George Smiley (Alec Guinness) and Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock) dine at their club in the BBC TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), as filmed in the real-life dining room of the Eccentric Club.
George Smiley is the unlikely hero of the long-running series of novels by John le Carré, the nom de plume of former MI5 and MI6 spy David Cornwell (1931-2020). A short, podgy, badly-dressed, myopic, reserved, ageing, uxorious-but-cuckolded masterspy, Smiley inhabits a demi-monde laced with clubs, overlapping with his responsibilities at ‘the Circus’, the fictionalised MI6 headquarters around Cambridge Circus.
This is the first of two posts, examining the fictional (or not-so-fictional) clubs of Smiley’s world. Here, I look at the two clubs of which Smiley himself was a member.
Le Carré went to some lengths to deny that the clubs of Smiley’s world were based on real-life institutions (his disclaimer at the start of The Looking Glass War (1965) states “None of the…clubs, institutions nor intelligence organisations I have described here or elsewhere exists, or has existed to my knowledge in real life. I wish to make that very clear.”), but few will have believed him. This is particularly the case with some of le Carré’s later books, which explicitly named several real-life clubs as having been used by Smiley’s contemporaries. (But more on that in Part 2…)
George Smiley’s first club
We first encounter an unnamed club of George Smiley’s in his debut appearance, in the novel Call for the Dead (1961). In it, he invites Police Inspector Mendel to dine at the Club. Le Carré describes it thus:
Membership of the club to which Smiley belonged is not quoted among the respectable acquisitions of those who adorn the pages of Who’s Who. It was formed by a young renegade of the Junior Carlton named Steed-Asprey, who had been warned off by the Secretary for blaspheming within the hearing of a South African bishop. He persuaded his former Oxford landlady to leave her quiet house in Hollywell and take over two rooms and a cellar in Manchester Square which a monied relative put at his disposal.
It had once had forty members who each paid fifty guineas a year [worth £1,650 in 2025]. There were thirty-one left. There were no women and no rules, no secretary and no bishops. You could take sandwiches and buy a bottle of beer, you could take sandwiches and buy nothing at all. As long as you were reasonably sober and minded your own business, no one gave twopence what you wore, did or said, or whom you brought with you.
Mrs Sturgeon no longer devilled at the bar, or brought you your chop in front of the fire in the cellar, but presided in genial comfort over the ministrations of two retired sergeants from a small border regiment.
In some ways it is reminiscent of the highly informal Special Forces Club, which superficially resembles a domestic house, and is similarly out of the way from the heart of Clubland in St. James’s.
But the resemblance should not be taken too literally. The Special Forces Club is in Knightsbridge, not Marylebone. Unlike Smiley’s club, it does indeed have many of the institutional trappings of a traditional club, including rules, a secretary and a chairman. Yet it nevertheless retains a far more informal atmosphere than many of the St. James’s clubs, the members as likely to wander around anonymously in woolly jumpers as in regimental blazers.
The utterly unassuming exterior of the Special Forces Club, which largely resembles a normal house, inside and out. (Photo credit: CAMRA.)
The emphasis on this club of Smiley’s is simple, informal hospitality - Call for the Dead (1961) tells us that on a Saturday evening (traditionally a quiet time for most clubs, which either operate on a reduced opening at weekends, or are closed altogether):
Only half a dozen people were there. Smiley had ordered their meal, and a table was set for them in the cellar, where a bright coal fire burned in a brick hearth. They were alone, there was sirloin and claret; outside the rain fell continuously.
Later in the novel, we are told, “Smiley had lied to them that night in his club”; in other words, work continues at his club, he never lets his guard down and switches off from espionage. Instead, for Smiley, the Club is a place of intrigue. In the other clubs found in the Smiley canon, this turns out to be something of a recurring theme.
The description of Smiley’s club in The Looking Glass War (1965) is no less eccentric. His boss Leclerc:
thought Smiley’s club a very strange place; not at all the kind of thing he had expected. Two half-basement rooms and a dozen people dining at separate tables before a large fire. Some of them were vaguely familiar. He suspected they were connected with the Circus…Leclerc noticed that the claret was very good.
In this respect, it physically resembles Pratt’s on Park Place, off St. James’s Street; for although the Club owns the whole of its Queen Anne building, its life is centred around two modest basement rooms, one being the dining room, the other a waiting room where drinks and dinner are ordered. (Although the emphasis on “separate tables”, in the traditional sense, again brings to mind the dining room of the Special Forces Club.)
The unassuming, cosy basement dining room of Pratt’s. (Photo credit: Daily Mail.)
We can therefore infer, with the mixed signals that the Club resembles both Pratt’s and the Special Forces Club in different ways (and also has marked differences to both), that it was a composite in le Carré’s imagination, rather than being based on one real-life club.
One of the odder aspects of Smiley’s club was its membership composition, with no provision for institutional continuity. We are told in Call for the Dead (1961):
Naturally enough, most of the members were approximate contemporaries of Smiley at Oxford. It had always been agreed that the club was to serve one generation only, that it would grow old and die with its members. The war had taken its toll of Jebedee and others, but no one had ever suggested they should elect new members. Besides, the premises were now their own, Mrs Sturgeon’s future had been taken care of and the club was solvent.
This is later echoed in The Looking Glass War (1965), when Leclerc is being shown around:
‘This is rather a good spot. How do you join?’
‘Oh, you don’t,’ said Smiley apologetically, then blushed and continued, ‘I mean, they don’t have new members. Just one generation … several went in the war, you know, some have died or gone abroad.’
In reality, it is almost inconceivable for any club to have deliberately operated on such principles. Nevertheless, it was an obvious commentary by le Carré on what was going on within Clubland in the 1960s. Veterans of both world wars tended to be very loathe to elect members who had not served in ‘their’ war; and this extended to a reluctance to admit members too young to have served. Consequently, by the 1960s, many of London’s traditional clubs were often suffering from decades of refusal to elect younger members in any large numbers; and this was having a serious detrimental effect on the commercial viability of these clubs, as the venerable old members began to die of old age, without having been gradually replaced to any great degree. Smiley’s club is a caricature of how this would have worked, if it had been done deliberately - the open aim was to lead to the extinction of the Club beyond the present generation.
A decade later, by the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley seems to be less enamoured with this club. At the beginning of the novel, he bumps into Roddy Martindale, a bumptious and indiscreet civil servant:
Fool that he was, Smiley bought his escape by agreeing to dine that same evening at a club in Manchester Square to which they both belonged but which Smiley avoided like the pest, not least because Roddy Martindale was a member.
Despite the infrequency of Smiley’s visits by the 1970s, he is still enough of a presence in this small club to be recognised by one of its waiters, who asks him, “Anything further you require, Mr. Smiley?”
The reference to it being “near Manchester Square” - with Marylebone never having been a fashionable area for clubs - strongly suggests it being the same club that Smiley frequented a decade earlier; but his growing detachment from it is underlined later in the book by it being referred to as “Martindale’s club,” rather than as their club.
Smiley then humours Martindale over an interminable four-hour dinner, batting away his questions about secret service acquaintances with “Yes”, “No”, and “No, they never found him.” This seems to be a commentary on the faded state of Clubland by the 1970s, with Smiley noting that the Club’s instigator Steed-Asprey, “had founded that very club in order to escape from bores like Roddy Martindale.” It also says something on the nature of Clubland conversation, which Smiley clearly regards as being far too indiscreet.
Smiley’s other club?
In Smiley’s People (1979), we read of how George Smiley has at least one other club:
There was a club he belonged to, against his better judgement, near Pall Mall, and he lunched there in imperial solitude on warmed-up steak-and-kidney pie. Afterwards, from the head porter, he had requested his box from the club safe and discreetly abstracted a few illicit possessions, including a British passport in his former workname of Standfast, which he had never quite managed to return to Circus Housekeepers; an international driving licence to match; a sizeable sum of Swiss francs, his own certainly, but equally certainly retained in defiance of the Exchange Control Act. He had them in his pocket now.
There are several points of interest here. It seems that Smiley does not enjoy membership of this club at all; in fact, he seems to only use the place as a convenient location to deposit sensitive material, rather than as a place to meet other members, dining in “solitude” over indifferently-reheated food. While bad food was pretty standard fare in 1970s London Clubland, it compares poorly with the “sirloin and claret” found in Smiley’s earlier club. One imagines Smiley does not relish his inclusion in the Club’s circulation of an annual published list of all members in its handbook, either.
It is also worth noting that the Club is “near Pall Mall”, not on Pall Mall. It is therefore unlikely to have been one of the “big name” establishments on Pall Mall itself - but more on that below…
It is also possible that Smiley has by this time resigned from his other London club. Le Carré later describes, “the passport he had collected from his London club” - note the description is not “from one of his London clubs.” Given how jaded he had become about the Manchester Square club by the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), and the very real security risks posed by Roddy Martindale’s indiscretions in and around that Club, it is quite plausible that Smiley has tendered his resignation there by the events of Smiley’s People (1979).
Alternatively, given the sketchy economics of his other club, and its aim, “that it would grow old and die with its members,” it is quite possible that it has done precisely that, and closed down by 1979 - particularly if it was already down to just 31 members in the 1960s.
Either way, it seems that by 1979, the club “near Pall Mall” is now Smiley’s only London club.
Smiley’s clubs onscreen
There have been several screen adaptations of Le Carré’s works. The 1967 film of Call for the Dead (retitled The Deadly Affair) with James Mason, the 1991 film of A Murder of Quality with Denholm Elliott, and the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman, did not attempt to show us Smiley’s club life. Yet both of Alec Guinness’s appearances as Smiley, in 1979 and 1982, show us each of his clubs onscreen. Neither depiction is wholly faithful to the original books.
Episode 1 of the 1979 BBC television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy accurately renders Smiley’s accidental Mayfair meeting with the irritating Roddy Martindale (here played by Nigel Stock), after leaving Heywood Hill bookshop. (Although in this screen version, they actually meet at the Albemarle Street entrance of the Royal Arcade, after Smiley snuck out of Heywood Hill’s back entrance, rather than in front of Heywood Hill with Martindale emerging from a haircut at Geo. F. Trumper next door.)
But when they repair to their club, what we see is not a building near Manchester Square. Instead, the interior and exterior was filmed in a real-life St. James’s club in 1979: the Eccentric Club, at 9 Ryder Street. This screen version of Smiley’s club is far smarter than the literary version. Far from being a couple of cramped rooms in a Georgian basement, we see an expansive Edwardian club dining room, converted out of a set of high Victorian chambers. (The building had been constructed as a set of serviced apartments, before being converted to the Dieudonné Hotel, before then being taken over by the Eccentric Club and used as their clubhouse from 1914.)
A full view of the dining room of the Eccentric Club in 1979, used to depict Smiley and Martindale’s club in the BBC TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
There are other differences, too. Of the literary version, we are told after Smiley and Martindale’s four-hour dinner, “They were putting on their coats. The porters had gone home; they had to fetch them for themselves from the empty brown racks.” By contrast, we see several uniformed porters on duty in the onscreen version of the front lobby, including one who approaches Smiley to check if a left-behind umbrella is his property. (“It’s not mine, thank you.”) The screen version is a far more attentive place, more reflective of a St. James’s club like the Eccentric Club, than Smiley’s unnamed club of the books.
And there are other touches, not found in the book, like Martindale’s mean-spirited remark to Smiley, after they have waved off the hall porter: “I hope you’re not going to tip him; it’s a guinea at Christmas,” referencing the staff Christmas fund.
Smiley (Guinness) and Martindale (Stock) walk out of the Eccentric Club’s ground floor dining room and pick up their coats before proceeing down its corridor to the front entrance. The open hall at the back, on a raised level reached up some steps, can be seen.
Despite its deviation from the book, this onscreen version of Smiley’s first club has other reasons to recommend it. The Eccentric Club was financially ailing in 1979. It would close its doors in 1984, and the building never reopened as a club, with the Club’s closure and winding-up announced amidst financial difficulties two years later. (As its yard backed onto Christie’s, the building has since been bought up by the auction house, and is now an annexe wing of theirs.) The onscreen portrayal of the Club in the 1979 screen version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is therefore an invaluable insight into the building as a functioning clubhouse, just before its closure. And in just six minutes of screen time, we see the dining room, the corridor (with the raised vestibule up some steps in the background), the porter’s lodge, and the front entrance. We also see a level of detail that would not have been possible for a one-off studio set for a relatively throwaway scene, from club silverware, to artworks adorning the walls.
Due to having been filmed in a series of tracking shots, roaming from one room to the next, it is obvious that the scenery is not a combination of location filming and studio sets; instead, the cameras followed the actors among different interiors shot on the location, before moving out onto Ryder Street in the heart of St. James’s, with its art shops and boutiques. Smiley eventually evades Martindale, marching off in the direction of Duke Street St. James’s, with its multiplicity of private art galleries.
Smiley (Guinness) and Martindale (Stock) in the porter’s lodge of the Eccentric Club in 1979, doubling for Smiley’s unnamed club.
This last point does, however, make it clear that the Club is nowhere near Marylebone or Manchester Square - and so the screen version of Smiley’s first club is obviously very different to the literary version. It is, however, an all-too-accurate depiction of a London club of the era.
The Ryder Street exterior of the Eccentric Club, doubling for Smiley’s first club in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The building’s exterior remains almost identical today.
As for Smiley’s second club, we see this in episode 3 of the 1982 BBC television adaptation of Smiley’s People. It is a slightly improbable portrayal: the Reform Club on Pall Mall is used as a filming location, both inside and out.
Smiley strides up to the main entrance of the Reform Club on Pall Mall, in the BBC TV adaptation of Smiley’s People.
In this screen version, a club servant Mr. Carson (Vass Anderson) says, “Good morning, Mr. Smiley, sir, I haven’t seen you in quite some time,” as Guinness’ Smiley meekly nods in acknowledgement, asking for, “My little box.”
George Smiley paces across the Saloon of the Reform Club in the BBC television adaptation of Smiley’s People.
While this effectively captures the grandeur of Smiley’s second club, and how ill-at-ease this normally shadowy figure looks and feels in such conspicuous surroundings, the choice of the Reform Club is questionable. As stated, this club is supposed to be “near Pall Mall”, not occupying one of the most prominent buildings on Pall Mall. There would have been plenty of perfectly qualifying buildings near Pall Mall which were operating as clubs at the time (the Turf Club, which has been on Carlton House Terrace since 1965, for instance); but as the Reform Club was one of relatively few clubs which were welcoming film crews at the time, strict accuracy may have had to be sacrified at the expense of which photogenic clubhouses were available for booking.
We can therefore infer that Alec Guinness’ screen incarnation of George Smiley is a spin-off, existing in its own similar reality - but disconnected from the book series.
George Smiley (Alec Guinness) consults his treasure trove of forbidden items, deposited in the Library of the Reform Club, in the BBC TV adaptation of Smiley’s People, while club servant Mr. Carson (Vass Anderson) keeps the contents secure between consultations.
Part 2 of this piece will look at the use of clubs in Smiley’s world more broadly.
Incidentally, given that I was able to identify and verify the real-life use of the old Eccentric Club building by using photographic geolocation techniques taught to me during training from Bellingcat journalists who were drawing on their intelligence background, I would like to think that George Smiley would approve of such methods being applied to his world…
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.
I am certain that a column on the photographic geolocation technique that you used would be fascinating!
Thank you for a very interesting and very well researched article. The clubs in le Carre's books are one of my first contacts with clubs. Looking forward to reading part 2.