Since one of the most common questions I receive is around the election process to clubs, I have prepared the below flowchart to shed light on this. Every club will have its own variation, but most share certain commonalities.
The processes in the black boxes tend to be fairly objective, formulaic stages involving the consideration of evidence. Other stages are more subjective:
When a club expects supporting signatures to be gathered, these not only represent a minimum threshold to be met for a candidate to be taken forward, but they are also a way of showing support for that particular candidate, above and beyond most other candidates. This becomes especially pertinent if there is a waiting list, as a conspicuously long list of supporters can give the Committee grounds to let the candidate “jump the queue.”
Waiting lists, if present at all, tend to work on a “one out, one in” principle, when a club has a limit on the number of members (which it has reached). Candidates are generally advanced for election in the order they applied (even if they applied decades ago, and the difference between application dates is by only a few days). But as noted above, candidates with significantly more support may be edged up in the queue.
Membership feedback is a particularly nebulous area. It can be anything from thoughtful, well-sourced and considered, to hysterical, opinionated and prejudiced. The Committee considering an application cannot control the quality of submissions from member feedback; but they can handle all material (including candidate vetting they have undertaken or commissioned) with the utmost professionalism.
Interviews also need to be handled with the utmost professionalism - my advice on them is found here.
The above chart is particularly timely, given recent press coverage around club balloting processes. There is still widespread confusion around how these processes work - even among club members who were elected under them.
In particular, what is frequently misreported as a “waiting list” is often actually the “supporting signatures” stage. Gathering supporting signatures (particularly in a club demanding a high number of them) can be a time-consuming process over many months or even years, especially if the applicant does not already know a large number of members of that club, and/or if the Club does not allow candidates to view a membership list. Some candidates can sail through in only a few months, others may take years. Depending on your point of view, it is either a good thing or a bad thing that this requirement tends to lead to the existing membership being largely self-replicating - this arguably leads to greater cohesion, but at the considerable risk of growing stale. But this is not the same thing as a waiting list, merely a very slow process.
Waiting lists deserve a post of their own, but are extremely rare in British clubs today outside of sporting clubs.
In a proprietary club, the Committee may well be made up of two or three unelected individuals tasked by the owners with sifting applications. In a member-owned club, the Committee are more likely to be a group of members elected for that purpose - whether it is the Club’s main Committee, or a designated Sub-Committee dealing with membership issues.
One area not dealt with in the above chart is the question of how a proposer or seconder deals with their candidate not being successfully elected. This is a deeply personal matter, and there is no clear consensus on what to do (and there has never been - despite the prevalent myth to the contrary). Certainly, if a member keeps proposing a string of candidates who all end up being blackballed, then after a while their own resignation might well be expected. But it has never been the case that one unsuccessful candidate is enough to force their sponsor’s resignation; and even in those cases where a proposer’s resignation might be thought of as “the honourable thing”, it has not followed that this was what was always done.
It is also worth pointing out a wider trend from my analysis of a range of historic candidate’s books: that the vast majority of unsuccessful candidatures were not caused by applicants being blackballed, but by applications being withdrawn. The reasons for this are complex - and in no small part due to a common desire to avoid the embarrassment of blackballing. It has not been unknown, for instance, for a committee to inform a proposer that a formal ballot has been deferred for another month or two, but that a blackballing is thought overwhelmingly likely; and that they may wish to recommend to their candidate that they consider withdrawing.
For a fuller discussion of the application process, I will quite shamelessly direct readers to “Joining a Club: A Step-by-Step Guide”, on pages 178-188 of my most recent book, London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious.
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.