Behind Closed Doors Quotes

“The assumption started to be that the kind of man who joins a club alongside women members was either exceptionally effeminate, or else had something to hide through over-compensation.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Around him, he built up a close cadre of followers. Some, like Muhammad Ali Jinnah (later founder of modern-day Pakistan), became NLC members themselves; others like the young Mohandas Gandhi were content to remain visitors.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“To this day, almost any British imperial club which was in business in the nineteenth century still has one particular item: a weighing chair. Members used it to weigh themselves before and after a heavy meal.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The first club on the Australian mainland was Sydney’s appropriately named Australian Club, founded in 1838, which survives to this day, often making headlines because of its continued refusal to admit women.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Little wonder, then, that as well as the usual transient guests flowing through any city, Indian clubs began to attract their own measure of ‘permanent residents’, like a modern-day bed and breakfast, only rather grander.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Wherever three Englishmen are gathered together, two of them will form a club, for the purpose of keeping the third one out’, ran an old joke.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Which London clubs have survived, then? Which make up the resilient 10 per cent? The answer has little to do with economics. It lies in culture and theme.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“A club’s claim to ‘exclusivity’ often lay on the Porter doing a thorough job in filtering out members of the public. The very best at their craft were expected to know every club member by sight – potentially several thousand individuals – and to keep abreast of deaths, resignations and members owing money.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“As the clubs’ catering operations grew more complex, so did the ranks of waiters, stretching up to the exalted heights of Steward and Head Steward, for the British have always loved to replicate the class system in every bureaucracy they create.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The most impressively capable Club Secretary of my acquaintance observed that successful clubs have three components: their members, their staff and their building.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“It used to be said that there were two types of club: those where you went to meet people, and those where you went to avoid meeting people.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The object of the ballot in clubs is to enable you to act upon predilections and aversions which you cannot perhaps justify, and dare not care to avow, and it rests upon the ground that everybody has a right to choose with whom he will associate. Beyond that there is no principle involved. It is the right you claim of selecting your associates and friends without giving any public reason, or without being able to give any reason or justification of the aversions and prejudices which you may entertain.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“One persistent blackballer in an Edinburgh club had managed to veto all new applicants for two years, until he realised he had misunderstood the process – in casting his ballot for ‘No’, he believed it meant ‘No objection’.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“In 1841, the London Library was spun off from the library of the Travellers Club, run as a private members’ club, but offering a template for the lending libraries open to the public which would sweep the nation in the second half of the century.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“the London club provided a template for a rulebook, and a system of election.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Like the Pall Mall clubs, many made ends meet by selling off or subletting parts of their building, exploiting their real estate to compensate for the fact that the basic club business model had ceased to work for them.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“New clubs would be set up in the late nineteenth century by high-minded, far-sighted founders, proclaiming lofty goals around nobles causes – the Arts Club for artists, the Eccentric Club for self-described eccentrics, and so forth.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Richard Usborne echoed the belief that a club’s ‘hall porter was a reasonable picket against cads, creditors and hunch-backed foreigners”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Memorably, the Lord Chancellor Lord Brougham physically got down on his knees in the House of Lords in support of reform, telling his fellow peers, ‘I implore you − yea, on my bended knee I supplicate you − reject not this bill!’15 Unfortunately for Brougham, it was at that exact moment that his back seized up. The drama of the moment was considerably reduced as he had to ask his fellow peers to carry him away. As”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“The Naval and Military Club’s long bar was devastated by a bomb thrown through the building’s open front window. Remarkably, no one in the packed bar was killed; although, after a long, awkward pause and everyone being thrown off their feet by the blast, including the head barman Robbins, one member, Commander Vaughan Williams, broke the awkward silence: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“It was nothing new to satirise clubs: pioneering Georgian cartoonist James Gillray had lodged in the St James’s Street rooms of his publisher and lover Hannah Humphrey, and whenever he needed divine inspiration he had but to look out of the window at the nearby clubs, frequently spoofing Boodle’s next door, as well as Brooks’s and White’s. Clubs as a target of protest became a growing phenomenon from the nineteenth century.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Surrounded by a first-floor saloon where members sip drinks while staring, panopticon-like, down into the central lobby below, the Club showed the possibilities ahead.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“At the Reform Club, Soyer personified the gregarious showmanship which came to be embraced by noted chefs. Everything about him was unconventional – his artisanal clothes offset by a velvet hat, even his business cards, which were octagonal rather than rectangular, were all intended to draw attention to the man. This”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“New transport systems meant that diet ceased to be regionally based, and by 1900, thanks to the emergence of the processing industry, canning and refrigeration, food became international.’3 This coincided with the Victorian craze for celebrity expatriate chefs who balanced a flair for novel recipes and publicity, including Louis Eustache Ude, chef de cuisine of Crockford’s from 1827 to 1838, and his successor from 1838 to 1840, Charles Elmé Francatelli. Yet it was the celebrated Alexis Soyer at the Reform Club who would become the most famous Clubland chef.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Her host subsequently admitted that his wife had been a weekly guest for some time, and he protested that it did not breach the letter of the Savage Club’s rules, for they only said that a guest must behave like a gentleman.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“What do those two or three hundred members of a club actually do all day? Are they looking to enlighten themselves, in good faith, on important social issues? Do they talk about business and politics? Literature, theatre and fine arts, perhaps? No. They go there to eat well, drink good wines, play and escape the boredom of the household; they come there looking for a shelter from the tribulations of the day, and not to indulge in fatigue sustained by discussion on any topic. Besides, to whom could they chat? They remain unknown to each other; the membership of a club does not entail the obligation to speak to one’s associates, or even to greet them. And so everyone enters the lounges, a hat on his head, neither looking at, nor greeting, anyone. There is nothing more comical than seeing a hundred men gathered together in these large living rooms, as if they were furniture; one, sitting on an armchair, reads a new brochure; another writes on a table, next to an individual he has never spoken to; that one, sprawled across a sofa, sleeps; then there are those walking up and down; and not to disturb this sepulchral silence, there are some who speak low, as if they were in church. ‘What fun can these men find, to be reunited in this way?’, I thought when I saw them.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“An intriguing feature was that husbands automatically became members of the Female Coterie upon their wives joining. F. H. W. Sheppard noted another unusual feature: ‘The most important rules were that all members were admitted by ballot and “the ladies shall ballot for men, and men for ladies”; thus “no lady can exclude a lady, or gentleman a gentleman”.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“They would define a ‘clubbable’ man as who they want to spend an evening with, but who we want to spend an evening with is different, from person to person.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“In the seventeenth century, the focus had been on unclubbability; simply keeping out those who were objectionable, mainly because they could not be relied upon to pay their bills when drinking.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs

“Nowhere did bacchanal self-indulgence find greater and more deplorable scope than in the clubs. Roués came there to boast of their conquests, to waste their substance in riotous living, to drink to deepest excess. To be overcome in liquor called for no shocked comment.’8 The notion that clubs were synonymous with good behaviour would be a later, nineteenth-century development, when rules were drawn up in response to too many incidents in the ‘hell’ of Georgian clubs.”
― Seth Alexander Thevoz, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs