"MEN ONLY"

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 3, 3 July 1926, Page 20

"MEN ONLY"

A ROOM NO WOMAN MAY ENTER.

Visitors to England for tho season are enjoying the novelty of lunching and dining at a London chop house to which no woman visitor has ever been admitted, states the "Daily Chronicle." Within a stone's throw of tho Haymarket, it is said to be tho only place In the country that can make this claim. To a select but by no means limited company of London's husbands and bachelors its ancient coffee room ia known as Man's Last Stronghold. The chop house makes no attempt to eoneeal its ban on women. It appears rather to glory in it. The manager ■tates that, so far as he knew, the only woman who had ever entered tho coffee room since it was founded 156 years ago was the charwoman employed there.

"Hardly a day passes but I have to refuse admittance to women," he added, almost gaily. "We are a real man's eating house—chops and steaka, real tSnkards of beer, and so on—the only one left in the country, I believe. It would never do to admit women. If we did, we should lose many of our men customers. Men like it because they can come here and talk as they like with no woman to stop them."

I lunched there with a friend, who, with a perverted sense of humour, asked a waiter to reserve a table for dinner for himself and his wife. The waiter nearly dropped a dish he was carrying. A restful atmosphere brooded over the old coffeo room, with its straight, high-backed chairs. Men talked unreservedly, but in quiet tones, fis though they imagined that there was something sacrosanct about the place. Nearly everything on tho menu wag so substantially English that my friend embarrassed me a little by asking for French mustard. He got it, but a man sitting opposite frowned.