George Smiley (Alec Guinness) leaves the dining room of his club, with Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock) in pursuit, in a scene filmed in the dining room of the Eccentric Club, for the 1979 TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Yesterday’s piece looked at the two clubs frequented by George Smiley, the fictional masterspy of John le Carré (David Cornwell). Yet Smiley inhabits a whole world of clubs in all shapes and sizes, including many of them outside the remit of this Substack - drama clubs, golf clubs, motor clubs, cricket clubs, even old college debating clubs. But even just restricting this piece to clubs along the West End London model, there are plenty of examples.
For this, the second half of a deep dive into the clubs of Smiley’s world, I broaden my attention from Smiley’s own clubs, to those used by his immediate colleagues - and what their attitudes towards them tells us about Smiley’s world.
A theatrical club
The first club encountered in Smiley’s world is the run-down theatrical club operated by Mrs. Ludo Oriel in le Carré’s debut novel, Call for the Dead (1961). Inspector Mendel grills the proprietor:
‘Now,’ said Mendel; ‘how do you keep your club subscription list? What are the benefits of joining?’
‘Well, we have watery coffee on stage every morning at eleven sharp. Members of the club can mix with the cast during the break between rehearsals from eleven o’clock to eleven forty-five. They pay for whatever they have, of course, but entry is strictly limited to club members.’
‘Quite.’
‘That’s probably the part that interests you. We seem to get nothing but pansies and nymphos in the morning.’
‘It may be. What else goes on?’
‘We put on a different show each fortnight. Members can reserve seats for a particular day of each run…The girl at the box office has the seating plan and strikes off each seat as it’s sold. Club reservations are marked in red and aren’t sold off till last.’
‘I see. So if one of your members doesn’t take his usual seat, it will be marked off on the seating plan.’
These clubs were still common in London in the early 1960s - they were a convenient way to get around state censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which applied to all British theatres until 1965 - but which exempted private members’ clubs, including those that had in-house theatres. Clubs could therefore be more avant garde and more risqué in their choice of productions, and since the 1890s a fringe of theatrically-themed clubs had occupied this ambiguous area of law, such as the Old Playgoers’ Club, and the Players’ Theatre Club.
Le Carré notes the rudimentary way in which records were kept in this theatrical club:
Mrs Oriel opened her ledger. Mendel quite shamelessly looked over her shoulder. The names of club members were entered neatly in the left-hand column. A red tick on the extreme left of the page indicated that the member had paid his subscription. On the right-hand side of the page were notes of standing reservations made for the year. There were about eighty members.
Disdain for clubs: the mark of a rogue, or a sign of discretion?
Le Carré - a keen clubman in real life, who was a member of the Savile Club under his real name, having been proposed by his publisher, Charles Pick - frequently used someone’s dislike of the world of clubs to signify that they were not a team player.
In A Murder of Quality (1962), schoolmaster Terence Fielding tries to use unfamiliarity with clubs as a way to try to avoid answering more of Smiley’s questions:
Smiley stood up. ‘When did you say you’ll be coming to London? Thursday, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. I had arranged to lunch with my crammer man at one of those dreadful clubs in Pall Mall. I always go into the wrong one, don’t you? But I’m afraid there’s not much point in my seeing him now, is there, if all this is going to come out?
Smiley instead calls his bluff, suggesting he come and stay with him, while mentally noting that he was “reasonably confident that Terence Fielding was the most accomplished liar he had met for a long time.”
Though Smiley is a participant in le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in for the Cold (1963), he plays only a supporting role. The book’s protagonist and anti-hero, hard-drinking British spy Alec Leamas, is something of a square peg in a round hole; and it is quickly made clear by le Carré that Leamas is ill at ease with the clubbable society of his fellow spies:
“It was hard to place Leamas. If he were to walk into a London club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member; in a Berlin night club they usually gave him the best table. He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money, a man who was not quite a gentleman.”
Leamas later takes an instant dislike to one of his Circus colleagues, Fawley:
“Fawley was a man who belonged to Clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.”
Indeed, le Carré makes it clear that Leamas has little time for the world of clubs, dismissing some of his colleagues: “they’re so damned academic; I can see them sitting round a fire in one of their smart bloody clubs.”
Peter Guillam, portrayed by Michael Jayston (left) and Benedict Cumberbatch (right), in the 1979 and 2011 adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
And this lack of club background is expressed again, years later, by Circus operative Peter Guillam, in A Legacy of Spies (2017), which is structured as Guillam’s memoir. By then, he is attempting to evade Alec Leamas’ troubled son, Christoph, and notes that his own lack of Clubland footprint makes him hard to detect:
And what does Christoph know of me, meanwhile? That I am in London, burying a friend…I have no known address, I am not a club man. Not even a researcher of Christoph’s vaunted quality will find me listed at the Travellers [Club] or the National Liberal Club. Not in Stasi records, or anywhere else. My last known abode in the United Kingdom was a two-room flat in Acton that I had inhabited under the name of Peterson. When I gave my landlord notice, I left no forwarding address.
Guillam’s perspective, conveyed in le Carré’s final novel, possibly signals a shift in his attitude towards clubs - that participation in club life was also the weak underbelly of the British establishment, making operatives easy to trace. While there is still the implicit condemnation of Peter Guillam as an outsider, there is also the suggestion that this may have been why he has survived so long, without exposure.
Control, portrayed by Alexander Knox (left) and John Hurt (right), in the 1979 and 2011 adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Control’s clubs
Smiley’s boss in the 1960s, Control (who remains nameless) first has his club alluded to in The Looking Glass War (1965), without identifying it:
Control quite often stayed in London on Monday nights, which he said was the only time he could get a chair at his club; Smiley suspected he wanted to get away from his wife.
Le Carré was writing in the 1960s, more or less the nadir of London Clubland’s fortunes, when many clubs lay empty for most of the day. This makes Control’s version improbable, and Smiley’s suspicion the more likely explanation.
Although Control’s main London club remains nameless, the fact that his successor was a member of the Travellers Club (see below) makes it plausible that he was a member there as well.
Control is also implied to have been a member of the MCC. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), when Smiley is told of a rumoured sighting of the now-dead Control in South Africa, he remarks as to the improbability of the lurid story: “He hated South Africa. He hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus, and Lords Cricket Ground.”
Percy Alleline, portrayed by Michael Aldridge (left) and Toby Jones (right), in the 1979 and 2011 adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Percy Alleline and the Travellers Club
Percy Alleline was Control’s great rival, spending much of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) discrediting him; and after Control’s death, Alleline succeeds him as the new Control. Alleline was also an active member of the Travellers Club. He certainly made use of the place - we are told of rumours circulating, including how, “Now and then somebody would say they had seen Percy Alleline leaving his club and he looked furious.”
Indiscreet civil servant Roddy Martindale muses of Alleline/Control, “One has only to think of him in the old days lolling in the bar of the Travellers’, sucking away on that log pipe of his and buying drinks for the moguls.”
And Alleline continues to frequent his club for many years. In The Secret Pilgrim (1990), when hearing of, “self-styled merchant venturer and City magnate” Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, we are told that, “Alleline had befriended him – at his club, where else? Alleline had recruited him.” It suggests that Alleline taps into the Travellers Club and its global network of members for possible contacts, in a blurring between business and pleasure that marks several clubs in le Carré’s work.
The recruitment of Peter Guillam at the Travellers Club
There is another major role played by the Travellers Club in le Carré’s work: it is where one of Smiley’s young colleagues, Peter Guillam, was first recruited into the secret service.
Guillam narrates A Legacy of Spies (2017), and recalls how he was approached by, “a well-spoken Englishman called Jack…I know now that what he really dealt in was intelligence,” and that:
Jack suggested I come to lunch with him…and took me to the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, and asked me whether I would have preferred life in the [French Foreign] Legion, and if I was serious about any of my girlfriends, and why I had fled my public school considering I’d been captain of boxing, and whether I had ever thought of doing something useful for my country, by which he meant England, because if I felt I’d missed out on the war on account of my age, this was my chance to catch up.
This description, from Guillam’s memoir, is almost a textbook approach to join the secret service in the Cold War era.
Leonard Burr’s club
By the events of The Secret Pilgrim (1990), the Chief of the Circus is the improbably young Leonard Burr. The Circus’s Vienna operative Toby Esterhouse comments, “I think I better take this up with the Chief actually, one to one. A word in his ear at the Club,” which suggests that Esterhouse very much mixes business with pleasure at his club. While the Club is unnamed, the Travellers would again be a plausible candidate.
Leclerc’s club
In The Looking Glass War (1965), Leclerc is Director of the Department - and very much a consummate clubman, “a military man, he wished you to say, decent regiment, decent club, knocked around in the war.” After a testy exchange with one of his colleagues, Haldane, we are told of Leclerc’s retreat:
“He would go for a walk, take some fresh air and have lunch at his club; the best they had. He wondered what it would be; the place had gone off badly in the last few years.”
The facilities of Leclerc’s club are part of his staple hospitality for colleagues. He says to his aide John Avery:
‘When we get back to London,’ Leclerc proposed, ‘you must come and dine with me, John: you and your wife; both come. I’ve been meaning to suggest it for some time. We’ll go to my club. They do a rather good dinner in the Ladies’ Room; your wife would enjoy it.’
But the impression given elsewhere is that Leclerc is merely going through the motions, and that he increasingly finds his own club rather stale. Leclerc is impressed with a visit to Smiley’s club, with its two simple basement rooms, and it leaves him musing:
He wished he had joined a smaller club; his own had gone off terribly. They had such difficulty with staff.
Given the emphasis is on Leclerc’s background as a military man, the most plausible club for him in this era would have been the United Service Club on Pall Mall, which was undergoing considerable difficulties in the 1960s, and would ultimately close down in 1975.
Bill Haydon, portrayed by Ian Richardson (left) and Colin Firth (right), in the 1979 and 2011 adaptationa of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Bill Haydon and the Savile Club
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), we learn that the charismatic antagonist Bill Haydon is a member of the Savile Club. It suits the character’s literary and cultural interests, and his flair for the dramatic; but is also less flashy than a dramatic club like the Garrick.
Far from being incommunicado to the outside world when in his club, Haydon is quick to respond to a crisis. When British agent Jim Prideaux is captured in Czechoslovakia, the duty officer at the Circus, Sam Collins, reports to Smiley of Haydon’s swift appearance in the office, “Bill Haydon arrived, white as a sheet. Picked up the story on the ticker-tape at his club.” Smiley sceptically observes that it must have been “rather late”, and Collins responds that it was around 1:15AM. Smiley reacts:
“Which is late, isn’t it, for reading club ticker-tapes.”
“Not my world, old boy.”
“Bill’s the Savile, isn’t he?”
“Don’t know,” said Sam doggedly.
It was quite normal for London clubs in the 1970s to retain archaic ticker-tape machines for reporting the incoming news. Nonetheless, while a residential club like the Savile was (and is) open to resident members around the clock, it would have been unusual for the loud ticker-tape machine to have been left operating after hours, lest the noise keep members awake. For Smiley, this was a clue that Haydon may have received his tip-off elsewhere. And it turns out to be significant, as it emerges Haydon was in bed with Smiley’s wife Ann that night, rather than at the Savile. Later, Smiley reasons:
“Haydon would have had a chance to read his club ticker-tape after Sam Collins had rung Ann, and before he arrived at the Circus to take over. But because Jim had been shot, there was fumble at the Czech end and the bulletin was released after his club had closed.”
Haydon could therefore not possibly have received the bulletin by ticker-tape wire at the Savile Club. He knew about the shooting, because he was directly involved in it, as a traitor in the Circus.
Sam Collins, portrayed by John Standing (left) in the 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For the 2011 version, the character of Jerry Westerby is merged with Sam Collins and given his background, and Stephen Graham cast (right),
Sam Collins’ gambling club
Sam Collins leads a double life, under the cover of being a club impresario. The events of Karla’s Choice (2024) are set in 1963, in the aftermath of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and we read of how Sam Collins was already running a chic gambling club in Paris. He has a seemingly genteel daily routine - but it is also grounded in an insistence on personal control, bordering on the paranoid:
Sam Collins opened up at the club in the early afternoon. His bar staff were reliable and the doormen positively subtle, but Sam didn’t like letting anyone else begin the day…The truth was that Sam wanted to sniff the air and run his finger along the bar counter. The club was his place, and he believed with a certainty that could only be considered superstitious that if someone was watching him or setting him up, he’d know from that first moment in his day.
By the events of The Honorary Schoolboy (1977), Circus operative Peter Guillam pays a visit to the supposedly retired Sam Collins, at his gambling club in West London:
The same afternoon, he dropped in at the quiet West End gaming club where, in the permanent nighttime of his elected trade, Sam Collins endured the rigours of retirement. Expecting to find him overseeing his usual afternoon game of chemin-de-fer, Guillam was surprised at being shown to a sumptuous room marked ‘management’. Sam was roosting behind a fine desk, smiling prosperously through the smoke of his habitual brown cigarette.
Smiley later arranges for his bodyguard Fawn to be put up at Collins’s club. The Club is clearly extremely prosperous - unlike the more traditional London clubs which were ailing in the seventies, Collins says of his gambling establishment, “That club of mine practically runs itself these days. I’m getting bored with it to be frank. Money, money.” This was not a common predicament in seventies Clubland.
The reasons for this unusual prosperity are hinted at later in The Honourable Schoolboy: the late 1970s saw London’s gambling clubs embroiled knee-deep in racketeering, money laundering and organised crime, through a series of syndicates which operated several casinos at a time - something which came to a head with a wave of casino raids and closures in the early 1980s. Le Carré’s 1977 novel, with topical perceptiveness, suggests that Collins’s club was at the heart of this:
On the Monday an ornate desk arrived, with a red leather top, and several fake hunting prints from the walls of Sam’s club, which was in the process of being taken over by one of the larger gambling syndicates, to the satisfaction of all parties.
The real-life Curzon House Club on Mayfair’s Curzon Street, with its name clearly visible on the awning, was used as a filming location for Sam Collins’ club in the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, just months before its closure due to police raids in 1979.
The Club and its supposed real-life identity is actually fleshed out in a brief appearance in episode 5 of the 1979 TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Here, George Smiley visits Sam Collins at his club one morning - and it is filmed in the real-life Curzon House Club at 20 Curzon Street, with the location clearly visible on the awning over the front door. The Curzon House Club was a gambling club which had opened in the historic Curzon House in 1962, in a bid to cash in on the liberalisation of the gambling laws in 1960.
George Smiley (Alec Guinness) kills time in the lobby of the Curzon House Club, waiting for Sam Collins.
Collins (played by John Standing) observes to Smiley (played by Alec Guinness) that this cover is “Better than selling washing machines anyway”, and that it is “A bit odd putting on a dinner jacket at ten o’clock in the morning, of course. It reminds me of diplomatic cover, come to think of it.” Before disappearing into Collins’ office, he assures Smiley, “Believe it or not, it’s straight - which makes for a change.”
The front lobby of the Curzon House Club, seen in the 1979 screen adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Ironically, given Collins’ onscreen assurance in the 1979 television series, only a few months after filming took place, the Metropolitan Police raided the real-life Curzon House Club over various breaches of the gambling laws, as part of their string of raids on casino clubs across London, and the Club was shut down later that year.
The upstairs gambling tables of the Curzon House Club, as seen in the 1979 screen version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Lacon’s club
Oliver Lacon (later Sir Oliver, and then Lord Lacon) is the Cabinet Office Under Secretary who oversees the Circus. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley remarks of Lacon:
“He’ll be at his club this evening at seven. If you’re worried, you’re to call him from the phone box down the road. I’d prefer you not to do that, but if you must he’ll make the necessary impressive noises.”
From this, we can infer that like many members of the Circus, Lacon does not entirely separate out his working life from his club life, and that his club may indulge his taking work calls from the premises. Given his seniority as a civil servant and the sensitivity of his reponsibilities, this is probably the only way the Club can secure his attendance in the evenings.
It is not clear if Lacon is the same person as the earlier unnamed Under Secretary in The Looking Glass War (1965), but they appear to have the same responsibilities. This Under Secretary, however, mistrusts clubs as a nest of gossip:
‘If those people know,’ the Under Secretary said with contempt, ‘it’ll be round every damned club by tomorrow.’
Oliver Lacon, portrayed by Anthony Bate (left) and Simon McBurney (right), in the 1979 and 2011 adaptationa of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Martindale’s other club: the Garrick
Tiresome, indiscreet, pushy civil servant Roddy Martindale is not only a member of Smiley’s unnamed club for those with intelligence connections. In The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), it emerges that Martindale is also a member of the Garrick Club in Covent Garden, where le Carré suggests a touch of misogyny helps him to bond with the other members: “Martindale, who had never loved a woman in his life…made a positive thing of it at the Garrick.” He gossips at “the luncheon table at the Garrick,” telling all and sundry what he makes of recent personnel changes in the secret service:
‘It’s a scandal,’ Martindale announced huffily, as he cropped his smoked eel and steak-and-kidney and the club’s own claret, up another twenty pence a crack. ‘I shall tell everybody.’
Discretion was clearly not Martindale’s forte.
While Martindale’s background previously overlapped with wartime codebreakers, Smiley frequently reminds himself that this was three decades ago, and that Martindale has not had any real role in intelligence since then - he simply sticks his nose into gossip. He is therefore a member of a far more flamboyant club of actors and broadcasters, than many of the bona fide spies of Smiley’s world.
Gerald Westerby’s club
Journalist and retired spy Gerald “Jerry” Westerby meets his literary agent “Ming” Mencken at a rather vaguely-defined club in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977):
They lunched in Jerry’s club, a grand, grubby place which owed its survival to amalgamation with humbler clubs, and repeated appeals through the post. Huddled in the half-empty dining room, under the marble eyes of empire builders, they lamented Lancashire’s lack of fast bowlers.
Given the state of London Clubland in 1977, this could have been any one of several dozen establishments.
The Alias Club
In The Looking Glass War (1965), we are introduced to the Alias Club, a particularly discreet establishment. Like Smiley’s first club, it is located in a basement, though it is clearly a different place, around the Thames Embankment. The first mention of it is when Wilf Taylor develops a yearning for Steinhäger gin shortly before his death. He resolves, “He’d make them order it at the Alias Club when he got back. Cause quite a stir.”
Later, Department operative Jack Johnson succinctly describes the military clientele:
‘Know the Alias Club at all?…Off Villiers Street? A lot of the old gang meet up there. You ought to come along one evening, when we get home.’
Le Carré treats the reader to an elaborate description of the Club. While it is a distinct club from Smiley’s Marylebone one near Manchester Square, it seems to capture a similar spirit, a mixture of nobility of purpose, and traumatic loss:
Somewhere not far from Charing Cross, in the basement of one of those surprising eighteenth-century houses between Villiers Street and the river, is a club with no name on the door. You reach it by descending a curving stone staircase. The railing…is painted dark green and needs replacing.
Its members are an odd selection. Some of a military kind, some in the teaching profession, others clerical; others again from that no-man’s-land of London society which lies between the bookmaker and the gentleman, presenting to those around them, and perhaps even to themselves, an image of vacuous courage; conversing in codes and phrases which a man with a sense of language can only listen to at a distance. It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe. It is their battlefield still; if there is love, they find it here in one another, shyly like adolescents, thinking all the time of other people.
From the war, none but the dons were missing.
It is a small place, run by a thin, dry man called Major Dell; he has a moustache and a tie with blue angels on a black background. He stands the first drink, and they buy him the others. It is called the Alias Club…
It is open in the evenings. They come at about six, detaching themselves with pleasure from the moving crowd, furtive but determined, like men from out of town visiting a disreputable theatre. You notice first the things that are not there: no silver cups behind the bar, no visitors’ book nor list of membership; no insignia, crest or title. Only on the whitewashed brick walls a few photographs hang, framed in passe-partout... The faces are indistinct, some enlarged, apparently from a passport, taken from the front with both ears showing according to the regulation; some are of women, a few of them attractive, with high square shoulders and long hair after the fashion of the war years. The men are wearing a variety of uniforms; Free French and Poles mingle with their British comrades. Some are fliers. Of the English faces one or two, grown old, still haunt the club.
From this description, the Alias Club appears to be a composite of several clubs. Physically, it resembles the small, intimate dining clubs like Pratt’s in the basement, or the Beefsteak upstairs. Like Smiley’s unnamed club, it clearly draws some inspiration from the Special Forces Club, particularly the mention of framed photographs of secret agents. In its theme, it is closer to the service clubs of the armed forces. At the time le Carré wrote in the 1960s, there were few surviving clubs around the back of Villiers Street; but in the Edwardian era, the area around the Adelphi and the Thames Embankment had been teeming with clubs based in townhouses, so it is not far-fetched to imagine one having survived into the 1960s.
Li Po Chun Chambers in Hong Kong in the 1960s, when they hosted the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. (Photo credit: The Industrial History of Hong Kong Group.)
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong
Finally, much of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) is set in Hong Kong, and the book offers up much scene-setting with its depiction of a real-life institution, the colony’s premier press club, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Originally set up in 1943 as a wartime press association for British foreign correspondents in Shanghai, it relocated to Hong Kong in 1949. From 1962 to 1982, it occupied the upper floors of a 1957 block called Li Po Chun Chambers (on the site of a previous colonial building of that name), with a mixture of old and new design elements. Le Carré describes it thus, on “a certain typhoon Saturday in mid-1974” at three o’clock in the afternoon, when residents awaited the next onslaught:
In the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a score of journalists, mainly from former British colonies – Australian, Canadian, American – fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero. Thirteen floors below them, the old trams and double deckers were caked in the mud-brown sweat of building dust and smuts from the chimney-stacks in Kowloon…And in the men’s room, which provided the Club’s best view of the harbour, young Luke the Californian was ducking his face into the handbasin, washing the blood from his mouth.
We are later given insights into the peculiarities of the Club’s gossip, from how, “A veteran British frigate lay at anchor and Club rumours said Whitehall was selling it,” to a member asking, “Has Big Moo gotten hiccups again?” and how, “Big Moo was Club jargon for the Governor.” Le Carré depicts it as an Anglophile’s paradise, hosting, “a succession of aimless drinking sessions,” as Police Superintendant Rockhurst, “tucked his napkin into his collar in preparation for the Club’s roast lamb and mint sauce and a lot of potatoes.” A later description reads how:
In the Hong Kong club a serenely Christian clock struck eleven and the chimes tinkled in the panelled quiet like spoons dropped on a distant kitchen floor. The better chairs were already taken by readers of last Thursday’s Telegraph, which gave a quite dismal picture of the moral and economic miseries of their homeland.
‘Pound’s in the soup again,’ a crusted voice growled through a pipe. ‘Electricians out [on strike]. Railways out. Pilots out.’
‘Who’s in? More the question,’ said another, just as crusted.
‘If I was the Kremlin I’d say we were doing a first-class job,’ said the first speaker, barking out the final word to give it a military indignation, and with a sigh ordered up a couple of dry martinis. Neither man was above twenty-five years old, but being an exiled patriot in search of a quick fortune can age you pretty fast.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club was having one of its churchy days when burghers far outnumbered newsmen…Luke was at the bureau and his boss the dwarf was slouched grumpily at the bar surrounded by sonorous British suburbanites in dark trousers and white shirts discussing the eleven hundred gearbox.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club is also depicted by le Carré as having a streak of rudeness displayed by members towards its staff, with Rockhurst exclaiming, “And another beer! But cold this time, hear that, boy? Muchee coldee, and bring it chop chop!” It is a condescending cry we hear repeatedly yelled at the staff later in the novel.
Indeed, le Carré’s picture of the Club is far from being a fond one:
“the Club was pretty much empty. For reasons of prestige, the top correspondents steered clear of the place anyway. A few businessmen, who came for the flavour pressmen give, a few girls, who came for the men. A couple of television war tourists in fake battle-drill.”
Meanwhile, veteran journalist and sometime Circus operative William Craw (clearly based on the real-life journalist Richard Hughes) is one of the few bona fide members of the press to frequent the Club:
“a Monday came, and around midday the old boy strolled into the Club wearing a new beige suit and a very fine buttonhole, all smiles and anecdotes…He spent money, more than his paper would normally have allowed him. He ate several jovial lunches with well-dressed Americans from vaguely titled United States agencies…In the Club, he was reviled for diplomat-crawling, a grave crime, and this pleased him.”
Indeed, clubs formed part of le Carré’s scene-setting in Hong Kong in general, with Drake Ko OBE being mentioned as Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, another real-life club in the British colony. Other real-life clubs referenced included the Hong Kong Club (its original clubhouse still standing at the time, with “Wedgwood porticoes, striped blinds and a smell of stale English food at the doorway,” ), the American Club and the Club Lusitano.
Conclusion
Le Carré’s depiction of clubs - even heavily fictionalised ones - is by turns affectionately knowing, and occasionally caustic. On the one hand, we find clubs to be a common currency among his characters, and it provides a window into their hobbies and personalities. On the other hand, much of le Carré’s fiction covers Clubland at its nadir in the 1960s and 1970s, and he seemed well aware that he was detailing its diminished circumstances and attendant shabbiness. He was also aware that members could sometimes make for distinctly unwelcome company - from bores like Roddy Martindale, fishing for gossip on sensitive affairs of state, to boorish members like Inspector Rockhurst, yelling at the staff. The characters may inhabit a world of clubs, but Smiley himself is clearly uncomfortable with the attendant gregariousness, which clearly comes more easily to a traitor like Bill Haydon, than to discreet professionals like George Smiley or the unclubbable Peter Guillam. Le Carré’s characters often frequent Clubland, but are seldom of Clubland.
Further reading
John le Carré, Call for the Dead (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961).
____________, A Murder of Quality (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962).
____________, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).
____________, The Looking Glass War (London: William Heinemann, 1965).
____________, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974).
____________, The Honourable Schoolboy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977).
____________, Smiley’s People (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979).
____________, The Secret Pilgrim (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).
____________, A Legacy of Spies (London: Viking Press, 2017).
Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (London: Viking Press, 2024).
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.
My first encounter with clubs where The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (TV and book) and le Carres's books. Appreciate and admire the effort you have put into these two articles about clubland in le Carre's books.
A great discussion of all. Hopefully of some use to other scholars.