Lost Clubs: The Union Club (1799-1964)

The template for so many clubs...

Sir Robert Smirke’s 1824-7 building for the Union Club (left) and the Royal College of Physicians (right), now the Canadian High Commission on Trafalgar Square. Photo credit: author’s own picture.

Today, London’s historic Union Club is either forgotten entirely, or else is mistaken for the (completely unrelated) Soho social club of the same name, which has been operating on Soho’s Greek Street since 1993.

It was not always this way.

Just over a century ago, the Union Club was an iconic London institution, standing on Trafalgar Square, which stood as the template for many of the clubs which followed. Its custom-built clubhouse, which housed it for 97 years, can still be seen today as the Canadian High Commission on Trafalgar Square.

Early beginnings

The beginnings of the Union Club have long been shrouded in mystery and dispute. Its foundation has variously been ascribed to 1799, 1800, 1802, 1804, 1805 or 1807. But there is irrefutable documentary proof, unearthed in the 1940s, that the Club’s origins went back to 1799.

Its name was curiously both political and apolitical. As Britain responded to the French revolution and went to war with France, long-unresolved questions remained around the (largely unwritten) constitution of Britain, and there were calls for fresh Acts of Union, with Ireland. These were eventually resolved in 1800-1; but it was in this spirit that the Union Club was founded - it was meant to be a club which was quite literally a union of all that made Britain great; and while its membership remained tightly focused among the aristocratic elite who dominated the 18th century clubs, its founders stressed their origins and landholdings all around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And they hoped to cross political divides with these aims.

For all their posturings on a deeper political resonance, the satirical etcher James Gillray took an altogether more jaded view in his 1801 print The Union Club, poking fun at the members as a collection of Britain’s most powerful, raucously misbehaving in a bacchanalian excess of alcohol and illegal gambling. In this sense, it did not differ much in public perception from existing clubs such as White’s, Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Watier’s and Tom’s.

James Gillray, The Union Club (21 January 1801).
© Trustees of the British Museum.

The Club proved particularly popular with Irish peers who had been displaced by the 1800 Acts of Union’s dissolution of the Irish Parliament. The Club’s first Chairman was the 2nd Earl of Bective, later the 1st Marquess of Headfort.

The Club’s original meeting-place was in a suite of rooms within the Palladian mansion of Cumberland House, an expansive mansion built in 1765 at 85-87 Pall Mall, where it remained from 1799 until the early 1800s. The Club later moved to the 6th Duke of Leeds’ house, at 21 St. James’s Square, still being there in 1807.

Cumberland House, which stood at 85-87 Pall Mall from 1765-1908. Courtesy of the Victorian London website, http://www.victorianlondon.org/organisations/waroffice.htm.

In this early incarnation, the Union Club was - like all the other clubs of the time - a proprietary club. One early manager was George Raggett. Raggett ran the Club from 1807 until 1812, when he left to take over the management of White’s. Upon his departure, the Union Club expanded by 50 members, including assorted Dukes, Marquesses, Lords, and bankers. Among the members who joined in the 1812 surge was Lord Byron.

In 1817, the Club moved to an ex-public house at 86 St. James’s Street, where it remained for a year. It would eventually return to that address (in a later building on the site) on a longer-term basis, over 130 years later. For three years, from 1818-21, it moved to an unknown address on the west side of Regent Street, during a period characterised by acrimony in the Club.

The Club’s short-lived home from 1817-8, at the foot of the western side of St. James’s Street, can be seen in this later 1840 print, as the building closest to St. James’s Palace. Coloured ngraving by Woods after Read, 1840, ‘The Conservative Club, St. James’s Street, London’, reproduced in [Anonymous], Your Club (London: Whitbread, 1950), p. 18.

In 1821, the Club would be re-founded. This was to be a significant moment in Clubland history.

The 1822 rules

The importance of the resuscitated Union Club lay in its rules. These were devised carefully and deliberatively over a year, only being finalised in 1822. They were to prove the template for British members’ clubs thereafter.

Under the 1822 rulebook, the club was limited to 800 members. Crucially, the members collectively owned the Club. This was significant.

Even more significant was the way that the Union Club rulebook was thereafter used as a blueprint for new members’ clubs. Foundation meetings of new clubs would typically involve brandishing a copy of the Union Club’s rulebook, and those present at the meeting voting, clause by clause, on which provisions to adopt and which provisions to amend. Even older proprietary clubs, such as White’s, Boodle’s and Brooks’s, eventually had management buy-outs by the membership later in the 19th century, and used the Union Club rulebook as a template when making the change in status.

Therefore the Union Club, whilst far from being London’s oldest or most architecturally distinguished, nonetheless had a solid claim to being one of the most influential clubs in history.

The opening of an 1840s edition of the Union Club rulebook.

Despite these rigid rules, the Club could still attract its fair share of chancers. In 1828, there was a ballot for the son of Tory whip William Holmes. The son was found to have attracted seven blackballs in the ballot, and the result was announced to the father by a waiter, Matthew Treadway. But Treadway also reported that he had seen a member removing blackballs from other ballot boxes, and stuffing seven of them into those of Holmes Junior. The father asked, “Is it possible it can be Mr. Trant?” The waiter confirmed it was indeed Trant. When confronted, Trant strenuously denied the accusation, and said that while he rarely ever participated in voting, he had come in that day simply to support a friend. Since it emerged that Trant regularly turned up to vote, few believed him. Treadway later had a stranger turning up at the Club, offering him £100 if he would change his testimony, and say that he was mistaken. Treadway said it was a lot of money, but still refused, and asked the stranger to go back to his unnamed master and report that he would not change his story. The Club called an emergency meeting to expel Trant, but he resigned before that.

An iconic clubhouse

In the 1820s, the reconstituted club planned a more permanent home in the heart of London, on what was then New Square (and would later be expanded to become Trafalgar Square). It was a period of intense building among new clubhouses, including the nearby Athenæum, United Service Club, and University Club. One of Britain’s leading architects, Sir Robert Smirke - then best known for designing the British Museum - was commissioned to design the building, favouring something in the Palladian style, with neoclassical touches, including ionic columns.

The clubhouse on Trafalgar Square, pictured in the early 20th century. (Photo credit: R. C. Rome, Union Club: An Illustrated Descriptive Record of the Oldest Members’ Club in London, founded circa 1799 (London: B. T. Batsford- Union Club, 1948).)

The building took up the entire western block of the square. To cut the considerable costs, it was to be shared with the Royal College of Physicians - they would enjoy the northern frontage onto Pall Mall East, while the Club would have the longer eastern frontage overlooking the square. The Club’s main entrance was on Cockspur Street, to the south.

The building took three years to complete, from 1824 to 1827, and was to be the Club’s home for the next 97 years. Touring the completed building in the 1850s, John Timbs wrote:

“It was much less ornate than the Club-houses of later date; but its apartments are spacious and handsome, and it faces one of the finest open spaces in the metropolis.”

Like other major clubs of the era, it completely shunned any portraiture or artwork on its bare walls, preferring to stress its architecture and furniture. Much of the Club’s furnishings were commissioned for the building’s opening, from the famed upholsterer Thomas Dowbiggin. It also had an extensive silver plate collection, bearing the date 1822.

Colourised photograph of the Trafalgar Square clubhouse’s interior in 1896. Photo credit: R. C. Rome, Union Club: An Illustrated Descriptive Record of the Oldest Members’ Club in London, founded circa 1799 (London: B. T. Batsford- Union Club, 1948), colourised using the Kolorize.CC app.)

Club life

The merchant James Smith, co-author of the Rejected Addresses, offered this vignette of life in the Union Club’s recently-opened clubhouse in the 1830s:

“At three o’clock I walk to the club, read the journals, hear Lord John Russell deified or diablerized, do the same with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Wellington and then join a knot of conversationists by the fire till six o’clock, consisting of lawyers, merchants and gentlemen at large. We then and there discuss the Three per cent Consols (some of us preferring Dutch two and a half per cents) and speculate upon the probable rise, shape and cost of the new Exchange. If Lady Harrington happens to drive past our window in her landau we compare her equipage to the Algerine Ambassador’s; and when politics happen to be discussed, rally Whigs, Radicals and Conservatives alternately, but never seriously, such subjects having a tendency to create acrimony. At six the room begins to look deserted; wherefore I adjourn to the dining toom and gravely looking over the bill of fare exclaim to the waiter “Haunch of Mutton and Apple Tart”. These viands despatched with the accompanying liquids and water I mount upwards to the Library, take a book and my seat in the armchair and read until nine. Then call for a cup of coffee and a biscuit, resuming my book until eleven; afterwards return home to bed.”

The Club was long noted for the quality of its gastronomy, and members had a reputation for gluttony - there was a minor uproar when the Club had to invest in hiring a professional carver in the Coffee Room, after members kept helping themselves to excessive quantities of roast beef. The Club’s Victorian speciality dishes included a beef, oyster and mushroom pie, and a mutton-chop and oyster pudding.

There could be unorthodox rituals - members would dine in their hats, to demonstrate that they were eating as they would at home, rather than as in a public restaurant. And things could get raucous. In the 1860s, two Irish members, named Fitzpatrick and Fitzgerald, argued in the Coffee Room, and ended up brawling in the main Hall.

Indeed, in the absence of an overarching theme to bring members together, T. H. S. Escott painted a very factional picture of the Club’s life in the Victorian era:

“It began to be honeycombed by mutually hostile and jealous coteries and cliques. The country gentlemen pilled [blackballed] the professions. The lawyers and doctors, not seeing their way to retaliate directly, showed their independence and power by blackballing those not belonging to their cloth. The fortunes of the place suffered from the intestine strife.”

Escott suggested that further strife was only avoided by stripping the members of the power to elect or blackball, and by handing it to the Club’s Committee.

Staff at the Club worked long hours. In the early nineteenth century, the hall porter was on duty from 7AM to 9:30PM, with only a half-hour off in the morning twice a week, plus each second Sunday off.

The Canadian intervention

In the early 1920s, the Club had a singular offer from the Canadian government, which was looking to expand its diplomatic presence in London. In 1924, the Union Club and the Royal College of Physicians accepted an offer to vacate their building in favour of the Canadian High Commission, which reopened the building as Canada House in 1925. The Club was paid £225,000 (around £18.4 million today) to give up its lease.

Numbers 10 (right) and 11 (left) Carlton House Terrace, home of the Union Club from 1924-51, and now the home of the British Academy. (Picture credit: Wright & Wright architects.)

Instead, the Club spent £80,000 of its windfall securing new premises at 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, in a row of two houses overlooking The Mall, which had been constructed in 1831 by John Nash. The Club would remain there until 1951. The two buildings were actually acquired separately - the larger number 10 on the corner of Duke of York Steps was on a 59½-year lease for £55,000, and the smaller number 11 was on a 60-year lease for £25,000. Each house had had a distinguished history: number 10, for instance, was Gladstone’s London townhouse from 1856 until 1874. Both houses were knocked through into one by the Club.

This new building was in a prime Clubland location, behind the United Service Club, and diagonally opposite the Athenæum on Waterloo Place.

Final resting place

By 1951, the Club faced many of the same financial challenges as other clubs in post-war Britain. It looked to downsize its premises. The remaining 33 years of the leases on the clubhouse on Carlton House Terrace was sold to the Commonwalth Secretariat.

The Club’s new home was familiar territory. 86 St. James’s Street technically stood on the old numbers 85 and 86 of that street. Prior occupants of the site had included (at number 85) the Thatched House Club, and (at number 86) the Union Club itself, briefly for a year in 1817-8. The site had been redeveloped in the 1860s, originally as the (short-lived) Civil Service Club. The four-storey clubhouse, designed by James Knowles, was thought by F. H. W. Sheppard to be “undistinguished.”

86 St. James’s Street, the Club’s final home, from 1951-64. The building is now Mark Masons’ Hall. (Photo credit: Stone Edge Conservation.)

The move was not a happy one. Despite a membership of 950 by the early 1960s, it was still ailing financially - and socially, according to Tom Girtin, who saw it as one of the “places to go to get away from people, not to meet them,” as he quoted Anthony Sampson. The Club finally closed in 1964.

Fate of its former clubhouses

Cumberland House on Pall Mall was requisitioned in 1806 for use by the government, first as the Board of Ordnance, and then (after 1858) as the War Office. It was finally demolished in 1908, to be replaced by the present Royal Automobile Club on that site.

As noted, the former clubhouse on Trafalgar Square remains the Canadian High Commission to this day.

10-11 Carlton House Terrace continued to be used by the Commonwealth Secretariat as overflow offices from their nearby headquarters in Marlborough House, until the building’s sale in 1998. Since then, it has served as the headquarters of the British Academy.

86 Pall Mall went on to become the final resting place of the Constitutional Club as an independent club, from 1969 until 1979. In 1977, the building was sold to the Freemasons, and since 1979 it has been Mark Masons’ Hall.

Further reading

• T. H. S. Escott, Club Makers and Club Members (London: T.F. Unwin, 1914).

• Tom Girtin, The Abominable Clubman (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

• Arthur Griffiths, Clubs and Clubmen (London: Hutchinson, 1907).

• Ralph Nevill, London Clubs (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912).

• R. C. Rome, Union Club: An Illustrated Descriptive Record of the Oldest Members’ Club in London, founded circa 1799 (London: B. T. Batsford- Union Club, 1948).

• John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London, with Anecdotes of its Famous Coffee Houses, Hostelries, and Taverns from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Time (London: Chatto and Windus, 1866).

Seal of the Union Club.

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