Late Tuesday afternoon, on an unseasonably warm day in London’s West End, 800 or so of Britain’s finest actors, directors, and the type of people who like to say they hang out with Britain’s finest actors and directors shuffled into the Grand Connaught Rooms, an ornate event space usually reserved for weddings and funerals.
Two and a bit hours later, that same procession of men in cucumber-and-salmon ties wandered out into the evening light. Red-faced and beleaguered, their specific patina could be attributed to either fury or merriment in a proportion of roughly 59.98 percent to 41.02 percent.
In the intervening period, members of the Garrick Club had discussed and voted on the most significant and divisive question in its history: Can the girls come, too? In the end, 562 said, “O.K. then” (“And does anybody know any?”), while the remaining 375 said, “No, thanks very much,” while feeling, in their heart of hearts, that the writing was probably already on the wall. As such, an ugly debate that has bedeviled the club for decades was at last laid to rest. Well, sort of. Stephen Fry beamed. The gout throbbed. And the rest of London shrugged.
The Garrick Club first opened its doors in 1831. It was launched by theatrical types as a more bookish alternative to the sporting and military clubs of St. James’s, a few hundred feet west, where “actors and men of refinement” could meet on “equal terms.” It was, if anything, a sort of proto–Soho House—a place for those we now call “creatives” that sniffed, with its notoriously stringent entry requirements and blackball system, that “it would be better that 10 unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted.” For 193 years it fulfilled that purpose quite convincingly—Brian Cox, Benedict Cumberbatch, Hugh Bonneville, and Hugh Laurie are all members—while adding, slowly but surely, a good number of barristers, judges, and other failed actors into the mix, too.
Women, however—who can also be barristers, judges, and failed actors, as it happens—have long been left out in the cold. They have previously been allowed to enter certain rooms in the clubhouse, but they must be accompanied by a man at all times. In 2015, a proposal to admit women as equals earned 50.5 percent of the vote, which fell short of the two-thirds super-majority required to make such a hefty constitutional change.
“It would be better that 10 unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted.”
In 2020, a lingerie entrepreneur named Emily Bendell instructed lawyers to seek an injunction to stop the Garrick Club from “continuing to operate its discriminatory policy,” evoking the Equality Act 2010. She claimed that the rules treated women “as second-class citizens,” who are permitted access only “on the whim of a man,” and that this, in a place where so many of the nation’s power players held court, was unlawful and disgraceful.
Things went quiet for a bit. The members snoozed off the shepherd’s pie. And then, earlier this year, the campaigning Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman, best known for unearthing the injustices of the Windrush scandal—whereby nearly 100 people who had arrived in England from the Caribbean before 1973 were wrongly deported because of shambolic government record-keeping—turned her laser eye to the Garrick, that other bastion, apparently, of institutional depravity.
The paper published a list of the club’s high-profile members—figures who peppered the judiciary, government, and pop charts—in a move to name and shame those perpetrating an elitist, misogynistic culture. Richard Moore, the head of M.I.6, resigned in horror immediately, as did the string-pulling Cabinet secretary Simon Case—both apparently shocked by the fact that the conspicuously men-only club they had recently applied to turned out to contain only men.
As the debate raged in the papers (O.K., just in The Guardian), other members were cast out. Former theater producer Colin Brough, who had been a member for four decades, was expelled after sending a volley of furious e-mails around the club saying that women should be allowed in at once by the “Putin-style” powers that be.
Meanwhile, a core of ultras huffed and puffed and wondered why The Guardian seemed so intent on ruining their fun. (And a journalist named “Gentleman” for that matter! The cruelty!) The Garrick had always been very clear that no work meetings were to be done there, and so the whole cozy, cabal-ish networking charge seemed completely spurious to them.
She claimed that the rules treated women “as second-class citizens.”
The issue mattered, in a way that things that don’t seem to matter very often do. This was a hill to … well, if not quite die on, to at least shout and harrumph on for a bit. First they came for my men-only members’ club, and I said nothing … A chap had to draw a line somewhere, didn’t he?
In March, the issue became one of almost postmodern semantics. David Pannick, K.C. (King’s Counsel), best known for suing the government over Brexit, discovered that the rules did not, in fact, specifically ban women. Reading through the club’s rule book, Pannick argued that “he” essentially, could also mean “she” in a judicial setting, thanks to the Law of Property Act 1925—meaning no great constitutional change was required to open the door to women after all.
Encouraged by the development, a group of barristers established a protest encampment outside the club, with placards and wigs and everything. “Exclusionary clubs belong in the past!” they said, and one imagines they’ll now move on to the other dozen or so single-sex members’ clubs that remain in the capital, utterly untroubled by the fuss.
Finally, last week, Sting himself was moved to write a letter, having been allegedly fast-tracked into the club less than a year before. (His application was said to be rubber-stamped in a day, while others can take years.) The singer decided that things needed to change. His message to the club’s chair, Christopher Kirker, was signed by Stephen Fry, Mark Knopfler, and a slew of leading actors and producers, and appeared to be motivated not by rank injustice but irksome P.R.
“The current very public controversy over this issue has put us all in an untenable position,” Sting wrote. “Our relations with female artists, co-producers, authors, cast members, members of our creative teams, backstage and front of house theatre staff have all been jeopardized by the recent publicity.” I know I’ve only just got here, but it’s getting awkward with the makeup girl.
A bit like it had for hunger in Africa, or whatever, Sting’s intervention meant that the world could ignore the issue no longer. Consequently, a special general meeting was called to vote on the question once and for all. The Guardian claimed the two-hour event was “courteous.” Someone else told me it wasn’t. Stephen Fry stood up to say that the club desperately needed people such as Olivia Colman and Emma Thompson among its ranks—two of the nation’s best-known (and most unobjectionable, perhaps) female luvvies.
The most effective speech was said to have been made by an unnamed lawyer, who meticulously rubbished David Pannick’s gender-bending legal advice. “She” is apparently clearly used at various moments in the club’s rule book, meaning the “he” referring to members must, surely, be an actual “he,” not simply a metaphorical one. Nevertheless, the vote passed at last in favor of women, who may or may not be thrilled at the news.
Though crushing for the Never-Girls, the referendum might not be final. The club’s 24-man committee is set to meet this summer, and, as Rachel Johnson points out in an incisive Evening Standard piece, its composition could yet be rejiggered to welcome “a majority of crusty diehards,” who could quickly erase this week’s result, and claim that a full two-thirds super-majority was, in fact, required.
And then the Amelia Gentleman Industrial Complex will kick into gear yet again, and Sting will dust off his fax machine, and Stephen Fry will burn his pastel tie, and the nation’s finest legal minds will be scrambled like fighter pilots, while everyone else goes to the pub.
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London
