Bullingdon Club 1935 and 2013

Found in the window of an antique shop a photo of the 1935 members of the ultra privileged Oxford University Bullingdon Club -an exclusive society noted for its grand banquets and boisterous rituals, such as 'trashing' of restaurants and college rooms. It is mentioned in novels by Waugh, Powell, Raven etc.,

Membership of the club is expensive, with tailor-made uniforms, regular gourmet hospitality and a tradition of on-the-spot payment for damage.Their rallying cry is 'buller, buller, buller!' and their ostentatious display of wealth attracts controversy, since many ex-members have moved up to high political posts - UK PM David Cameron, London mayor Boris Johnson and Chancellor George Osborne. They are seen to embody an upper class mentality that could have no inkling of how ordinary mortals live. Certainly the 1935 members look highly patrician, snobbish even arrogant.

Bullingdon Club members in London 2013

How much has changed 78 years later? Former members include Edward VII and VIII, Frederick IX of Denmark, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany,Prince Paul of Yugoslavia,Rama VI, King of Siam, David Dimbleby,Lord Randolph Churchill, Darius Guppy,Peter Holmes à Court, John Profumo, Cecil Rhodes, Nathaniel Philip Rothschild, Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath and Felix Yussupov. The 1935 crowd appear to have no famous members, just the usual aristocrats, landowners and gilded youth...

Lotos Club, New York - The Ace of Clubs

The Ace of Clubs

That’s what Mark Twain called New York ‘s famous Lotos Club, which still exists.  Founded in 1870 by a group of writers and critics, it seems, back then, to have been a sort of plusher Groucho Club. Its first home was at 2, Irving Place, off 14th Street. The early leading lights were, like Twain, high powered journalists; but before too long, scholars, artists, collectors and connoisseurs had joined the throng. Within two years the Club had outgrown its quarters and had moved to more spacious premises in Fifth Avenue. Here members might live semi-permanently.

Thomas W. Knox  (1835 – 96), adventurer, soldier, popular author and journalist, had begun as a teacher, left to join the gold rush and when the Civil War broke out in 1863 was made a colonel in the Californian National Guard, but  was invalided out and subsequently became a war correspondent for the New York Herald. He then travelled the world, initially with the Russo-American Telegraph Company, and from the 1880s, when not travelling abroad, had an apartment at the Lotos Club. By 1889, it would appear that he had lost his taste for ‘parties and receptions’. In this letter to fellow journalist Alphonse Miner Griswold, popularly known as ‘The Fat Contributor’, politely declining an invitation, Knox writes that ‘for the past two years and more I have altogether ceased to be a society belle (sic)…I’m nearly always in bed by 11 pm.’

But Knox’s taste for adventure never waned. In 1896, just seven years after writing to Griswold, Knox died at his beloved Lotos Club after returning from the Sahara. He was just 60. Griswold had predeceased him in 1891 aged 57. It must have been all that rich Lotos Club food. The Club is still famed for its Michelin star cuisine.[RH}

Gargoyle Club Members 2

Two well known members at the Gargoyle Club were the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Luke recounts a night of serious drinking where Maclean walked between tables loudly proclaiming 'I am the English Hiss' (i.e the American spy Alger Hiss) and after a few more drinks 'I work for Uncle Joe'. No-one took the slightest interest assuming his behaviour was just pour épater. At the time he was head of the American desk at the Foreign Office.

 Luke is unclear as to precisely when it finished but a rock and roll night in 1956 was considered a sort of death knell. The evidence of there being members like Ginsberg, Corso and Terry Southern indicates that it may have struggled on into the 1960s. Michael Luke,author of David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) was the son of Sir Harry Luke, friend of Baron Corvo. It is unlikely had Corvo still been around in the 1930s he would have been a member ( 4 guineas a year). More members from Michael Laws roll-call to come..


[Theatre & Films] Robert Newton, Anne Newton, Michael Redgrave, Freddie Ashton, Gottfied Reinhardt, Sylvia Reinhardt, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Anthony Asquith, Peter Glenville, George Minter, Dennis Foreman, Ken Tynan, Adrian Pryce, Sally Anne Field, Hermione Gingold,

[Regulars & Adventurers] Quentin Crewe, Colin Crewe, Sally Crewe, Xan Fielding, William Moss, Michael Alexander, Richard Wolheim, Anne Wolheim, Ran Antrim, Anthony Frere Marocco, Michael Morris, Poldy Loewenstein, Bianca Loewenstein, Werner Alvensleben, Henry Weatherall, Hugh Cruddes.

[Politburo & Mainstream Regulars] David Tennant, Hermione Baddeley, Virginia Bath, David Tennant Jr., Pauline Tennant, Sabrina Tennant, Georgia Tennant, Henry Bath, Daphne Fielding, Tony Vyvian, Robert Boothby, Patrick Kinross, Angela Culme Seymour, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Clair Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Paul Roche, Diana Mosley, Nancy Mitford, Jessica Mitford, David Herbert, Augustus John, Philip Toynbee, Victor Rothschild, Richard Wyndham, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Anthony Powell, Violet Powell, John Sutro, Gillian Sutro, Ivan Moffat, John Hayward, Phillip Dunn, John Strachey, Isabel Strachey, James Strachey.

[Mainstream Regulars] Derek Jackson, Gotfried von Hoffmanstahl, Lisa von Hoffmanstahl, Iris Tree, Auberon Herbert, Michael Young, Peter Watson, Norman Fowler, Brian Howard, Sara Langford, Rodney Phillips, Monica Phillips, Mark Culme Seymour, Robin Campbell, Mary Campbell, Clarissa Churchill, Michael Harrison, Maria Harrison, Poppet John & Pol, Joy Craig, Dennis Craig, Robert Heber Percy, Pauline Gates, Sylvester Gates, Igor Vinogradov, Claud Cockburn, Ralph Partridge, Francis Partridge, John Young, Ray Parsons, Alan Peile, Freddie Ayers, Nancy Cunard.

Gargoyle Club Members 1

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwoood

List of Gargoyle Club members compiled by Michael Law (a friend of Ivan Moffatt) in the late 1950s and found illustrated (as a hand-written list - hence some inaccuracies) in Michael Luke's David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) To quote from Michael Luke's 2005 obituary: 'This rooftop den was founded by David Tennant in 1925, high above the corner of Dean and Meard streets, and reached by a rickety lift whose dimensions were such that strangers entering it left as intimate friends at the top.

The Gargoyle Club was a theatrical arena for London society, high and low. The Moorish interior - its walls narcissistically mirrored with fragments of 18th-century glass and inspired by Henri Matisse (himself a member) - was described by Luke as "Mystery suffused with a tender eroticism". On its dance floor Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Tallulah Bankhead conducted a rite of hedonistic alcoholic abandon while Noël Coward and Francis Bacon looked on, and Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean filled out membership applications...'

 Many more names to come (Writers, Poets and Politburo.) The full list pretty much covers  London society including boho and haute boho from 1925 -1965. Some of the names are now untraceable...


[Ladies etc.,] Joan Wyndham (Shivarg), Janetta Parlade, Caroline Blackwood, Mamaine Paget, Sally Belfrage, Barbara Skelton, Henrietta Moraes, Caryl Chance, Nora Sayre, Jeanne Campbell, Kitty Epstein, Natalie Newhouse (Newton) Margaret Lygon, Sarah Macmillan, Margaret - Ann Ducaine, Glur Dyson Taylor (Quennell) Josephine Lowry Carry, Suna Portman, Pamela Tellerson, Jennifer Fry, Sonia de Leon (Quennell) Venetia Murray, Jennifer Renwick, Tania Vinogradov (Hobson) Deidre Craig (Levi), Anne Dunn, Antonia Fraser, Anne Paget, Charlotte Starbussman, Patricia Cutts,Mary Keene, Louisa Morriss, Rosamund Fellows, Rita Wheatley, Dinora Mar (Mendelsohn)Vivien Talbot Brady, Ingrid Wyndham (Channon)


[Arts & Music] Freddie Mayor, Edward James, Tilly Losch,  Feliks Topolski, Matthew Smith, Francis Bacon, Michael Wishart, Douglas Cooper, Lucian Freud, John Minton, John Craxton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Marion Leigh, Isabel Lambert, George Melly, Rodrigo Moynihan, Elinor Moynihan, John Moynihan, David Sylvester, Erica Bransen, Malcolm Arnold, John Heath Stubbs, Gwynneth John, John Banting, Hellen Lessore, Colquhoun & McBryde, Peter Palham, Mary & Rose Palham, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nina Hamnett, Robin Darwin, Bebé Berard.

Two in the morning at the Gargoyle (Virginia Bath)