Savile Club


The Savile Club is a traditional gentlemen's club in London that was founded in 1868. Located in fashionable and historically significant Mayfair, its membership, past and present, includes many prominent names.

Changing premises

Initially calling itself the New Club, it grew rapidly, outgrowing its first-floor rooms overlooking Trafalgar Square at 9 Spring Gardens and moving to the second floor. It then moved to 15 Savile Row in 1871, where it changed its name to the Savile Club, before lack of space forced the club to move again in 1882, this time to 107 Piccadilly, a bow-windowed building owned by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery. With its views over Green Park, it was described by the members as the "ideal clubhouse". However, after 50 years' residence, demolition of the building next door to create the Park Lane Hotel caused the old clubhouse such structural problems that, in 1927, the club moved to its present home at 69 Brook Street in Mayfair, a house built with leases granted by the Duke of Westminster in the mid-1720s. In 1850, Edward Digby, 2nd Earl Digby commissioned Thomas Cundy II to add the Doric porch to No 69, satisfying a Victorian desire for greater privacy as well as warmth. This had previously been occupied by the Dowager Duchess of Cleveland from 1866 to 1883 and was later the former home of "Loulou" Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt, a Liberal Party cabinet minister, and his wife Mary Ethel Harcourt, Viscountess Harcourt. The building, a combination of 69 and 71 Brook Street, owes its extravagant Dix-huitième interior to Walter Hayes Burns, the father of Lady Harcourt and the brother-in-law of financier J. P. Morgan, who commissioned William Bouwens van der Boijen of Paris to adapt it for his wife Mary Lyman Morgan to entertain in a suitable style at home. It thus includes an elegant hall, a grand staircase and a lavish Louis XV-style ballroom. Following the marriage of her youngest daughter in 1926, Ethel Harcourt decided to dispose of the lease of Brook Street, which she did 12 months later to the Savile Club.

Savilians

Savile Club members are known as Savilians and the Club's motto of Sodalitas Convivium implies convivial companionship. The traditional mainstays of the Savile are food and drink, good conversation, playing bridge and poker, and Savile Snooker. This is a 19th-century version of the game, whose rules were first written down in the mid-20th century by Stephen Potter. It is a form of volunteer snooker, with some unusual features.

Controversy

Members have consistently voted not to admit women members to the club, most recently in January 2025, when 53% of current members voted against letting women in.

Evolution

Some traditions have been lost: regular cigar club dinners went with the smoking ban, but have since been revived in memoriam on the terrace ; "the penny game", disappeared with decimalisation; Friday-night candlelit dinners in the Ballroom for wives and girlfriends disappeared with changes in fashions and attitudes. The musical tradition continues, with informal lunchtime and evening concerts, jazz evenings, sponsorship of music students and an annual St Cecilia's Day concert, where Club members perform. A strong science connection has been revived with regular "Science at the Savile" talks. Other traditions have evolved: the preferred dress is still jacket and tie, but the code has been relaxed slightly to allow for the less formal attire worn in offices today; mobile phones are generally banned but can be used in the Club's old telephone area.

Prominent members

Acting and the theatre
  • Michael Croft
  • Robert Donat
  • Valentine Dyall
  • Jimmy Edwards
  • Edward Fox
  • Kenneth Haigh
  • Sir Henry Irving
  • Braham Murray
  • Simon Oates
  • Ralph Richardson
  • Bill Simpson
  • Simon Ward
Art, illustration and cartoons
  • Michael Ayrton
  • Sir Max Beerbohm
  • Vaughan Grylls
  • George Percy Jacomb-Hood
  • David Low
  • John Merton
  • William Orpen
  • John Reinhard Weguelin
  • Victor Weisz
Broadcasting and journalism
  • Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein of Leigh
  • Colin Brazier
  • Sir Clement Freud
  • Stephen Fry
  • Val Gielgud
  • Gilbert Harding
  • Patrick Kidd
  • Quentin Letts
  • Tony Miles
  • Michael Molloy
  • Roy Plomley
  • Robert Robinson
  • Petroc Trelawny
  • Huw Wheldon
Films
  • Sir Michael Balcon
  • Charlie Chaplin
  • Joseph McGrath
  • Gareth Neame
  • Ronald Neame
  • Michael Powell
  • Emeric Pressburger
History and the military
Mathematics and computing
  • William Clifford
  • Karl Pearson
  • John Venn
Medicine
  • Sir Frederick Grant Banting
  • Arthur Bell
  • Bryan Donkin
  • George Fayad
  • Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins
  • Charles Rycroft
Music
  • William Alwyn
  • Julian Anderson
  • Richard Arnell
  • Sir Malcolm Arnold
  • Martin James Bartlett
  • Arthur Benjamin
  • Arthur Bliss
  • Adrian Boult
  • Francis Chagrin
  • Sir Edward Elgar, 1st Baronet
  • Henry Balfour Gardiner
  • Ron Goodwin
  • Gavin Henderson
  • Bernard Herrmann
  • Herbert Howells
  • Norman Kay
  • Robin Legge
  • Andrew Lloyd Webber
  • William Lloyd Webber
  • Muir Mathieson
  • Sir Hubert Parry, 1st Baronet
  • André Previn
  • Roger Quilter
  • John Scott
  • Sir Charles Villiers Stanford
  • Virgil Thomson
  • Sir William Walton
Politics and political theory
  • Leo Abse
  • Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour
  • Sir Alan Barlow
  • Humphry Berkeley
  • James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
  • Bernard Coleridge, 2nd Baron Coleridge
  • Sir Bernard Crick
  • H. A. L. Fisher
  • Sir Charles Dilke
  • William Edward Forster
  • Arnold Goodman, Baron Goodman
  • George Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen
  • Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 3rd Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
  • William Harcourt
  • David Hardman
  • Jerry Hayes
  • Bryan Magee
  • Frederic Maugham, 1st Viscount Maugham
  • Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway
  • John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
  • Walter Morrison
  • Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh
  • David Young, Baron Young of Graffham
Science
  • Francis William Aston
  • Sir James Chadwick
  • John Douglas Cockroft
  • Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood
  • Edward Williams Morley
  • Walter Hermann Nernst,
  • Ernest Rutherford
  • John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh
Writing
  • Richard Adams
  • J. M. Barrie
  • Algernon Blackwood
  • Sir Malcolm Bradbury
  • Charles Hallam Elton Brookfield
  • John le Carré
  • Erskine Childers
  • Count Michael de la Bédoyère
  • Maurice Druon
  • James Fisher
  • Sir William Goldin
  • Winston Graham
  • Patrick Hamilton
  • Thomas Hardy
  • Sir H. Rider Haggard
  • Sir A. P. Herbert
  • E. W. Hornung
  • Henry James
  • M. R. James
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • Charles Godfrey Leland
  • Eric Linklater
  • Sir Compton Mackenzie
  • A. A. Milne
  • Frank Muir
  • Stephen Potter
  • J. B. Priestley
  • John Pudney
  • Anthony Sampson
  • Sir Stephen Spender
  • C. P. Snow
  • Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Evelyn Waugh
  • H. G. Wells
  • W. B. Yeats
  • James Sully
Other occupations
Fictitious members of the Savile Club include Bill Haydon, the aristocratic polymath and British intelligence agent at the heart of John le Carré's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and William French, wine merchant and Master of Wine, in Alexander McCall Smith’s ''The Dog Who Came in from the Cold.''