Clubs in Popular Culture: The Bellona Club

From the Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Smoking Room, as depicted in the 1973 television adaptation of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

This post is based on my notes and slides from a talk given to the 2023 annual convention of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society.

Having looked at fictional clubs in literature, from Blades in the James Bond books, to two clubs in the Sherlock Homes stories (the Diogenes Club, and Dr Watson’s unnamed club), I thought it worth turning to a club synonymous with another fictional detective: the Bellona Club.

The Club is the title setting of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Dorothy L. Sayers’ fourth book in her series about the detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The novel has also been popularised by two BBC adaptations, both made in the 1970s, featuring Ian Carmichael as Wimsey: the 1973 television version, and the 1975 radio version. Both adaptations are quite faithful. While the novel concerns a murder at the Club, relatively little of the novel is actually set there, and we only learn a finite amount about it.

Identity

The Bellona Club takes its name from Bellona, the Roman Goddess of war, who is related to Mars (either his sister or his wife, depending on the source). It is a fittingly militaristic name for a club which has more than its fair share of military veterans.

But it is not a purely military club like the Army & Navy or the Naval & Military, containing social members, too. It has a wider reach than its military theme would suggest.

Sayers’ characters stress how sleepy and quiet the Club’s environs are, saying, “They’d hoof me out of the Club if I raised my voice beyond a whisper”, and referring to “the deserted library.” And Sayers herself observes of its quiet and solitude:

“There never was anybody in the library at the Bellona. It was a large, quiet, pleasant room, with the book-shelves arranged in bays, each of which contained a writing-table and three or four chairs. Occasionally someone would wander in to consult The Times Atlas, or a work on Strategy and Tactics, or to hunt up an ancient Army List, but for the most part it was deserted. Sitting in the farthest bay, immured by books and silence, confidential conversation could be carried on with all the privacy of the confessional.”

Lord Peter Wimsey uses the deserted Library of the Bellona Club to conduct enquiries, in the television adaptation.

Clearly, this was not a bustling club. Indeed, there is a morbid emphasis on death, which recurs throughout the descriptions of the clubhouse:

Captain Fentiman: “What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue?”

Lord Peter Wimsey: “Oh, I wouldn’t call it that. Funeral parlour at the very least.”

Elsewhere, the members are referred to as “corpses.” The book’s main plot is kicked off by the elderly General Fentiman being found dead by a club fireplace, and this being deemed an entirely normal occurence at the Club - at least, until Lord Peter Wimsey digs deeper into the matter.

“Nobody remembered speaking to him. They were all used to old General Fentiman, slumbering by the fire.”

This prompts the reaction from the dead man’s grandson, Captain Fentiman:

“Take him away! Take him away! He’s been dead for two days! So are you! So am I! We’re all dead and we never noticed it!”

Today, we might be quite used to the staple parody of Clubland as being filled with the elderly and the retired, gently snoozing and on the brink of imminently expiring. Yet it is worth stating that in the 1920s, this was a relatively recent development. London clubs had often been thought of as quite lively, bustling, even raucous, places in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. For reasons gone into in my last book, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Great War that Clubland began to show dramatic signs of fossilisation and decay. Accordingly, Sayers’ unflattering portrayal should be seen in light of this - it was a topical commentary, on what was then a current, ongoing development.

Location

We are told that:

“The Bellona Club is situated in Piccadilly, not many hundred yards west of Wimsey's own flat.”

Though no number is named, the mention of overlooking Piccadilly suggests a house number anything between 78 and 140.

At the time of writing, there had been some 19 clubhouses on Piccadilly, with 13 of them still open when the novel was published in 1928. (I shan’t name them all here, not least because you’ll find the answer in my new book - which includes a complete building-by-building street index of every known London clubhouse, past and present.) Today, only the RAF Club (formerly the building of the Lyceum Club) at number 128 and the Cavalry Club (now Cavalry & Guards Club) at number 127 are still operating as clubs - though one ex-clubhouse, Cambridge House (which used to house the Naval & Military “In & Out” Club) is due to reopen as a new private members’ club, later this year. All this barely hints at how the north side of Piccadilly was once a hub of London Clubland, particularly at the western end of the street overlooking Green Park - a snapshot of this can be gleaned from the below map, from 1910.

A Daily Chronicle map of London Clubland in 1910, showing Piccadilly’s high concentration of clubhouses.

Layout

The Bellona Club seems to be equipped with most of the amenities you would expect of a London club of the era. Sayers describes the busy Smoking Room which was the centre of club life (“There were people in the smoking-room all morning, my dear Lord Peter”), the Entrance Hall, the Staircase, the Cloakroom, the Bar, the seldom-used Library with its Anteroom, another Anteroom with a telephone cabinet, and mention of Bedrooms, plus a description of how members were littered across “various rooms.”

There is no direct mention of dining facilities, but these are almost certainly a given, in light of the extent of the other facilities. (Plenty of clubs do not have a library or bedrooms, but it is much rarer to find one without a dining room, especially if it already has a library and bedrooms.)

The Bar of the Bellona Club, as depicted in the television adaptation.

Visual impressions of the Bellona Club are likely to be informed by its portrayal in the 1973 television adaptation; but despite the presence of period details in this, it looks more like a club of the 1970s, with its tired wallpaper and studio lighting; so it is not necessarily an accurate rendition of the club envisioned by Sayers.

One particularly interesting feature is the Bellona Club’s Bar. Bars would have been considered a relatively novel feature in 1920s London Clubland. It had certainly been commonplace to buy alcohol in Victorian clubs, typically from an attendant in the Smoking Room, or with a meal in the Coffee Room; but it would have been considered the high of gaucheness for a club to have had a whole room dedicated to vending alcohol, prior to World War I. The bars spread gradually and sporadically, with some clubs holding out against them until the 1960s. The first of the London club bars was Buck’s, which opened in 1919, and made a great point of its cocktail bar taking up pride of place - and it must be borne in mind that at a time when alcohol was illegal in the United States, having an “American cocktail bar” could seem a rather louche, racy, daring feature. It also stands as a contrast to the staid, death-laden imagery used by Sayers elsewhere in the novel.

Buck’s: a pioneer of the club cocktail bars which became increasingly fashionable in some clubs of the 1920s.

Drinks

We get a flavour of the Bellona Club embracing drinks from both ends of the spectrum - the daring and the traditional. At the more experimental end was the reference to cocktails such as a “dry martini.” At the more conservative end of the spectrum is an 1886 Cockburn’s vintage port – an interesting suggestion from Sayers. On the one hand, it was a strong vintage from a respected port house. While it was close to being a vintage at its peak (around the 45-year mark), it was not a pre-phylloxera vintage from the very different-tasting vines before the 1860s & 1870s wine blight, which were still considered a great luxury in 1920s London. Accordingly, it may be inferred that the Bellona Club’s cellars were respectable enough, but not the most luxurious in their selection.

Club ‘characters’

Every club has its “characters.” Sayers gives us some vivid pen-portraits of some of the individuals populating the Bellona Club. The Club’s Secretary, Culyer, is given a distinctive description, with the strong implication that he has an arm missing or wounded in the Great War:

“The Club Secretary hurried in, in his dress-shirt and trousers, the half-dried lather still clinging to his jaws…The Secretary had only one sound arm.”

There was also a more stereotypical figure, found in most clubs:

“Wetheridge, He was the Club grumbler. Distinguished even in that fellowship of the dyspeptic and peremptory – always threatening to complain to the committee, harassing the secretary and constituting a perennial thorn in the sides of his fellow members. He retired, murmuring, to his chair and the evening paper.”

But a strong emphasis runing throughout the Bellona Club and its members is on discretion:

“Fortunate, indeed, that Penberthy was the old man’s own doctor. He knew all about it. He could give a certificate. No inquest. Nothing undesirable. The members of the Bellona Club could go to dinner.”

Conclusion

Sayers portrays the Bellona Club as a composite: stuffy, but also with a slightly racy cocktail bar. She gives a fairly typical Clubland address for the period - Piccadilly - but does not obviously base it on any one club. What we perhaps realise less easily with the passage of time is how much Sayers’ Bellona Club, with its ageing membership who were widely expected to expire imminently, represented social satire of the recent state of Clubland in the 1920s; a commentary on how London clubs had only just started a half-century-long process of going stale.