The New University Club’s clubhouse which stood on St. James’s Street from 1868-1938, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. (Picture credit: E. Wimbridge, ‘University Club, St. James’s Street’ - Mr. Waterhouse, architect’, Building News (1868); reproduced in Illustrated London News, 29 August 1868, p. 24.)
Nothing is left of the New University Club, beyond a few prints and papers. It was once one of the most distinctive buildings on St. James’s Street, and was the first clubhouse by one of Britain’s most influential architects. But it remains largely forgotten, one of a queue of “university” clubs.
By the 1860s, London already had a variety of clubs that catered to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The first of these was the United University Club which launched in 1821 for graduates of both English universities, followed by the Oxford & Cambridge Club in 1830; as well as clubs such as the Athenaeum founded in 1824 having a particularly academic bent, with a high concentration of Oxbridge graduates among the first two generations of members.
By the 1860s, the Victorian club boom was well underway; and I have written before of the profusion of “Junior” clubs from the 1860s, assuming the branding and style of a well-known, established, smaller club with a gridlocked waiting list, whilst being completely independent from it. The New University Club eschewed the “Junior” moniker - though a later “Junior Oxford & Cambridge Club” would come into existence in the 1870s.
The Club was formed at a meeting in Willis’s Rooms (formerly Almack’s) on King Street, St. James’s (which had also been the site of the formation of the Liberal Party at a meeting on 6th June 1859), on 12th May 1864.
Temporary clubhouse
Within a few months, the Club had rapidly secured a 60-year lease on a site in the heart of Clubland: numbers 57 and 58 St. James’s Street, which had previously been in use as Symon’s Hotel. Located on the western side of the street, a couple of doors up from Brooks’s and half a dozen doors down from the Devonshire Club, while overlooking Boodle’s, it could scarcely have been in a better location for a major new London club.
The buildings, however, left something to be desired, being a pair of undistinguished Queen Anne-era terraced houses in a state of disrepair. Once the Club had identified an architect to build a purpose-built clubhouse on the site, it would be necessary to decant the Club elsewhere during construction.
No. 1 Savile Row today. (Picture credit: author’s own photograph.)
It was for this reason that in 1866-8, the New University Club temporarily relocated to 1 Savile Row, on the corner with Vigo Street and Burlington Gardens, just opposite the rear entrance to the Albany. The building is better known as the subsequent headquarters of tailors Hawkes & Co. (latterly Gieves & Hawkes), who have been located there since 1912. The New University Club vacated the building for the Royal Geographical Society, who would occupy it as their headquarters from 1870-1912.
Building and architect
The Club selected Alfred Waterhouse as its architect. He was their first and only choice to take on the project. Waterhouse, who later served as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, is best remembered for later buildings such as Manchester Town Hall, the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, the Prudential Building in Holborn, as well as the debating unions in Oxford and Cambridge, and refacing various Oxbridge colleges (from Balliol College, Oxford, to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge); and he later designed and built one of London’s largest and most elaborate clubhouses, the National Liberal Club in Whitehall.
In the 1860s, Waterhouse was still early in his career, and the New University Club was his first clubhouse. Waterhouse was extremely versatile in embedding different styles and materials into his projects. The building existed side-by-side with the Georgian townhouses which still lined much of the street in the 1860s, but blended a Victorian bay-window, and Gothic design elements, including a pointed fifth Gothic arch over the front entrance flanked by Corinthian columns, and embedding Oxbridge college crests carved into the masonry along the building’s front. The building spanned three main floors, plus a basement and an attic mezzanine. Waterhouse’s plans were approved at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Club in 1865, with the building planned to accommodate 1,200 members.
Waterhouse’s Gothic touches to the building can be seen around the main entrance. (Picture credit: Waterloo University and Internet Archive.)
The ground floor contained the entrance hall and staircase, front-facing morning room, coffee room (members-only dining room), strangers’ dining room, waiting room and serving room; the first floor had a front-facing drawing room, library (above the coffee room), committee room and writing room; while the second floor contained a front-facing smoking room (above the drawing room), billiard room and conservatory. The basement was given over to servants’ areas, including the kitchen, larders, servants’ rooms, dressing rooms and bathroom.
The clubhouse was considered something of a landmark in 19th century St. James’s Street. (Picture credit: Illustrated London News, 13 February 1886, p. 175.)
An additional challenge to the site was the somewhat irregular shape of the plot of land. As well as the two main buildings at 57-58 St. James’s Street, the Club had also acquired 10-11 Arlington Street behind it, which more-or-less connected onto the rear of the building, but at a different angle. Whilst this gave the clubhouse a welcome and spacious annexe, it also presented architectural challenges.
The building was completed in 1868, when members moved in following a grand opening ceremony on the 6th June.
The Smoking Room of the New University Club in the 1930s, overlooking St. James’s Street. Note that the Boodle’s clubhouse can be seen through the window, to the south-east. (Picture credit: Print from author’s own collection, colourised using the Kolorize.CC app.)
Members and staff
The conditions of membership were rather less onerous than either the United University Club or the Oxford & Cambridge Club. Members did not need to have graduated from either university or held an MA degree; instead, they simply required either three terms of attendance or an honourary degree, from either Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
The first 600 founder-members paid an entry fee of 20 Guineas; and thereafter members paid an entrance fee of 25 Guineas. The annual subscription was initially 6 Guineas, and rose to 7 Guineas in 1867 and 8 Guineas in 1871. By 1876, the Club had grown to over a thousand members. It had thus grown to about the same size as the United University Club, and the Oxford & Cambridge Club.
The membership was overwhelmingly academic by background - which, given the role of the Church of England in the universities, meant that the clergy were also well-represented - and academics such as A. V. Dicey and Sir G. O. Trevelyan were founder members. Later members included Augustine Birrell, James Clifton Brown, the 1st Baron Collins, the 1st Baron Cunliffe, the 7th Earl of Egmont, the 1st Baron Houghton, the 1st Baron Kinross, the 1st Viscount Milner, and George Herbert Morrell. However, historian John Thole believes that in public life, “Apart from [William Ewart] Gladstone, none [of the members] were of the first rank.”
The Club hired some 59 staff by the 1870s - comparabale to several major clubs of St. James’s and Pall Mall at the time. Unfortunately, the staff had a tendency to turn up in the press in reports relating to prosecutions, around everything from petty larceny to more ambitious thefts. For instance, in 1877, the Club’s own long-serving night-porter, Frederick John Knapp, pleaded guilty to stealing £5 in silver, telling the court, “It was all through his wife getting into debt to a baker.” In 1883, the Club’s House Steward, 48-year-old George Lee, was exposed as leading a double life as a cat-burglar, and convicted of a string of burglaries. In 1899, the Club Secretary Arthur Waters gave evidence in the successful prosecution against a 24-year-old clerk at the Club, Charles Williams, who had taken £100 for club expenditure, and had embezzled £36, 14s., 4d. The overall impression given from these trials is that the Club did not pay its staff well; and they consequently felt at liberty to top up their meagre pay, as opportunities allowed.
View from the New University Club’s clubhouse, looking south-east down St. James’s Street in 1916, with St. James’s Palace at the end of the street on the corner with Pall Mall, and King Street to the left. (Picture credit: author’s own collection.)
The Club at war
The New University Club’s Secretary in the 1910s, Captain Rowe signed up immediately in August 1914 to serve in the First World War. In his absence, the Club’s administration suffered - power passed to the Steward and the Head Chef, both of whom, it emerged in 1920, had spent much of the war comprehensively defrauding the Club. An intervention from Captain Rowe spared the Steward from jail time, with a character reference stressing his many years of faithful prior service to the Club.
The war saw the Club offering hospitality to serving British officers on leave, and to American officers who were members of the university clubs of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.
The Club was deeply concerned by the exposure of its members to the war effort. Some 349 of its 1,100 wartime members had served in the armed forces, while 45 were killed, and 75 were wounded on active service; but pessimism that the numbers might prove even starker prompted members to ask where the next generation of members was to be found - and in 1916, the Committee first considered (and then rejected) a proposal to merge with the United University Club.
Mergers and closure
In October 1919, the Club had an offer of £120,000 (worth £9.2 million today) for its building, which it took very seriously, investigating the possibility of acquiring 20 St. James’s Square at half the cost of the sale of the St. James’s Street premises.
The Chairman, Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. M. Greenly, made it clear that he considered the Club could do better for a building, and that he disliked its Victorian architecture:
“Its rooms, though fine, are unnecessarily high, and appear cold and comfortless when judged by the standards of today; it has an unnecessarily large amount of waste space that cannot be utilised, and yet that must be kept clean and decorated; the bedroom accommodation is extremeley limited; its service arrangements are extremely awkward and even insanitary; its lavatory accommodation could well be improved upon…It is difficult to heat adequately without a very large expenditure of fuel; it has no accommodation for ladies, should such be considered desirable; and lastly its architecture cannot be described as one of its attractions.”
Members voted in November 1919 to approve the plan to sell the building, by 137 votes to 58. Yet when it came to the sale, the prospective buyer withdrew, and an attempt at a March 1920 auction of the building yielded no other buyers for the clubhouse.
The effect was that from that point onwards, the Club felt that its time at 57-58 St. James’s Street was marked. The Club continued to entertain offers for the building throughout the 1920s and 1930s, though none was fully to the satisfaction of the Committee.
Certainly, by the inter-war years, the Club’s raison d’etre was distinctly fading. E. Beresford Chancellor wrote in his Memorials of St. James’s Street (1922):
“Beyond the facts that the New University is the only ‘Varsity club in St. James’s Street, that its frontage stands out in a prominent way, and that it is obviously a flourishing concern, there does not appear to be any particular reason (unless, of course, you’re a member or a guest) for loitering at it.”
The Club’s Committee also complained about how the wider financial situation affected the institution. Popular accounts of the 1920s remain dominated by the idea of “The Roaring Twenties” in America, with a credit-fuelled boom. But the British experience of the 1920s was very different, with a series of recessions, crashes and strikes throughout the decade, so that the Great Depression after 1929 was really only the latest in a series of never-ending and mounting financial hardships since the First World War. And this was reflected in the Club’s minute books, with the Committee observing in 1931, “It was pointed out that the Club, in common with others, was feeling the effect of the present depression and cash was less plentiful.”
Membership sagged, with falling recuitment, and rising resignations (including 100 members resigning in 1932 alone). The Club tried to abolish its 30 Guinea joining fee in 1934, but this did little to boost recruitment. In 1933, the Club absorbed the membership of the New Oxford & Cambridge Club on Pall Mall, which had closed down that year. A 1934 attempt at forming a Club Masonic Lodge in a bid to boost recruitment was defeated by the members. A scheme to demolish and rebuild the Club with a modern clubhouse was rejected on cost grounds, in both 1936 and 1937.
Photograph of the New University Club in the 1910s. (Picture credit: author’s own collection, with photograph colourised using the Kolorize.CC app.)
Finally, the end came with the acceptance of a September 1937 offer to buy the building for £100,000 (£9.5 million today), which was supported by the Chairman, Neville Colt. A December EGM voted for the sale by 131 members to 44, and the sale was completed before Christmas that year.
The Club closed its doors on 3 June 1938, having agreed to merge into the United University Club on Pall Mall. Once its debts were taken into account, it brought with it a dowry of some £40,000 to the UUC. Although the New University Club’s members were pleased with the move, the staff were less well looked after, with several left in a state of ambiguity as to whether they were being laid off, or would have jobs waiting for them in the merged club. On 6 March 1938, one club waiter, 26-year-old Alfred Steel, had committed suicide amidst the ongoing uncertainty around his employment.
The clubhouse remained shuttered up during the war, and was subsequently demolished and redeveloped as Cassini House, an office block in the Art Deco style, numbered 57-59 St. James’s Street, which was heavily renovated in 1999.
Further reading
E. Beresford Chancellor, Memorials of St. James’s Street; Together with the Annals of Almack’s (London: Grant Richards, 1922).
John Thole, The Oxford and Cambridge Clubs in London (Henley-on-Thames: Alfred Waller-United Oxford and Cambridge University Club, 1992).
(The floorplans of the New University Club are contained in the London Archives, formerly the London Metropolitan Archives; but as they are still under copyright, I have not been able to reproduce them here.)
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.