It’s common to hear people across Clubland reflecting that a club (whether their own, or another) is either “Too large” or “Too small”. They are rarely discussing the building, but the membership. The implication is that there is such a thing as an ideal size for a club. This idea is nothing new.
Membership caps
The earliest clubs and societies - going back to the roots of informal dining societies in the 17th century, which lacked permanent premises - would often stipulate a cap on the size of their membership. Some groups still operate on this principle today. For instance, the 213-year-old Roxburghe Club, the oldest society of bibliophiles in the world, is still limited to just 40 members. Occasionally, a new club establishing a membership limit could be aspirational, particularly if the limit was in the hundreds or thousands - they were signalling that they wanted to recruit that many members for a new estavlishment. But typically, it was intended as a cap, to keep that club exclusive.
Exclusivity
As I have written elsewhere, “exclusivity” is one of the most widely-used, yet widely-misunderstood, terms found in Clubland. In fact, it is almost synonymous with private members’ clubs, with their being routinely described as “exclusive”. The etymology of the word “exclusive” derives from the practice of exclusion - literally defining your club by its exclusion of others. This is an entirely accurate description of some clubs. It is also an entirely inaccurate description of many (most?) clubs - which makes the word inappropriate to use about clubs generally.
For a club to decide whom it is trying to exclude (if anyone), it needs to first decide whom it is intended to include. Not least as that is far more likely to instil a sense of cohesion and loyalty among the members. It is not enough to simply say that “the general public” are to be kept at bay, if any member of the general public could still gain membership by just filling out a form and paying a subscription and joining fee. That is the business model of strip clubs - but no-one would call them “exclusive”. Only when there is a strong sense of the community that is trying to be built by a club, can there then flow any meaningful notion of whether anyone would be excluded from that.
But this is not how “exclusivity” has tended to be meant, either in clubs or among the general public. It is usually intended as a short-hand description for “snob value”. Whether it has actually reflected this has varied considerably, from club to club. But understanding this is key to understanding the common fallacy that “Sticking to a fixed number will keep us exclusive.” Rigour in candidate vetting, and in the election process, is not the same thing as a club’s membership sticking to a fixed number.
Waiting lists
The traditional argument for capping a club to a small number of members is that if there is high demand for membership of that club, then a waiting list will result. A waiting list is often used as a metric of a successful, oversubscribed club. Historic clubs often boasted of the decades required to get through to successful election, after languishing in the Candidates’ Book.
Yet there are several pervasive myths around waiting lists, and it is worth challenging them:
Most obviously, waiting lists are increasingly rare in London Clubland today (though still found elsewhere). While they are most obviously found in sports clubs (where competition for finite facilities offers a more compelling, practical rationale for restricting membership numbers), they are increasingly rare in city clubs in general.
Waiting lists are commonly conflated with other factors, i.e. a club’s processes typically taking two or three years to guide a member through to election is not the same thing as a waiting list, which involves a queue of applicants waiting for a finite number of vacancies to come up.
A waiting list is a market mechanism, dependent on supply and demand, which means that it invariably fluctuates from year to year. Thus even when there is a waiting list, this makes a mockery of the idea that it is fixed at, say, seven years or thirty years. A flurry of deaths or resignations can drastically change the whole waiting list landscape for a club.
Most compellingly from the point of view of a club’s balance sheet, a waiting list is a waste of money for the club. The club typically derives neither subscription income, nor a joining fee from applicants who are languishing on the waiting list. (A handful of clubs do charge a registration fee, but this is typically quite modest.) It therefore makes no money from the waiting list, and arguably loses potential revenue, which must be made up elsewhere.
A waiting list has little to do with exclusivity, because those on the waiting list have not actually been excluded - the Club has simply deferred reaching a decision on their applications, sometimes for decades at a time. A genuinely “exclusive” club would simply reject a large number of applicants.
These are all factors in waiting lists having become much rarer outside of sports clubs.
Commercial pressures
Against this, commercial pressures have tended to push clubs towards greater recruitment, and growing ever larger. Again, this is not a recent development. I recently highlighted the example of the Westminster Reform Club, during its short-lived existence from 1834 to 1836:
“The members there wanted a prime clubhouse in the heart of London, with the most extravagant furnishings, and the best chef, open at all hours. They also didn’t want to pay very much. And there were only 105 members. Unsurprisingly, they spent the whole of their brief history in debt, and went bankrupt. They were to be replaced in 1836 by a new, expanded Reform Club, which made a point of recruiting at least 1,000 members – so that they had the membership base to fund the palatial clubhouse they envisioned, which they still occupy today. This is typical of how throughout history, costs have often driven London clubs towards larger memberships, to meet their spending commitments.”
If a club is looking to increase its financial footprint, without significantly inconveniencing the members with higher suscriptions and charges, then a popular option has been to elect another tranche of members. This is why most of the major London clubs today have memberships two or three times the size of their 19th century caps - even though it was insisted at the time that the Club could not possibly countenance a single extra member.
Of course, this has not resulted in most clubs going for the logical extension of maximising their size, to maximise the scope for economies of scale. Whilst a handful of clubs do maintain memberships of tens of thousands of people, this is not a common trend. Club membership expansions have tended to be more piecemeal. In London today, traditional clubs tend to average around 1,500-2,500 members, and newer clubs tend to average around 3,000-5,000 members (with some serious outliers). This compares with clubs of under 1,000 for much of the 19th and early 20th century. And it compares to many similar US clubs which have only a few hundred members.
Extending the cap
Consequently, it has been entirely normal throughout club history to see clubs extend their caps on membership. Yet this has usually been done in a piecemeal way; typically by 100 members at a time.
For instance, when the Carlton Club was founded in 1832, it was limited to just 600 members. By 1837, this was raised to 700 members, just as the Club embarked on the expenditure of its first custom-built clubhouse. In 1861, it was raised to 800 members, as the Club refitted and redecorated its second clubhouse on that site. Today its membership is nearly double that number.
And this was by no means an isolated example. The Athenæum has long recounted the tale of how, having originally been limited to 1,000 members:
“To alleviate the financial pressure, 160 supernumerary members were admitted to ordinary membership. An additional 40 candidates were brought forward from the waiting list for election by Committee. These 'forty thieves', as they became known…included Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin…The present complement is 2,000 members.”
This is typical, therefore, of how those clubs which still have a cap arrived at a number far in excess of the original figure; but usually as a compromise between the clashing notions of exclusivity, and financial pressures.
Dunbar’s Number
Recent decades have seen the development of a very different idea, drawn from the field of evolutionary biology: Dunbar’s Number, postulated by the British psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
Dunbar’s Number correlates brain size in different species with typical size of social circles; and the theory argues that humans are optimised for social circles containing no more than around 150 individuals. That is not to say that humans cannot maintain relationships with considerably more than 150 individuals. But the argument goes that cohesive communities with meaningful relationships and engagements are limited to around 150 individuals. (Dunbar’s precise quantification was 148, but he argued that to all intents and purposes any number between 100 and 250 was plausible, and that 150 was a strong median.) The implications for private members’ clubs are considerable.
Dunbar’s Number is not without its critics; but it has been highly influential in how many organisations across different sectors have reorganised themselves, with many workplaces and institutions empahsising intimacy of scale - for instance, Malcolm Gladwell notes that independently of Dunbar’s Number, the makers of the Gore-Tex brand had already concluded that none of their offices should house more than 150 people. Yet this revolution across the workplace has not necessarily percolated through to recreational clubs - not least as literally restricting clubs to 150 members would require a wholesale transformation in the cost of clubs per member.
Club use
This brings us to a major variable, which interacts with Dunbar’s Number: club use.
I have previously written about how most club members can be divided into two broad categories: ‘regulars’ and ‘show-offs’. The ‘regulars’ are the members who come into the club several times a week, know all the other regulars by name, and are frequently found propping up the bar and/or dining room, mingling with other members. The ‘show-offs’ are the infrequent users of the club - they might only come in once or twice a year, and they will tend to bring their own company with them, showing off the club to their guests, rather than mingling with other members. The ‘regulars’ will tend towards the inexpensive dishes on the menu, but will offer the club great regularity of custom, as well as providing much of its identity and spirit; while for the ‘show-offs’, a visit to their club is a rare treat and so they will be big spenders in the dining room, typically selecting the most expensive items on the menu and the wine list during their annual visit to their club. Both make a positive contribution to the club.
I had previously quantified the ‘regulars’ as making up 10% of a club’s membership, and the ‘show-offs’ as making up 90%. I have subsequently adjusted this to 15% and 85% respectively; but this is where Dunbar’s Number comes in.
I would suggest that any application of Dunbar’s Number to clubs needs to take into account club use. It is incredibly rare for a clubhouse to contain anything more than a tiny fraction of members at any given time; even an Annual General Meeting or an Annual Dinner will be lucky to draw more than a few dozen individuals, in a club of several thousand members. Consequently, there is a case to be made that Dunbar’s Number might apply to the ‘regulars’ of a club. This would reflect the meaningful social interactions among those members using the club with any great regularity.
If so, then that would suggest an optimal club size of 1,000 members (if the ‘regulars’ make up 15% of the membership); or of 1,500 members (if the ‘regulars’ make up 10% of the membership). But that is only a rough sketch.
Interestingly, clubhouse capacity is rarely an issue in most city clubs; if anything, greater intimacy tends to result from cramming members into a smaller space (something which explains why many successful club bars are in relatively small spaces). As mentioned, sports clubs are in a category of their own - the tennis courts are either available, or they are not - but facilities like dining rooms in city clubs are rarely packed to capacity, outside of a small number of peak periods, such as the run-up to Christmas. And so for these city clubs, the pressures on size of membership seldom emanate from facilities, but from other factors.
Of course, in itself, size of club is no guarantee of cohesion. I can think of plenty of small, intimate clubs with only a few hundred members which have been the site of considerable acrimony. And so I am far from convinced that this works as a rigid rule - not least with the further complication of clubs divided between members residing in town (who are the most likely of all to visit), and those living in the country or overseas (who are inherently less likely to visit as frequently). It may well be, for instance, that Dunbar’s Number would only apply to the ‘regulars’ among the town members, with further seasonal variations, which could make it a very small subset indeed. I would therefore caution against regarding Dunbar’s Number as a rule with too much rigidity. But as an intellectual exercise, I think it worth looking into.
Conclusion
I do not pretend I have all the answers here. I am not even sure about the applicability of Dunbar’s Number, since it is (like all models) a contested theory. Nevertheless, given that it specifically relates to meaningful social interactions among human beings - something at the core of every club - it offers a fascinating insight into a tipping point around communities of individuals. It may not even be accurate. But if it is an arbitrary number, then I would suggest it is no more or less arbitrary than the sizes many clubs have reached organically, through a compromise between striving for ‘exclusivity’ and wider financial pressures.
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.
Very interesting and well argued. I am a member of the Bangalore Club in India. The waiting list us currently about 25 years. For children of existing members, the wait is about a third of this.
Another Bangalore club, the Bowring Institute, enlarged its membership considerably, and whenever I have visited it, its large premises feel somewhat crowded.