Admitting us a mistake

Press, 28 June 1977, Page 12

Admitting us a mistake

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN London Because my father was a teacher in a boys’ school, I was able at the age of about 12 to make my first foray into a sacred male domain. One holiday I ventured, trembling, into the boys’ lavatories. And what did I find? Just a long white tiled

trough, and toilets and basins just like anywhere else. It was only the first of the long series of disappointments I’ve suffered every time I’ve ever ventured on to reserved male territory.

In Britain, men’s colleges, men’s clubs and various formal dinners have traditionally kept women out. This has naturally made us all do our damndest to get in. Over the years, our hearts fluttering with a sense of privilege, we’ve dined at High Tables, been invited into the great men’s clubs along Pall Mall — “It’s not that we think you’re human,” one man said, “but if we allow women in, we might be able to avoid putting up the subscription for another six months.” I have even made it to the “Punch” table, which a woman’s group once picketed for leaving women out. This table is a mighty oval of oak owned by Britain’s oldest humour magazine (the jokes are pretty venerable too). Over the years writers and politicians, tycoons and academics, have been invited to it; finally unable to- leave out the leader of the Conservative Party, they invited; Margaret Thatcher and that let in the rest of us. Only Princess Anne, though, has been allowed actually to carve her name on the table, as the men do; just as well she didn’t try and carve it on their steak. The conversation wasn’t any louder or sillier or more self-conscious than any other student-type dinner; but to pretend ft was somehpw the cream of the nation’s . conversation was just (at last!) a joke. And the same’s true with the colleges Of Oxford and Cam-;

bridge. Dinner there is like dinner in a doll’s house: it all looks marvellous — until you come to eat it. The glint of candlelight on old silver, the darkly polished tables, perhaps minstrels in the gallery; well, at least it takes your mind off what you’re eating. In the old days they no doubt did a better line in stuffed swan than your average private house. Not now. Half the colleges have their kitchens run by cost-con-scious catering firms, and even those that don’t, always seem to aim at one more course than the budget can really support; any average London dinner party does better. Ana the conversation of dons, as Brits call the faculty, is invariably either up in

the clouds with Einstein’s theories and the precise place of the mangel-wurzel in the politics of fourteenth century Bavaria, or down at the level of college gossip: who will get Professor Finkelstein’s rooms when Dr Thinkwhistle moves out? Did the Master really cut the chaplain dead? It’s painful. The one thing these old colleges do have is cellars full of splendid old wines, which antique fluids presumably account for the conviction that academics still have that their conversation is “schecond” to none.

I’m prepared generously to suppose that the Worshipful Company of Shrimp; Fanciers puts on a bettor] meal and less tedious speeches when it isn’t having a ladies’ night, but that' still leaves us with the men’s clubs. They’re variable, of course; the Travellers has delightful premises for its lady visitors, and it was generally felt when journalist Janies Morris resigned from the Club on changing sex and becoming Jan Morris, that he/she had i missed a great opportunity ito get women admitted. But [others are beyond belief awful. The Reform Club, particularly, which once had the best chef in London — Alexis Soyer — seems now to have sunk to the level of what the great Soyer did next, which was to go off and work out gruel recipes for soldiers in the Crimea. The one thing the clubs still do well is the kind of pudding you’ll never find anywhere else: Spotted Dick [and Treacle Roly-poly, just the way they had it in the i nursery.

i It’s been noticed that any (time one of the clubs does ! admit women, it loses a few jof its members to other Idubs that still hold out I against them. Time was I’d have tried to follow them land flush them out; • not jnow, poor things, there has Jto be someplace where they can go, to maunder on about the old school and what planes they flew in the Air i Force and how much beer old Foggy drank, as they ! stuff themselves with nurseery food and remember better days. But if they really want us to feel we . were not being permitted to aspire to something so far j above us. then the mistake ’ I they made was ever letting jus near the joint in the first iplace. —O.F.N.S. Copyright.