This blog was an occasional feature at best - mainly a place to share miscellaneous writings - and it’s probably long overdue to acknowledge that it’s effectively been discontinued. But I’ve not given up writing! Over at https://clubland.substack.com/, you’ll find that for the last seven months and counting, I’ve been regularly writing about the history, culture and economics of private members’ clubs worldwide - typically two or three pieces a week.
To mark the publication of my new book on the history of London clubs, I am sharing here an article I first published in the Autumn 2019 volume (69:3) of the Baker Street Journal, which tries to address the long-running controversy over whether the fictional Diogenes Club was based on a real-life club.
The Diogenes Club:
A Response to David Leal, and the Case for the Junior Carlton Club[1]
Seth Alexander Thévoz
David Leal's lively article ‘What was the Diogenes Club?’ homes in on several new clues in identifying Mycroft Holmes’s legendary club, and the author ultimately plumps for his own club, the Reform.[2] However, for all the article’s considerable originality, I find myself agreeing with little of its reasoning, and certainly not with its conclusion. Tempting though it might be to write a playful riposte, making the case for my own club, the National Liberal (a natural base for Mycroft in Whitehall), I will instead draw here on my own work as an historian of ‘Clubland’ to argue for why the Diogenes is probably a non-existent composite, with elements of the Athenaeum and Marlborough Clubs – but that if it were based on one club, then it would have to be the Junior Carlton Club. The Junior Carlton has long been overlooked by Sherlockian scholars as a viable candidate.
There has been a distinguished pedigree of authors speculating as to the ‘true’ identity of the Diogenes Club.[3] If there is something close to a consensus, it is that expressed by Leslie S. Klinger, that the Diogenes did not exist, and was an untraceable composite of many different clubs.[4] Nevertheless, Sherlockians have long been intrigued by the idea that the Diogenes is “only an alias”, in Edward Donegall’s phase.[5] There is, of course, much precedent for this – John H. Watson was no stranger to barely concealing the names of real places behind thinly-disguised pseudonyms. In ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, for instance, he wrote of ‘the atrocious conduct of Colonel Upwood in connection with the famous card scandal of the Nonpareil Club’[6] which any contemporary reader would have instantly recognised as a reference to Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon-Cumming’s role in the 1890 Royal Baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft.[7] Yet much of the literature has sought to reconcile most rather than all of the clues as to the ‘real’ Diogenes Club.
Most literature arguing for the Travellers Club derives from a widely-quoted New York Times review of Charles Graves’s 1963 book about modern-day London clubs, which quotes Graves on Travellers members maintaining silence – an unusual feature by the 1960s, but not in the 1880s.[8] Following on from this, S. Tupper Bigelow made a less-than-convincing case for the Travellers, arguing that in order for Mycroft Holmes to have been “a founder” of the club in 1819, he would have been 104 years old in 1888 (and presumably aged 111 by the time of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’), and that he was 70 years older than his brother Sherlock, rather than the stated 7 year age difference.[9] Other theories are easily disproved – David Marcum improbably suggested the residential address of 77-78 Pall Mall for the Diogenes[10] (despite it serving as the Marquess of Ailesbury’s townhouse from 1862-92)[11], and the apartments opposite at 48 Pall Mall for Mycroft’s rooms. Yet these serviced apartments at No. 48 were not built by Hyman Henry Collins and Marcus Collins until 1894-7 – too late for the 1888 events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, or the 1895 events of ‘The Bruce-Partington Submarine’.[12]
Before I set out my disagreements with Professor Leal, I should note that his article has much to commend it. He has delved further into the archives than any other writer who had previously tried to address this question; and his article contains several shrewd deductions. He is correct in pointing out that Mycroft Holmes, who was reluctant to stray as far north from Whitehall as Baker Street, is unlikely to have been a member of the Travellers Club, membership of which requires having travelled to a location over 500 miles from London.[13] He is also correct to conclude that it was rare for career civil servants to join openly political clubs (which typically required members to sign a declaration of principles), but that there were already precedents for civil servants who joined political clubs by the 1880s.
Ordnance Survey Map of Pall Mall, 1894, with the Junior Carlton Club on the north of Pall Mall, and the south of St. James’s Square, https://maps.nls.uk/os/
Nonetheless, the article is built on a series of flawed assumptions.
Professor Leal places great emphasis on how a political club such as the Reform could contain some members who were civil servants, because “the first nineteenth-century civil servants to join [the Reform] were statisticians.”[14] Yet crucially, Mycroft Holmes is never described as a statistician. He “has an extraordinary faculty for figures, and audits the books in some of the government departments.”[15] Beyond the rather flimsy resemblance that both occupations involve numbers, there is the world of difference between the skills of a statistician and an auditor.
Professor Leal curiously insists, like Charles Merriman before him, that the Diogenes had to have been based on one of the clubs of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a member.[16] This is highly questionable. In the late-Victorian age of gregarious clubmen, with most of the restrictions on male guests lifted by the 1860s, it was the norm for writers and editors to be intimately familiar with a range of clubs to which they never belonged – yet which they were constantly flitting in and out of as guests. Consider, for instance, P. G. Wodehouse's repeated references to the National Liberal Club,[17] when he never belonged to that club, and was in fact a member of its nearby conservative rival, the Constitutional Club.[18]
Another questionable extrapolation is Professor Leal’s assertion that “the Reform Club library was larger and more comprehensive” than that of the Travellers, and that its sheer variety would have been of more use to Mycroft's line of work than the travel-centred literature of its neighbouring club.[19] This is true, and makes the Reform Club a more likely candidate than the Travellers. Yet Professor Leal omits to mention that in 1888, the largest library in all of Clubland belonged to the Athenaeum, making that an even more likely candidate by this rationale.[20]
One possibility: the Marlborough Club
Professor Leal argues that Mycroft's status as a founder of his club “rules out all Pall Mall clubs except the one that required friendship with the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII)”[21] This Club, the Marlborough, is not as improbable as it may sound. The Marlborough has tended to be all too easily dismissed – S. Tupper Bigelow noted, for instance, that Charles Graves’s 1963 book Leather Armchairs “says little” about the “long since disappeared” Marlborough and New Athenaeum Clubs, and that “If they are beneath his notice, they should be beneath ours, and, a fortiori, Mycroft’s as well.”[22] Judge Bigelow does not seem to have grasped that Graves was writing a survey of contemporary London clubs in 1963, and that listing long-dissolved clubs was well outside his remit.
The Marlborough Club was based in a narrow but deep building at 52 Pall Mall. It was founded by the Prince of Wales, against a backdrop of rumour and press attention on the Prince’s dissolute lifestyle. The Prince very much enjoyed being a clubman, yet Clubland was rife with gossipers.[23] In setting up his own club, the Prince inserted a singular clause into the rules: that he, personally, retained the right of veto over candidates for membership. Owned and underwritten by the Prince as a proprietary club, it primarily existed as a means for him to continue with his drunken carousing in the most discreet company.
The Marlborough Club has several points in its favour. It was that great architectural rarity, a Pall Mall club with a bow window. (In fact, it had two, one atop the other on the first and second floors.) It was founded in 1868, when Mycroft was 21, making it plausible for him to have been a founder member.[24] King’s Place emerged onto Pall Mall as a passageway along the side of the Club’s deep, narrow building, offering a viable prospect for him to have had lodgings nearby, among the bazaar of picaresque shops which lined the alleyway, and the residential accommodation above. It was located some way opposite from the Carlton Club, on the north side of the street (although as Klinger concedes, if Holmes was walking from St. James’s Street, the Marlborough would have been reached long before the Carlton).[25] Angel Court, although it did not at the time connect through to Pall Mall, also ran alongside the Club, connecting with King Street at the rear, providing a further candidate for nearby accommodation.
Marlborough Club, 52 Pall Mall, 1868
Given this background, and the Club’s consequent reputation for being a gathering of the Prince’s “Yes-Men”, it is not difficult to see how it could have acquired a reputation as “the queerest club in London,”, with Mycroft as “one of the queerest men” among “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town”.
Nevertheless, the Marlborough’s louche reputation meant that to characterise its members as exhibiting “shyness…misanthropy... [and] no wish for the company of their fellows” would be going a step too far. It is possible that this could be reconciled in considering the very different hours Mycroft kept to the Prince of Wales’s “fast set”. Not all members would have conformed to the Marlborough Club’s caricature, and it was inconceivable that such a socially well-connected club would not be considered respectable. The Prince was fond of staying up late for all-night gambling, in sharp contrast to Mycroft’s fixed late-afternoon and early evening hours in the Club, and it is quite possible that the kinds of members who frequented the Club at different times of day were themselves different; indeed, that the “no conversation” rules varied at different hours. Many a night-time bordello has been the very soul of respectability and even prudishness in day-time.
Another possibility: The Athenaeum
Neither should the Athenaeum be entirely disregarded as a possibility for the Diogenes Club. The off-hand dismissal of the Athenaeum by Professor Leal is perplexing – it is held up as “unlikely”, “almost impossible” even, and is regarded as having been “as much a national honour society as a club.”[26] This latter point, surely, makes an even stronger case for why a man of Mycroft’s expertise would not only be a member, but could draw upon the expertise of fellow members in his singular occupation. The Athenaeum was considered sine qua non in its status as a pillar of the Establishment, with its cross-section of members who were authorities in every major field.[27] I would concur with the late Edward Donegall, that its concentration of experts in the arts, literature and science made it the perfect base of operations for Mycroft.[28] It was a leading trendsetter for the later clubs of Pall Mall, in its external architecture (the first Classical Revival building on Pall Mall),[29] internal architecture (the first to be designed around a large, central atrium),[30] balloting practices,[31] and social prestige. It was, in short, the quintessential club.
It also matched many of the details of the Diogenes, including positioning “some little distance from the Carlton”[32], the presence of glass-panelled internal doors, the members’ disdain for conversation in several club rooms, and the scope for Mycroft to have had rooms opposite, on Carlton House Terrace.
I share Professor Leal’s reasoning that Mycroft’s line of work would probably have necessitated access to a good library. As the Athenaeum contained Clubland’s finest library at the time, it would have been a more logical choice than the Travellers or Reform – and Mycroft was nothing if not logical. It should be conceded, however, that the emphasis that both Professor Leal and I place on the Club’s library is not necessarily supported by the canon. Holmes singles out “comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals” at the Diogenes, but makes no reference to any well-stocked library.[33] Newspapers were a Clubland fixture, but not all clubs had libraries.[34] Moreover, Whitehall had plenty of fine in-house libraries in the major government departments, including the Foreign Office’s legendarily well-stocked example, so it is far from certain that Mycroft would have needed to supplement his workplace’s libraries with a private club’s library.
The two points against the Athenaeum are, of course, the non-existence of any bow window, and Mycroft’s status as a founder, when the Athenaeum was founded in 1824 – some 23 years before he was born.
Junior Carlton Club, 30 Pall Mall, J. Macvicar Anderson, 8 June 1887.
The only candidate for which all the evidence fits: the Junior Carlton Club
One particularly problematic detail for any Sherlockian scholar to reconcile is Sherlock Holmes's mention in 1888 that Mycroft was “A founder member”[35] of the Diogenes. Using Baring Gould's chronology, with a birth date of 1847, Mycroft would have been far too young to have been a founder member of the major Pall Mall clubs, including the United Service (established 1815), the Travellers (1819), the United University (1821), the Athenaeum (1824), the Oxford and Cambridge (1830), the Carlton (1832), and the Reform (1836).[36] Professor Leal insists that “no Pall Mall club was founded at such a time (except the Marlborough)”, and speculates that “this part of the narrative was possibly misdirection by Watson.”[37] This overlooks the presence of a major Pall Mall club which was founded at precisely the right time: The Junior Carlton Club at 30 Pall Mall, established in 1864, with a clubhouse opened in 1869, opposite the Carlton Club and the War Office, and originally designed by the same architect as the Marlborough Club, David Brandon.[38]
A 17-year-old Mycroft Holmes could easily have joined as a Junior Member. This would have been fully in keeping with the nature of supply-and-demand among applicants to clubs. As I have written elsewhere, the chances of a nineteenth century man from even the most landed background promptly joining an established club were rather slim;[39] and this would both reinforce Sherlock Holmes's claim that his brother was a founder member of the Diogenes Club, and would count against Professor Leal's easy dismissal of this detail. Existing clubs each had a strict cap on the maximum number of members they contained, meaning that they generated a waiting list of candidates eagerly awaiting the next available place, and it could take a candidate literally twenty or thirty years to even come up for election.[40] By the 1880s, most major Pall Mall clubs had a waiting list at the upper end of the scale. The only way to join an existing club was to wait for the current members to resign, or for them to die of old age; all the while the queue grew exponentially longer. My study of ballot books shows that it was not abnormal for men to put their names down for club membership in their teens, nor for them to experience a decades-long wait.[41] Nor was it unheard of for the Junior Carlton in particular to have teenagers amongst its founder members in 1864, such as the 15-year-old cartoonist and cartographer Fred W. Rose.[42]
Even if he had submitted applications to established clubs as a teenager, a 41-year-old Mycroft in 1888 is unlikely to have yet been elected to any of them, much less to have been a long-standing member.
It was the exponential growth in club waiting lists, in both the number of candidates and the length of wait, which prompted a flurry of “Junior” clubs to be founded from the 1860s onwards (the Junior Army & Navy Club, the Junior Athenaeum, the Junior Constitutional Club, etc) – including the Junior Carlton Club in 1864. Other new clubs set up around this time, without the “Junior” prefix, were also set up to address this very problem.[43] The nature of supply-and-demand in ‘Clubland’ meant that prospective members were far keener to set up new clubs which they could immediately begin using, than to wait interminably for the vague promise of eventually joining an established club in their old age. This contributed to the soaring growth in ‘Clubland’, from around 30 clubs in the early 1860s, to over 250 by the early 1890s.[44] Most of these “Junior” clubs were located on a series of nearby streets – Albemarle Street, Dover Street, Haymarket, Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, or Suffolk Street. Only the Junior Carlton stood as a “Junior” club on Pall Mall.
We do not know which university Mycroft attended, but S. C. Roberts deduced that “Mycroft could not have attained such a position [as he did] if he had not had an expensive public school and university education behind him.”[45] Baring-Gould suggests that he went up to Oxford in 1865, at the age of 18.[46] If Mycroft joined the Junior Carlton at the age of 17, then it is likely that he did so with a view to having a base in London. As per Baring-Gould, the Holmes family lacked deep roots – the brothers had been born in Yorkshire, but their father Siger Holmes had only returned from India in 1844, and the years 1855 to 1864 had been spent with the family travelling around Europe. When they returned in 1864, Siger took the lease on a house in Kennington, and so his precocious 17-year-old son co-founding a club on arrival can be seen as an attempt to set down some roots in London.[47]
The Junior Carlton has long been overlooked as a viable Diogenes candidate, probably for three main reasons: (1) it is no longer there, with the original building having been demolished in 1963, and so its existence is easily overlooked by those making a recce of Pall Mall today; (2) it was a political club for conservatives, and so membership meant signing a declaration of support for the Conservative Party and its leaders in parliament – although if the highly politicised Reform Club is to be considered a viable candidate, then so should the Junior Carlton; and (3) it was on the north side of Pall Mall.
When one thinks of Pall Mall, the south side invariably dominates, with its almost continuous row of grand, purpose-built nineteenth-century clubhouses, constructed on the grounds of the former royal palace, Carlton House, which was demolished in 1826. Yet the north side of the street also had its fair share of clubs by the 1880s. The north side was a patchwork of different buildings of wildly different ages. The sheer prestige of a Pall Mall address meant that many newer clubs were keen to site themselves anywhere on the street, and this included the Junior Carlton, the shape of its lengthy, oblong building being necessitated by the row of terraced houses backing onto the south side of St James's Square, which had to be demolished to make way for it.[48]
Yet the Junior Carlton was well-located to be the Diogenes Club. Coming from St. James’s, Holmes stopped “at a door some little distance from the Carlton”[49] – a description which perfectly fits the Junior Carlton Club, diagonally opposite the visually striking Carlton, on the other side of the street.
Further evidence for the Diogenes being a political club like the Junior Carlton is offered by Sherlock Holmes’s observation that his brother is “always there from quarter to five to twenty to eight.”[50] This presumably coincides with Mycroft’s mealtimes, since one of the main attractions of a club was the ability to dine well, and inexpensively.[51] Given the prohibition on speaking to fellow Diogenes members, one cannot imagine mealtimes taking long, and Mycroft would have rapidly left after a silent dinner. It should be noted that political clubs such as Brooks’s favoured serving dinner at 7pm prompt, to slot around parliamentary sitting hours, tallying perfectly with Mycroft leaving the building forty minutes later.[52]
Further evidence for Mycroft having belonged to a political club was put forward by William D. Jenkins, who noted that the commonly-ascribed dates for ‘The Greek Interpreter’ and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1888 and late 1895) both tallied with the Unionist governments of Lord Salisbury; and moreover, that Mycroft’s stated salary was far too low for him to have been a career civil servant in a senior role, but that this could be explained by his having been a political appointee within the civil service. Jenkins further argued that Sherlock Holmes’s oft-quoted comment that Mycroft “occasionally is the British government” emphasises the temporary nature of his role, as a political appointee, out of office whenever the Unionists were out of office – as was the case for five months in 1886, and again in 1892-5.[53] (Jenkins’s own conclusion, that the Diogenes was actually another conservative establishment, the Unionist Club, is easily disproved: Jenkins was clearly unaware that the short-lived Unionist Club closed down after just four years in 1892 – three years before the events of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’.)
The Junior Carlton was intended to be different from other clubs. It was larger and architecturally grander, yet less prestigious, than many of its Pall Mall neighbours – and not simply because of the presence of the word “Junior” in its name. The original Carlton Club had been founded to support the Tory cause in 1832, and was initially limited to 800 members. Despite a couple of modest extensions to that cap, the Carlton’s waiting list had spiraled out of control, and in the Club’s first 35 years, the list grew from 78 candidates to 1,107.[54] In creating a Junior Carlton Club with a capacity for 2,000 members, it was hoped to ease the pressure on the Carlton. Yet the Junior Carlton was not merely a decanting spot for the Carlton, and had a different composition. It was less of a haven for MPs and peers – across the 1865-8 Parliament, the Junior Carlton had just 43 MPs, compared to 328 at the Carlton.[55] It attracted all manner of political ‘fixers’, manipulators, wheeler-dealers, agents, organisers, and conservative study groups. It had some of the grandest facilities of any London club; but from the outset it also had a frosty, even adversarial dynamic amongst members, with frequent complaints and disciplinary matters brought to the attention of the Committee and General Meetings.[56] It is not too far a stretch to picture its members frostily refusing to talk to one another, as was common in even the most harmonious of clubs. Nor were the members the most congenial of clubmen – the rules made it very clear that they needed to be restrained: “No books, papers or periodicals that are the property of the club or supplied by the circulating library shall be taken into the lavatories. Nor may any member place his feet on any sofa or chair or wet umbrella into any of the rooms.”[57] Few other clubs would have felt the need to spell this out to their members.
To deal with the question of politics, Professor Leal reasons that as the Liberals who constituted the Reform Club believed in the values of “Peace, retrenchment and reform”[58], he asserts, “This could be a description of Mycroft, as it is difficult to imagine him or Sherlock as advocates of war and protectionism and opponents of reform.”[59] There is little evidence to support this assumption. As Professor Leal concedes, the canon says little on politics, and it is unlikely that Sherlock Holmes himself was a particularly political figure; and the canon says nothing at all about Mycroft's politics. If Mycroft were, for the sake of argument, a man of deeply conservative temperament, it does not follow that his brother Sherlock would have shared these views, as Professor Leal supposes – the speculation about the shared politics of the Holmes brothers reads more as wishful thinking. A desire for peace was not a Liberal monopoly in the 1880s; an era anyway marked by colonial wars across Africa which enjoyed support from Liberals and Conservatives alike. Nor was there any hint of Mycroft expressing much zeal for reform. Furthermore, if Mycroft Holmes were to have held very conservative views, and his brother Sherlock were to have been the apolitical character he seems likely to have been, then it is doubly understandable why Sherlock would have been reluctant to raise political topics around Mycroft, for fear of reigniting long-simmering family arguments. Holmes's evident disapproval of the two Conservative characters in 'The Naval Treaty', a detail stressed by Professor Leal,[60] only reinforces this notion. And Holmes’s description of the Diogenes, that “I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere”, takes on a very different meaning if we assume that he does not share the views of the Club’s members, but revels in their being silenced.
A further reason for advocating the Junior Carlton Club is the ‘club topography’ which Professor Leal cites in favour of the Reform. He rules out several other clubs, due to Watson’s description of the Diogenes:
[Holmes] led the way into the hall. Through the glass paneling I caught a glimpse of a large and luxurious room, in which a considerable number of men were sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook. Holmes showed me into a small chamber which looked out into Pall Mall[61]
Professor Leal is correct that neither the Athenaeum nor the Travellers Club correspond precisely to this description. The Athenaeum's ground floor hall did indeed have a small room facing Pall Mall to the right of its main entrance, used for receiving visitors; but the entire left third of the ground floor was dominated by the “Coffee Room” (the prevailing Clubland term for the main dining room). It is not impossible that the men “sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook” were doing so at their own separate tables (for the Athenaeum's diners are seated on small tables), refusing to talk to one another; but this involves some imaginative reinterpretation. Meanwhile, the Travellers suffers a similar problem, as its ground floor room running almost the entire length of the building's front along Pall Mall (apart from the front entrance on the far right), now the Outer Morning Room, offers no scope for a visitors' room to the left, while its side walls adjoin with two other clubs, offering no scope for a sideways view onto the street. Professor Leal accurately highlights how the Reform Club matches Watson's description, with its ground-floor Reading Room and Audience Room for visitors. What he overlooks is that the same also holds true of the Junior Carlton Club, which had a members-only Morning Room and Smoking Room, and a Pall Mall-facing Strangers’ Smoking Room for receiving guests, all on the ground floor.[62]
There is another vital clue as to the Junior Carlton having been the Diogenes: the presence of the distinctive “bow-window of the club” in the only room where members and guests can speak.[63] Professor Leal concedes that “there are no bow windows” in the Audience Room of the Reform Club, “or in any other room of the Reform, Travellers, or Athenaeum that faces Pall Mall.”[64] The bow window is a staple of club literature, due to its presence in earlier eighteenth century clubhouses along St. James's Street. (White's and Boodle's, the oldest and second-oldest clubs in London, each have famous bow windows, along with various celebrated anecdotes around them.)[65] But the major Pall Mall clubs of the nineteenth century were built to very different architectural styles, and most lack bow windows. Going against the grain, the Junior Carlton had bow windows, facing Pall Mall.
David Brandon’s original 1869 Junior Carlton clubhouse had a single south-facing bow window on the ground floor, at the far west end of the Pall Mall facade.[66] But in 1880, the Junior Carlton acquired Adair House next door, and set about extending the Club to the east of its original site.[67] After the Club suffered a serious terrorist bombing in November 1884,[68] architect J. Macvicar Anderson extensively remodelled the Club both internally and externally in 1885-6, with the annexation of the eastward Adair House having expanded the Club’s floor plan by over 40%.[69] The remodelling included the addition of a second bow window on Pall Mall, at the east end of the south-facing side.
Ground-floor plan of the Junior Carlton Club, after the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse.
A visitor in 1888 would have walked into the Club’s main hall, and found a pillared passage on the left leading to the enormous Morning Room, a strictly members-only enclave, where members could read the newspapers.[70] This was a prime candidate for the “large and luxurious room, in which a considerable number of men were sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook”, and would have been fully visible to anyone standing in the hall.[71] A photograph taken in March 1888, just six months before the events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, shows that the door to the Junior Carlton’s Morning Room, visible from the hall, embedded glass panelling, just as Watson described.[72] Meanwhile, heading over to the right from the main hall, one would have found a series of three interconnected smaller Smoking Rooms, with one possessing a bow window overlooking Pall Mall, and one of them marked on the Club’s architectural plans as the “Strangers’ Smoking Room”.[73] This could easily be the “Strangers’ Room” described as “a small chamber which looked out into Pall Mall”.
View of the Hall of the Junior Carlton Club, with the Morning Room visible through the glass-panelled doors on the left, March 1888, J. Macvicar Anderson.
The only flaw in this is that only one of the three Smoking Rooms was labelled a “Strangers’ Smoking Room” in the architect’s plans – and that was not the same one that possessed a bow window.
However, this need not be an insuperable obstacle. Firstly, the surviving plans were in fact drawn up in 1935. It was quite common in Clubland for similar or adjoining club rooms to be switched around in function over the years with some frequency, particularly when a building had only just opened and was still experiencing teething troubles. In 1889, for instance, the National Liberal Club flipped around its (members-only) Smoking Room on the lower ground floor with its Visitors’ Smoking Room on the upper ground floor, after members complained that the former afforded little privacy from the street outside, with the public easily peering in from above. The two rooms had identical floor plans one atop one the other, and were easily switched, just two years after the building opened in 1887. Similarly, it is not far-fetched to suggest that with the Junior Carlton’s ground floor containing a Morning Room, Bar and Smoking Rooms that were all considered members-only, there may have been a period of experimentation after the building’s 1886 rebuild, whereby a different one of the three Smoking Rooms was temporarily designated the Strangers’ Smoking Room. All three Smoking Rooms were contained in the former Adair House, so all three were “new” rooms to the Club. All this would have been long before the 1935 plans recorded the post-1886 internal configuration.
Even the “Diogenes Club” pseudonym may itself be a not-so-subtle clue. The original Carlton Club was founded in 1832 to rally conservatives against the Reform Bill, and was marked by a consistent streak of scepticism directed at the “Age of Reform”, at the succession of Liberal plans to remould the constitution, and at the rapid social change Britain was undergoing. The Junior Carlton, by all accounts, was even more avowedly partisan than the original Carlton, and more sustained in its assaults on change and political reform – an issue still very much alive in the 1880s. What could be more appropriate in describing a club full of avowed opponents of reform, than to name it after Diogenes the Cynic?
Mycroft’s lodgings
One of the main sticking points in locating the Diogenes is the location of Mycroft's lodgings. Vital linguistic clues are offered by Holmes's observations that “Mycroft lodges in Pall Mall”, that the Club on Pall Mall “is just opposite his rooms”, that Holmes visited “my brother's rooms in Pall Mall”, and that “His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall—that is his cycle.”[74] As Klinger notes, “Whitehall” in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ refers to a wider district as well as a street, so this potentially broadens out our horizons to the wider Pall Mall area.[75] There are two plausible prospects on or near Pall Mall.
Cumberland House, 85-87 Pall Mall, 1765-1908; by 1888 it was interconnected with a network of surrounding buildings (note the house on the far-left, one of the candidates for Mycroft’s lodgings). Courtesy of the Victorian London website, http://www.victorianlondon.org/organisations/waroffice.htm.
If we take the Junior Carlton Club to be the Diogenes, then the obvious candidate is the gargantuan Ordnance Office and War Office building directly opposite. Cumberland House, a late-Palladian mansion, stood at 85-87 Pall Mall, on the south side of the street. From 1806 until its demolition in 1908, it served as the Ordnance Office; and from 1858, it housed the War Office as well. The building’s layout was a complex one, embedding a rag-bag of neighbouring houses and buildings, and knocking them through into a tangled web of “thirteen rambling buildings”.[76] Two buildings, east of Cumberland House, were on Pall Mall, directly in front of the Junior Carlton Club. These houses had been residential in design, and so it is not inconceivable that this much-derided rag-bag of buildings would have included some government-owned apartments. We know that Mycroft worked in Whitehall, not Pall Mall; but the Ordnance Office, which was tasked with the requisition of munitions and military supplies, would doubtless have required skilled auditors such as Mycroft, and so it is quite conceivable that he acquired the use of some government-owned apartment under the Office’s aegis, in exchange for occasional services. This ongoing Ordnance Office connection would also offer some insight into Mycroft’s keen interest in the development of the Bruce-Partington submarine, from its earliest stages of planning.[77]
A further circumstantial piece of evidence can be found in the two individuals whom the Holmes brothers sighted from the Club’s bow window overlooking Pall Mall, one a billiard-marker, the other an elderly Non-Commissioned Officer, who had only recently been discharged after serving some years in India. The billiard-marker could have easily come from almost any club in Pall Mall. But the soldier would have been less easy to place. None of the Pall Mall military clubs admitted NCOs – they were all strictly officers-only. The War Office building opposite the Junior Carlton, on the other hand, offers an obvious point from which this soldier would have been coming or going.[78] Mycroft’s additional observations that the man was widowed with two children could have made it quite plausible that the recently-discharged soldier was enquiring about his pension.
There is another possibility, which supports the Athenaeum, Travellers and Reform Clubs. To the rear of the south side of Pall Mall runs Carlton House Terrace, made up of twenty houses constructed on the grounds of the old Carlton House. Numbers 3-9 Carlton House Terrace directly face the back of these three clubs on the south side of Pall Mall, with only the Clubs’ rear gardens between them. The street’s prestigious John Nash-designed villas were mainly residential in the late nineteenth century, with a succession of rich and influential occupants, including three current or future Prime Ministers; plus the Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens, a small cul-de-sac at the end of the terrace. (The Duke of Holderness in ‘The Priory School’ also resides there.) Professor Leal argues that “Mycroft may not be rich, [but] he is not poor”, citing his £450 annual salary as $60,000 in today’s money.[79] Even with such income, it is inconceivable that Mycroft could have afforded lodgings on one of London’s premier streets, without considerable financial assistance.
With so many of these buildings having been in the hands of significant government figures, it is not too great a leap to see how and why a man in Mycroft’s position might have been offered free or subsidised lodgings by the government. This is particularly plausible if one considers that Number 3 was occupied by MI6, Britain’s intelligence service with roots going back to at least 1909.[80] Relatively little is known about the tenure of their occupancy – a residency for at least two decades after World War II has been confirmed, but it is unclear how long they had been there for, or how long they remained. An obvious incentive for maintaining a British intelligence presence on the street would have been the location of the German Embassy at Number 9 from 1849 until 1939 (with an interregnum from 1914-1919, for self-evident reasons) – a point referenced in ‘His Last Bow’, as “things are moving at present in Carlton Terrace”.[81]
It is therefore easily tenable that if the Diogenes were based on the Athenaeum, Reform or Travellers Clubs, Mycroft could have resided on Carlton House Terrace opposite.
Conclusion
It is unlikely that the Diogenes Club was a pseudonym for the Travellers or Reform Clubs. Mycroft’s deep reluctance to travel made him unlikely to have ever qualified for Travellers Club membership, while none of the grounds advanced by Professor Leal for the Reform Club bear up under sustained scrutiny.
The most likely conclusion, of course, is that the Diogenes Club was a composite – a figment of Watson’s febrile imagination, embodying both affection and satire for the oddities of London’s Clubland. Two stories established that Watson was a clubman himself, and Holmes once referred to how “You returned from the club last night”, though the only clues offered to its identity were that it had billiards tables that Watson seldom used, and his non-familiarity with the Diogenes Club means he probably did not frequent that section of Pall Mall.[82] It is therefore likely that his gentle mockery of the Diogenes pointed to affection rather than disenchantment with Clubland. This conclusion certainly offers the most leeway for creativity, and is to be embraced by all who delight in the many pastiche adventures of the Diogenes Club.
Yet it is also plausible that it was merely a pseudonym for a real club, as was the case with much of Watson’s storytelling. In weighing up so many of the “usual suspects” – the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Reform, and the Marlborough – our personal conclusions come down to how much we suspect Watson of engaging in willful misdirection. If this is the case, then the Athenaeum and Marlborough Clubs deserve recognition as likely candidates. The problem with this approach is that it depends on willfully ignoring some evidence, and selectively picking which evidence supports each club. If we are to look at the totality of the evidence, and to take all of Watson’s narrative at face value, then we are inexorably drawn towards one conclusion: only the Junior Carlton Club matches the Diogenes Club’s full description.
Dr Seth Alexander Thévoz is the author of Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is Honorary Librarian of the National Liberal Club.
FOOTNOTES
[1] I should like to thank Kayleigh Betterton of Birkbeck College, University of London, and Dr Tim Oliver of Loughborough University London, for their constructive comments after seeing a draft of this article. I am also grateful to Christopher Raper for highlighting an innacuracy in an earlier version of this article, about the internal layout of the Travellers Club at the time, which has since been corrected.
[2] David L. Leal, ‘What was the Diogenes Club?’, Baker Street Journal, 67:2 (Summer, 2017), pp. 16-26.
[3] There was already considerable interest in the Club by the 1960s – see Charles O. Merriman, 'In Clubland', Sherlock Holmes Journal, 7:1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 29-30; S. Tupper Bigelow 'Identifying the Diogenes Club: An Armchair Exercise', Baker Street Journal, 18:2 (June, 1968), pp. 67-73.
[4] Leslie S. Klinger (ed.), The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 640-641.
[5] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 591.
[6] ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902).
[7] Michael Havers, Edward Grayson and Peter Shankland, The Royal Baccarat Scandal (London: Souvenir Press, 1977).
[8] Review of Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Collins, 1963); in Orville Prescott, ‘Books of the The Times’, New York Times, 30 November 1964; quoted in ‘Letters’, Baker Street Journal, 15:2 (June 1965), p. 126, and ‘Letters’, Baker Street Journal, 18:3 (September 1968), pp. 183, 186.
[9] Bigelow, ‘Diogenes’ (1968), pp. 67-73.
[10] David Marcum, ‘Pall Mall: Locating the Diogenes Club’, Baker Street Journal, 67:2 (Summer, 2017), pp. 27-33.
[11] John Thole, The Oxford and Cambridge Clubs in London (London: Oxford and Cambridge Club/Alfred Waller, 1992), pp. 97-8.
[12] ‘Pall Mall, North Side, Existing Buildings’, in F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volume 29, St. James’s and Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 343.
[13] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 20. This point is also made in Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 640.
[14] Ibid., p. 16.
[15] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[16] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 22; Merriman, 'Clubland’ (1964), pp. 29-30.
[17] P. G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally (London: Everyman, 2011 [first pub. 2011]), p. 101 ; P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Archibald and the Masses’, in P. G. Wodehouse, Young Men in Spats (London: Everyman, 2002 [first pub. 1936]), p. 202. ; P. G. Wodehouse, ‘All’s Well with Bingo’, in P. G. Wodehouse, Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (London: Everyman, 2000 [first pub. 1940]), p. 12.
[18] Sophie Ratcliffe (ed.), P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 64, 1n.
[19] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 23.
[20] The National Liberal Club subsequently had an even more extensive library than the Athenaeum, but even though its clubhouse had opened in 1887, its Gladstone Library would not formally open until 1892, making it implausible as a serious candidate for the 1888 events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, where Mycroft’s routine is well-established.
[21] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[22] Bigelow, ‘Diogenes’ (1968), p. 70.
[23] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 131-139.
[24] Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960), p. 344.
[25] Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 641.
[26] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 16, 22.
[27] Ralph Nevill, London Clubs: Their History and Treasures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912), pp. 279-282
[28] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 591.
[29] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), p. 240.
[30] Ibid., p. 46.
[31] Mordaunt Crook, ‘Blackballing’, in Fernández-Armesto (ed.), Armchair Athenians (2001), pp. 19-30
[32] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[33] Ibid.
[34] White’s, for instance, had no library, and a number of its members saw this as a source of pride. Thévoz, Club Government (2018), p. 149. See also the extended discussion of Clubland newspapers in Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: Volume I – The Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981).
[35] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[36] Seth Alexander Thévoz, Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), pp. 22-23.
[37] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 23.
[38] Barry Phelps, Power and the Party: A History of the Carlton Club, 1832-1982 (London, Macmillan, 1982), pp. 34-36.
[39] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 82-93.
[40] Ibid., pp. 82-93; J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Locked Out of Paradise: Blackballing at the Athenaeum, 1824-1935’, in Felipe Fernández-Armesto (ed.), Armchair Athenians: Essays from the Athenaeum (London: Athenaeum, 2001), pp. 19-30; Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 35-57.
[41] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 90-92.
[42] Rod Barron, ‘Politics Personified: Fred W. Rose and Liberal & Tory Serio-Comic Maps, 1877-1880 – Part 1’, Barron Maps blog, 11 March 2016, http://www.barronmaps.com/politics-personified-fred-w-rose-and-serio-comic-maps-1877-1880-part-1/.
[43] Examples include the Devonshire Club founded in 1874 (provisionally called the Junior Reform Club before its launch), and “the New University Club…was founded, in 1864, to accommodate those awaiting election at the older clubs.” Thole, Oxford and Cambridge Clubs (1992), p. 25. Both were on St. James’s Street.
[44] Seth Alexander Thévoz, ‘Club Government’, History Today, 63:2 (February, 2013), pp. 58-59.
[45] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 593.
[46] William S. Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 16.
[47] Ibid., pp. 11-17.
[48] F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volume 29, St. James’s and Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 341.
[49] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[50] Ibid.
[51] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 143-147.
[52] Ibid., p. 144.
[53] William D. Jenkins, ‘The Adventure of the Misplaced Armchair’, Baker Street Journal, 19:1 (March, 1969), pp. 12-16.
[54] Ibid., p. 91.
[55] Seth Alexander Thévoz, ‘Database of MPs’ club memberships, 1832-68’, www.sethalexanderthevoz.com/database-mps-clubs/.
[56] To reach this conclusion, one need only look at the catalogue of members’ disputes which punctuate MS ‘Junior Carlton Club General Meeting Minutes, Volume 1, 1865–1967’, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[57] Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 96.
[58] A phrase which evolved in the 1820s, in the run-up to the Reform Act which gives its name to the Reform Club. E. A. Smith, Lord Grey, 1764-1845 (London: Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 279.
[59] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[60] Ibid., p. 19.
[61] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[62] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[63] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[64] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[65] See Marcus Binney and David Mann (eds), Boodle’s: Celebrating 250 Years, 1762-2012 (London: Boodle’s/Libanus Press, 2013); Anthony Lejeune, White’s: The First Three Hundred Years (London: A&C Black, 1993).
[66] ‘Plate 120c: Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall, Ground-floor plan, published 1867’ in, Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960).
[67] Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 96.
[68] Charles Petrie and Alistair Cooke, The Carlton Club, 1832-2007 (London: Carlton Club), p. 210.
[69] ‘Plate 120c: Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall, Ground-floor plan, published 1867’ in, Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960); Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive. A comparison of the 1869 and 1886 floorplans makes it clear how dramatic the expansion was.
[70] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[71] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[72] J. Macvicar Anderson, ‘Junior Carlton Club, 30 Pall Mall, Westminster, Greater London’, taken on 21 March 1888, hosted by the Historic England website, http://viewfinder.english-heritage.org.uk/search/reference.aspx?uid=215925&index=5928&mainQuery=westminster,%20london&searchType=all&form=home.
[73] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[74] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893); ‘The Final Problem’ (1893); ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908).
[75] Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 640.
[76] Piers Brendon, The Motoring Century: The Story of the Royal Automobile Club (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 135.
[77] ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908).
[78] I am grateful to Dr Tim Oliver for making this shrewd observation.
[79] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[80] Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).
[81] ‘His Last Bow’ (1917).
[82] ‘The Dancing Men’ (1903); ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902).
An abridged version of this piece ran on Wellesnet,
Anyone interested in Orson Welles’ work has sooner or later chuckled along at ‘Frozen Peas’, the notorious out-take in which the actor-director tetchily took to task his director and sound engineer, whilst recording a series of commercials for Findus Frozen Foods. But what was the full story behind it?
Background
Findus are a Scandinavian food company, founded in 1905 and best known for the frozen foods they began selling from 1945. They were a long-term client of the London office of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency – BFI records indicate that JWT first produced adverts for Findus as early as 1960, and continued doing so until 1980. Welles was only the latest in a string of 1960s celebrity spokespersons for the ads – as late as 1968, TV game show host Michael Miles was used as a narrator, and TV character Alf Garnett had fronted another Findus advert the year before.
Jonathan Lynn has already shed some light on the background of Welles’ association with Findus, and how the working relationship got off to a rocky start. Back in 2016, he allowed me to share with Wellesnet a preview from his memoirs, including:
One night he told us about his voice over for Findus frozen peas. “An ad agency called and asked me to do a voice over. I said I would. Then they said would I please come in and audition. ‘Audition?’ I said. ‘Surely to God there’s someone in your little agency who knows what my voice sounds like?’ Well, they said they knew my voice but it was for the client. So I went in. I wanted the money, I was trying to finish Chimes At Midnight [sic – Lynn may well have been mistaken about the exact project]. I auditioned and they offered me the part! Well, they asked me to go to some little basement studio in Wardour Street to record it. I demanded payment in advance. After I’d gotten the cheque I told them ‘I can’t come to Wardour Street next week, I have to be in Paris.’ I told them to bring their little tape-recorder and meet me at the Georges Cinq Hotel next Wednesday at eleven am. So they flew over to Paris, came to the hotel at eleven – and were told that I had checked out the day before.” He chortled happily. “I left them a message telling them to call me at the Gritti Palace in Venice. They did, and I told them to meet me there on Friday. When they got there I was gone – they found a message telling them to come to Vienna.” Now he was laughing uproariously. “I made them chase me all around Europe with their shitty little tape recorder for ten days. They were sorry they made me audition.”
Archives
I managed to trace the papers of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which are held by Britain’s History of Advertising Trust. They very graciously shared copies of the original production papers for the adverts, including scripts. They offer several interesting insights.
Much as Lynn’s anecdote of a Wellesian chase around Europe tells us a lot about the strained agency relationship from the beginning, it does not mean that the adverts were recorded on a tape recorder in a Vienna hotel or anywhere else on the continent, as has been speculated. They were clearly recorded in a London studio, fully equipped to screen the visual elements identified – probably the “little basement studio in Wardour Street” in London’s Soho district, then still the centre of the production offices for London’s film industry, as well as being the capital’s centuries-old red light district. Indeed, the building was very likely the Pathé Studios at 103-109 Wardour Street, which was a functioning studio for hire from 1910-70, and hosted a myriad of recording sessions for different media. By 1970, the building was shabby, with closure looming.
What survives in the J. Walter Thompson archives are post-production scripts, matching Welles’ changes to the copy. Each script typically carries two dates: the first is a “date typed”, which can be taken as having been soon after the original recording session, probably within a week. The second is a handwritten footer note in the margin with a production number matching BFI records, and a date a week or two later. I believe this latter date to refer to when the final cut of the fully narrated advert was edited and synced, the production number referring to the final product.
Thus the “Lincolnshire” segment of “Frozen Peas” was typed up on 19 January 1970. Intriguingly, this advert alone had two handwritten dates with serial numbers, covering 26 and 28 January 1970. Given a combination of Welles’ tetchiness in recording, and the mammoth nature of the recording (more on that later), I would suggest that this points to two attempts at edits of the final ad.
That the post-production scripts reflect Welles’s final delivery is confirmed by comparing the post-production scripts with Welles in the out-takes – although it is noticeable that the phrase “crumb crisp coating”, which apparently caused Welles so much annoyance, did appear.
Another detail emerges from the papers. Most of Welles’s Findus ads were farmed out by the agency to the production company Les Films Pierre Remont, with a director credited as “Monsieur Dimka”. A 1959 listing in the trade paper Business Screen Magazine shows Les Films Pierre Remont to be based in Paris’ affluent 8eme arrondisement, a company dating to 1949, with Dimka cited as a co-producer and director. The company specialised in filming adverts, and its clients already included the J. Walter Thompson agency. Dimitri Dimka certainly moved in similar circles to Welles – he had been a cinematographer on a 1959 documentary short by Montenegrin director Frédéric Rossif, who went on to co-direct with François Reichenbach the flattering 1968 ‘Nouvelle Vague’ French documentary Portrait: Orson Welles – one wonders if Rossif affected an introduction. Dimka directed all of Welles’s 1969 adverts for Findus, although one was through a different company, the Geneva-based Listar International, for reasons unknown.
When it came to the fraught January 1970 recording session, the adverts were filmed by a new company, Film Fair, with a young director, Maurice Stevens. Stevens would have been in the business for less time than Dimka – at the time Les Films Pierre Remont was starting up in 1949, Stevens was still studying at Hornsey College of Art. Welles’s obvious displeasure in the recordings was thus likely aggravated by dealing with a new director.
Anyway, given the sheer difficulty of tracing Welles’ nomadic movements around Europe at the time, I present below a table of the dates gleaned from documentation. As previously noted, several of the adverts survive and have been digitised, with links given when the video survives.
Date typed; Prod. No.; Title; Product; Production company; Director; Notes
30 January 1969; 81829; Picking; Peas; Les Films Pierre Remont; Monsieur Dimka; A later copy of the same script is dated 13 February 1969.
27 February 1969; 81831; Sliced Braised Beef; Sliced beef; Les Films Pierre Remont; Monsieur Dimka; Recorded at the same time as the below.
27 February 1969; 81831 (BB); Braised Beef II; Sliced beef; Les Films Pierre Remont; Monsieur Dimka; Variant on the first beef ad – first half was identical. Copy exists dated 25 February 1969.
6 March 1969; 81835C; Fish Portions; Fish portions (cod, haddock, plaice, hake); Les Films Pierre Remont; Monsieur Dimka
6 May 1969; 81830; Fresh Caught; Fish fingers; Listar International; Monsieur Dimka
4 August 1969; 81832; Beefburger; Beefburger; Les Films Pierre Remont; Monsieur Dinka
16 January 1970; 82505C; Norway; Fish fingers; Film Fair; [uncredited]; Source of the “Norway” out-takes.
19 January 1970; 82502C; Far West; Beefburger; Film Fair; [uncredited]; Source of the “Far West” out-takes.
19 January 1970; 82502C and 82503C; Lincolnshire; Peas; Film Fair; Maurice Stevens; Source of the “Lincolnshire” out-takes.
January? 1970; Not known; France; Not known; Not known; Not known
January? 1970; Not known; Highlands; Sliced beef ;Not known; Not known
January? 1970;Not known; Normandy; Not known; Not known; Not known
January? 1970; Not known; Shetland; Fish portions; Not known; Not known
January? 1970; Not known; Sweden; Cod portions; Not known; Not known
The documentation also bears out the director’s comment in the out-take, shortly before Welles walks out at the end, “Orson, you did six [commercials for us] last year”.
Two credits remained constant throughout the paperwork: J. Walter Thompson producer Roger Holland, and lighting/cinematographer Bob Zubouwitch, although the latter need not have ever met Welles, since Welles was only providing voiceovers to pre-filmed footage.
Real people?
Lincolnshire’s “Mrs. Buckley”, Norway’s “Jon Stangeland” and the American West’s “Charlie Briggs” are listed as “artistes” in paperwork discussing visual advert elements of them, suggesting that they may have been real people rather than actors.
The format of the adverts made it clear that real people were being captured, typically farmers and fishermen, and surviving clips seem to support this. I have been able to ascertain that the Buckleys of Lincolnshire are a long-standing agricultural family, and indeed that they still grow peas there today!
When was ‘Frozen Peas’ recorded?
Given that documentary evidence survives for both ‘Braised Beef’ segments in February 1969 having been recorded at the same time, but that post-production scripts were also typed up two days apart, it is likely that the whole ‘Frozen Peas’ segment was all from the same recording session, even though the transcriptions are dated three days apart. Crucially, 16 January 1970 was a Friday, and 19 January 1970 was a Monday, suggesting that some of the transcription work was simply left to do after the weekend. It is therefore overwhelmingly likely that ‘Frozen Peas’ was recorded sometime in the week up to and including 15 January 1970.
Original post-production script for the ‘Lincolnshire‘ segment of ‘Frozen Peas’. Courtesy of the J Walter Thompson archive at the History of Advertising Trust (HAT).
It appears that the surviving J. Walter Thompson scripts are not exhaustive, though. Comparing them to the BFI’s records and the surviving footages, whilst there is some duplication with the production paperwork, one finds BFI listings for five more 1970 Findus adverts made, but not included in the above: “France”, “Highlands”, “Normandy”, “Shetland” and “Sweden”. Recordings of several of these survive. Whereas the 1969 adverts were in black-and-white, the 1970 ones were in colour. From the jump in production codes for the January 1970 recording session (82502C, 82503C, 82505C) it is likely that at least one of these adverts was the “missing” 82504C; and indeed quite probable that all eight commercials were recorded together, back-to-back, in one mammoth recording session. This is doubly likely, as their voiceovers all follow the same structure – introducing a locale, with a person, discussing the Findus product, and finishing on “people like [name of person], who can taste the difference.”
Findus advertising after Welles
Findus had already been moving between spokespersons before Welles. After the 1970 advert session, it is perhaps unsurprising that they did not renew his contract, and reverted to rotating narrators. A 1972 commercial with English comedian Sam Kelly is so dated with its obnoxious materialism and casual sexism, it looks uncannily like the spoof advert in Michael Winner’s 1967 film I’ll Never Forget Whatsisname – which coincidentally featured Welles as the jaded, unscrupulous advertising executive producing such tripe. By 1974, Findus had a longer-term narrator for a series of adverts, in the dulcet Scottish tones of actor Gordon Jackson, by then best known for his starring role in Upstairs, Downstairs. Two decades earlier, Jackson had worked for Welles, in the London stage production of the experimental Moby Dick, Rehearsed.
Where do the Findus adverts fit in to Welles’ career?
At the time of these adverts, Welles was living with his wife and youngest daughter at the Mori family villa in Fregene, outside Rome, although he continued working all over Europe. He had three major projects underway, which the ‘Frozen Peas’ commercial was helping to fund. With so many overlapping strands in Welles’ life, it is important to understand why he took on this particular advertising work.
The first two projects were The Deep, a thriller filmed periodically on boats over summers in Yugoslavia in 1967-9 as climate permitted, and Orson’s Bag, containing a series of sketches and a half-hour condensation of The Merchant of Venice. By 1969, the original funding for Orson’s Bag as a CBS American TV special had dried up, over disagreements on whether his Luxembourg-based holding company could be paid by CBS, but he continued to work on the segments out of his own resources. As late as 1971, he was still filming the linking narration in London. The Merchant of Venice in particular consumed much of his time on the editing at Safa Palatino Studios, a version being completed in 1969, prior to the loss of several key film elements. Both The Deep and Orson’s Bag were major projects he shared with his long-term lover, Oja Kodar.
The third major project Welles was engaged in was his long-standing Don Quixote. While the project had been conceived in various forms since the mid-1950s, most of the filming was done in Italy in 1959-64, and by 1964 a fully-edited workprint existed, Don Quixote Goes to the Moon, named after its ending. Welles held on to this edit through the 1960s (it was shown to his friend Juan Cobos around 1965, essentially completed), mindful that the avowedly non-commercial film could harm his career, and that he first needed a major commercial success to pave the way for something as idiosyncratic. After a disappointing box office response to Chimes at Midnight (1966), it appears he had his hopes pinned on first The Deep (1967-9) and then The Other Side of the Wind (1970 onwards) as the “commercial” movie that would pave the way for Don Quixote. But the project suffered a further, self-inflicted setback in 1969: Welles binned most of his own workprint, believing that the July 1969 moon landings “ruined it.” What had seemed magical five years earlier was now passé. Welles thus began extensive further tinkering on Don Quixote, which would remain unfinished for the rest of his life.
Of this period, Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas write in Orson Welles at Work (2006, trans, 2008):
In 1970, with The Deep, Orson’s Bag and also Don Quixote, Welles found himself with three pieces of work on which filming was more or less complete, but which he could not finish for lack of money. The negatives and positives were scattered in different places while continuity demanded the filming of shots in which the actors were present.
This adds some much-needed context on Welles’s exasperation whilst doing a lucrative but intellectually “unrewarding” commercial voiceover.
A long-standing story from several Welles biographies is that he was outraged by an Italian tabloid covering his extra-marital relationship with Oja Kodar, and left Italy in a rage, drawing an abrupt close on the productive European phase of Welles’s career (1947-56 & 1957-70). Beatrice Welles’ confirmation that she and her mother did not know of Kodar’s existence until 1984 strongly suggests that he was also keen to leave the country to keep Kodar’s existence from them. The Welles family first moved to London for a few months of 1970, and then to the USA. Thanks to Alberto Anile’s scholarly Orson Welles in Italy (2006, trans. 2013), we can trace his departure to February 1970, from the date of the offending article (‘Welles enjoys Oja’s company in his wife’s absence’, Oggi, 17 February 1970). Thus ‘Frozen Peas’ was recorded just a month prior to this major upheaval in Welles’ life on several levels (not least the rushed departure which saw all the reels of Don Quixote negative left behind). The move to London was temporary, though no doubt a productive one, as it afforded the opportunity to do more filming on Orson’s Bag, as well as several well-remunerated talk show appearances with David Frost. By July 1970, Welles was renting a cottage in the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, and he started filming The Other Side of the Wind the following month. Thus the Findus commercials were at the very tail-end of his long European sojourn, without any sense yet that his decades of being mainly based in Europe would soon be coming to a close.
Swinging London
Looking at Welles’s production schedule around this time, it seems highly likely the 1969 Findus recording dates in London would have been at the same time as he was filming the first ‘Swinging London’ scenes of Orson’s Bag, centred around Carnaby Street.
As noted above, the Findus commercials were recorded in Soho’s Wardour Street, a short walk from Soho’s Carnaby Street. Glimpses of the area can be found in ‘Swinging London’, including the strip-tease clubs which marked the area. These scenes were shot sometime between November 1968 and February 1969 – something I was able to confirm with the late Tim Brooke-Taylor, who in 2016 sent me his recollection of working with Welles. (Much of the material he sent me is reproduced in this 2017 interview here.)
Welles had first seen him and Graeme Garden in a (now mostly lost) TV comedy series called Broaden Your Mind, the first episode of which aired on BBC2 on 28 October 1968. Brooke-Taylor recalled that he and Garden were “nervously watching the first episode” together:
As the show finished the phone rang in Graeme’s flat. Graeme talked for a while, put the phone down and said, “That was Orson Welles.”
“Funny you should say that”, I said, “I was expecting a call from the Pope.”
“No, it really was him.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
The series does not seem to have been sold abroad, so Welles would have needed to be staying in the UK to watch the broadcasts. Brooke-Taylor clarified that Welles admired the zany, madcap, Pythonesque humour that he and Garden wrote (both were university contemporaries of future Monty Python writer-performers Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle, with all of them being active in Cambridge’s Footlights troupe). Welles therefore asked Brooke-Taylor and Garden to write as well as perform in several of the ‘Swinging London’ scenes, including the ‘Carnaby Street’ and ‘Aristocrats’ sketches (Brooke-Taylor told me he remembered writing the latter). Garden also contributed narration to the ‘Churchill’ segment. These scenes were shot before the February 1969 Rome shoot on The Thirteen Chairs (where Welles and Brooke-Taylor co-starred), tallying with the January 1969 recording dates of Welles’s first Findus commercials, and most likely being shot back-to-back with the ads, on his trips from Rome to London.
Intriguingly, while Brooke-Taylor and Garden would achieve fame as a trio from 1970, along with their Cambridge Footlights contemporary Bill Oddie, and while Oddie was attached to the ‘Swinging London’ project, they were not all working on it at the same time. Brooke-Taylor recalled, “I don’t remember the ‘one-man band’ being part of it, though we certainly knew it as one of Bill Oddie’s songs.” When I asked Bill Oddie of his recollection of it, he told me:
This is one of those lost events. I didn’t work with Orson Welles and I never met him. I was aware that Tim and Graeme did something, but I have no knowledge of [the song] One Man Band being incorporated. I wrote that for radio ISRTA [for I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, 1964-73], and as far as I recall it went no further.
It therefore seems likely that the ‘One Man Band’ sequence was a belated addition by Welles (with or without Oddie’s knowledge), shot later than the other scenes, and edited into it. Those additional scenes were clearly filmed before the summer of 1970 (when Welles grew a beard), but sometime after Brooke-Taylor and Garden completed their scenes in February 1969, so could quite plausibly have been shot around the time of the ‘Frozen Peas’ out-takes in January 1970. However, studying Welles’s performances synchronised to the music, as a one-man-band, a policeman, a street sweeper, an angry old woman, a Chinese strip-tease promoter, and a flower woman selling “dirty postcards”, none of these scenes show any evidence of having been filmed in London (unlike the reverse-angle shots with Brooke-Taylor). They could just as easily have been filmed in Italy, France or Yugoslavia. Welles was therefore juggling these reinventions of the material all through ‘Frozen Peas’, whilst he was yet to film the linking narration until 1971, when he was in London filming links for the Marty Feldman Comedy Machine.
Reputation
I recently spoke to Peter Shillingford, assistant director on several of the Paul Masson adverts, (including Welles’ other well-known out-take), and I was intrigued by an observation he made. Apparently, by the late 1970s, Welles bemoaned that he was having much more difficulty getting voiceover work.
Shillingford had three lunches with Welles at his favourite Los Angeles restaurant Ma Maison in 1979 – before and after the well-known out-take – and what prompted them was Shillingford’s offer to help him secure more voiceover work. During the first lunch, it emerged that Welles had heard of the existence of a bootleg recording of him in circulation, reinforcing his ‘difficult’ image, but had not heard it himself. Shillingford had access to a copy, and played it to him on a tape recorder over a subsequent lunch in Ma Maison, the two of them laughing along.
It appears that Shillingford’s efforts were not in vain – Welles’ credits in 1980 show a significant rise in the amount of voiceover work Welles undertook compared to the late 1970s. Nonetheless, the ‘Frozen Peas’ bootleg tape continued to have a life of its own.
[FOOTNOTE: Brooke-Taylor’s recollection of nervously watching Broaden Your Mind with Graeme Garden was that it was of the first episode of the second season, but that is not possible: that didn’t air until November 1969, seven months after The Thirteen Chairs was filmed – Brooke-Taylor was adamant in correcting my assumption that The Thirteen Chairs came first, saying that they first met Welles when making ‘Swinging London’, so it would have had to be the first series in 1968 for that to have worked. That is also consistent with the non-participation of Bill Oddie – Oddie played no role in season one of Broaden Your Mind, but joined the cast in season two.]
Three years ago, I wrote a journal article for the Journal of Liberal History, on ‘Cambridge University Liberal Club, 1886-1916: A Study in Early University Political Organisation‘. Although recent issues of the journal are for subscribers only, the JLH does make the content publicly available after three years - so you can read my piece here.
Meanwhile, my most recent peer-reviewed journal article (sadly very much behind the paywall!) was in British Politics: ‘“Lordy Me!“ Can donations buy you a British peerage? A study in the link between party political funding and peerage nominations, 2005-2014‘, co-written with Simon Radford and Andrew Mell, and published on 14 March 2019 here.
It's HERE at last! One of the consequences of writing about the history of private members' clubs is my abiding interest in the international trends of such places.
London is synonymous with clubs - deservedly so. At least 400 clubs have been based there, more than any other world city. But clubs have been a major international export of various European empires the world over - it wasn't just the British, but also the Spanish and Portuguese Empires that were keen exporters of clubs. And as Peter Clark showed in his landmark British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), the early clubs were very much an Anglo-American form of socialisation; and indeed, for all the many column inches about White's in London being "the oldest club in the world", that distinction actually belongs to the South River Club in Maryland, which was recognisably operating as a club by 1690, whereas White's was merely a chocolate shop with a gambling den around the back for its first 80 years or so - it was not until the 1770s that White's recognisably became a club, very much in parallel with its great rivals, Boodle's and Brooks's. Clubs are therefore much more global in their scope than the British institutions that are often envisaged.
And the post-colonial dimension of the colonial clubs is a fascinating area, deserving of further study. Benjamin B. Cohen's outstanding In the Club: Associational Life in South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) includes a fascinating final chapter on the post-colonial legacy of clubs in India, and it is well worth comparing and contrasting the differing experiences of former colonial clubs the world over. See, for instance, how Ian Smith of Rhodesia's notorious white minority regime is still feted in some Zimbabwean clubs today, and compare that to how rapidly India's emerging middle class of the 1940s and 1950s appropriated the European clubs after Indian independence in 1947. While there are some country-specific surveys of clubs, like Purshottam Bhageria and Pavan Malhotra's sumptuously-produced Elite Clubs of India (New Delhi: Bhageria Foundation, 2005), a wider international study of clubs and empires has yet to be produced (and indeed, is down on my shortlist of future possible projects).
So as a scoping exercise, I have been compiling copious notes on the surviving clubs that exist around the world today, and have produced a "Global Clubs Directory" at http://www.sethalexanderthevoz.com/global-clubs-directory/. This is an interactive resource, constantly being updated, with hyperlinks provided wherever possible.
Although Country Clubs and City Clubs exist the world over, it's noticeable how global cities tend to also host concentrations of clubs. London remains the undisputed Clubland capital - today it has 109 clubs, over 30 of them set up in the last decade. New York comes second on the list, with some 42 active clubs up and running today. Beyond that, the remaining cities with clubs in double digits all stand testament to the popularity of clubs in the United States, and the British Empire - particularly in the former British India, with cities in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all well-represented (and Bangladesh still containing its colonial-era clubs as well):
The list tells us a great deal about the evolving shape of clubs in the 21st century. After decades of decline, there has been a huge growth in the number of "new" clubs the world over - usually run for profit by a landlord (or even a global conglomerate), rather than as a mutual run by its members. And a small number of international chains have dominated this: Texas-based ClubCorp, which mainly (though not exclusively) operates in the United States; Signature Clubs International, which operates mainly (though again, not exclusively) across Africa; the Birley Group, which runs no fewer than five clubs across London; and more controversially, the Trump Organization, for which the Mar-a-Lago Club (set up by Donald Trump, partly as a tax avoidance measure on his Palm Beach mansion) is their flagship club.
It also says something about the decline of single-sex clubs. Men-only clubs were once by far the most common type of club, and The Guardian recently called for a public register of these clubs. Yet my database shows that their predominance is severely waning, and of the thousands of clubs listed, just 64 worldwide are men-only. Yet they still hugely outnumber the tiny handful of women-only clubs worldwide - the database lists just 8, in Australia, Britain and Canada. And men-only clubs still dominate in some countries, particularly Italy: every single one of Italy's 18 clubs remain men-only.
By its very nature, the list is evolving and incomplete. It's also somewhat arbitrary in some of its choices. When is a club a club? As with my book Club Government, I've defined it as being tied to a shared space, which means excluding the many societies which simply have "Club" in their name. As a general rule of thumb, specialist sports clubs like golf clubs and football clubs haven't been included - unless they include a clubhouse which is notable enough in its own right to rival the many city clubs and country clubs worldwide. But even then, with all the work that has gone into this, readers must recognise that any listing remains slightly arbitrary. If you would like to make any proposed corrections, want to draw attention to any omissions, or spot any dead links, etc, you can get in touch with me through the "Contact" page.
One of the major underpinnings of both my PhD thesis, and my recent book Club Government, was a database I compiled. It lists the complete known club memberships of all 2,588 British Members of Parliament who sat between 1832 and 1868. This took over a year of painstaking research, drawing upon over 50 print and archival sources. (They're listed in the Appendix of Club Government, should anyone be curious.)
I'm a great believer in open access to data wherever possible; and so I've decided to make my database publicly available for others to use. It's published on my website, on the page here (along with a rather lengthy explanatory note from an appendix to my PhD, on the methodology used in identifying MPs' party labels).
You're very welcome to use it in any way you wish. All I would ask is that if you're going to use it, please give an attribution. A lot of midnight oil was burned to produce this resource!
I was delighted to launch 'Club Government' at the National Liberal Club yesterday, in a packed talk given in the David Lloyd George Room. The audience response was touching, with some very intelligent questions, and I look forward to giving more talks on the subject in the coming months!
I've been busily revising the final manuscript of my first full book, Club Government, which will be released by I.B. Tauris in February 2018. It's a major work, which has taken me 7 years of research and editing - the first study of its kind to look at the nineteenth century phenomenon of "Club Government".
In the Great Fire of 1834, the old Palace of Westminster was burned down, and the next 35 years saw the parliamentary estate reduced to a noisy building site, while the present House of Parliament were constructed. Consequently, many of the functions of government were moved into the space of private members' clubs. And this had long-term ramifications for the way we do politics in Britain today: electioneering, party finance, candidate selection, party identity, whipping MPd, parliamentary architecture, MPs' entertainment - all of these had abiding, long-term influences from 'Club Government'. Meanwhile, the whole of British politics was in a state of flux after the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832, and "Club Government" helped fill the void of what the new "Victorian" politics would look like. It's a "lost" chapter in British political history, and the book draws on a unique range of archival and print material to tell an important story.
Copies of "Club Government" can be pre-ordered through Waterstone's here.
I'm delighted that the WhoTargetsMe plugin which I worked on has won an award at the CogX Artificial Intelligence conference 2017.
The WhoTargetsMe plugin for Google Chrome was created for the 2017 UK general election, and compiled data on how different political parties and politicians have used targeted adverts on facebook. A full report of the findings is in progress. CogX gave WhoTargetsMe an award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Services Use of AI.
I served as Political Advisor on the project, helping to refine what meaningful data the plugin was seeking to capture; and advising on legal and regulatory compliance.
My colleague Luke Blaxill and I did some instant election analysis, as the results of the really quite extraordinary general election came in. Both of us are historians who are unashamed election anoraks...
A piece I've written for the new issue of Liberator (#384):
Last year, there was much surprise when CentreForum, the liberal think tank, announced that it would be abandoning its political mission in favour of a much narrower focus, as the renamed Education Policy Institute. This culminated a decade-long transformation from one-time Liberal Democrat-affiliated think tank, to billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Marshall’s plaything. And with Marshall having severed his links with the party in 2015 around the same time he came “out of the closet” as a Brexiteer, CentreForum soon followed. But it didn’t have to end this way.
One might raise the question of what any think tank is for. There is a very real, urgent place needed in public debate for the overlap between rigorous, in-depth academic analysis, and an appreciation of the topical urgency of political issues. Unfortunately, many think tanks struggle to do both — or either. The Tax Payers’ Alliance, for instance, hires more press officers than researchers, making it clear where its priorities lie. Or if you visit the Henry Jackson Society’s website, you will see staff biographies routinely place primacy on “Media Profile” over “Publications”. Today’s UK think tanks are usually poor at filling the very space they are supposed to occupy.
Liberals like ideas. It’s often been one of their biggest weaknesses as well as their biggest strengths. And as a way of refining and communicating ideas, the old Liberal Party had a vibrant pamphlet culture, from its eighteenth century roots to the merger with the SDP. From Ramsay Muir to Michael Meadowcroft, pamphlets continued to act as a vehicle for ideas among twentieth century Liberals. Yet this fell by the wayside, a victim of the 1990s demise of print culture, before the internet started to (partly) fill the void a decade later.
In the meantime, there were the think tanks — a curious, mostly post-war invention, born out of frustration at university thinking being too theoretical, and encouraged by successive leaders of the “big two” parties, not least as a way of circumventing the formal party policymaking apparatus. The old Liberal Party conspicuously lacked a think tank (though the SDP had the Tawney Society) — and I would suggest the reason for this was the vibrant print culture; liberals didn’t need such an organisation to outsource their thinking to, when they had pamphlets to think aloud and respond to one another. And Liberal pamphlets weren’t an exclusively “elite” activity — activists and councillors up and down the country would pen them, comparing reflections on campaign strategy and tactics as well as philosophy.
The mid-1990s had become an age of think tanks — lobbyists desperate for an entrée into both the Conservative government and resurgent New Labour frequently found that funding a think tank was a perfect vehicle to getting inside access; and the Lib Dems felt a noticeable lack of heavy artillery on this front. Additionally, by 1997, the growth of the Lib Dems to 46 MPs meant that it was felt they would benefit from such resourcing.
Early in the merged Liberal Democrats’ existence, there were some attempts at unofficial Lib Dem think tanks — the much-missed LiNK (Liberal Information Network) pre-dated merger, and did much to bridge the thinking of the merged party and the breakaway Liberals. Other laudable but under-resourced attempts, like the John Stuart Mill Institute, or the Liberal Institute, regrettably seem to have become dormant.
The Centre for Reform was launched in March 1998, a spinoff of party magazine The Reformer which had launched five years earlier. It was primarily the brainchild of ex-SDP Lib Dems close to Charles Kennedy, keen to reach out across the political divide to other progressive politicians. It enjoyed modest funding of an annual £50,000 from former Liberal MP Richard Wainwright, and was headed up first by Dr Richard Grayson, then Anthony Rowlands. Grayson recalls Wainwright being “very much” at arm’s length, with their only ever meeting twice, and Grayson being given a free hand at the Centre. Despite its strong party links, the Centre’s original incarnation promoted genuinely independent and radical ideas. Publications like Francis Wilkinson’s The Leaf and the Law (2000) made the case for cannabis legalisation in the context of wider European drugs policy, followed by a look at Heroin (2001). Meanwhile, Ross Laird’s Education Outsourcing: A Privatisation Too Far? (2002), inspired in no small part by the author’s experience shadowing education on Labour-run Haringey Council, one of the first British authorities to outsource education, took a position it is hard to imagine later CentreForum pamphlets taking. Not all publications were so subversive — many, like Ed Davey’s 2000 pamphlet on the mechanics of budget scrutiny, took a more technocratic, even “safe”, approach. But by and large, the old Centre for Reform was creative, bold, left-leaning, and yes, occasionally bonkers. (It memorably published a 2002 “State of the Union” address by Tony Blair, as edited by Norman Baker. Yes, you read that right.)
All this changed after its fifth anniversary. With the death of Richard Wainwright in 2003, the Centre found itself desperately in need of a new “sugar daddy”. Enter Paul Marshall. Marshall, though politically involved since the days of the SDP, as Charles Kennedy’s one-time research assistant and the 1987 parliamentary candidate for Fulham, had until this point been a relatively marginal figure in Lib Dem politics, but this was about to change with his de facto acquisition of the Centre. Guaranteeing three years of funding from 2004, he rapidly set about transforming the think tank in his own image. Moving from a room rented from the Wildlife Trust on Horseferry Road to a large suite of penthouse offices on Dartmouth Street, the Centre’s politics noticeably shifted to the right, matching Marshall’s own free marketeering instincts which at times seemed to border on fetishism. Staff were recruited from unlikely quarters such as GoldmanSachs, and Thatcherite think tanks like the IEA and the Adam Smith Institute. As reported by Lib Dem Voice in 2009, and recounted in Donnachadh McCarthy’s The Prostitute State (2014), the Centre became “the source of opposition in the party to the Tobin Tax”, and a slew of publications started to make the case for slimming the state. There was also a noticeable rise in the Centre’s longer-standing technocratic tendencies.
Even the name changed — in 2006, Centre for Reform became CentreForum, a conscious effort to stress an ideology of the centre rather than the more left-leaning, radical direction of Charles Kennedy’s party leadership. Predictably, it was swiftly lampooned in the pages of Lib Dem News as the Centre For, Um?
The changes also coincided with Marshall co-editing the controversial Orange Book of 2004 — not the cogent articulation of a shift to the right often argued, though its editors sometimes claimed it to be precisely that, despite the rather bland collection of essays largely failing to match such ambitious goals.
The newly renamed Centre undoubtedly professionalised its operation, but arguably at the expense of the quality and innovation of its output, which became formulaic, even predictable. The impression given was of a think tank that spent the next decade going through the motions: the obligatory fringe events at conference, a slew of publications which no doubt generated ongoing employment for the Centre’s staff but which seemed light on new ideas and, in some cases, appeared to simply be reiterations of the Centre’s pre-existing publications.
CentreForum did have some successes. In its final years, it became a model of transparency— a “Who Funds You?” assessment of think tanks gave them only a C-rating in 2012 after they initially refused to list their donors; but by 2015, the think tank had achieved a coveted A-rating for transparency over whom they received funding from. Such welcome transparency unfortunately made it all the more obvious what was going on: Marshall had only guaranteed funding for the first three years, and while he continued to play a dominant role through its Advisory Board, it would be wrong to characterise the Centre as having been “owned” by him, as was sometimes claimed. Instead of depending on Marshall for money, as the Centre had done in 2004-7, the think tank increasingly funded part of its output by providing producer-interest pamphlets funded by the very bodies they were analysing. Examples included Access and Equity: Positioning Alternative Providers in Higher Education Provision (2014), co-published with Bimm music academies and the private HE college GSM London; The Liberal Case for Aviation (2015), which acknowledged “generous support” from Gatwick and Heathrow Airports, Let Britain Fly, Heathrow Hub and GTMC; and Reforming Retail Energy Markets (2015), supported by comparethemarket.com. Such publications were not always as one-sided as their titles might suggest, sometimes offering balanced lists of the pros and cons of issues. And of course, this was all standard practice across the think tank sector, and funding from an interested party was fully declared. It was no worse than any other think tank. But that was the problem — it had ceased to be a think tank seeking distinctively liberal solutions, and the whole advantage of being a genuinely independent think tank had been forfeited. The cumulative effect was to give it an increasing air of a “hired gun” agency.
With Marshall’s increasing estrangement from the party after the fall of the coalition, and with the influence of his long-term interest in education (he runs ARK Academies — whose top team is beginning to resemble a JobCentrePlus for former coalition policy wonks), it is therefore unsurprising that the Centre decided it had limited mileage in its pre-existing model. Given the position it had found itself in, the move away from a party political think tank, and towards a niche education policy study group, made perfect sense — if one’s only concern was the continuation of a think tank, rather than the flourishing of liberal ideas. But it was an abandonment of the Centre’s original mission.
So farewell, Centre For Um. Good luck, Education Policy Institute — you’ll need it. What the EPI face is the same perennial question: “What is a think tank for?” If it is simply a device for party leaders and a circle of donors to circumvent a party’s policy-making apparatus, by deploying resources to develop alternative policy without wider membership input, then I don’t see much political ‘buy-in’ for that. If, on the other hand, it is to bring analytical rigour combined with topical relevance and political sensitivity, then think tanks would need to follow a very different model to CentreForum’s.
Dr. Seth Thévoz of Nuffield College, Oxford is a political historian. He sits on the Council of the Social Liberal Forum.
The Evening Standard reports that business leaders see a large Conservative majority in the forthcoming election as a good way to “soften” Brexit. One can see why this sounds plausible. Unfortunately, it’s complete twaddle.
With all due respect, business leaders are not exactly renowned for their political nous. Business leaders confidently predicted that “Remain” would win the EU referendum. Business leaders confidently predicted that Trump would crash and burn in a landslide electoral defeat. Business and politics are very different disciplines, with very different skill sets. History is full of politicians imagining that they will become geniuses at business, only to fail spectacularly (remember Reggie Maudling?); and of businessmen being brought into political office to give some much-needed business discipline to the woolly world of politics, only to find themselves left as fish out of water (a long list from Eric Geddes to Digby Jones).
But one can see why the Conservative Party has gone into overdrive to assure business leaders that a Conservative landslide might mean “softer” Brexit. The Conservative Party has not been lacking in donations over the last two years of this Parliament. But it has had nothing like the £106 million in declared donations made in 2011-15, ahead of the last election. Accordingly, the Conservatives do not seem to have the large “war chest” available to them ahead of the last election; and funding this snap election will presumably depend on persuading a series of donors – mostly drawn from business leaders – to invest in the party’s machinery. Yet as the EU referendum campaign made very clear, Britain’s business leaders remain overwhelmingly pro-Remain – with the exception of those working in hedge funds or other forms of speculation that thrive on instability and fluctuation. So there is an all too obvious motive for the government to put some form of spin on events, as to why a large majority for a party embracing Brexit, which asks for a mandate to aggressively pursue Brexit, might not actually sound as harmful to the very business leaders who most fear Brexit.
So how true is this? Conservative Party selection contests would suggest it’s something of a fairy tale. Byron Criddle’s landmark work on candidates and selection contests offers some clues on the Conservative Party’s direction of travel. Over the last 20-30 years, Conservative Associations have become increasingly Eurosceptic, with the result that any serious Conservative aspirant to a winnable seat usually needs to be a tub-thumpingly confident Brexiteer – or at least, to send out the right “dog whistles” to their selection meeting. It’s one of the reasons why several Conservative MPs like Alan Mak found themselves at odds with members of their associations last year, publicly coming out for Remain whilst party activists complained of having been distinctly assured of a Leave pledge at a selection meeting only a year earlier.
Keen observers of the Conservative backbenches have watched each parliamentary intake since 1992 become steadily more Eurosceptic, with the result that some members of the Class of 2010 and Class of 2015 hold views on Europe that would have had them expelled from the party only a decade earlier. This pattern of increasing Euroscepticism in Tory candidate selections shows no sign of abating.
Indeed, the European issue among Conservative MPs is very much a generational divide, with many of the most ardent pro-Europeans like Sir Nicholas Soames and Ken Clarke being some of the party’s oldest and longest-standing MPs. It is no coincidence that the one Conservative MP to have voted against triggering Article 50 is now the Father of the House
Of course, it is possible that with the Conservative Party’s central HQ taking sweeping powers to adopt last-minute candidates for this snap election, that they will somehow buck the trend of the last three decades, and install a run of pro-European candidates in previously-unwinnable seats, and will coast to victory, providing the Commons with a more rational and balanced approach, to replace the rabidly ideological “Leave at all costs” tendencies of the party’s right wing. But I wouldn’t bet the bank on that. It sounds more likely that the government is hoping the political gullibility of business leaders will make them blithely accept that voting for what is increasingly looking like a hard Brexit will somehow magically deliver a soft Brexit. There is simply no logic to this – it flies in the face of all the available evidence from the last three decades.
British politics is at an unusually fluid time; and the recent run of strange by-election results has given much food for thought. I've just published The Richmond Park By-Election in Perspective: Lessons from Liberal, Social Democrat and Liberal Democrat By-Election Gains, through the Social Liberal Forum, putting Lib Dem election prospects in a longer-term context - this was mostly written over Christmas, but held over for revision in light of last week's Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent by-elections. In the event, I've only had to make the lightest of tweaks, and with a new by-election now due in Manchester Gorton, my thoughts on whether Lib Dems and Greens should stand down in favour of each other in a handful of ad hoc local agreements have just become even more topical...
A busy couple of months - but I haven't been keeping up with the blog! Just a couple of updates:
I've written a report analysing the effectiveness (or otherwise) of Lib Dem donations and spending at the 2015 general election, which has been published today by OpenDemocracy.
A short piece summarising some of the findings can be found in the new issue (no. 380) of Liberator magazine; and the full report can be read and downloaded here.
I've got an article out in the new issue of the Journal of Liberal History, on "Cambridge University Liberal Club, 1886-1916: A Study in Early University Political Organistion".
Over a decade ago, I chaired the successor society to the Cambridge Liberals; and longer ago than I care to admit, I promised I'd write them an official history. It's not quite as arcane and self-serving a topic as might might seem; I've always been interested in the history of youth politics; and Cambridge's Liberals are one of the oldest university political societies in the UK, trialling many of the campaign techniques now taken for granted, from their pre-dating the Edwardian "society boom" by 20 years to harness student canvassers, to the early practice of "community politics" by such pioneers as Bernard Greaves in 1960s Cambridge. And it's a fairly star-studded cast of characters, with Liberals from John Maynard Keynes to the rather more improbable figure of Chariots of Fire's Harold Abrahams. Accordingly, I felt (and still do) that there's a really interesting story to tell here about how UK liberal politics evolved in its distinctive form in the twentieth century, and the surprising amount of influence exerted by a relatively small but well-connected group through the decades.
I've still spectacularly failed to complete the manuscript of this history of Cambridge's Liberal Club - though I retain all my notes, I've written about half of it, and I still hope to complete it some day. What was originally envisioned as a short pamphlet is shaping up to be a 150-page book with detailed appendices; and it's a big, detailed project only likely to ever be of interest to a relatively small number of people. So it's slipped by the wayside in favour of some of my other work.
Nonetheless, I thought the opening chapter, chronicling the first thirty years, had enough original "meat" in it to stand on its own two feat and be worth adapting into a standalone article, which is what I've written up for the JLH.
I was pretty surprised when the below - little more than a rant on Facebook - ended up getting over 480 shares in barely a day. So with Thursday's European Union referendum looming, I thought I'd share it here:
11 things that are worrying me about Brexit:
1. The near-certain collapse of the pound - which is likely to be lasting, and to have a devastating effect on the UK standard of living for a decade or more.
2. The removal of the protections on workers' rights afforded through the EU, with a relentless stripping away of these rights by the Tory right over the next four years (or sooner).
3. A massive "brain drain" of skilled workers out of the UK, with a massive knock-on effect to productivity and living standards for all in Britain.
4. The knock-on implications for the EU's ability to counter Russia. Brexit may well trigger nothing less than the disentangling of the European Union, which in turn would trigger a new phase of Russian expansion in Eastern Europe - Ukraine would only be the start of it. Whilst NATO exists as a military bulwark, it is the EU which is presenting an economic bulwark to Russia; and Russia's modus operandi today is in the far subtler forms of economic expansion, which NATO is not equipped to counter. The EU is.
5. The complete marginalisation of the UK by the USA. We would go from being the USA's vital link to the EU, to being on a par with Brazil or Canada - way back in the queue of influence, behind the EU, India, China, or Japan.
6. Even in the best-case scenario, we're looking at being locked out of any free trade deals with our major trading partners for the next few years, since these things take an *average* of two and a half years to negotiate (though far, far longer in any trade deals with the US), and Brexit would have to happen within two years of a 'Leave' vote. With the USA, it's highly doubtful we would negotiate any free trade agreement at all - with their congressional ratification system, they're only really interested in free trade deals with major blocs like NAFTA and the EU, not with individual nations. That's why they don't have any free trade deal with major economies like Japan, China and Brazil. Nations like Canada, Mexico, France and Germany only get free access to the US market as part of a bigger trading bloc like NAFTA or the EU. And as for the EU, it's unlikely to grant us preferential trading terms if we've just thrown the whole European project down the pan, and most likely triggered a run on the Euro; far more likely is the scenario that they'd penalise us with stiff tariffs. Tariffs on EU and USA trade would affect over 70% of our exports. There won't be a recession, it'll be a major, crippling, lasting depression.
7. The fruitcakes advocating Brexit tend to fall in two camps: those who want to turn the Commonwealth into a second British Empire, and those libertarians who want Britain to become the 51st state of the USA. Neither will happen. There is no viable post-Brexit model.
8. Scotland will secede from the Union, and will apply for EU membership (which will probably be granted). Northern Ireland probably won't follow, but renewed calls for Northern Ireland secession to follow will result in a renewal of Northern Irish terrorism between loyalists and republicans, which will affect the whole UK.
9. In the longer run, with all of these factors, the GDP of what's left of the UK will steadily slide in gradual decline. What's left of the UK will oscillate between "managed decline" and "unmanaged decline" as the country will go back to the 1970s (or worse).
10. The UK currently has the best deal in Europe, including numerous opt-outs, vetoes, and the only rebate of any EU member state. When the remaining rump of the UK eventually goes back to what's left of the EU with its tail between its legs in 20/30 years' time, admitting that it made a terrible mistake in 2016, and applying for readmission to the EU, it will be on the most punitive terms imaginable.
11. There will be a realignment of politics, for the worse. In what's left of the UK, the Conservatives will have a natural majority, and the Labour Party will dwindle into irrelevance. UKIP, which came second in 125 English constituencies at the 2015 general election, will become the principal opposition; and UK political battles will be pitched in a new "centre ground" between the Conservative Party and UKIP.
On the plus side, housing stock would probably start to become affordable again with the whole economy going down the pan.
The votes have been counted, and the 3rd Viscount Thurso has been elected as the newest member of the House of Lords. I say “newest”, but he was previously a member of the Lords from 1995 until 1999, until his right to sit as a hereditary peer was abolished. Now he’s back.
The victorious candidate did rather well. He received 100% of the vote, on a 100% turnout – a result that even Kim Jong-un would be envious of. Admittedly, he only polled three votes, but still, it was a full and vigorous poll, worthy of Old Sarum.
There was the small matter of manifestos. Candidates to sit in the Lords were able to write a manifesto of up to seventy-five words, setting out the case for why they should be installed as a legislator until their death or retirement. Six of the seven candidates chose to submit such manifestos, emphasising such pressing issues as grocery delivery, and fast food. The seventh candidate, Viscount Thurso, declined to write a manifesto at all. A week later, he scooped up the votes of the entire electorate, made up of his three former parliamentary colleagues.
The three voters, three white men named Dominic, Patrick and Raymond, were unavailable for comment.
It is truly stirring, in this day and age, to see democracy in the Mother of Parliaments as such a shining example to all.
In related news, a man named “Asquith” did not cast his vote for a man named “Lloyd George”, to no-one's great surprise.
N.B. On a point of pedantry, I have yet to see a news outlet correctly describing who the electorate was. They were not “all the Lib Dem sitting hereditary peers” (there are five – now six – not three), nor were they “the hereditary peers allocated to the Lib Dems” (until Thurso filled the vacant place, there were only two of the three left after Lord Avebury’s death). The electorate was made up of every currently-sitting Lib Dem hereditary peer who was sitting by virtue of a hereditary peerage.
Both the 6th Baron Redesdale, and the 14th Earl of Mar and 16th Earl of Kellie (the two Earls are actually one man, with two titles), started sitting as hereditary peers, and then had their right to sit abolished by the 1999 reforms, but were subsequently awarded life peerages. Since they sit by virtue of life peerages rather than hereditary peerages, neither had a vote in this election. Still awake?
Of the three voters, two were allocated Lib Dem hereditary peers, the 6th Baron Addington and the 10th Earl of Glasgow. The third voter was the 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, a hereditary peer elected from peers across the whole House of Lords to replace another Lib Dem who was part of that “whole-House” grouping, the late 7th Baron Methuen. There was initially an extra peer able to vote, another Lib Dem elected as part of the “whole-House” grouping, the 15th Viscount Falkland, and he did indeed cast a vote in the last Lib Dem hereditary peers’ by-election in 2005. However, in 2011 he ceased to take the Lib Dem whip, so he now has no vote in such elections, shrinking the electorate from four to three.
With the result of the latest hereditary peerage by-election due out today, to replace the late, lamented Lord Avebury, I teamed up with my friend John Lubbock, Avebury's youngest son, to share some thoughts in yesterday's Guardian on this farcical election...
Following on from Dennis Skinner's ejection from Parliament for calling the Prime Minister "Dodgy Dave", I set down a few thoughts on whether or not "Dodgy" is really "Unparliamentary Language", and what the historical precedents say...
