I joined the Garrick Club in 2009 and resigned at the end of 2023. When our bookshop was in Long Acre, Covent Garden, the club was just around the corner. My father was a member long before I was and used to go every Monday for lunch, usually sitting at the publishers’ table where others involved in the book trade would gather. Sometimes he would take me along. Back then the food was pretty school dinner terrible, since very much improved, but the wine never failed to please. I think it is fair to say that Monday afternoons were not my father’s most productive. My mother and father celebrated their 60th birthdays there, hosting friends in the Milne Room. The legacy from A.A. Milne gave the club a huge influx of funds. My bank manager (in the days when it was normal actually to know one’s bank manager), used to ask me to take him again to “your Winnie-the-Pooh club”. I have very much enjoyed taking friends there and American customers in particular were invariably impressed by the opulent surroundings and the extraordinary collection of theatrical portraits.
Whenever I visited, I left with a warm sense of well-being and having been perfectly looked after by the inimitable staff.
Not long after my father died, I visited as a member for the first time on my own. My primary proposer had been the kind and lovely journalist Godfrey Smith. I was very nervous but was quickly made to feel at home. As I was leaving, the Hall Porter beckoned me over. “The entire staff have asked me to say how very sorry we all were to hear of the death of your father.” That brought tears to my eyes and a firm sense that I would be a member for a very long time.
The club was founded in 1831, named after the actor David Garrick, as a haven for actors, the literati and the glitterati of the day. Membership has always been open only to men, women being allowed only as guests.
One of the rules is that no business is to be conducted or even talked about on the premises, but I was told many times that “of course everybody does it.” I still liked the idea of that (although I confess that my membership paid for itself many times over in one way and another), that the use of mobile phones was not permitted and also two of the unwritten rules – you must not be a bore and you must never be rude to the staff. I was once told that you should not shake hands with members, your and their very presence obviating the need for any show of trust and friendship but that seemed to be another rule honoured more in the breach than the observance.
There are dress codes (jacket and tie, no jeans), latterly somewhat relaxed, but I didn’t mind those at all. When our trade association, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, at one point held its meetings in the Reform Club, one bookseller entered into a slanging match with the staff on the door who had offered to lend him a tie, the wearing of which was de rigeur. Childish, boorish and unforgivable.
Another tradition of which I was fond was that if you or you and a guest went to sit at the Centre Table (places at which cannot be reserved), no gap must be left between you and your fellow diners, to encourage friendly conversation and so that no one was left to dine alone.
I heard very few complaints from anyone about the club, except one, which came up over and over again, and that was to deplore the membership of far too many lawyers, which, some said, had changed the character of the place irretrievably.
The Garrick has had to try to address an aging membership and the strange fact that a surprisingly large proportion of the members never visit the club at all, year in, year out. Since we and our business moved to the countryside, I almost became one of those and the expense (not huge but not insignificant) became increasingly difficult to justify.
I decided to take a friend for lunch towards the end of last year on what I thought might well be my last visit (and so it turned out), to help me make up my mind whether to continue with it. We had a wonderful time, met interesting people as ever, but it did not help that it took us over four hours to get home. It should have been a journey of an hour and a half, but the reliability of the railway network has gone back to the abysmal state of the days before privatisation. I did apply for a refund on the cost of the ticket but received just £8.50 – I had had to spend five times that on a taxi for the last leg of the journey.
I continued to ponder. Did I really want to break the link with my father or was it absurd to continue to spend the money on something I so rarely used?
Then I started to receive some unsettling e-mails relating to the question of whether women should be admitted as full members of the club, a matter which had come up time and time again over the years, always defeated in the end by democratic vote. The instigator this time around was the theatrical manager Colin Brough. I had no strong feelings either way. I thought and still do think that if men, or women, want to have a single gender club, they should be allowed to do so, but did wonder if a more progressive approach might be the best way forward.
Then came a letter from the chairman, Christopher Kirker. This I objected to rather strongly. Apart from the contents, it was poorly laid out with an unattractive typeface and font and printed on very cheap paper, causing me to question its authenticity. The tone was very much de haut en bas. I have always liked that expression, since it is itself rather de haut en bas and I used it in my reply. There is nothing like a bit of self-aware pomposity in the right circumstances to make a point. The first time I heard the phrase, it was used in conjunction with others from various languages by the second most pompous person I have ever known. There was a member of our trade association who would throw Latin phrases into our meetings. Sometimes, only something from another language will quite say what one means (how else to encapsulate je ne sais quoi, Zeitgeist, or Schadenfreude?) But this guy only did it because he knew that most of his colleagues would not understand it. Presumably his insecurity made him feel the need. He was, funnily enough, not the second but the most, by a country mile, not pompous but duplicitous person I have ever had the misfortune to know.
In my reply to the chairman of the club, I made the points above and wondered about his description of certain behaviour as undemocratic: “…a small group of members has recently tried to interrupt the democratic path…” I continued: “I do not know the ins and outs of it all, but that seems a fairly serious accusation to make. The Chairman may very well be right, but I can’t think that the letter and survey I received recently can be the best answer to the question. I am not sure the allegation stands much scrutiny, however improper the means of communication may have been. Elsewhere you wrote of a vendetta which just seems bizarre and intemperate.” I also wrote: “What has tipped the balance is the way that the recurring debate about women becoming members has been conducted this time around. There has been a fair bit of press, and the infighting is, to my mind, rather unseemly … It is painful for me to tender my resignation, especially because it feels like the severance of an almost tangible link with my father, who so loved the club.”
Apart from a very short expression of regret from the Club Secretary and an even shorter note acknowledging my resignation, I did not receive the courtesy of a reply.
Now there is something of a storm and a media frenzy. I am very glad that I left when I did rather than in its aftermath. I do seem to have been, by chance, rather prescient.
The trigger has been the ‘leaking’ of the membership list. I am really not sure what the ‘news’ actually is. I don’t recall ever having been told that the list was a secret, very many members proudly wear the club tie and list their association in Who’s Who. All I can recall is that you are not supposed to make unsolicited contact with other members by using it, which seems fair enough, although even that is not in the printed rule book. That Colin Brough certainly did.
I have two favourite Garrick jokes. The first seems unfortunate now – that when the issue of women members came up last time, the committee cast around for an independent legal opinion but struggled to find a judge who wasn’t a member. The other was from a report in the newsletter about a talk given by a young designer on the club’s refurbishment. Shockingly, the young man had used the c-word to the horror of his audience. At the end of the article, the c-word was revealed to have been ‘contemporary’.
Now there have been a number of resignations, including those of four senior judges, the head of MI6 and the head of the Civil Service, bringing further unwanted press attention. There is no doubt that this rehashing of a very old argument is the result of women feeling excluded not just from the club but from concomitant possibilities of advancement in the legal profession. What seems to have been key is that the lawyer who originally said that the club could bar women changed his mind in 2022 and said there was no legal justification for it. If, as Colin Brough claimed, that was withheld from the general membership, that seems to me a disgrace. Mr Brough was expelled on February 1st 2024 on the grounds of conduct unbecoming a gentleman.
Overall I tend to agree with Charlotte Ivers, former politicial adviser and now a journalist writing in the Sunday Times – the whole thing is really all rather silly and a storm in a teacup.
What I really object to is the resignations, and also the hand-wringing by Stephen Fry (whom I otherwise much admire) who wrote that he was “ashamed and mortified by the continuing exclusion of women from our club”. Why did he join in the first place then? What they have done or are seen to have done is to admit that membership of the Garrick is something shameful, something about which to be clandestine and furtive. In doing so I think they have tarnished the club more than the membership policy could ever have done, probably irreversibly. I cannot see that their actions were intended to do anything but hurt the club, I can only guess at their motivation.
My own membership may surprise some who know me, but I am all for a broad church. In a kind and witty review of my first book, Animal Trust, in the Garrick newsletter, fellow member Bob Lowe, began: “There can’t be too many Garrick members who also belong to the Hunt Saboteurs Association, but if you do want to join the sabs Julian is the man to buttonhole at the bar.” I remain extremely proud of having been a member of both simultaneously but feel I left very much at the right moment. These resignations and gnashings of teeth after the event, the media “exposure”, seem to me dishonourable and indeed unbecoming of gentlemen.
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