. But is he quite sure? It is a charming quality of youth to be polite to the aged ; but what do they think and say in private of the fossils who do not even under- stand their language or code? What is lying in wait for the poor, old boys in future club histories ? Ah, what ?
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