THE RAND PLAYS ON
Jonah Hull’s club has evolved from colonial to cool
MY Dad first took me to a gentlemen’s club when I looked old enough to drink. I’m sure he would have done so sooner, but the rules tend to be pretty strict — which is to say, if you look old enough it’s probably OK.
That was the East India Club in St James’s Square, the heart of London’s clubland, founded nearly 200 years ago for “the servants of the East India Company and Commissioned Officers of Her Majesty’s Army and Navy”. I must have been about 15 at the time.
Dad was a long-standing member of the Oriental Club. Its early members lived or had travelled in “the East” or had some official connection to “that quarter of the globe”. My father’s most enduring link to the East is his love of curry — a club menu staple. In fact, he’s more connected to the South, an Englishman in Rhodesia, and later South Africa.
His membership of the Harare Club allowed him use of Johannesburg’s Rand Club, and so it wasn’t long before we networked our way to the longest bar in Africa, suited and booted, lunching regularly and gently bending the rule that affords only occasional use to visiting members of reciprocal clubs in foreign lands. It wasn’t really done to go on bending club rules willy nilly though, so Dad asked some friends to put me up for membership and we became legal. That was 20 years ago.
I always have lunch at the Rand Club when I’m in Jozi. Many of my contemporaries don’t “get” the club attraction, so I do struggle sometimes to find lunch mates. They feel it’s fusty and old, or stuffy and sexist, or just way out of the way in the dodgy centre of the old CBD. Most who believe these things have never actually been. In an effort to reverse declining revenue in recent years, the club has courted younger members and more frequent use, and extended its opening hours. There’s a dedicated sports bar. You don’t have to wear a tie to get in.
Since 1993, it isn’t even necessary to be a MAN anymore, still less a WHITE man. At the top of the grand staircase (suffragettes once chained themselves to its railings in protest), a portrait of Nelson Mandela looks out at the gallery. You get the sense he approves. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, a statue of Cecil John Rhodes appears to proffer, at first glance, a Nazi salute — except the Nazis hadn’t been invented yet so it’s more likely a friendly wave, or a gesture of instruction to a servant. The Rand Club, much like the world around it, has changed with the times.
Some things stay the same, of course: the stuffed giraffe, Wilson the doorman, curry on the club menu, beer out of pewter mugs. The club attraction is both historic and homely. At places like the Rand Club, they remember your face. It isn’t long before they remember your name. And there’s something cool about sitting where Randlords once sat, where a city was carved out and history was made, being offered “your usual, sir” — a plate of marrow bones on toast.
Since 1993, it isn’t even necessary to be a MAN anymore, still less a WHITE man