The bizarre history of London’s private members’ clubs

At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the front window of the In & Out – the Naval and Military Club, then in Piccadilly. Exploding, it knocked everyone off their feet, including the barman Robbins, and trashed the Long Bar. But in the silence that followed came the unwavering request of senior member Commander Vaughan Williams: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.’

A subsequent cartoon in the London Evening Standard depicted the scene of devastation (no one was injured or killed) with a mess-jacket-wearing member calmly wondering what the barman had put in his pink gin: ‘But I’ll have another!’ That combination of sangfroid and eccentricity is perhaps typical of London’s private members’ clubs and is amusingly captured in this riveting history.

At first, London clubs were raucous coffee houses with back rooms for gambling. White’s, in St James’s Street, founded in 1693 by the Italian immigrant Francesco Bianco, was the pioneer, followed by other proprietary clubs where aristocrats could gossip and gamble, racking up vast debts. In the early 19th century came a significant change, Seth Alexander Thévoz, the author of Behind Closed Doors, reveals, in the form of the member-owned club, aimed at like-minded middle-class professionals. This engendered some snobbery from the Duke of Wellington, who declared that his two great life lessons were: ‘Never write a letter to your mistress and never join the Carlton Club.’

The first of these new-style establishments was the United Service Club, appealing to some senior military officers. The idea of generals coming together provoked controversy among those fearing a continental- style military coup d’etat. According to an article in the Times in 1816:

It is a legitimate and wholesome terror that no man who has ever turned over the history of this or that country can view a military combination of such a kind, and at such a time, without alarm.

It was, however, the creation of middle-class professionals’ clubs, such as the Athenaeum for artists and writers and the Oriental Club for East India Company veterans, that engendered a more sedate Victorian atmosphere, far away from that of debauched ancien régime nobles.