An insight into London Clubland in the early 1950s: Pathé newsreels of the Empress Club

A corner of the basement restaurant of the Empress Club, seen in 1950, colourised using the Kolorize.CC app. (Photo credit: Pathé news archive.)

London clubs jealously guarded their privacy from cameras for much of the 20th century. While there are photographs of club interiors dating back to the 19th century, these were typically achitectural photographs, showing empty rooms. Until the second half of the 20th century, it remained rare to see photos of members inside their clubs.

Rarer still was the breaking of the taboo on film cameras being allowed inside a club. Early examples, both from the mid-1960s, included this commercial for Double Diamond pale ale, filmed in what was then the Gladstone Library of the National Liberal Club; and this 1965 “Look at Life” colour cinema short on London Clubland, previously covered on this Substack.

It was therefore a nice surprise to have a tip-off on several earlier clips, of a London ladies’ club in the early 1950s.

I have previously covered the Empress Club on Dover Street, once one of the grandest ladies’ clubs of Edwardian London, though in somewhat diminished circumstances after World War II. Thanks to a message from Carolyne Scott, the daughter of the Club’s last proprietor, I can now share several early 1950s Pathé newsreel shorts, when cameras were admitted to the Club.

The bar of the Empress Club, seen in 1951, colourised using the Kolorize.CC app. (Photo credit: Pathé news archive.)

Firstly we have a January 1950 concert from renowned Austrian zither player Anton Karas. He had shot to international stardom in the preceding months, thanks to the film The Third Man (1949). Karas had been performing in Viennese cafes when The Third Man’s director Carol Reed heard him play one night during location filming, and insisted on recording his music, to give the movie some local colour. What became known as “the Harry Lime theme” was a composition of Karas’s own, and became a #1 hit gramophone record worldwide. The Empress Club’s management invited Karas to perform to members and guests, and here he can be seen playing in the Club’s main basement restaurant.

In April 1950, another newsreel showed South American musical act “The Two Codolbans” entertaining members in the Empress Club. This clip comes with a clear view of the bar:

Pathé’s newsreel cameras also filmed an African-themed fashion show at the Club, covered in a January 1951 newsreel called “Beauty and the Beasts.” Once again, the setting was the Club’s basement restaurant. Unlike the other clips, showing a roughly 50-50 male/female audience, this shows a majority female audience, and was therefore probably closer to a “typical” event at the ladies’ club:

In a similar vein to the fashion show was the ‘Happy Go Lovely Beauty Contest’, with contestants drawn from across the United Kingdom, hosted at the Club in June 1951. The narration makes no mention of the setting; but the production notes state that it was filmed at the Empress Club.

Pathé also covered some of the Club’s general election night party in October 1951. The publicly-released newsreel, ‘Britain Decides’, only used a few seconds of footage from the party. But Pathé’s archive has preserved lengthier out-takes, like the minute of silent footage below, showing dining and dancing into the small hours, with a band playing, again in the Club’s main basement restaurant:

Finally, in 1952 the Variety Club of Great Britain had one of their regular luncheons at the Club, filmed by Pathé. As I noted in my previous overview of the Empress Club:

“By the 1950s, the Club’s large premises housed a rag-bag of different groups - the attic had been let out to the Variety Club of Great Britain since 1950, making it particularly popular with actors.”

This arrangement was to lead to the Club’s downfall in 1955, after a police raid found plenty of illegal gambling on the premises, especially among the actors. The newsreel footage of the Variety Club gathering in the Empress Club is therefore all the more historic. It is a hotch-potch of different bits of footage strung together, some without sound, but it shows a number of well-known faces, including Laurel & Hardy (then on a stage tour of Europe), with the lunch in their honour compered by Eamonn Andrews. Further details can be obtained from the Pathé website.

These are not necessarily glimpses of “typical” club life for the Empress Club. These newsreels show elaborately-staged setpiece events, with members dressed up for gala occasions. Yet they give a rare insight into what was already a vanishing breed of club, at a time some decades before film cameras were generally deemed acceptable in Clubland. And it shows the range of different events being hosted by one of London’s best-known ladies’ clubs in the early 1950s.

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