Decay of the Club.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13697, 12 September 1908, Page 2 (Supplement)

Decay of the Club.

How the Old Order is Parsing and Giving Place to New. (By Harold Spender.) Ts (he day of the London club over? A shrewd observer in a friendly country seems to think so. " Hotel smoking-rooms restaurants, flats, and motor-cars," says the London correspondent of a New lork paper. " have combined to make the London clubs unnecessary." He might have added a far more potent rival —the Golf Club. During the last few years London has been girdled in a circle of golf links, where a man can have sport and society at once. Why remain in a stuffy room looking out on a Piccadilly or Pall-Mall when you can spend the afternoon amid the gorgeous verdure of. Hanger's Hill or on the high, wind-swept, downs cf Wimbledon? The time and money put aside twenty yeara ago for the luxury of a club in town is how diverted to more healthy and pleasant paths. THE OLD CLUB. Who will weep the downfall of the London club? I do not mean the club with an object—the sporting clubs, like the Leander. the 5E.C.C., and the Alpine, which have still a fine tradition and a common inspiring purpose: the literary clubs, like the .Authors and the Whitefriars; the political clubs, like the Reform, the Carlton, the National Liberal, and the Constitutional, which help to weld together our party-system of Government. All these clubs have their uses and their objects. Clubs of that kind will not decay. If anything, they are increasing in numbers and prosperity. The club which is decaying is the old "social" club—the club which expresses socialhility in ternis of exclusivei)ess, and tries to bind men; together by nothing but common selfisbnefs. It is the sort of club that. Thackeray ridiculed in his ' Book of Snobs," and which, then and now, has always been parent of all kinds of British social cruelty. That kind . of club is decaying; and no one need weep at its grave. For when the -old British club is dead we shall marvel at the memory of its savage selfishness. In su<ih clubs the governing law is that you should take nc thought except for what you should eat and for what- y<>u should drink. Youl chief pride is that your friend is a stranger and you refused to take him in. Sine* the destruction of the gallows at Tybur* and the pillory at Westminister 1 dbubt whether the civilised world hns possessed a more barbarous relic of madiaeval time# than the little oblong box in the hall of the Athenaeum Club, wlsere visitors are generally incarcerated. But even that, is an advance on the true old spirit of the British club. There are clubs in London, as all the world knows, wltcre no stranger is allowed to set foot within the building. These are dreary baildings, haunted inainly by elder bores, gated and barred like Barons' * Castles in the central flood of London multitudes.. THE NEW CLUB.

Now if its good that such clubs should perish. - For 1 hey are obsolete survivals of an extinct spirit. Inhospitably was once the curse of these islands—an inhcaspitality born of a union-between insular pride and insular fear. Kxclusivenesa to those .beneath you ; cxclusiveness to the foreigner—these were the two law.s of old British social life. They were especially the laws of that early nineteenth century period when so many of these clubs were founded." But no wfew people except. ...barbarians take any pride in men* exclusiveness. The vital part of our old aristocracy shows its energy in an immense excliisivcnees—sm instinctive desire to spread its influence, instead of containing it. These old cluhs have no i»se for such men. The best aristocrats do not wish to be shut up with the decaying members of thier own class. Take a noble conerust in this matter of clubs. Keveryone who travels much over the world knows than in America and the British colonies—as, indeed* also in many British Provincial towns—♦ he club is now the most hospitable ifwstifui ion of institutions. You are visiting a town for the first time. You have perhaps one introduction. After the first private hosjritalities, your now friend turns round in Ills mind how lie can h?lp you. After some thought, he almost- always make* the same : suggestion. "I will ,put yott down for my club." lie says. He 'puts you down and you are able from that moment to ««e with ease all the people you wish to meet in that town. THE BLACK BALL.

Hut we are far from it yet. For contrast our London treatment of our foreign or Colonial visitors. There are a f«>w clubs, Mich as the National Liberal, that wt ;i good example. There you can, after

the carrying out of certain forms that may be necessary in so large and centra! a city as London, secure a few days' hospitalit'v to a foreigner. But the old 'London social club—the club which is perishing—rigidly closes its doors. No foreigners for that institution. To them, as to the barbarians of Tauris, the stranger is the enemy, tit only to sacrifice. So the stranger or Colonial goes back with a veiy sore heart-, the Frenchman perhaps -wondering how the Englishman translates the words " Entente Cordiale," and the Colonial harbouring resentful reflections on London Imperialism. I wonder how maniv Colonials have been entertained, say, in Toronto, Quebec, or Melbourne? When we talk of organising British hospitality, here is a side, outside the scope of Governments, which cannot be ignored. When we think of the way that women are treated in these old London clubs. In a few London clubs women are nowlet in by back "ways, and allowed to sit in small rooms or on chilly terraces. But those are not the old London clubs, which, like the Old Guard, "die, but do not. surrender." It is the proud boast of many such clubs that no woman has ever darkened their doors. The laws of chrivalry stop !at their gates. The hall-porters—-sorriest products of ancient British manners—are trained to treat women with firm disrespect. Perhaps the prceent great rebellion of womankind had its be-, ginning on the stejxs of a London club. There are, I have been told, in many of these old London clubs groups of men who make it a fixed rule to black-ball everyone who desires entrance. With masked faces they will bolt and bar the gates on all without. Noble .products of the old club spirit! Genial results of the " Baron*6 Castle" theory of social . life 1 Bankruptcy is now overtaking them. They are perishing of their own isolation, dying of their own exclusive>ness. The world will get on very well without them.

For the law of the club of the future will be hospitality, rather than exclusiveness.