Seth Alexander Thevoz > Quotes

“The Naval and Military Club’s long bar was devastated by a bomb thrown through the building’s open front window. Remarkably, no one in the packed bar was killed; although, after a long, awkward pause and everyone being thrown off their feet by the blast, including the head barman Robbins, one member, Commander Vaughan Williams, broke the awkward silence: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Every club has its ‘bores’, and the saying goes ‘If you can’t name the Club Bore, it’s because you’re the Club Bore yourself.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Which London clubs have survived, then? Which make up the resilient 10 per cent? The answer has little to do with economics. It lies in culture and theme.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Generally speaking, good food in these Dining Rooms is a rarity. Club members tend to dine at their clubs in search of good company, rather than because the food is anything to write home about.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“In the seventeenth century, the focus had been on unclubbability; simply keeping out those who were objectionable, mainly because they could not be relied upon to pay their bills when drinking.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“A club is an extension of the member’s home, and the member wouldn’t tip servants in their own home.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“In 1841, the London Library was spun off from the library of the Travellers Club, run as a private members’ club, but offering a template for the lending libraries open to the public which would sweep the nation in the second half of the century.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“What do those two or three hundred members of a club actually do all day? Are they looking to enlighten themselves, in good faith, on important social issues? Do they talk about business and politics? Literature, theatre and fine arts, perhaps? No. They go there to eat well, drink good wines, play and escape the boredom of the household; they come there looking for a shelter from the tribulations of the day, and not to indulge in fatigue sustained by discussion on any topic. Besides, to whom could they chat? They remain unknown to each other; the membership of a club does not entail the obligation to speak to one’s associates, or even to greet them. And so everyone enters the lounges, a hat on his head, neither looking at, nor greeting, anyone. There is nothing more comical than seeing a hundred men gathered together in these large living rooms, as if they were furniture; one, sitting on an armchair, reads a new brochure; another writes on a table, next to an individual he has never spoken to; that one, sprawled across a sofa, sleeps; then there are those walking up and down; and not to disturb this sepulchral silence, there are some who speak low, as if they were in church. ‘What fun can these men find, to be reunited in this way?’, I thought when I saw them.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“New transport systems meant that diet ceased to be regionally based, and by 1900, thanks to the emergence of the processing industry, canning and refrigeration, food became international.’3 This coincided with the Victorian craze for celebrity expatriate chefs who balanced a flair for novel recipes and publicity, including Louis Eustache Ude, chef de cuisine of Crockford’s from 1827 to 1838, and his successor from 1838 to 1840, Charles Elmé Francatelli. Yet it was the celebrated Alexis Soyer at the Reform Club who would become the most famous Clubland chef.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Little wonder, then, that as well as the usual transient guests flowing through any city, Indian clubs began to attract their own measure of ‘permanent residents’, like a modern-day bed and breakfast, only rather grander.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Like the Pall Mall clubs, many made ends meet by selling off or subletting parts of their building, exploiting their real estate to compensate for the fact that the basic club business model had ceased to work for them.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“When White’s was rebuilt, Arthur had it reconstituted as a club. It is from this 1736 re-establishment that the first London club rules survive – although they were far from being the first club rules in the world. It was a simple list of ten rules, stipulating the conditions for election, including a minimum quorum of twelve members needed to elect a new member, spelling out a guinea a year’s subscription and expecting the swift settlement of bills by midnight.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“To this day the Reform Club still shudders at the memory of when they agreed to rent out the premises for a fashion shoot for a few hours in 1978. The following year, they were rather astonished to find that a string of nude photographs featuring a nineteen-year-old Paula Yates made the front cover, centrefold and main feature of Penthouse magazine, all making extensive use of the Reform Club’s furniture, architecture and statues.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“in 1762 Almack began hosting and servicing a society at the house next door, 51 Pall Mall. This gathering was serviced for its first decade by a head waiter named Edwin Boodle, and came to be known as Boodle’s club.20 The success of the public tavern allowed private services for the Club next door to be subsidised. It also raised the stakes significantly, in the kind of facilities that could be offered to members. Today, Boodle’s is the ‘second-oldest’ club in London”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The first club on the Australian mainland was Sydney’s appropriately named Australian Club, founded in 1838, which survives to this day, often making headlines because of its continued refusal to admit women.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Surrounded by a first-floor saloon where members sip drinks while staring, panopticon-like, down into the central lobby below, the Club showed the possibilities ahead.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“There is much that is unknown about Francesco Bianco (or Francesco Bianchi, according to some accounts), but he was an Italian immigrant who anglicised his name as Francis White. Joining seventeenth-century London’s frenzy for luxury goods, he set up White’s Chocolate Shop, selling both coffee and hot drinking chocolate (or cocoa). Instead of locating the business alongside rivals in the City of London itself, he opted for the up-and-coming neighbourhood of St James’s. This was a risky venture: the area was fairly peripheral to London at the time, then still recovering from the Great Fire of 1666, while St James’s still overlooked wide-open pig fields to the north, bound by the street Pigadillo – now called Piccadilly.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“A club’s claim to ‘exclusivity’ often lay on the Porter doing a thorough job in filtering out members of the public. The very best at their craft were expected to know every club member by sight – potentially several thousand individuals – and to keep abreast of deaths, resignations and members owing money.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“As the clubs’ catering operations grew more complex, so did the ranks of waiters, stretching up to the exalted heights of Steward and Head Steward, for the British have always loved to replicate the class system in every bureaucracy they create.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“the London club provided a template for a rulebook, and a system of election.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Her host subsequently admitted that his wife had been a weekly guest for some time, and he protested that it did not breach the letter of the Savage Club’s rules, for they only said that a guest must behave like a gentleman.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The most impressively capable Club Secretary of my acquaintance observed that successful clubs have three components: their members, their staff and their building.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“An intriguing feature was that husbands automatically became members of the Female Coterie upon their wives joining. F. H. W. Sheppard noted another unusual feature: ‘The most important rules were that all members were admitted by ballot and “the ladies shall ballot for men, and men for ladies”; thus “no lady can exclude a lady, or gentleman a gentleman”.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“One persistent blackballer in an Edinburgh club had managed to veto all new applicants for two years, until he realised he had misunderstood the process – in casting his ballot for ‘No’, he believed it meant ‘No objection’.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“By the late eighteenth century, those in power were getting younger – George III acceded to the throne aged twenty-two, and Pitt the Younger became prime minister at twenty-four.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“They would define a ‘clubbable’ man as who they want to spend an evening with, but who we want to spend an evening with is different, from person to person.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Wherever three Englishmen are gathered together, two of them will form a club, for the purpose of keeping the third one out’, ran an old joke.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“New clubs would be set up in the late nineteenth century by high-minded, far-sighted founders, proclaiming lofty goals around nobles causes – the Arts Club for artists, the Eccentric Club for self-described eccentrics, and so forth.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Richard Usborne echoed the belief that a club’s ‘hall porter was a reasonable picket against cads, creditors and hunch-backed foreigners”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The assumption started to be that the kind of man who joins a club alongside women members was either exceptionally effeminate, or else had something to hide through over-compensation.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs