Inside the Garrick, the Elite Men-Only London
Club Rocked by Criticism
Founded in 1831, the opulent private club has long
guarded its membership list closely. A leak this month caused a scandal.
The Garrick Club in London’s theater district counts
among its roughly 1,300 members judges, actors, Britain’s deputy prime minister
and King Charles III.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
March 27,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/world/europe/garrick-club-london.html?searchResultPosition=1
On a side
street in Covent Garden stands an imposing palazzo-style building, strangely
out of place amid the burger joints and neon marquees of London’s theater
district. It houses the Garrick Club, one of Britain’s oldest men’s clubs, and
on any given weekday, a lunch table in its baronial dining room is one of the
hottest tickets in town.
A visitor
lucky enough to cadge an invitation from a member might end up in the company
of a Supreme Court justice, the master of an Oxford college or the editor of a
London newspaper. The odds are that person would be a man. Women are excluded
from membership in the Garrick and permitted only as guests, a long-simmering
source of tension that has recently erupted into a full-blown furor.
After The
Guardian, a London newspaper, put a fresh spotlight on the Garrick’s men-only
policy, naming and shaming some of its rarefied members from a leaked
membership list, two senior British government officials resigned from the
club: Richard Moore, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Simon
Case, the cabinet secretary, who oversees nearly half a million public
employees.
Only days
earlier, under questioning at a Parliamentary hearing, Mr. Case defended his
membership by saying he was trying to reform an “antediluvian” institution from
within rather “than chuck rocks from the outside,” a line that provoked
derisory laughs. Mr. Moore’s membership seemed at odds with his efforts to
bring more racial and gender diversity to the British spy agency, known as MI6.
Now, the
club’s 1,300 members are debating the future of the Garrick over lamb chops in
the dining room, after-dinner drinks in the lounge under the main staircase and
in a WhatsApp group, where they swap fretful messages about the latest
developments. Some welcome the pressure to admit women as long overdue; others
lament that doing so would forever change the character of the place.
“The
Garrick Club has an absolute right to decide who its members are,” said Simon
Jenkins, a columnist at The Guardian and a former editor of The Times of London
who is a longtime member. “That said, it is indefensible for any social club
these days not to have women as members.”
“Judi
Dench, for God’s sake — why shouldn’t she be a member?” he added.
Or Jude
Kelly, an award-winning former theater director. Ms. Kelly, who now runs the
charity Women of the World, said that excluding women from membership in the
Garrick deprived them of access to an elite social circle where professional
opportunities inevitably flowed with the brandy.
“We’re in
2024,” Ms. Kelly said. “These are incredibly senior people. Many of them are
espousing diversity and inclusion in their professional lives. Being on the
inside for a long time makes you complicit.”
The Garrick
Club is not the only private club in London that does not admit women: White’s,
Boodle’s, the Beefsteak Club and the Savile Club are also men only. But what
makes the Garrick unique is its star-studded membership list, which ranges
across the worlds of politics, law, arts, theater and journalism.
Members,
based on The Guardian’s leaked list, include the actors Benedict Cumberbatch,
Brian Cox and Stephen Fry; Mark Knopfler, the guitarist of the rock band Dire
Straits; Paul Smith, the fashion designer; the BBC correspondent John Simpson;
Oliver Dowden, Britain’s deputy prime minister; and, yes, King Charles III (on
an honorary basis).
The
boldfaced names have lent the dispute extra piquancy, especially since many of
them would seem the kind of bien-pensant progressives who would abhor any kind
of discriminatory policy. Indeed, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fry and Mr. Simpson are among
those who have come out publicly in favor of admitting women.
The last
time the members voted on the question, in 2015, a slender majority — 50.5
percent — said they supported it. But the club’s bylaws require a two-thirds
majority to change the policy on membership, and a new vote, if it were
scheduled, would not be held until the summer. A club official declined to
comment on the matter.
For all the
misgivings that members have about not admitting women, some predict they would
still fail to reach the two-thirds threshold. The dispute has, perhaps
inevitably, turned bitter, pitting a handful of committed campaigners against a
larger, older group, many of whom are fine with women as guests but are
reluctant to rock a boat that has sailed grandly since 1831.
In New York
City, private clubs like the Union League and the Century Association began
admitting women in the 1980s, often under the pressure of legal judgments. But
in London, where clubs like the Garrick are more zealous about being social
rather than professional networking institutions, defenders argue that the case
for preserving male-only membership is more justifiable.
These
members say they go to the Garrick to drink wine, unwind and enjoy themselves.
They crack jokes they wouldn’t make in mixed company. They are not allowed to
conduct business; even pulling papers out of a briefcase is looked down upon.
Some
dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot. Jonathan Sumption, a lawyer and former
justice in the Supreme Court, said he supported the admission of women, but
added that those who opposed it were entitled to their opinion.
“The
Garrick Club is not a public body and the whole issue is too unimportant to
make a fuss of,” Mr. Sumption said. “It is still a pretty good club.”
Mr.
Jenkins, the columnist, agreed, suggesting that some of the news coverage had
caricatured the Garrick as a vaguely sinister place where men gather to plot
against women. Women, he said, were welcome at the communal table in the dining
room, perhaps the club’s most hallowed place.
The only
room off limits to women is the members’ lounge, known as Under the Stairs,
where men gather after dinner. Yet, as Ms. Kelly and other women note, the most
valuable relationships are often formed in such informal settings.
To that
extent, the Garrick is different from White’s, an even more exclusive men’s
club in St. James’s, where Queen Elizabeth II was the only woman ever invited
as a guest. When President Donald J. Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood
Johnson IV, held lunches there with his senior staff, he could not invite his
own political counselor because she was a woman. Female employees at the
embassy complained to the State Department, and he was urged to end the
practice.
But White’s
and its old-line, Conservative-friendly brethren “tend to be high Tory places,
where the question wouldn’t arise,” said Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of
The Guardian, who resigned from the Garrick more than a decade ago.
“The
Garrick membership is more a mix of actors, journalists and lawyers,” he said.
“Thus, it’s a more pertinent question.”
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom,
as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has
been a journalist for more than three decades. More about
Mark Landler
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