Home at last

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands to a distance of 500 miles from London in a direct line’, and opportunities to meet distinguished foreign visitors. As it nears its bicentenary, John Martin Robinson has produced a thorough, scholarly and highly readable biography on an institution that has served among other things as the ‘Foreign Office Canteen’ and a refuge for derring-do adventurers.

The Club’s members included royalty, dukes, ambassadors and explorers, not to mention aesthetes, artists and even authors, despite Anthony Powell’s claims to the contrary. Explorers included Lt Col William Leake, who surveyed the Nile as far as the cataract, and bought his future bride in the Cairo slave market; and Francis Younghusband, who was appointed Commissioner to Tibet by Lord Curzon, after extensive travels through Central Asia. He secured a peace treaty with the locals, which was repudiated by the Foreign Office, earning him both a knighthood and an official reprimand. In more recent years, Wilfred Thesiger has maintained the tradition with his exploration of and publications on the Arabian peninsula. The most famous ambassadors were Talleyrand, for whom the Club fitted an extra handrail to the stairs to help him negotiate them with a club foot, and Baron Von Ribbentrop, the only member to be hanged.

Charles Barry was commissioned as architect for a new building in 1828. His style ranged from Italian Renaissance to English Carolean: the exterior of this new Club derived mainly from the Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, whereas the richly carved staircase inside harks back to English examples of the 1630s and 1640s. It was much praised when finished in 1832: James Stuart Wortley wrote: ‘The House is really charming and does infinite credit to our architect Mr Barry.’