London Diary

Jack o’ Clubs

Jermyn Street is London’s branded shirt mecca. On a parallel street to the south is the world’s clubs concentrate, astride Pall Mall, abutting St James’s Square. During my October 2010 club crawl, I counted ten of the best military and civilian clubs, cheek by jowl on the most expensive real estate in the heart of London’s West End. The Army & Navy Club, also called The Rag—by one Capt Billy Duff, for the spartan fare once served there—and affiliated to our own Delhi Gymkhana (not a patch on The Rag), is located on Pall Mall, but the entrance is through St James’s Square. As the navy is the senior service in Britain, the dominant motif and flavour is maritime, though as you enter, on the left corner is the rarest of rare pictures—that of Admiral Nelson and Lord Wellington together. Near Nelson’s room on the first floor adjacent to the dining room is a portrait of a horse-borne Queen Victoria in 1837, the year of her accession to the throne and also the year the club was formed. From a pick of six for the main course, I chose char-grilled Scottish rib-eye steak with garlic butter and hot minted potatoes accompanied by Laroque 2002. Simply delicious!

Operation Pall Mall started at 6 pm—RV, the Travellers Club which keeps good company with two others, Reform and Athenium. While Athenium is for academics and Nobel laureates, Reform Club is exclusively a male preserve and boasts of a smoker’s lawn that must obfuscate even the strongest white phosphorus grenade. The Travellers welcomes explorers, adventurers and those who seek pleasures of discovery. Typically, it has an 18th century sit-down weighing machine which would reveal the lbs lost in high-risk travel. The size of half a badminton court, the main bar is the tiniest anywhere, with guzzlers bursting at the seams. A younger member recalled how, after several tots of Laphraoig and considerably depleted in cash, he chose to sleep the night in the library, draped under a sprawling curtain courtesy the night-watchman, saving £150 in room charges.

Bar Code

The next watering hole is the Naval and Military Club, also called the In & Out. The original and now abandoned In & Out sits on Piccadilly near Mayfair. US marines on a training programme with their British counterparts have taken over a wing of the club. A late addition to the club crawl, you need to be rekitted with a jacket, tie and laced shoes by the reception staff. The Naval Club secretary inspects my dress before letting me into the bar. We are shown the famous picture of the Waterloo dinner after the epic battle which turned British history around and made Wellington a legendary war hero. Staying in St James’s Square and fortified with a variety of single malts, we invade the East India Company, the club sarcastically called White Socks because it is a businessmen’s club and some ‘still wear that stuff’.

Back on Pall Mall past midnight, it is the Oxford and Cambridge Club, the meeting place of young dons. It has half a dozen reading and study rooms with a fantastic library and a lift constructed in 1802—it’s still fully functional but can carry only two people at a time. The bar, redolent with rowdy revellers, is conspicuous with black-tie-attired gentlemen consoling a dishevelled colleague just married. Champagne is being knocked back like there’s no tomorrow. Joining them is a strategic error as memory thereon is hazy. Still, I recall being told about the Conservative Party’s opulent Carlton Club close by, and how it was bombed by the IRA.

Champagne Savages

We are hijacked by the marriage party to the Savage Club, which is virtually a one-room pub located on the premises of the Reform Club of the Liberal Party. Like the Carlton, the Reform opened its doors and bar to women on October 1, for the first time, the very day I visited, though by the time we made it to the Savage, the ladies were gone. It was the Club’s Founders’ dinner—poached salmon steak pie and warm Parkin cake with rhubarb ripple ice cream laced with champagne. Founded in 1857 by Richard Savage, the club was open to those ‘erudite in the arts’ like Bernard Shaw and Charles Dickens. Charlie Chaplin’s cane is among the memorabilia casually displayed. The bar closed at 2 am but only after beverages had been lined up. Mr Married was distributing eight-inch-long Monte Cristos and inviting people to smoke them on the terrace. Mine will become a ‘Koi Hai?’ relic.

Blair, Mush & Me

Completely savaged by eight hours of close encounters with single malt, my host for the evening, a retired naval officer, put me in a cab with a Congolese driver, Joseph, who asked where to. I mumbled Edgware Road near where Tony Blair and Pervez Musharraf live. I told Joseph I was in Congo with the UN peacekeepers in1962 and he told me about the current mess there. Back in my hotel, I made a beeline for the sundowner’s bar. Three cheers for Pall Mall!