Amelia ‘Milly’ Gentleman, the Guardian’s fearless investigative reporter, has ‘exclusively’ revealed some of the Garrick Club’s filthy secrets. It’s ‘the final gasps’ of ‘a declining patriarchal elite’, she writes. ‘A lonely slice of an England that forgot to modernise’. All over the country, fair-minded folk must be thinking ‘woo, when can I join?’
Clubmen tend to talk about the subject that occupies people wherever they gather: the crooked timber of humanity
What is the club’s original sin? To be an all-male enclave deep within the Establishment, which draws its members from the Inns of Court, Whitehall, Westminster, the City, and the West End. What? Judges, senior civil servants, bankers, and famous mummers quaffing and scoffing at the Garrick! Whoever would have thought it?
Fellow Guardian journalist Gaby Hinsliff was equally brisk. The club in Covent Garden was a rest home, she wrote, for ‘a few old buffers snoozing in their armchairs’. In the Observer, Catherine Bennett thought the members mentioned in dispatches were, ‘the kind of big names you’d join a club to avoid’. You first, madam.
A more disinterested observer might infer from this turbulence that the club was barely a step up from the swamp. Lady guests, it was suggested, were obliged to enter the hallowed portals through a separate door. The same observer might also interpret the bateyness as a veiled application for membership. Milly is three-quarters of the way there already. The daughter of a celebrated painter, she attended St Paul’s Girls School and Wadham College, Oxford, and is married to a peer of the realm. An unofficial English rose.
Any road up, we dwellers in London’s most secretive hideaway are in the dock. Sir Richard Moore, MI6 chief, and another knight, Robert Chote, former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, have walked before seeing the umpire raise his finger, and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, has joined them in the pavilion.
As a Garrick loyalist, I was sad to see Chote go because we joined the club on the same day, 13 years ago. He’s a good man, and it is no breach of a gentleman’s code to say we shall miss him. Some outsiders have said he and the other recusants were bullied into submission. As Mr Justice Cocklecarrot (not himself a Garrick man) told members of the jury: it is entirely a matter for you.
I was proposed by Stephen Fay, ‘Captain Claret’ to Private Eye, and the archetypal clubman. Stephen told fine tales, as good journalists should, and listened when others held the floor. He had learned at the knee of his father, Gerard, a star reporter on the Manchester Guardian when that paper was a liberal and, in the best sense of the word, a provincial newspaper. How the wheel has turned.
The Guardian did get some things right. The waiting staff do look smart in their white coats, and again it is no breach of omerta to say they are the best thing about the club. There are plenty of paintings, too, and guests do dine at side tables, though if they pass the port the wrong way we may move them to a drafty alcove.
But, as with all clubs, the idea that regulars gather with the primary intention of talking shop can only be entertained by those who have never set foot in the place. And as many a Guardian scribbler has belonged to the club, Miss Gentleman has not done her research as thoroughly as she might.
Do guests enjoy our company? I have hosted captains of the England cricket team, opera singers, bankers, broadcasters, publishers, chefs, wine bar owners, a Sex Pistol, a film director and (whisper it) a well-known Guardian columnist, and every one said ‘by ‘eck, this is a grand place’. A BBC veteran who kicks firmly with the left foot had been in the bar for no more than ten minutes before he said ‘I’ve got this wrong’. Of course. It’s one of the great rooms of London.
Clubmen tend to talk about the subject that occupies people wherever they gather: the crooked timber of humanity. We just do it in a place more agreeable than the average tavern, and if some folk don’t like it they can bugger off. As Auden wrote, the blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide.
In any place where strong drink is served in healthy measures, there will be gossip, some of it emanating from those fabled corridors of power. But you can hear similar stuff at Ramsbottom Cricket Club, my other haunt, where, Miss Gentleman might care to note, much of the talk is about the summer game. Another exclusive beckons!
Leave the Garrick alone, you earnest bores. There is no club finer in London, which means there is none finer in the world, since unaffected friendship is something the British do better than anybody. In that same spirit of British solidarity I suggest that if you do know a Garrick member, you persuade them to propose you. Now’s the time.
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