Lost Clubs: The Naval Club (1919-2021)

The second clubhouse of the Naval Club, which it occupied from 1946-2021. (Photo credit: Wetherell estate agents.)

Regular readers of the Clubhouse Substack will have previously come across the Naval Club - it was one of two real-life London clubs used as a filming location for the Drones Club in Jeeves & Wooster (1990-3). But aside from this diverting brush with television, it occupied its own unique niche - and lessons for the rest of Clubland.

Britain has had a long history of Naval Clubs - the first, for senior naval officers from the rank of Commander and above, was launched in 1815, but only existed for a year before merging with the General Military Club to form the United Service Club on Pall Mall. A separate Royal Naval Club opened on New Bond Street in 1828, but folded after fifteen years. A litany of combined services clubs catered to naval officers through the peak years of London Clubland.

This particular club opened in 1919, aimed at officers of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, originally under the name of the RNVR (Auxiliary Patrol) Club, or “RNVR Club” for short. Officers of the RNVR experienced greater difficulty than their Royal Navy counterparts in securing election to military clubs, and so the creation of a dedicated club meant that it had a natural constituency - especially in the aftermath of mass demobilisation after the First World War. In the inter-war years, it was a mass-membership club, boasting some 15,000 members. Its original clubrooms were in the complex of the Connaught Rooms, at 61-65 Great Queen Street in Covent Garden.

During the Second World War, the Connaught Rooms suffered bomb damage, and the Naval Club moved into the clubhouse of the Marlborough Club at 52 Pall Mall. It was a crowded arrangement, with several other bombed-out clubs all lodging in the same narrow building - including the Windham Club, and the Orleans Club. While these latter two clubs merged more permanently into the Marlborough Club in 1945, the RNVR Club took the opportunity to acquire a more permanent home.

The main staircase of 38 Hill Street, Mayfair. (Photo credit: Wetherell estate agents.)

In 1946, they fundraised for and purchased the freehold of the 1748 townhouse at 38 Hill Street in Mayfair, which had once belonged to the 2nd Earl of Chatham. It was to be their home for the next 75 years. It was a substantial property that offered members a full range of club facilities, including 27 bedrooms.

And it was in this new home that the Club became synonymous with the informal “Thursday Club” group around the Duke of Edinburgh in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The view from the ground-floor bar towards the main staircase and front hallway, at 38 Hill Street. (Photo credit: Daily Telegraph.)

With the closure of so many other clubs in the post-war years, a decision was taken to broaden the Club’s remit from RNVR officers, to naval officers in general. To reflect this change, the Club changed its name to the Naval Club in 1969.

Nonetheless, the broadened remit did not change one major truth which affected all the major London military clubs in post-war Britain: large-scale cutbacks in the UK’s armed forces after World War II significantly reduced the pool of potential members from Clubland’s Edwardian heyday, resulting in the existing military clubs vying with one another for an ever-smaller pool of members. While the Club’s ownership of its freehold safeguarded it against some immediate financial pressures, by the 21st century it struggled to remain financially viable, as its once-large membership dwindled to under a thousand.

The final blow came with the forced closure brought about during the Covid-19 pandemic; in 2021, it was announced that the Club would not reopen, and that the Naval Club Council had made the decision to go into liquidation.

The ground-floor bar, located in the far corner. (Photo credit: buildington.co.uk)

What happened next was a textbook illustration of the temptation of historic London clubs for demutualisation - which has long been a major factor in the wave of closures over the last century. In theory, the Naval Club should have been largely immune to such temptation, because its original Memorandum of Association stated that in the event of liquidation, any surplus from the sale of assets should go to naval charities.

However, shortly before the clubhouse was put up for sale, 490 members attended an emergency general meeting in April 2021, which changed the Club’s rules, with the approval of some 99% who were present and voting - so that instead of all profits going to charity, only a proportion of the profits would be given away. The rest were to be divided among the Club’s 860 members. 38 Hill Street was put up for sale, with an asking price of £35 million, and Tatler predicting, “It could be worth £100 million.” In the end, it sold in 2022 for rather less - reportedly for £27.5 million, to “a Saudi billionaire”, according to the Daily Telegraph. The remaining sum, minus the Club’s debts, was to be distributed among members.

The Telegraph reported, “A row has…erupted with critics claiming crucial decisions about the future of the club were made during the ‘fog of the pandemic’ with little wider consultation”, and quoted several “outraged” RNR and RNVR spokespersons, who argued that the Club “had effectively confounded the original intentions of the club’s founders”, and that they saw the sale as “sacrilege”. Against that, a spokesperson for the liquidators said that the disposal of the clubhouse had all been conducted in line with the Club’s rules, and that the principal critics were not members of the Naval Club.

Once the Naval Club was wound up, its remaining members were offered five years of membership at the Army & Navy Club in Pall Mall. A spokesperson for the latter said that a decision on whether to stay on at the Club will follow in 2026. At present, the Army & Navy Club’s main lobby displays a range of memorials and ephemera from the old Naval Club.