The grand staircase of the Junior United Service Club from 1857 to 1953. (Photo credit: F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960), colourised using the Kolorize.CC app.)
Having recently covered “The Senior” - the United Service Club - it made perfect sense to follow up with its offshoot, the Junior United Service Club, which was a major London club in its own right for over a century.
Origins
The Club was directly inspired by the United Service Club. R. H. Firth observed:
“The success of the first general Service club was marked, but as it did not admit officers of lower rank than Commander in the Navy and Major in the Army, there soon developed a demand for a similar institution open to both senior and junior officers.”
Calls for such a club had appeared in print as early as 1816 (in the Star), when the United Service Club was only a year old; but were not fulfilled for more than a decade. The object was controversial, with Admiral John Jervis, 1st Earl St Vincent, spearheading attacks in parliament, arguing that as with “The Senior”, it was constitutionally dangerous to create an organisation encouraging different branches of the military to congregate in central London.
The newly-constituted club held its first meeting on 24 March 1827. The Duke of Wellington (one of the founder members of “The Senior”) was an early advocate, and agreed to serve as a patron. While being open to all officers, senior officers still prevailed, and the army predominated: the initial Committee comprised 8 Generals, 9 Colonels, 3 naval Captains, 3 Majors, 12 army Captains, and 3 naval Lieutenants.
The Club’s remit was not restricted to the army and navy, but included marines, militia, volunteer corps, and private armies such as that of the East India Company - placing it in direct competition with the Oriental Club created three years earlier. Though as we shall see, things did not work out that way in practice.
It was initially launched with 600 members, with a cap of 1,500 members. (This was raised to 1,700 in 1853.) The launch was far from smooth, with numerous irregularities found, including several cases of people deemed elected who should not have been declared elected.
The British Coffee House at 27 Cockspur Street, which hosted the newly-launched club from 1827-8. (Picture credit: R. H. Firth, The Junior: A History of the Junior United Service Club, from its formation in 1827, to 1929 (London, Junior United Service Club, 1929), facing p. 6; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)
The first Charles Street clubhouse
Neither of the addresses which hosted the Club survive today. For its first year of operations, it was based in the upstairs rooms of the British Coffee House at 27 Cockspur Street, just off New Square (now Trafalgar Square). This was only an interim arrangement, while the Club acquired a more permanent home.
The old clubhouse on Charles Street (left) occupied by the United Service Club from 1819 to 1828, on the corner with Regent Street, which was occupied by the Junior United Service Club from 1828 until its demolition in 1854. The Theatre Royal Haymarket can be seen in the distance. (Picture credit: R. H. Firth, The Junior: A History of the Junior United Service Club, from its formation in 1827, to 1929 (London, Junior United Service Club, 1929), facing p. 23; colourised with the Kolorize.CC app.)
On 20 June 1828, the United Service Club vacated its purpose-built St. James’s clubhouse at 11-12 Charles Street, on the corner of Regent Street, in favour of their new clubhouse on Pall Mall. The Junior United Service Club stepped in, and purchased the discarded Charles Street building for £15,000 (around £2.2 million today).
The early membership
In its earlier years, the Club rapidly filled up and built up a waiting list of its own - a contributing factor to the creation of further combined services clubs, including the Army & Navy Club in 1837, and the Naval & Military Club in 1862.
Despite being theoretically open to militias and the East India Club, the Junior in fact saw very aggressive blackballing against candidates with those service backgrounds - so much so, that one ballot saw all 18 candidates blackballed; another saw 44 out of 45 candidates blackballed.
Behaviour among the members was a recurring topic of complaint. From the Club’s inception, drunkenness and brawling in the public rooms was not uncommon, compounded by raised tensions over card games for high stakes. In the first Charles Street clubhouse, a notice had to be put up in the Drawing Room:
‘Requesting that members will abstain from lying at length upon the sofas and soiling them with the dirt from their boots and shoes.’
There were further complaints about members dining in their hats. There were also thefts of silver plate, in which members were considered prime suspects. Later, as smoking became fashionable from the 1850s, there were recurring complaints about subalterns smoking on the front steps.
The second Charles Street clubhouse
As the Club became embroiled in strife among the members, and complaints about the facilities mounted, a Special General Meeting in 1853 hit upon a new idea: building a bigger clubhouse. It was hoped that this would add to the Club’s prestige, and allow it to become more selective in future. Expansion was to be undertaken by purchasing the neighbouring St. Alban’s Hotel. After an initial debacle commissioning an architect for £1,300 whose plans proved completely unworkable, the Club managed to buy the Crown lease on the hotel for £7,500, and to buy out the tenant for £4,500.
The exterior of the new clubhouse, constructed from 1854-7. (Picture credit: The Builder, 30 May 1857.)
In 1854, the Club began construction of the new building, at a cost of £46,000. The building was to an Italianate design by Thomas Marsh Nelson and Charles Innes, of the firm Nelson & James. Nelson was an experienced architect, but not in the field of clubs - he was better known for his neo-classical churches, such as St. John’s in Clapham. The building embedded a frieze beneath the cornice, incorporating medallions and trophies.
During the three years of construction, members were accommodated by the Army & Navy Club and the Guards Club both on Pall Mall, and the East India United Service Club on St. James’s Square; and by renting at £1,000 a year Lichfield House, at 15 St. James’s Square, for use as a temporary clubhouse until 1856. When the lease on Lichfield House ran out, the Club moved its temporary quarters to the Wellington Hotel on St. James’s Street, until completion of its new building in 1857.
Main staircase of the Junior United Service Club. (Picture credit: Illustrated London News, 18 April 1857.)
The ground floor centred around three major rooms: an impressive Hall leading up to the main staircase, a large Morning Room to the left of that (with a bay-window overlooking Regent Street), and a large Coffee Room to the right of the Hall, with a large bow-window overlooking Charles Street. Guests to the Coffee Room were relegated to a recessed area away from the window, hidden behind pillars. The front of the first floor was divided between a Regent Street-facing Writing Room over the Morning Room to the west, a Charles Street-facing Reception Room to the south, and an east-facing Library. Towards the rear of the first floor was a Card Room, two Billiard Rooms, and the Secretary’s Office.
Floor plan of the ground floor of the clubhouse in its original configuration, showing the irregular form of the L-shaped interior. (Picture credit: The Builder, 30 May 1857.)
Beyond these major setpiece rooms, use of space in the building was quite poor, with numerous windowless rooms and circuitous routes that must have been quite cheerless. A major renovation of these ‘back-end’ rooms was later undertaken, reflected in the two floorplans shown.
Floor plan of the modified Junior United Service Club. While the Morning Room, Hall, Coffee Room and Visitors’ Coffee Room remained largely unchanged, the rear areas of the clubhouse underwent extensive redevelopment; not least to illuminate the once-windowless Writers’ Drawing Room with natural light. (Picture credit: F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St James Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960).)
Artwork
The building was adorned with several large friezes of battles, including two by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and it held artefacts such as the sword carried by General Rowland Hill at Waterloo. It also had numerous large sculptures commissioned from John Thomas, best known for his work in the Palace of Westminster. In 1842, it commissoned Frederick Newenham to paint his portrait of the young Queen Victoria, now displayed in the Royal Albert Hall. At the top of the stairs of the 1857 clubhouse hung William Allan’s 1843 painting of the Battle of Waterloo.
William Allan, ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ (1843), which hung at the top of the stairs from 1857-1953. It had originally been painted for Wellington, but he refused it, due to its depiction of him in the foreground of the scene. Wellington accepted a copy by Allan which removed him from the scene, while the Club purchased the discarded original from an art dealer, Mr. Blackburn, in 1856. (Picture credit: English Heritage.)
Membership patterns
Who Was Who lists 522 notable individuals who delcared their membership of the Club between Who’s Who’s foundation in 1898, and the expiry of the Club in 1953. The vast majority of them were senior army officers. This would have been below-average for a London club of this type and size (compared to several thousand individuals at others - for instance, over 2,700 members listed at “The Senior”), and most of the names listed had died before World War II, suggesting a sloping-off of membership before then. Notable members over the years included Earl Kitchener, Sir John French, and King Rama VI of Siam.
A colourised photograph of the building exterior in the 1920s. (Picture credit: original photographic slide; colourised using the Kolorize.CC app.)
Decline and closure
The Club had noticeably stagnated by the beginning of the twentieth century. It possesed neither the prestige of “The Senior”, nor the sense of fun of clubs more popular with young officers such as the Guards, and the Army & Navy. Membership rolls remained full enough to enable to it tick over for many years more, but it was not the club of first choice for most people, and a lack of energy and raison d’etre becomes noticeable in contemporary press coverage by the Edwardian era. Membership noticeably sagged after World War I.
The Club’s address, Charles Street, was renamed as Charles II Street in 1939, for the purposes of disambiguation from King Charles Street in Westminster.
By October 1953, faced with bankruptcy, the ailing club announced that it would be wound up that December. With the Club’s closure, the membership merged - logically enough - with the United Service Club on Pall Mall, which was itself in some financial difficulty. They brought with them to their new home a number of paintings which remain in the building (now the Institute of Directors) to this day. The Club’s furniture was auctioned off in 1954.
The building was torn down in the 1950s, and the site redeveloped twice over - the first time with a brutalist government office block built in 1955, and the second time with the more recent office block that has a ‘San Carlo’ Italian restaurant, and a branch of Pret a Manger, on the ground floor. It is easy to spot, if you are ever at the junction of Regent Street and Charles II Street, and its size gives some idea of the dimensions of the former clubhouse.
Further reading
R. H. Firth, The Junior: A History of the Junior United Service Club, from its formation in 1827, to 1929 (London, Junior United Service Club, 1929).
The bookplate of the Junior United Service Club, showing its seal.
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.