Garrick Club
The Garrick Club is a private members' club in London, founded in 1831 as a club for "actors and men of refinement to meet on equal terms". It is one of the oldest members' clubs in the world. Its 1,500 members include many actors, writers, journalists, leading arts practitioners, at least 10 serving members of parliament and dozens of members of the House of Lords, many heads of public institutions alongside businessmen, and at least 160 senior legal professionals and members of the judiciary including King's Counsel, Supreme Court and Court of Appeals judges. For most of its history, the Garrick was a gentlemen's club with membership customarily restricted to men. However, in May 2024 club members voted to acknowledge that existing rules had never explicitly excluded women as members and that there was no impediment to their election.
New candidates must be proposed by an existing member and seconded by another member, before supporting signatures are collected from at least 30 other members. The candidate then goes in front of a series of committees followed by a secret vote on membership. According to the club website, the original assurance of the committee is "that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted".
The exclusion of women from membership generated disagreement within the club and criticism from wider society, especially as many figures were seen as members of the British establishment, or cultural elite; this criticism increased after a membership list was published in March 2024. In May 2024, the club voted to accept women as members for the first time.
History
The Garrick Club was founded at a meeting in the Committee Room at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Wednesday 17 August 1831. Present were James Winston, Samuel James Arnold, Samuel Beazley, General Sir Andrew Barnard, and Francis Mills. It was decided to write down a number of names in order to invite them to be original members of the Garrick Club.The avowed purpose of the club was to "tend to the regeneration of the Drama". It was to be a place where "actors and men of refinement could meet on equal terms" at a time when actors were not generally considered to be respectable members of society.
The club was named in honour of the actor David Garrick, whose acting and management at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in the previous century had by the 1830s come to represent a golden age of British drama. Less than six months later the members had been recruited and a club house found and equipped on King Street in Covent Garden. On 1 February 1832, it was reported that the novelist and journalist Thomas Gaspey was the first member to enter at 11am, and that "Mr Beazley gave the first order, at ½ past 12."
The list of those who took up original membership includes actors such as John Braham, Charles Kemble, William Macready, Charles Mathews and his son Charles James; the playwrights James Planché, Theodore Hook and Thomas Talfourd; scene-painters including Clarkson Frederick Stanfield and Thomas Grieve. Even the patron, the Duke of Sussex, had an element of the theatrical about him, being a well-known mesmerist. To this can be added numerous Barons, Counts, Dukes, Earls and Lords, soldiers, parliamentarians and judges.
The membership would later include Charles Kean, Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir James M. Barrie, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Lord Olivier and Sir John Gielgud. From the literary world came writers such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne, and Kingsley Amis. The visual arts has been represented by painters such as John Everett Millais, Lord Leighton and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The club's popularity at the beginning of the 1860s created overcrowding of its original clubhouse. Slum clearance being undertaken just round the corner provided the opportunity to move into a brand-new purpose-built home on what became known as Garrick Street. The move was completed in 1864 and the club remains in this building today.
All new candidates must be proposed by an existing member before election in a secret ballot, the original assurance of the committee being "that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted". This exclusive nature of the club was highlighted when reporter Jeremy Paxman applied to join but was initially blackballed, though he was later admitted, an experience he shares with Sir Henry Irving who, despite being the first actor to receive a knighthood, had himself been blackballed in 1873. Bernard Levin was blackballed by members who were upset by a column he had written about Lord Chief Justice Goddard after Goddard's death.
When the club was founded in 1831, rule 1 of the Garrick Club Rules and Regulations called for the "formation of a theatrical Library, with works on costume". At a general meeting on 15 October 1831, the barrister John Adolphus suggested that members should present their duplicate dramatic works to the club, and that these should go some way towards forming a Library. A very valuable collection has thus come together over the years, and its special collections are particularly strong on 18th- and 19th-century theatre. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray would frequently draw members of the club who he found amusing.
In 1985, Prince Charles was proposed by his father, Prince Philip, and seconded by the actor Donald Sinden. Charles described his profession as "self-employed" on the nomination form.
James Winston, the first secretary and librarian of the club, was one of the principal early benefactors and his gifts included minutes from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as his own Theatric Tourist. These presentations formed the nucleus of a Library which now holds well over 10,000 items, including plays, manuscripts, prints, and many photographs.
In 1933 a 21-year-old kitchen maid at the club stabbed a 33-year-old fish cook at the club in a dispute about working conditions. She was subsequently remanded for a medical report at the Bow Street Police Court. The evidence presented to the court by a witness included a large chopping knife and a letter complaining about her working conditions.
In 1956, the rights to Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books were left to four beneficiaries: his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the Garrick Club.
A 1960 dinner at the club hosted by Eugen Millington-Drake brought together British and German survivors of the Battle of the River Plate. In January 1961 the Soviet naval attaché and spy Yevgeny Ivanov was introduced to osteopath Stephen Ward at the club by Colin Coote, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, which would lead to the subsequent Profumo affair.
The broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge resigned from the club in 1964 after being asked for a transcript of an American television interview in which he had criticised the British royal family. A committee member of the club, journalist Joseph C. Harsch, inquired whether "the propriety for a member of the club for speaking against the royal family" might be considered by the club committee. Muggeridge said it was "preposterous... that the committee of a club like the Garrick should consider themselves entitled to adjudicate upon the propriety or otherwise of what a member may choose to say in public".
Membership
Membership process
Whilst details of the official membership process are not publicly available, various aspects of the process are known through news stories and the accounts of past or present members. Typically, an existing member is required to initially propose the name of a prospective new member, with another member required to second this proposal. The name of the proposed new member is then "put up" or "posted" in a membership list book. Enough members must sign in support of membership before membership will be formally considered. Should enough members have signed in support, the name of the prospective member has to go before the Candidates Committee. Only then, to progress from there, is someone considered by a reportedly 24-member General Committee. In between those two stages, a prospective member will be invited to attend so that members of the more senior committee can judge him.Although prices are not publicly available, in March 2024 the cost of an annual membership was around £1,600. In 2011, the waiting list for membership was reported as being up to five years long.
Membership list
The identity of some club members, both past and present, has been widely known and reported in the press, with some individuals publicly identifying themselves as members. Since the Garrick's inception however, the club had always kept details of the full membership a closely guarded secret. In March 2024, The Guardian newspaper reported having access to the full "50 page membership book" and started reporting on the identities of "about 1,500" all-male members, many of them senior members of the establishment including individuals from royalty, politics, the legal profession, the media and the arts.Politicians
Reportedly, the Garrick has fewer politicians as members compared with 20 years ago; however, the membership list reveals dozens of members of the House of Lords and 10 serving members of Parliament and remains a significant hub for senior legal professionals and Whitehall leaders. The majority of serving politicians are members of the Conservative Party; these include the former deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the former levelling-up secretary, Michael Gove, Gove's levelling up department colleague Simon Hoare, the former minister of state for Brexit opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former justice secretary Robert Buckland, Daniel Hannan, a member of the House of Lords and adviser to the Board of Trade and Kwasi Kwarteng who was elected as a member days before he was appointed as chancellor of the exchequer.Also within the political sphere or as heads of public or political institutions are Robert Chote, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, who was chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility from 2010 until 2020, David Willetts, the president of the British think tank, the Resolution Foundation and Dean Godson, the director of the Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, former Post Office chair Tim Parker and the chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, Edward Faulks. Following the Guardian reports, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and the prime minister’s most senior policy adviser and the leader of nearly half a million civil servants, and Richard Moore, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, announced their resignations from the club on 20 March 2024. Case rejoined six months later.