Leather Armchairs is a book by Charles Graves, the poet Robert’s brother, published in 1963. It has a foreword by P G Wodehouse, which is a good start, and it describes sixty of the London Clubs then extant.
Once you dip into it, it is hard to put down. It is strong on history and anecdotes. The Clubs he describes range from White’s, formed in 1693, to the Clermont, founded in 1962. What has become of them now? Anthony Lejeune’s The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, published in 2012, takes up the tale almost fifty years on. In terms of numbers they are depleted; he describes thirty-one clubs. Many of the casualties are the result of mergers or of forced closures when leases ran out, a remarkable exception being the Cavalry and Guard’s Club which in 1986 bought their freehold from a property company for £3,200,302.04.
Most clubs in 1963 were open at the weekend. Graves writes about one club: “Waitresses, as in most clubs, have supplanted waiters. But there are no coloured staff in view, despite slight pigmentation in the kitchen.” I suppose he meant the black pudding?
The Bath Club in 1963 had 2,000 members of which 120 were women; it was ahead of its time then but closed in 1981, offering members admission to the In and Out. However, it lives on in the pages of P G Wodehouse as The Drones Club and the scene of low-down skulduggery by Tuppy Glossop, resulting in Bertram Wooster falling into the swimming pool in the full soup and fish.
One of the clubs that has endured is the Farmers. It has 6,000 members and started in 1842. Its premises are in Whitehall, conveniently close to the Ministry of Defence. An army contact tells me that he negotiated honorary membership so that he could have meetings with people that he preferred not to be seen with at the MoD. He discounted the risk of his contacts being recognised by bona fide members.
In 1963 annual subscriptions were less than thirty guineas, today they are around £1,300. The standard of cooking has risen in the same ratio. The age of the members of most of the surviving clubs is worryingly high but my guess is that most of them are good for at least another fifty years, the clubs that is, not the members.