Mild signs of a potential willingness to modernise have been observed in some of central London’s establishment clubs in the past few weeks, led by the announcement that, after a wait of 166 years, women will finally be allowed to become members of Pratt’s.
The decision by the owner of Pratt’s has been met mostly with resigned acceptance by the club’s membership, which includes at least a dozen MPs, and has triggered renewed discussion of possible reform at the remaining hardcore handful of gentlemen’s clubs that refuse to admit women.
Members of the Beefsteak, another men-only dining club joined by MPs, actors and judges, believe it is now likely it will also be obliged to change its rules to admit women. A renewed drive by female campaigners was launched last week to persuade members of the Garrick, including Michael Gove and the actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh Bonneville, to allow women to join.
Meanwhile, at the Athenaeum (which has allowed women as members since 2002) an organised movement by about 70 members to block further modernising changes was rejected at last Monday’s annual general meeting, with an intervention from Theresa May, who shut down discussion of a series of motions aimed at preserving the club’s “traditional ethos”.
The need for reform is being felt at many of London’s Pall Mall clubs, despite their reputation as outposts of an unchanging Britain frozen somewhere in the 1950s, partly because rising food and energy prices have brought cost of living issues to the attention of members of clubs located in old, draughty buildings with high overheads.
Changes at Pratt’s – where the current and former Conservative MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Nicholas Soames and Hugo Swire are members – were brought in “with immediate effect” by the club’s owner, the Earl of Burlington, William Cavendish, without consultation in late May. However, there will probably not be any perceptible change to membership in the near future, because the process of proposing and seconding new members takes considerable time, requiring 25 people to support a nomination by writing their names in a book in the club and later committee approval.
“There has been chuntering, people saying, hmm we don’t like this, complaining that they weren’t consulted,” a Pratt’s member said, but he added that younger members were beginning to feel belatedly that the status quo was indefensible. “There’s a feeling that the legal grounds for these places to be all male is quite shaky.”
Emily Bendell, the founder of a clothes business who has been campaigning for the Garrick to change its rules to admit women, wrote last week to a handful of the club’s most prominent members, noting that eight years had passed since 50.5% of the club’s membership voted in favour of women members, a vote that fell short of the required two-thirds majority needed for rule change. “A second vote is long overdue,” she wrote.
“I’m sure you would not be a member of a club that excluded members on the basis of race, religion or sexuality, so we urge you to call for a new vote to allow female members at the Garrick.”
Her campaign has been met with bemusement by some (mostly male) commentators who question the need to fight for equality at a tiny group of elite institutions, but she argues that the existence of men-only clubs that have senior male lawyers and politicians as members “negatively impacts women’s professional advancement”.
Last week’s failed attempt by a splinter faction of Athenaeum members to resist modernising changes to the club centred on a desire to “restore quiet harmony”. Its failure suggested most members recognised that reform was necessary. A new sub-group within the club, named the 1824 group (the year the club was founded), sent a letter to fellow members protesting that: “We sense that the traditional ethos of our club is step by step being eroded and moving towards something which appears more like a corporate run facilities-based hotel/restaurant.”
The former prime minister Theresa May, who like her husband, Philip May, is an Athenaeum member, intervened with a procedural motion, blocking discussion of all motions proposed by the 1824 group, according to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, who was one of the 1824 group’s organisers. “I was literally shouted down,” he said.
“We were trying to enshrine the perception of the club not as a business, but as a meeting place of intellectuals. A lot of us have become very dissatisfied very recently because the club is being driven at a furious pace towards incorporation as a business. There’s a commercialisation happening across clubland,” Fernández-Armesto added.
The Travellers Club (which has diplomats among its members), White’s (which has never allowed women inside the building, with the occasional exception of the late Queen Elizabeth II), Brooks’s and Boodle’s all remain resistant to admitting women.
Even at clubs that chose to let women in decades ago, the proportion of female members remains low. Although the Athenaeum began admitting women 21 years only, its membership remains overwhelmingly male; only 28% of the club’s 147 new members were women in 2022-23, only 7% were under 40 and only two new members were under 30.
