Lost Clubs: The Junior Constitutional Club (1887-1941)

The Junior Constitutional Club building pictured today.

The Junior Constitutional Club was the first London clubhouse in which I ever set foot. For many years, my mother worked in the Japanese Embassy of London, which occupies the building today; the annual Christmas Party was a family affair, and I can well remember glancing around this opulent building as a teenager, intrigued by its history.

Like many clubs with the “Junior” prefix, it is often overlooked - despite having one of the grandest clubhouses ever built in London, in a prime spot on Piccadilly overlooking Green Park. Wikipedia incorrectly states, “It had closed by 1904”, when it actually continued until the Second World War - illustrating how little is generally known about the Club today.

Origins

As the name suggests, the Junior Constitutional Club was an offshoot of the Constitutional Club. The Third Reform Act of 1884-5 had been anticipated by the Conservatives, who wanted to counter the National Liberal Club with a mass-membership political club of their own. However, the resultant Constitutional Club launched in 1883 was so oversubscribed that it was considered almost full from the beginning. Thus by the time its clubhouse opened in 1886, Conservatives set about planning a Junior Constitutional Club, to accommodate thousands more new Conservative-aligned voters who wished to be politically active, but had not joined the Constitutional Club in time.

Sketch of the building as completed, embedding the original plans for the ground and first floors on the top-left. Note this was prior to the 20th century alterations, which saw the creation of a main entrance in the centre of the building, still in use today. (Picture credit: Building News, 10 October 1890.)

Membership

Like other Conservative-affiliated clubs including the Carlton, Conservative, Junior Carlton, St. Stephen’s and Constitutional Clubs, it jealously guarded its political identity: applicants had to “profess Conservative principles” to qualify for membership.

Indeed, the Club saw itself as “a powerhouse of conservative and imperial ideas.” From 1904, it would host another club within, the United Empire Club, which was launched to support Joseph Chamberlain’s policy in favour of imposing “imperial preference” tariffs.

Like its Constitutional Club namesake, it numbered some 5,500 members. Although this made it one of the largest clubs of Victorian London, the original intention had been for an even bigger membership. The 1890 edition of Whittaker’s Almanac claimed that it had 10,000 members, but this appears to have been an aspiration rather than a statement of fact.

Building

The Club initially occupied a very familiar building: 14 Regent Street had latterly specialised in being the temporary home of a new mass-membership conservative club, firstly in 1864-9 for the Junior Carlton Club, and then in 1883-6 for the Constitutional Club. The Junior Constitutional Club was based there from 1887-90.

Meanwhile, the Club developed its purpose-built clubhouse at 101-104 Piccadilly, opposite Green Park, which was completed in 1890. Like much of the adjacent frontage along Piccadilly, including the Naval & Military Club in Cambridge House, the land was leased from Sir Richard Sutton Estates.

The building was designed by Robert William Edis, who had already built the Badminton Club’s neighbouring premises at 100 Piccadilly in 1875; and more recently, the Constitutional Club’s clubhouse at 28 Northumberland Avenue. Edis’s Constitutional and Junior Constitutional clubhouses were described by the Masonic Review (for he was an active Freemason) as “his finest pieces of work.”

The Club’s catering facilities were considerable, and it was noted for its gastronomy, with the Club regularly roasting a whole ox - even in wartime. The London Evening News recounted in 1940 how members would consume:

“an Aberdeen Angus black poll ox. It will occupy a ceremonial table in the centre of the coffee-room as cold baron of beef...four expert carvers will slice away at it unceasingly for an hour or more.

“This baron of beef luncheon is a tradition at the Junior Constitutional...It is said that, for flavour, there is nothing to touch an ox roasted whole.”

A number of photographs of the interior have survived from the building’s years as a clubhouse, most of them dating from a 1939 illustrated Picture Post feature.

Smoking Room of the Junior Constitutional Club in 1890. (Photo credit: author’s collection, colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

The Reading Room of the Junior Constitutional Club in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

The Club Lounge of the Junior Constitutional Club in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

A member reclines in the Library of the Junior Constitutional Club in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

Members look out from the raised ground-floor Morning Room of the Junior Constitutional Club, onto Green Park, in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

A club servant by the main staircase of the Junior Constitutional Club, onto Green Park, in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

A member in the Coffee Room of the Junior Constitutional Club, looked on by a page boy, in 1939. (Photo credit: Felix Man, Picture Post, 19 August 1939; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)

Bombing, and closure

The building was damaged by a bomb blast in late 1940, necessitating the immediate closure of the clubhouse. Due to the news blackout in operation at the time, it is unclear on which date the Club was hit, though most likely in December 1940.

While the closure was originally intended to be temporary, the Club ended up announcing that it was closing down for good on 3 March 1941, citing the “prohibitive” cost of repairing the bomb damage.

Aftermath

When the Club closed down, it was seized for war use by the American Military Police, as their London headquarters. After the war, the building changed hands several times in the ensuing decades. In 1947, it featured in a court case: Frederick Vivian Chaffey Giddins was a company director and former Guards officer who claimed to have purchased the building for £200,000 (though he never seems to have paid the promised money), and he used it as the centrepiece of a scheme to defraud investors, while purporting to want to restore it as a club. He was jailed for 12 months.

The building was subsequently Listed in 1972, with its Grade-II Listing reading as follows:

“Large former Club premises. 1890 by Colonel Edis for the Junior Constitutional Club. White marble and Portland stone, slate roof. Free Italian and Flemish Renaissance detailing. 4 storeys, high basement and 2 attic storeys. Broad 5 window symmetrical front. Doric order to ground floor with pairs of polished granite columns flanking windows and central entrance up steps. Upper floors have flanking and central 2 storey canted bay windows with carved decoration. Arcaded and balustraded windows to 1st and 2nd floors and paired windows to 3rd floor. Enriched cornices and 3 ornamental gables, with 2 storeys of attic windows, and double stone dormers breaking balustraded parapet with altered dormers above. High balustrade to area surmounted by 6 cast iron lamp standards. Apparently the first building in London to be entirely faced in marble.”

In 1989, the building became the Embassy of Japan, which it remains to this day.

Further reading

• Shōzō Kadota, ‘The Japanese Embassy in London and its Buildings’, in Ian Nish (ed.), Japanese Envoys in Britain, 1862-1964 (London: Japan Society/Brill, 2007), pp. 1-7.

Many of the interiors of the Grade I-Listed clubhouse are still well-preserved in the Japanese Embassy today. (Photo credit: ‘Japan in UK’ facebook group.)

The seal of the Junior Constitutional Club.

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