The "Aristocratic Embrace"? The Labour Party and London clubs

A difficult relationship

Map showing the spread of the various Labour-sympathetic clubs of the early 20th century. (Dates refer to the physical location of buildings.)

Anthony Sampson, analysing clubs for his landmark 1962 Anatomy of Britain, regarded Labour politicians as being “more pubbable than clubbable” - an observation repeated by Sam Aldred in his 2020 survey of Clubland artefacts - and dismissed the idea of Labour politicians having made significant inroads into London Clubland. This was certainly not always the case, and having looked at both Liberal and Conservative clubs, I think it is worth charting the Labour Party’s early attempts at setting up West End clubs.

Ralph Miliband, in his 1961 polemic Parliamentary Socialism, argued that several of the 1920s attempts at Labour-aligned elite London clubs were part of the wider “aristocratic embrace” that compromised Labour - something which has been critiqued by Nicholas Owen and Richard Toye. This idea looked at how Labour MPs were embraced by - and the argument goes, became increasingly deferential to - the Westminster way of doing things, including club memberships, the parliamentary model, the honours system, and country house weekends.

When Labour was a rising party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the position of Labour politicians within the existing clubs was nuanced, but not altogether absent. While the more aristocratic citadels such as Boodle’s and White’s remained effectively out of bounds for Labour politicians, a complex and far-ranging ecosystem of London clubs had evolved across the West End by the 1880s - including many middle-class and lower-middle class clubs, a number of which embraced radical politics, and were popular with socialists and social democrats.

This was also bound up with the way the Labour movement, through so much of the 19th century, was still seen as part of the Liberal Party’s electoral coalition. Although the election of Independent Labour Party MPs presented a challenge to this, it remained outweighed for decades by the scores of “Lib-Lab” MPs who sat from 1870-1918 and considered themselves both Liberal and Labour. Even after the Labour Representation Committee’s electoral breakthrough with the election of 29 MPs in 1906, many Edwardian Labour MPs saw themselves as working in tandem with a broadly sympathetic Liberal Party which they critiqued for not reforming enough, rather than regarding with outright hostility.

And so against this background, we find many early members of the National Liberal Club in the 1890s and 1900s were in this broadly “Lib-Lab” category of fellow travellers, including Ramsay MacDonald, Hugh Dalton, and H. G. Wells. We also find spin-off radical clubs, like the avowedly socialist New Reform Club which - after a couple of years of renting rooms at the St. Ermin Hotel in Westminster - lodged in the ground floor of George Bernard Shaw’s Adelphi Terrace townhouse, with members flocking to the shared staircase for a glimpse of their illustrious neighbour.

Working men’s clubs

Hand in hand with the “more pubbable than clubbable” line is the common belief that Labour politicians kept away from London private members’ clubs because their domain was more properly that of the working men’s club. This view is strongly contradicted by the evidence.

Historically, the party which secured the greatest success in setting up an extensive UK-wide network of party-aligned working men’s clubs was - and is - the Conservative Party. Conservative efforts at local, accessible, politically-affiliated clubs pre-date the 1850s explosion of working men’s clubs under the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union, and even the Great Reform Act, and date to at least the 1820s in Merseyside. When the working men’s clubs expanded, the Conservatives were pioneers at setting up a portion of these as Tory-affiliated ‘Constitutional’ and ‘Conservative’ clubs. It was not until the 1870s that the Liberals began to belatedly catch up, and on a more limited scale. By the rise of the Labour movement from the 1880s, Labour was in third place among affiliated working men’s clubs, and would not outstrip the Liberals until the 1920s. Even then, the Conservatives remained unchallenged in having the most affiliated clubs, and the Association of Conservative Clubs remains the largest of its kind today, with some 1,100 affiliated clubs, outstripping its Labour and Liberal working men’s club equivalents. Labour may have long been the party of “the working man”, but it was never the party of working men’s clubs.

1917 Club

The 1917 Club was a grassroots-led attempt at an affordable Soho private members’ club for socialists, based at 4 Gerrard Street. As the name implied, the Club was founded in wartime - its name commemorated Russia’s February Revolution of 1917 (less well-remembered now than the October Revolution which followed it; and unlike that revolution, committed to pluralism and constitutional government). The 1917 Club had strong pacifist instincts, with its early membership being centred around E. D. Morel’s Union of Democratic Control.

The membership tended to be middle-class socialist intellectuals such as G. D. H. Cole, E. M. Forster, J. A. Hobson, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Morrison, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Oliver Strachey, H. G. Wells, Leonard Woolf, and even (during his Labour phase) Oswald Mosley; in other words, people who were already active members of other established London clubs, and were keen for the 1917 Club to emulate this model.

The Club proved relatively short-lived, however. While it survived the trauma of the Labour split at the end of the second Labour government, it dissolved not long after, in 1932, amid acrimony and deadlock over a contested committee election.

Half-Circle Club

While the Labour Party came fourth (in terms of MPs) in the 1918 general election, they went on to become the Official Opposition for the first time in the Parliament of 1918-22 (because the first two parties, the Conservatives and the Coalition Liberals, both went into government; and Sinn Fein’s MPs refused to take their seats). The result was that the 57 Labour MPs were suddenly overstretched, assuming a string of parliamentary duties - and this had implications for their families, too.

Against this backdrop, the Half-Circle Club was founded by Beatrice Webb as a ladies’ club which catered to the wives of Labour politicians - particularly MPs and trade unionists. (Labour peers were still in single figures at this time.) It was founded in 1921, and based in Pimlico, at 41 Grosvenor Road.

Never a mass-membership club, in 1928 the Half-Circle Club was merged into the new National Labour Club (see below).

Parliamentary Labour Club

The Parliamentary Labour Club was the brainchild of Sidney Webb. The general election of November 1923 had resulted - from January 1924 - in Britain’s short-lived first ever Labour government, lasting just 9 months. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party had just 142 MPs (and a smattering of Lords), most of them new to Westminster. Webb was a cabinet minister in that government, as President of the Board of Trade, and he felt there should be a club for Labour MPs, close to the Houses of Parliament. A clubhouse was found at 11 Tufton Street, opening in 1924.

The Club struggled to make headway. Many Labour MPs refused to join it, defeating its principal object. As I wrote in Behind Closed Doors:

“From the start…[it] had a deep tension. On the one hand, it had members who wanted to show that Labour had arrived as a serious party of government, and could hold its own as a club when it came to prestigious surroundings, fine dining and convivial company. On the other hand, it was widely derided by those on the left of the Labour movement who asked what on earth socialists were doing even considering cavorting in such an elitist way.”

In 1927, the Club moved to new premises nearby, at 58 Romney Street, leasing their clubrooms and bedrooms from actress Edyth Goodall, whose London house it was. Goodall had already cultivated the house as a meeting place for radical intellectuals: the Romney Street Group is so named because for the first 18 months of its existence in 1917-8, it met in the building. The Romney Street Group, which took for the form of a conversazione society for socialist thinkers such as R. H. Tawney, relocated for the remainder of its existence, not wanting to intrude on Goodall.

In 1928, with both the ladies-only Half-Circle Club and the gentlemen-only Parliamentary Labour Club experiencing financial difficulties, it was agreed to merge the two into one mixed-sex club, the National Labour Club, taking over the Parliamentary Labour Club’s lease in Romney Street.

National Labour Club

The newly-inaugurated National Labour Club had a tumultuous existence. The name obviously had echoes of the National Liberal Club - of which some early Labour politicians had been members - as well as suggesting a clear aspiration to have a reach well beyond Westminster; indeed its membership criteria specified that all manner of local Labour officials from across the nation were welcome.

The Club had changing political and financial fortunes. Its political fortunes briefly improved after the unexpected defeat of the Conservative government in April 1929, leading to the second Labour government of 1929-31. Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary that the Club could be a hive of activity at this time, writing in 1930 of:

“short-haired typists from the trade union offices, M.P.s, Cabinet Ministers, all being served in strict order to their coming, and all chatting together indiscriminately.”

However, the Labour government of 1929-31 ultimately proved to be a miserable experience for almost everyone involved in it. Against a backdrop of global financial meltdown, Labour ministers struggled to implement wide-ranging cuts, to which their party colleagues were often ideologically opposed. In the resulting chaos, the Labour Party excommunicated their own Prime Minister and Chancellor, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, for defecting to (and leading) a Conservative-dominated coalition government from 1931. The resulting general election of 1931 was a landslide defeat for Labour, reducing them from 235 MPs to a rump of just 52 - which had obvious implications for a private members’ club centred around Labour MPs in Westminster. The political situation also meant that tempers were often flared by the early 1930s. These political disputes were also in evidence in the 1917 Club at the same time.

The National Labour Club also had financial difficulties. After the death of Edyth Goodall in July 1929, the Club in a rare moment of affluence had agreed to buy the freehold of the house for £8,000. However, it then struggled to pay the mortgage, and in 1934, it was forced to sell the house.

It continued to meet as a society, organising events in rented rooms, such as the reception (addressed by Hugh Dalton) with a dance and cabaret held at the New Burlington Galleries in 1937, and the ball at the Westminster Palace Rooms in Victoria Street in 1938. However, it quietly disbanded during World War II - ironically, by 1945, Labour newspapers were often found musing about the need for a new National Labour Club (although none was formed).

National Trade Union Club

A longer-lived Labour-affiliated club was the National Trade Union Club, founded in 1929. This came out of the Labour ministry formed that year, and the desire of the Trades Union Congress to eagerly lobby to hold it to account. The clubhouse opened at 24-28 New Oxford Street. It offered members a billiard room (which was reportedly “little-used”), as well as publicity materials extolling the buffet (with an inexpensive 1s 6d three-course lunch), restaurant, ping pong room, writing room, meeting rooms and lounge.

1933 promotional brochure for the Trade Union Congress Club. (Photo credit: Trades Union Congress archive, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.)

It comprised a varied hotch-potch of left-wing and progressive causes; for instance, Albert Meltzer recalled attending an anarchist meeting there in 1935; while the Club also hosted meetings of the “Popular Front” against fascism in the late 1930s. From 1935-46, a key figure in the Club was the Rev. Arthur Peacock, who was its Secretary and guiding light during those years, overseeing considerable expansion, even in wartime. Just before the war, he also oversaw the move of the clubhouse to 12 Great Newport Street, in Covent Garden, where it would remain for most of its history.

The Club was dissolved in 1960. By this stage, it was somewhat overshadowed by the nearby purpose-built offices of the Trades Union Congress on Great Russell Street (built in 1956), which overtook it in providing a social function for trade unionists in London.

Labour MPs across other clubs

Whereas club membership has long been considered almost obligatory among Conservative (and to a much lesser extent from the 20th century, Liberal) MPs, this has not been the case among Labour MPs. Nevertheless, it has still been a minority pursuit. This partly reflects the way the 20th century Labour Party was often a coalition of different factions and demographics, including trade unionists, intellectuals and lawyers.

Some MPs, by dint of their extra-parliamentary interests (such as lawyers) were keen club members - but often kept this quiet, sensing they were out of step with wider feeling in their party. They were also fairly widely dispersed across the different clubs, depending on their interests; for instance, Harold Nicolson at the Beefsteak, Tom Driberg at the Garrick, and Leo Abse at the Savile. These tended to be bon vivant mavericks, rather than the Labour mainstream.

Then there were the Labour MPs whose memberships owed more to their personal friendships than to any professional interests; for instance, the decidedly whiggish Brooks’s may not traditionally Labour territory, but Roy Jenkins was a very active member across four decades, elected in 1964 just prior to becoming aviation minister in Harold Wilson’s government. His membership was cited as the most likely probable factor in the Club having been targeted by an IRA bomb in 1974; and it was certainly the main forum through which Jenkins knew the 11th Duke of Devonshire, who became one of only a handful of Tory peers to join Jenkins’ SDP in the 1980s, which he maintained was done out of personal loyalty to Jenkins; but beyond that, the political significance of Jenkins’s membership was negligible.

Of course, some of the more reactionary corners of Clubland made it abundantly clear that Labour politicians were not welcome at all: something reflected in the often-told story of cabinet minister Aneurin Bevan visiting White’s in 1951 as a guest of Air Chief Marshal Sir John Slessor, and club member John Fox-Strangways taking a flying kick at Bevan’s backside just as he was descending down the front steps at the end of the evening. Depending on one’s views, Fox-Strangways either behaved abominably with childish violence, or defended the honour of the Club from an unwelcome outsider. (White’s subsequently apologised to Bevan, and expelled Fox-Strangways - but the latter has been toasted at White’s since then.)

In more recent years, the tendency has been for MPs of all parties - but particularly MPs on the left - to downplay any club memberships. In Club Government I noted that one-in-ten mid-19th century MPs lied in their hand-written questionnaire answers to Dod’s Parliamentary Companion about their club memberships, claiming to be members of prestigious clubs that had no record of ever having elected them. But today, the reverse is true: plenty of MPs belong to clubs, but never declare it to the likes of Who’s Who or Dod’s.

And MPs are often quite discreet about their private attitudes to clubs, too. Then-Labour MP Chuka Umunna was embarrassed in 2013 when his old online posts from ASmallWorld (then branded “MySpace for millionaires”) in 2006 were dug up, including his asking for recommendations for “trash free” clubs, and his bemoaning, “Most of the West End haunts seem to be full of trash and C-list wannabes”. Umunna later apologised for these remarks. Few would have characterised Umunna’s views as representative of the Labour mainstream - but the brand of snobbery displayed here captures the difficulty for Labour politicians, ostensibly committed to a more equal society, being identified with institutions widely seen as elitist.

The New Labour years, which saw a huge influx of new MPs in the “class of ’97”, coincided with the ‘Cool Britannia’ phenomenon, and newly-elected Labour MPs looking for a contrast to the Victorian ‘palace of varieties’ at Westminster often opted for one of the trendier modern clubs, like the Groucho Club, Black’s and the original Soho House. The trend did not last, however - many of the memberships lapsed, especially after Labour MPs lost their seats in 2005 or 2010.

Today, the Reform Club remains the club of choice for Labour parliamentarians seeking a traditional club which is not incompatible with their Labour values. (A process helped by the Club’s historic link to the Liberal Party having been diluted after 1886, and dropped altogether from the 1930s.) That is not to say that Labour parliamentarians make up a sizeable proportion of the Reform’s members today (quite the reverse); but of the Labour parliamentarians opting to join a traditional London club, the Reform is conspicuously the firm favourite. This is particularly the case amongst members of the Upper House - ergo Fergus Butler-Gallie’s recent quip in the Financial Times, that the Reform Club was the place where you were most:

“Likely to overhear…enthusiastic discussions about reforming the House of Lords conducted entirely by members of the House of Lords.

Conclusion

Membership of a social club need not be contradictory with socialism. Far from it, plenty of socialist thought places great premium on fellowship and community, as well as the idea of leading “The good life.” However, the trappings and popular image of traditional West End London private members’ clubs have often sat ill at ease with many parts of the culture of the Labour Party, and club memberships have been treated as a source of personal embarrassment.

Clubs were a much more deeply-embedded part of the parliamentary landscape in the inter-war years, and so it is quite understandable why there were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party. Since then, Labour politicians have tended to treat clubs as a private matter - there is no Labour equivalent to the Carlton Club - though in recent years the Reform Club has become popular among Labour peers.

---

You can view the full and varied backlog of Clubland Substack articles, by clicking on the index below.