”A very unclubbable man” was how writer Samuel Johnson disparaged Sir John Hawkins, his friend, editor and biographer, for lacking social graces.
Women are finding themselves so described in the battle of the gentlemen`s clubs now raging in London. What is especially appalling to the women is that it appears that this is not just the view of a tiny minority in Britain`s male elite.
In a vote last month, a grave event on front pages as well as on news and talk shows, the 161-year-old Garrick Club voted 363 to 94 against admitting women as members.
Another club, the United Oxford & Cambridge University Club, changed its rules last month so it can hold a vote by mail on the issue in the fall. There are press reports that the Athenaeum Club also may hold a vote; the club won`t comment.
”I would just like the Garrick to remain a gentlemen`s club because I don`t think women are clubbable,” Derek Nimmo, the 59-year-old actor, said after the vote. In the debate, he reportedly said, ”The only case for joining is to get away from women.”
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne argued that men would not be able to take much-needed breaks from chivalry if women were wandering freely about the Garrick.
”In the presence of women, most men try to put their best foot forward, and being on one`s best behavior is not what most of us regard the Garrick as for; rather the opposite,” he wrote in his column in the Sunday Telegraph.
Many members, he added, might feel compelled to give up their open-mouthed snooze after lunch or to temper their tongues in conversation at the bar for fear of offending women.
Many gentlemen`s clubs suffered from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, when a number folded or merged.
”Clubs got hurt by the anti-snobbishness that came into vogue,” said Harold Brooks-Baker, publisher of Burke`s Peerage Publications, which document the upper class.
Traditional members also were alienated when their clubs took in people who lacked the interests or backgrounds prevailing for the previous century or two, he said.
A handful of clubs, such as Boodle`s, the Turf and White`s, largely have remained true to their traditions: Their members still mainly hail from the horsy set and include many aristocrats and landed gentry.
”Others, like the Reform, the Travellers` and the Athenaeum, have become like railway stations-people passing each other in the night with no similar interest,” Brooks-Baker said. The last two reportedly are having financial problems, which may explain why the Athenaeum might consider taking in women. Many clubs, though, have seen membership applications surge in the last decade, when the upper-middle class prospered and status-seeking became acceptable. Clubs are also bargains: a three-course meal with a drink costs as little as $20 in several exclusive clubs; fashionable restaurants and hotels charge two to three times as much. Annual dues average $575 to $1,250.
But women say elite men`s clubs have no place in the new Britain, the classless meritocracy that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her successor, John Major, have been trying to build. While most clubs let in women guests, albeit typically with restrictions, women remain unappeased.
In a column in the Times titled ”I want to join the network of the clubbable,” Janet Daley insisted that gentlemen`s clubs remain cabals that control British society. Until women are admitted, she said, they cannot hope to attain true equality.
Many Garrick members are prominent in theater, film, journalism, publishing, the law and government. They include Sir Richard Attenborough, the director, producer and actor; Sir Kingley Amis, the novelist and poet; Lord Howe, who served in Thatcher`s cabinet; Lord Justice Woolf, a prominent judge; and editors of the Times, the Independent and the Observer.
As at most elite clubs, overtly conducting business is taboo at the Garrick. This helps explain why women`s assertions that career ”networking” is a reason they want in has only made many Henry Higginses convinced that women should be kept out.
Jeremy Colman, chairman of the committee overseeing the vote on admitting women to the United Oxford & Cambridge, said the majority of club members in favor seem to be those who attended college during the social revolution of the 1960s.
”There are people among them who say, `I am embarrassed that I cannot put up my daughter for membership when she is a member of my college,` ” said Colman, a 44-year-old partner at Price Waterhouse.
Opponents include men who are younger and older than the 40-something crowd: ”They are saying, `Why should we change? We like it as it is.`
” Colman would not predict the outcome.
The 156-year-old Reform Club, where Phileas Fogg made his bet that he could travel around the world in 80 days, voted to admit women in 1981. It seemed fitting that the Reform, founded by radicals dedicated to broadening the right to vote in Britain, would be the first to do so. But the decision also reportedly was influenced by financial difficulties.
This year, the Reform elected Barbara Beck-Coulter, editor of International Management magazine, as chairman, the first woman in that role. ”I suggested we keep the title,” she said.
”I would expect economic and social pressures will force other clubs to open their doors to women,” she said. ”Those who have resisted so assiduously seem to be rather old. They will die out in due course.”
The Carlton, a club for prominent Conservatives, admitted its first woman, Thatcher, in the 1970s by adhering to the club rule that the party leader be offered honorary life membership.
