In December of last year, I published a Christmas list of books on clubs which were still in print - you can read it here, since most of them remain in circulation.
This year, I thought I would do something a little different. Although a handful of new books have been published this year, I want to focus on a genre that can be found fairly easily on the second-hand book market: club fiction.
Firstly, it is worth acknowledging that two major books on London Clubland were published this year - even if I have a rather obvious interest, as the author of one of them. I see that Amazon has noted they are “Frequently bought together“, and they do indeed complement one another very nicely - mine is more of a comprehensive guidebook, reference work and almanac, and Andrew Jones and Laura Hodgson’s coffee table book is an illustrated study of a selection of 46 clubs. Since they do very different things, they throw light on one another when read together. Details of my book are here, and of Jones & Hodgson’s book are here.
There is also a new club history which I understand has only recently gone to press. The East India Club celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, and is now publishing a four-volume set on its history. The first two volumes, incorporating major new research by Dr. Toby Parker, are The Foundations for the East India United Service Club, 1846-1895 and Life in the East India Club, 1849-1923, while the set is rounded off by a resetting of Denys Forrest’s 1982 book on the EIC’s four component clubs, Foursome in St. James’s: The Story of the East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club; and an updated edition of Charlie Jacoby’s 2009 volume, The East India Club: A History. The books can be ordered directly from the East India Club, either individually or as a set.
Club fiction
I would like to focus the remainder of this bulletin on one-off Clubland novels. There have been at least half-a-dozen over the last 70 years, lampooning (usually affectionately) the mores of club members.
I will not attempt to cover the oeuvre of writers who are preoccupied with Clubland throughout their books, like John Galsworthy, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray or P. G. Wodehouse. They probably each deserve a post of their own. Instead, the below looks at standalone examples of club fiction, clearly modelled on real life.
What is noticeable is that even when written decades apart, many of the issues and personalities have a numerous echoes and commonalities - particularly in describing the small-’p’ politics of club committees.
Most of these books are out of print, but since the market for fiction on London clubs is limited, many of these can be found inexpensively through search engines such as bookfinder.com.
Andrew Graham, The Club (London: Macmillan, 1957).
Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Graham combined his careers as a soldier and diplomat, through a succession of postings as a military attaché in British embassies across Asia and the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s - as well as being an anonymous wine correspondent for The Times. An appreciation of his literary work, which included short stories, novels, and books on geopolitics, can be found here.
In The Club, we are treated to a tale of an arriviste manufacturer being rebuffed as he mounts a campaign to join a traditional old London club, the “True Blue Club”, alongside a series of caustic pen sketches of members.
It was definitely not based on the real-life Conservative Club, of which the author had been a member in the 1940s.
A. D. Wintle, The Club (London: Cassell, 1961).
Sharing the same title as the above comes a classic of the genre, penned by one of the notable “characters” of Clubland. A quick glance at the colourful life of Lieutenant-Colonel A. D. Wintle, from his exploits in both world wars to his success as a litigant in person before the House of Lords, can leave little doubt that he was accustomed to all manner of eccentricity as a way of life. His memoir, The Last Englishman (1968), remains extremely rare and prohibitively expensive (copies on Amazon sell for £550 - though can be borrowed for free by registered users on archive.org). Fortunately, his 1961 novel on Clubland is much easier to find, and is a delightful read.
There is less of a central plot than Graham’s book, and more a series of overlapping episodes involving members who are clearly stark, raving mad - but it is written with clear affection. The process of researching and writing the first-ever history of the Club (it is never named, and simply “The Club”) provides the central peg around which the author hangs most of the narrative.
It was definitely not based on the real-life United Service Club of the time, of which the author was a member.
Nigel Kneale, ‘Ladies’ Night’, in Beryl Bainbridge (ed.), Unnatural Causes (Poole: Javelin Books, 1986).
Clubland Substack readers may have come across my previous write-up of Nigel Kneale’s remarkable, knowing 1986 one-off TV play, “Ladies’ Night,” about the misogynistic members of the Hunters’ Club, a faded London gentlemen’s club begrudgingly tolerating the one day of the week when ladies are admitted as guests - and then closing ranks after a member apparently murders his wife.
Kneale also adapted his own teleplay into a chapter of this short story collection. While very faithful to the TV play, embedding a verbatim repetition of its dialogue, it also significantly expands on the tale, giving us much about the background, character and motivations of the principals. Although the central cast of characters remains largely unlikeable, they are much more fully fleshed-out, and their motives far easier to comprehend, in this short story version. The story packs a real punch into its 48 pages.
It was definitely not based on the real-life Bath Club of the time, of which the author had been a member.
Richard Gordon, A Gentlemen’s Club (London: Frederick Muller, 1988).
Another television adaptation, this one being written side-by-side with the scripting of the series. It was produced by Richard Gordon (the pen-name of Dr. Gordon Ostlére), the comic novelist best known for his series of Doctor novels from the 1950s to the 1980s, and their screen adaptations.
A Gentleman’s Club was a six-part sitcom starring William Gaunt and Richard Vernon, which screened on BBC2 in 1988. It was never repeated, and was never released in any domestic recording format. It concerned the feuds of the Albany Club, a faded London gentlemen’s club with a dangerously unhygienic kitchen, which hired its first woman Secretary and began to admit women members, in a bid to turn around years of decline. For the book adaptation, the six TV episodes were rendered as seven chapters. It is one of the most polished of the books listed here.
It was definitely not based on the real-life Beefsteak Club and Garrick Club, both of which the author was a member. (Somewhat misleadingly, in his author bio at the back of the book, Gordon writes, “He is now a long-running member of several London clubs, which as an ardent clubman he would never vulgarly name except that one plays an awful lot of cricket,” so that he references the MCC - his one London club membership upon which the series/book was not based.)
Richard Grindal, Time, Gentlemen, Please: The Great Escape of a Gentleman’s Club (London: Virtual Publishing, 2000).
A slim, hard-to-find, self-published volume that is not without its charms. It does not lack plot - quite the contrary, there are so many incidents from one page to the next that it can be hard to keep track. But it also preserves its fair share of laugh-out-loud moments. It covers the Carpetbaggers Club in St. James’s. Richard Grindal typically wrote crime fiction (usually under his name of Richard Grayson), so he was no stranger to spinning a yarn.
It was definitely not based on the real-life East India Club, of which the author was a member.
“A. Gentleman”, The Decline and Fall of Macready’s Club: A Dystopian Fable (London: ASys Publishing, 2024).
The most recent of these books, based on Macready’s Club, a completely imaginary Covent Garden gentlemen’s club for actors and lawyers, it documents the tussles and personalities as the Club becomes the subject of a media campaign to shame them into accepting women. The author’s ire was reserved for the machinations of the committee.
It was definitely not based on the real-life Garrick Club, of which the author was a member. The Garrick’s new legal advice partly revolved around the question of what constitutes a gentleman, and the quality of gentlemanliness, possibly explaining the author’s enigmatic choice of pseudonym. The Spectator suggested that they might be a well-known lawyer. A tie-in website for the book can be found here.
You can view the full and varied backlog of Clubland Substack articles, by clicking on the index below.
Index
Articles are centred around several distinct strands, so the below contains links to the main pieces, sorted by theme.