Town Mouse

In recent months, I have dined or drunk at the Garrick, the Groucho, the Union, the Academy, the absurdly luxurious 5 Hertford Street, the East India Club, the Phoenix, the Frontline and the rather more brash Soho House, a chain of hotels and bars for the young and ambitious.

In the 1990s I used to love the Colony Room, one of the clubs that sprang up in the forties and fifties as a result of pubs’ being closed from 2.30 to 5.30pm. I would also occasionally visit a basement club called Gerry’s (where Barry Cryer reveals that Mornington Crescent, the surreal game, was invented – see page 42), which stayed open late. A good club is like a good pub: you meet people there, but you can also quite happily sit on your own.

When the little mice arrived, though, it was hard to find the time to hang out at these places. In any case, I spent my thirties living in the wilds of Exmoor, where the Hunter’s Inn at Heddon’s Mouth was my most frequent resort. Mrs Mouse and I opened a bookshop and coffee house in Notting Hill. The idea was to create a meeting place for poets and anarchists, but the economics of the project eventually defeated us.

Now that the little mice are teenagers, I am finding I have just a little more leisure for sitting around in clubs. I am hoping that, as my fifties wear on into my sixties and seventies, I will have both more spare time and more spare money, and I plan to spend these resources liberally in Covent Garden, Soho and Pall Mall.

I even entertain fantasies of owning a small flat in the West End, so I can stagger from one convivial institution to another on foot – or by wheelchair – and have no need for taxi or tube train.

I remember going to interview Jeffrey Bernard in his high-rise council flat on Berwick Street in Soho in the 1990s. He had only one leg then, but managed to wheel himself around from the Coach & Horses to the Groucho Club and then back home, where he had a carer. This struck me as a civilised way to spend one’s old age. I would rather trundle around the city streets, surrounded by people, than sit alone in an elegant manor house in Somerset. Bernard was extremely grumpy, though: a life of booze, fags and shagging had not mellowed him.

So clubs are a good idea and thrive today. And for this, we have Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds to thank. London’s clubs are really their legacy. It was by the fireside in the winter of 1763 that Joshua Reynolds proposed to Johnson that a group of their pals should meet up regularly. The illustrious artist was actually motivated by concern for Dr Johnson’s mental health. Johnson was prone to melancholy, and good company was a tried and tested method for him to keep gloomy thoughts at bay. Johnson was 52.

Johnson’s own definition of ‘club’ in his dictionary of 1755 was ‘an assembly of goodly fellows, meeting under certain conditions’.

The Club started meeting in February 1764 at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho. Early members included Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke, as well as the young rakes Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton. Later members included David Garrick, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. By the time of Johnson’s death in December 1784, membership of the Club had grown to 35, which was far too many for Johnson’s liking. He’d argued for an upper limit of nine and, in 1776, said it was ‘quite spoiled by the introduction of too many members’. His biographers tell us that he stopped going in later life.

Today’s clubs are clearly quite different because they are tethered to a place and may have many thousands of members. So while Dr Johnson is certainly one of the parents of the modern club, the other would be the 18th-century coffee houses, many of which turned themselves into members’ clubs. In his Spectator, Richard Steele describes these early coffee houses as resorts for serious-minded chaps: ‘It is very natural,’ he writes, ‘for a man who is not tuned for Mirthful Meetings of Men, or Assemblies of the fair Sex, to delight in that sort of conversation which we find in Coffee Houses.’

White’s began life as a coffee house (or chocolate house); later the great Pall Mall clubs like the Travellers and the Athenaeum appeared. Some of them developed into meeting places for the daft and rich, as satirised by P G Wodehouse’s wonderful creation the Drones Club, where the lazy and useless (but charming) Bertie Wooster consorts with his fellow toffs.

Intelligent observers used to predict that the clubs would die. The Editor of this magazine tells me his grandfather spoke confidently of their demise after the war (and they did indeed decline for a while then). And I have friends who loathe and despise the very idea of a private members’ club, because they associate them with privileged groups.

But we all have a natural urge to belong to something. My 19-year-old son surprised me the other day by declaring that his latest ambition, once he has made his first million, is to start a members’ club. So an idea dreamt up by a humble lexicographer and his artist friend 250 years ago has shown remarkable staying power.