Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Private Members’ Clubs

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Private Members’ Clubs are often the location of suspected scandal - from Oscar Wilde to Chris Pincher, what happens behind these elitist doors?Seth Alexander Thévoz joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to reveal the secret history behind some of London’s most famous members’ clubs, from 1693 to the present day.*WARNING there are naughty words and adult themes in this episode*Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Edited and mixed by Anisha Deva.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!For your chance to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books (including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History), please fill out this short survey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's Kate Lister here once again to protect you with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, we are talking about adult themes and adult content. No doubt there will be some swear words involved as well. Today we're talking about the history of members clubs. So it's not the rudest one that we've ever had, but it is fascinating.

And no doubt we're going to stray into some areas that might rally you up. the wrong way. And if this one isn't for you, that's completely fine. Fair do's, you have been warned. Picture the scene. A quiet room filled with luxurious carpets, plump armchairs, and a quietly crackling fire in the background. A waiter in black and white attire carries a glass of amber liquid on a silver tray to one of the few sleepy retirees who seem to have become one with the chairs that they sit upon. Is this what you think of if you think of a private members club? because it's what I think of when I think of a private members club. This is what they look like in the movies.

It's certainly what they look like in my brain, a world out of touch with the one outside and only available to a select few. But is that true? Where did they come from? What is a private club? Have they always been super elitist? Well, today, betwixt the sheets,

we're going to get our name on the guest list and we're going to find out. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.

So, and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. Boodles, the Reform Club, White, the Athenium. London has had its fair share of private members' clubs, darling, for the elite. for the social spectacular and certainly not for plebs like you and me. Or is that the case? Hmm. Today we are joined by Seth Tovaux to get inside these hallowed doors to the private clubs of London and find out what are they all about?

Where did they come from? Why are they so often single sex clubs? What it means for the men and the women who have frequented them? Smoking jackets on, everyone. Let's go. Hello! to Seth Tovow. How the hell are you? Hello, I'm very well, thanks. Pleased to be here, Kate.

I'm so excited to be talking to you, because you are one of my favourite types of guests, which is that when I found out what you're researching, there's the moment of like, there's a what? And then you kind of think, well, of course there's a history to that. Of course there is. But I don't know very much about it at all. So I'm thrilled that you're here to talk to me

about private members clubs. No one does, which is why I thought it was worth looking at. I got into this stuff completely by accident, basically because I'm an inveterate thrill seeker, and I spent my time at university crashing parties and balls. And then when I graduated, this is 15 plus years ago now, I ran out of these places to go to. And I'm in London, as a young 20-something, thinking, well, where do I go now? And I think, well, there are all these private members clubs, which are really hard to get into. Can I bluff my way past the Porter's Lodge and get into them?

And I did quite successfully. I mean, you'll find a waistcoat helps you make a look about 15 years older. And when I was there, I started to find, gosh, there are actually lots of archives here. There's lots of really, really good stuff in the libraries and so on that never gets used and never gets quoted. And so when I started thinking about sort of going back to school and doing a PhD and all these sorts of things, I thought, well, someone really should use these club archives because they sort of run in parallel to the history that we all know, but they've got these wonderful snippets and things that are missed out that we forget about. I didn't even know that there were archives in these clubs.

You have to forgive my ignorance and my prejudice here, but I'll just say it and I'll just own it. But if you said to me private members club, I kind of think twats. That's bad, isn't it? I think I've got a really negative view of it. So help me dispel that. Well, yes and no. I mean, the bottom line is they can be absolutely, you know, awful, awful places. All brilliant.

I mean, they are what you make of them. And the thing about this whole world is, first, it's much, much bigger than we've often realized. Even today, there are about 40 or 50 of these historical London clubs. But back in the Victorian period, there were 400 just in London. Holy hell. Yeah, it was a whole subculture. 400. 400.

And there was something for every taste and every interest. And it was a whole ecosystem. And when you think of something else like, say, the Working Men's Club, they tend to be thought of it as an isolation. There'd never be any overlap. Actually, there are a direct continuation of that. The Working Men's Clubs were all about trying to bring a slice of Palmao to the people trying to popularise these very ideas. Of course. So it's a strange, strange world. It's sort of hidden in plain sight. Often you walk past the buildings all the time without any idea of what's

just right there. I found it fascinating. And the reality is that clubs have, as you quite rightly say, a terrible image. Terrible. Really bad, isn't it? Yeah. And that's fairly accurate. I wasn't expecting you to say that. Well, no, I'm going to weigh this out. It's exactly what clubs look like. when they're in terminal decline. And they've been in terminal decline for most of the last 50 to 100 years. Okay. And if you think about clubs,

you think about boring old farts, asleep by the fireplace, behind a newspaper, having had too much to drink. And that's exactly what they're like when they're in their death spiral. But there is more to it. Because if we go back 150, 200 years,

when this whole ecosystem is thriving, when people are going to their clubs to hustle for work and business, when they're doing exciting, new things in their clubs at the time. If you think about all the images that we have of clubs, we tend to think of these very staid, old-fashioned buildings. But everything in them was brand new at the time. It was high technology. I mean, even the newspapers that they were reading, those things were printed freshly that morning in Manchester and brought down on an express steam train

first thing in the morning. Everything about it was technological. Oh, that's slick. They were the first buildings in London to have telegraph wires, to have gaslight, have electrical light, to have kitchens run on a production line basis, almost like factories. So everything about the club originally was super modern and super innovative. And where they've started to fail today, in many cases, has been when they haven't changed and when they've just become these fussy, sort of reddits. That makes perfect sense when you say it like that. I'm still kind of reeling from the fact there was 400, because now I've got this image of like a group of guys going,

this is our private club. And then another group of people are going, well, we're going to have our own private club and you can't come in our club. and now there's 400 people going, well, actually this is our private club and you can't come in our club. How did it get started? At what point did someone go, well, we're going to have a gang with a good kitchen? They're all actually linked to each other because just to take that for a second, if you say, we can't have any more people in here, you know, we're full up. The natural thing the people who are left out do is they say, right, fine, we're going to set up our own club. Sodia. And that is what helps drive the growth of clubs. It's people who can't get into the existing clubs saying, okay, we're going to be more popular, more inclusive.

and they do that. Only what happens after a while is they say, well, you know, we've got a thousand people in our club now. We're not that inclusive. You can't come in and then they become the problem and then they drive other people to set up there. But going back to the very beginning, you're asking, I mean, we think of clubs as this sort of deeply British traditional institution. It's not actually that British. The British popularised them. But the very first private members club, even before the first ones in London was set up, We're actually in the northeast coast of what's now the United States when it's still an English colony. It was a North American idea. And a lot of the inspiration and the services and ideas of what classy kind of establishment for members, all that comes from Italy.

It comes from the Italian Secolos or Sicoli that they used to have the circles for members. So the British copy this, because London is this massive thriving port city, connects it all around the world with huge numbers of immigrants. And it's, by the way, it's almost entirely immigrants who set up clubs. So the first London club that we recognise really is now called White's Club, appropriately, given the demographic that these places often have. But it's set up by an Italian gentleman, the Mr. Bianchi. And Mr. Bianchi actually thinks, well, this isn't the very English-sounding name.

So he anglicises it to white. He passes away after a few years. Actually, it's his wife who sets it up. And that brings us to another interesting thing. You talked about the men in these clubs. And the image is that they are men's clubs and gentlemen's clubs. It is. But actually, there were a huge number of women's clubs.

in the Victorian period, 50 of them. Wow. There were 50 women's clubs in the centre of London, and they were mostly clustered around one particular quarter, just to the north of Piccadilly, which had loads of men's clubs. So north of there, there was Grafton Street, Alvarmal Street, Dover Street, and it was known as Ladies Clubland. And it also had some mixed sex clubs thrown in as well.

So it's this whole ecosystem that we've forgotten about that was a part of this. It's a lot more cosmopolitan than I had assumed that would be. I mean, London was a lot more cosmopolitan, and people forget that. I suppose my next question is, well, what did the clubs do? Like, did you just turn up and just go, hello, we're in our club? Like, I have a sandwich. Did different clubs do different things?

Or, like, what were they doing? So yes and no. There were, and indeed are still purely social clubs, where it's just like a lounge. And it's a fashionable lounge. And there might be famous people. They might be completely unremarkable people. And it's a very boring place. And you go there to fall asleep.

Actually, that's the absence of stuff going on, usually, is a sign of decline. When clubs became more and more fashionable, and they kick off originally actually, because, of gambling. Gambling is very, very fashionable in 17th and 18th century London, but it's also illegal. So what they do is they start to say, well, if we've got existing fashionable coffee shops, chocolate shops, places that you can go for a drink, we'll have a secret room around the back, which is a private members club. Oh, nice. And the joy of calling it a private members club is it makes it very difficult to be raided. Because you've got to remember

But there wasn't one metropolitan police back then. There were hot-potch of different authorities. And they were all having a terrible headache over, well, we're not sure whose jurisdiction this is, because it's almost like a private home where you can't really enforce the law here. Oh, that's clever, yes. So there was a lot of drinking. There was a lot of drug taking, you know, laudan and opium and these sorts of things. There were a lot of sort of 40-hour games, benders going on with no-holds, bars, gambling, all this kind of thing.

And everybody wanted in. And those are fairly sort of unpromising beginnings. I mean, these places are awful. If you look at Hogarth's representation of White's club, he calls a gambling hell, it's a barely furnished pit of a room, with people paralytic from alcohol on the floor, you know, sort of clutching to the gambling tables. That's not an elite club.

That's a weather spoon. That's what that is. It wasn't an elite club back then. These weren't elite clubs to begin with. Oh, they weren't. But they're also very fashionable, and they're in a very fashionable bit of London. You know, St James's is not actually London proper.

at the time. It's called the West End because it's west of London proper and it's close to St James's Palace, close to where the monarchy is but not actually, you know, directly there. And so it's got this sort of respectability, but also huge amounts of poverty at the time. I mean, you don't see that now in St. James's. But back then, it was the main road Piccadilly running to the north of it, was originally named Pigadillo because it was pig farms. I mean, this wasn't a terribly classy sort of area. But what happens is as it becomes more and more fashionable, people are looking for reasons to set up a club, reasons to join together. I mean, there's something basic in human nature. If we just forget clubs for a second, where you quite like going to

the pub with your mates, you quite like being with like-minded people. We're quite pack animals, really, aren't we? Exactly. It's deeply rooted in human psychology. And so from that, you then have these sort of 18th century cultural ideas of, well, how can we do this in privacy? How can we do this without people musseling on us? And where it really sort of kicks off in a big way, actually, because we're still only talking about maybe a dozen clubs or so in early 19th century, it's with the Industrial Revolution, because the Industrial Revolution creates a huge middle class of people with money, and they want to join these clubs, and they can't.

So that's when they start to kick off with themed clubs from about the 1810s, 18, 20 years onwards. And there's a point... Theemed clubs? Seemed, yeah. Okay. It's genuinely a case of if you work in scientific research, you want to belong to a member of a club.

Oh, I see. With other scientists. I thought you meant like fancy dress or something. No, I mean, the earliest club did that as well, you know, and still do. Sounds like quite good fun. But what you start to find is that in the 19th century, you get a themed club for more or less every occupation and every interest group. And it becomes a really fashionable way of socialising.

There's a whole ecosystem around this. I mean, there's a newspaper called Palmao Gazette produced by club members for club members. And it's all about the gossip inside club land and what, you know, who's in and who's out. I suppose it's like Hello magazine actually. You know, people pointing to all the valuable things in their home that should be burgled. And could you belong to lots of clubs or was it kind of very just like, no, you stay in your lane? There were one or two clubs that try to be really protective and say, oh, you can only belong to this because it's very, very exclusive. Actually, the most fashionable thing was belong to multiple ones.

So MPs, for instance, had an average of, I think, four clubs in 19th century London. So even when there were rules saying you can't belong to more than one, they all tried to join. The other thing is it's really hard to get into some of them because they've got a sort of maximum number of people who could join. So if you want to join an existing club, the only way to do that is to either have members who are expelled for not paying their bills, which happens, or you're waiting for the members to die of old age. Dead men's shoes. And that can literally take 30 years. And it gets very boring. But you have as a result, lots of people who are a member of one club, but they're waiting to get into a bigger

one and they're waiting for 30 years. So you're on the books of half a dozen of these places and you're hoping one of them will finally let you in. I think as well, it's a very human thing that if something's elite, we want it. Just to be a member, just to get in, if there's a really exclusive club or not even a club, like anything, like really expensive clothes and accessories or expensive haul, anything that you can go at Yacht, well, I'm special because I'm in the club. We like that, don't we? Yeah. And we're told that they're elite, so we just accept that they are. I mean, the reality is with a lot of these places, no one wanted to join. And you've got this amazing thing in the 20th century where they say,

look at this club, look at how marvellously exclusive it is. It's a completely empty room. There's no one here. Yes, that's because you're on your own, mate. No one wants to be part of this particular club. I love that as a P.R. Spittance, it's not dead. It's exclusive. It's so exclusive.

Nobody is here. All right, so they're kind of like the hubs of social interaction. I guess there's a bit of posing going on as well. There's a bit of like, I'm here. It sounds like some of them were well catered. Was it just upper classes by the 19th century? Or was this, so you said it was middle class. But what about like the working class?

It's a really interesting, almost like a straight line. Because in the 18th century, they are absolutely aristocratic clubs by the sort of end of the century. You start to get, let's say, upper middle class clubs from the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s onwards. People saying, you know, we're posh too. We have money. We can build. And there's almost a sort of arms race. We're going to build a bigger club than you.

that's where the club houses start to go from someone's house that's quite dingy to really impressive, palatial sort of buildings. And then as the 19th century wears on, you get two things. One is that you sort of get further and further towards lower middle class clubs. So the earliest clubs are set up for 500 people maybe. By the late 19th century, you're looking at six, six and a half thousand members to a club. And they're being built with accommodation so that people from out of town can come and join them. But what's going on at the same time is the great of working men's clubs, which I mentioned a bit. And that's really sparked off by a guy called Reverend Henry Solly, who is nuts. He wants to improve the working classes. He's a Unitarian

priest preacher, and he is convinced that the working classes need to be saved from the demon drink. And they need all the advantages of private members clubs and a sense of fellowship and comradeship and self-improvement and going to improving lectures in the evenings without any booze. So he tries to set up this network. Eventually, it's thousands. of Working Men's Club up and down the country. And there's a sort of battle where after about 15, 20 years, he gets booted out of his own organisation because they say, we quite like booze, actually.

Yeah, that's a fair cop. If you're working six days a week and looking forward to the Saturday night in the Working Men's Club, give us some beer at least. So what kind of stuff did you have to do to be a member? I assume if they had members of like 600, the criteria couldn't be that strict. But like what about some of the more elite ones?

What does you have to do to be a member? Weirdly it works the other way around. It's the ones with about 600 members that are very difficult to get in because it usually comes down to, do we know him? Is she a relative of us? That kind of thing. And it's how many people have personally recommended you. Whereas, actually, getting into a club with, you know, 6,000, 5,000 members is quite

straightforward if you sort of tick the box of saying, I have achieved something like this in my area. I mean, political parties were big on clubs. We tend to think of the notorious establishments, but actually, Labor were growing force at the time. there was a weird socialist club in the ground floor of George Bernard Shaw's house, which was a curious thing. But you had loads of liberal clubs. And actually, the working men's clubs, the conservative clubs, were the really, really successful ones in the 19th century. It's not until the 20th century. They start to die out in a big way. But yeah, there are all sorts of quirky qualifications. I mean, to this day, the Travellers Club, an early 19th century club, still has this weird qualification that you need to have travel to a location at minimum of 500 miles from London in a straight line. line. Now, that won't actually take you that far. That's sort of about Germany, you know,

thereabouts. But in the 19th century, it was a big deal. It was meant to say that, have you been on a grand tour? Have you been on a sort of self-improving trip to Italy or Greece or something like that? Like a weekend away at Torquay's not just going to cut it with them then? Sadly not. Well, I'm out of that one then. What about something like the Freemasons? Are they an example of a club? Are they a different thing? They're quite a different thing. I mean, they come out of almost the Middle Ages, and I get asked about the Freemasons a lot. It's my number one FAQ, and I tend not to touch them with a barge pole, to be honest with you. But no, it is a very different tradition.

It comes out of craft guilds and professionals, and it's sort of German, European idea from the sort of reformation, that kind of thing. Okay, okay. So they're kind of a club, but that's not really what we're talking about. What's interesting about clubs is that the British popularize socialising in a particular way. and then having this massive empire at the time, they export it all around the world. So you get loads of these copycat clubs. To this day, you'll find India has 300 of these clubs, places which had a big British presence like, say, Singapore or Hong Kong or South Africa,

huge numbers of clubs, all of them, very much models of what these Victorian clubs used to look like. So I'm kind of interesting as well in what you were saying about them being quite libertarian, a lot of them, and there were clubs for women. And were the clubs for people of colour, if they were sort of big, in India and sort of the colonies. But was it just a complete whitewash in Britain or were we more inclusive than that? Yeah, I mean, there weren't separate segregated clubs for, I think, minorities, religious minority members and so on, because they were members of some of these major clubs. You know, you've got to remember that Victorian London was a lot more diverse than people

often give it credit for. It really was, wasn't it? That always throws people when they learn that fact. Yeah. And you've got a huge number of wealthy merchants, for example, who have sort of quite cosmopolitan lives, they're travelling by ship around the world a great deal. So the clubs in the 18th and early 19th century is absolutely a whitewash, very much so on the whole. Although even then, I mean, you've got a black French fencer, gambler and composer who's in whites club in the 1790s. Even just the sort of environment that it is is not purely white actually. Then there are questions actually around how the racial composition, even of London, amongst white people in the University of Thomas, they're not in entire.

highly white. You know, there's a huge amount of mixed ancestry and so on going on. But certainly by the 1850s, there are clear and obvious cases of non-white members joining these clubs, originally in quite small numbers. And then certainly by the 1880s, when the clubs have really opened up, it's not unusual. You know, you've got actually seen the high dozens and possibly in the hundreds per club in some cases, members who are not white. And that's quite unusual, certainly compared to our preconceptions on clubs. And you have a sort of breakdown of religious minorities. So, for example, it's not all Protestant. There are a lot of Catholics. There are an increasing number of Jewish members. There are a number of Muslim members. There are

a party members. I mean, it's really quite a mixed sort of composition. And that argument extends also, and I suppose this is why I'm on this show, to attitudes to sex and sexuality. Because just about every inclination and grouping you can imagine is very much represented in clubs. club members are not that unusual as human beings, and they have the full range of desires and interests that you'll find amongst any group of the population. Were there any sex clubs that you found? I know that that's a thing we talked about today, like that, and there are actual sex clubs that you can go to and get a ticket.

But was that a part of it? Was there anywhere that was like, I don't know, was there like a gay club, or was there a kink club? Yes and no. If we sort of predate these kinds of clubs, in the early days, of course there are loads of sexual societies, groupings, gatherings, gatherings, gatherings, and Molly houses, Molly clubs, all these kinds of things. Beggars Benson.

Very much so. From the earliest days, because human beings, I mean, it's as simple as that. A lot of these clubs are really trying to push the respectability angle, particularly when I talk about women's clubs and why it's so important. But as a result, they're quite loath to be too involved in that. That's not to say it doesn't happen. There was a particular club in the 1840s that's forcibly closed down. Loads of MPs belong to it, but none of them would admit to it publicly.

And the reason it's closed down is that it was the only club at the time to have an in-house brothel to entertain the members. And there was an outbreak of venereal disease. Right. So wanted to touch the place of the barge pole. I mean, the reason why I sort of was hesitating slightly over the question is it depends what time we're talking about. Because actually, if we move forwards into the 20th century, if we look at the modern idea of the sex club, it entirely comes from the private members club. It's an offshoot. And the reason is all around licensing.

It's because when you have these clubs that are so successful in the 19th century, and there are so many politicians of saying we need to make sure the working class is clamped down on the booze and have responsible serving hours and very limited quantities and all these sorts of things. And they're introducing loads of licensing laws, some of which are still in the statute book today in one way or another. And they exempt private members clubs from them. They are of the view that my club is a very respectable place and doesn't have the kind of person that needs regulating. So you're building up a parallel ecosystem where these places don't have to close at 11pm. They don't have to stop serving alcohol at 3pm in the afternoon and all these kinds of things. And so when it comes to edgy sorts of places that have interesting alternative kinds of amusements in the 20th century, the way they build a whole of Soho, for example, in the 1950s especially, is to say,

couldn't we just call this place a private members club? And it's going right back to the very earliest routes of clubs. saying, well, it's outside of your jurisdiction as a local council. You can't slap a fine on us because we're not outraging public decency or members of the public. We don't get members of the public. We just have members in a private space. Actually, now you said that, you can see that all throughout the sex industry today is brothels still operate under the, well, we're not charging people to have sex here. We're just an establishment and what people do upstairs is nothing to do with us. And sex clubs, they operate often on a member's license. And there are private.

at sex clubs as well of people that meet up and there's quite a strong vetting process for that as well so that's really interesting to hear that and that's exactly it it comes straight out of that culture hiding in that sort of way i'll be back with seth after this all this month on gone medieval from history hit i'll be asking who really were the vikings how did they become so successful in spreading across northern europe and beyond from the late eighth to the 11th centuries what are the stories we about them and what legacy did they leave behind for us today? I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and throughout September I'll be examining the big questions about the Vikings with a host of experts and answering all of your burning questions about the Viking age as well.

So for everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I always assume that it was just always men, but like you said there were mixed groups. Am I right in thinking that there was some kind of fear or a stigma about it producing gay people if they mixed, particularly in the wake of the Oscar Wild trial. Yeah, I mean, there are several things there. Maybe it's helpful to just sort of start off looking at where the women's clubs were.

I mean, the very first women's club, actually, in 1770. It's called the coterie or the female coterie. It's quite an unusual club. Like the WI? Oh, it's a bit more... But with petticoats. With petticoats. Less jam.

It would make a great costume drama. And the female coterie is a weird thing because only men are allowed to elect female members, but only women are allowed to elect male members. Oh, that's brilliant. And if somebody gets elected, their spouse becomes an associate member, but it's dependent on their spouse, sort of male or female. So it was an interesting sort of set up that they had from the very early days, but it doesn't last for that long. It's sort of less than a decade that it's going. And then there are various rivals to club. Remember that women are actually

controlling the main rival to the clubs for the first 100, 150 years, which are the salons. So So if you ever come across the salons of London, not just things in people's front rooms, but really elaborate ballrooms. Just explain a bit what a salon is, just in case anyone thinks it's where you get your hair cut. It's different. A salon is essentially almost like an 18th century nightclub, with lots and lots of function rooms off the side. There's gambling, there's lots of drinking, and there are huge formal balls and dances.

But crucially, you don't have membership of a salon. Instead, you buy your ticket for the night, and you negotiate every night like you would in a nightclub, and you're trying to convince the bouncer. Go on, let me in. this case, the bouncers are aristocratic ladies who control all admission. Really? There's a huge amount of anger in the London society of saying, well, I have to depend on, you know, the Duchess of Devonshire, and I have to impress her every night, and I can't stand

her, but I've got to be polite to her all the time. And the reason why clubs move into a men-only direction very early on is there's a reaction to that. It's because they're saying, well, okay, shall we get some facilities where we don't have to depend on these aristocratic women? But they exist side by side with each other. Well, until the 1860s. And when the final salons go under in the 1860s, that's when women's clubs start to take off as an alternative. And they're quite interesting because from day one, they're being attacked very heavily in the press. And it's from both sides, really. It's on the one hand, it's loose, it's disrespectful. It's, you know, the kind of place where women

of loose morals who you'd never want to be seen with are trying to get you into a darkened back room and spend time with other women. Now, that sounds like the WI. Very much so. But if you want the even more WI version, the other criticism was, well, these places are just nunneries. I mean, they're full of perennial spinsters, the kind of women who'd never get married.

And so, take your pick. It's one or the other. They can't win then. It's either drug-fueled orgies or running down the time with your cat. Yeah. So what were they actually doing there? They were very preoccupied with respectability

to try and fight back against that and just say, look, we're just the normal, The big centre for them actually was around Regent Street, and the idea was that a lot of 19th century when didn't have much financial agency or independence a lot of the time, except when they were shopping. Because when they were shopping, and there's a whole book on this by Erica Rappaport, which is really, really good. The argument was that actually they've suddenly got some household budget that's allocated, then, they've got some independence, they've got some agency. And so this female clubland, if you look at it on the map, the reason why it's so close to Regent Street, it's marketed as

come to London and entertain people while you're shopping. When you're getting away from your husband, when you're not having to be part of the family, you're just there on your own terms, and you're going, whether it's with your friends, family or whoever you want to be with, you are the hostess in your club where you are the member hosting things. And that was quite subversive for its time and unsurprisingly, very, very popular. And you get dozens and dozens of these clubs that are set up. Many of them themed, just like the men's club. So you have something like, for example, the Green Park Club, which is for female cyclists who like exercising their bikes along Green Park, all these kinds of things. And they're really quite successful. And then from 1874,

what you have kicking off are the mixed sex clubs, which have not really been done up until that point. And the big sort of kickoff is one called the Alba Mard Club on Albemarle Street. And you mentioned the Oscar Wild scandal. Basically, until then, for about 20 years, the Albaal Club was the hottest place in town, because it was very respectable. You could bring your family, along. You'd have lots of children being brought as guests to afternoon tea and so forth. And it really was very well connected and lots of creative types and artists and writers. And these included Oscar Wilde and his wife. Now, Wilde lived geographically in a very small world. So the places that he was picking up rent boys and going to hotel rooms were all within two or

three streets. It's a rookie era, Oscar. Of the Alvim Alvarez Club. And he was sort of, you know, not just living this very dicey double life, but he was living within a few doors of one another and people seeing him go from one address to the next and being the loving family man doting over his children then going off to find a bit of rough the next. And all of this comes up in a big way in the Wilde scandal

because when Lord Alfred Douglas' father, Marcus of Queensbury, tries to find him, he famously goes to the Album R Club. It's the one place where do I find Oscar Wilde. I'll go to his club where Wilde and his wife are both members. And he's not in, so he writes a note and it famously says to Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite because he can't spell sodomite. Rightly. And that's founds and that kicks off the libel actions and all the court cases.

And it's all over the press. Wow. And as a result, people start talking about what are these kinds of clubs? Who goes there? And suddenly, the image changes from safe, family, reputable places to, well, clearly the kind of men who hang around the Arbemarle Club have something to cover up. Maybe they're overcompensating. They don't have so much of an interest in women after all.

and that's why they're joining a mixed sex club, all these kinds of things. And so there's a long, slow, lingering death for these mixed sex clubs after that. Wow. So they were associated with sort of sexual immorality and kind of, you know, or you might be a bit gay if you go there. The mixed sex ones were, yeah, the ladies' clubs less so. The reason why so few have survived, I should say, is that they had a very different model in how they funded themselves. The men's clubs were literally built on clubbing together.

That's where the word comes from, to pay the bills amongst the members, because men tended to be richer. Because women had much less financial independence, there were fewer wealthy women in these clubs. So usually the women's clubs were built around one financial patron, one lady who'd be subsidising them, basically. And when she would die of old age 20, 30 years later, the club would very often struggle to survive. So that's why these women's couples are huge in a late Victorian-ewardian era. They're basically dying out from the 1930s to the 1950s. And that's why when you think of club land and these old men, that's what it looked like by the 1950s, because that's what's all was left. It's the surviving men's clubs that are there.

I did once read about a spinsters club. A group of women, they got together more as financial support for one another, because obviously it's hard to understand just how dependent women were on men. Not even that long ago is that you really couldn't earn your own money, and if you could get a job, it was pittance, blah, blah, blah. So if you didn't have a man and you didn't have a family support, you really were in quite a lot of trouble. So I've read about these, I don't think they survived very long, but women would pay into it. It was almost like an insurance. That's right. And there were lots of benevolent funds and things run out of these clubs. I mean, the attempts of the clubs to just build a better world, were quite modest, but they were trying to

build something fairer and safer and nicer. And you find that, for example, in a lot of the Edwardian women's clubs, which were very much around women's suffrage in the women's franchise movement. You very often say, well, we'll have afternoon tea, followed by collecting your banners to go on the march and you'll go in a circle, then you'll come back here. So it's trying to mix the political and the social and the big way. You don't see that so much with the sort of gay life of clubs, which is across clubs more generally, because that's a lot more discreet and a lot more secretive. And gay men and lesbian women, for that matter, are really quite keen to sort of not draw attention to themselves. The clubs want to distance themselves from that. So if you think

about clubs having these really boring, overly prescriptive rules and regulations, that's because they're trying to control behaviour. And that goes into Victorian ideas of sexuality. So the Victorians don't actually believe that there is such thing as inclination towards homosexuality. They don't recognise that. They think that, you know, as you know, for well, it's around trying to stop a vice that's almost like a disease that you're trying to cure. There are people who are infecting and people are infected. And if you can regulate that vice, if you can regulate the behavior, then the inclination will die out in that way. So that is why there are, all these rule books saying, I mean, I've got one right here. Oh, please read me the rules.

I'm desperate to know the rules. I mean, they'll tell you what time of day you should turn up at meals and all these things. This is from the Bachelors Club in 1914. It's actually very well named because it used to appeal to confirm the Bachelors in particular. And they used to say, this is Rule 32. Members of the Bachelors Club shall cease to be members on marriage. But may, subject to the approval of the committee, continue as honorary members, on payment of 25 pounds to the funds of the club within two calendar months after the date of their marriage and the usual subscription on the 1st of January each year.

In other words, they're being fined the equivalent of several thousand pounds if they get married by their club. Oh my God. Was there records that people actually went for that? I really want to still be a member, but they're going to pay the fine, basically. Yeah, absolutely. If you're a gay man who belongs to the bachelor's club,

that's the centre of your social life. Yeah, you're not going to give that one up, are you? I mean, remember that the club is a social network, first and foremost. I mean, it's a physical space, but it is also where you meet your friends and acquaintances. And if you are very worried about being outed as a gay man, you want a discrete place and you want a discerning place and you want some choice. Now, whether your taste runs to high-class entertainment with great wits or whether you like a bit of rough, you want some control over that and you want everything to be absolutely certain. So the advantage of a club, and you would have instances in court cases of, for example, men picking up people on the footsteps of clubs,

and so they could say, well, I can't be ejected from the club because I haven't broken any rules in the club's precincts, but I'm trying to chat up men on the way in and out in that way. When people would chat up one another within the club, it was far more common to take any kind of liaisons and physical intimacy off-premises, because it's completely safe. If you watch the thread of how people move around on a map

and where they're moving to, there's a lot of going into the parks nearby, St James's Park was notorious for it. Dark corners, dark, yes. Guardsmen are always the stereotype for being fair game. But to be fair, they do actually turn up an awful lot. And, you know, there's a social, cultural sort of background for this. They're usually from very posh families if they're in Guard's regiments. So they've been to an all-male public school and, you know, sexual contact will have been in that context. So, yeah, there was very much that sort of presumption. Another favourite was the public toilet. I mean, it's now demolished, but there's a

scrappy little lane in Covent Garden that leads all the way to the Garrick Club. And there was a public toilet just opposite there. There was a Labour MP Tom Dryberg, who was known for his interesting proclivities, who was just shuttling back and forth between the loo. And he used to get a particular thrill out of going to a super respectable dinner, immediately after having picked up someone in the club, gone off opposite to the lavatory and come back. Nothing changes.

The Turkish bath was really, really successful. There's a huge Turkish bath craze in the 19th century. Yeah, you don't want to get those muddled up, do you? No. Funny you say that, because there are loads of Turkish baths in the middle of clubland. So German Street has a couple of really high-profile ones, and they become quite well-known gay cruising spot, certainly by the 1900s. And there's an awful lot of the way that they're marketed as what you can't do in your club,

you can do here. They've got private cubicles, you can pick people up, you can stay there overnight, which has all sorts of interesting things about the behaviour of the clientele there. But you also start to have clubs themselves building turquoise. Turkish baths within them to try and compete because they're competing with luxury facilities, luxury hotels, and they're saying we can do that too. I have to say, actually, there was less cruising within the Turkish bars of clubs themselves. The most conspicuous thing I can find, which is a very recent problem, is in the Royal Automobile Club, the RAC, has one of the last

surviving sort of original Turkish bath like this. And they've been in the news only a few years ago for issues with the male members flashing the female members on mixed days and then saying, please don't do this, which is possibly one of the reasons why they're so loath to sort of getting to mix sex things, because they can't trust the men to not flash. There's a Turkish bath in Harrogate, and then my friend persuaded me one day to go on a mixed day, nude day, and I was like, okay, I'll go, and I sat in the sauna, and I was the only person next to which really is, like, eight in the morning, and then this one guy came in, and the entire sauna, which is like his huge room, and he sat right next to me,

completely in the nip, and I was like, there's just no need. for that. So yeah, I didn't report him or anything. I thought maybe this is just what you do in a sauna. Well, I'm afraid there was a lot of that sort of thing in clubs, particularly with gay men, and you had, Rock Hudson was arrested for importuning in the German street hammam. There were other novel ways that the clubs would try and get around rules on this. There's one particular club. I probably shouldn't say which one on this show, but you can find out about it in my book. It was having an issue because they were offering a sort of discrete service off the menu, saying, you can go upstairs to one of the bedrooms with one of the waiters here for a modest fee.

And the local council found out about this and they were in serious trouble of their licensing arrangements. And the Westminster said, you know, this is not on. So yeah, it's outrageous and disgusting behaviour. But the customer is always right. And what the members want the members get. So they asked themselves, is there any way we could carry on this practice offshore? So they bought themselves a boat on the Thames. That is committed to getting your end away.

If it's at the point where you're buying a boat, you're quite? I mean, you've just gone full in then, haven't you? So was this, like, a sex boat that they had? Yeah, yeah, very much. That's what it was specifically run for. I love it. It's so difficult because these clubs must have been perfectly aware of what was going on in some of them, and that that was the appeal, that was their client demographic.

So that caught in a bind of, like, outwardly they have to be seen to condemn it, but they can't condemn it because they'll lose their members. Yeah, and a lot of these clubs are really democratic places. So you've got to remember that people running them are actually people who are fairly representative members. So they know full well. And indeed, some of them are involved in this kind of stuff themselves. And when we think of clubs as being these sort of all male environments in the 20th century, which they very much become, there is a big gay subculture that's a big part of that because it's become this very safe place for gay men to hang out and identify one another and socialise. It's Even if they're fairly chaste or too old for any sort of physical activity, they are still enjoying social life. And yes, there's an element of misogyny, absolutely. But it's also bound up with an element of, we have a gay subculture here that's very special and unique,

and we don't want to endanger that. And that was very often the thing that wasn't mentioned explicitly, but when you have all these really flimsy excuses, like, oh, you can't possibly admit women in the 1960s, because we'd have to install bathrooms, and we can't find the money for that. More caviar, please. what was actually going on was it was okay, so this isn't the club that we joined. But again,

that wasn't the club that was set up originally. It wasn't necessarily meant to be that kind of world. Wow. So you are the librarian of the Liberal Club. Is that correct? What is that club? Tell me about the club and what that does today. It was set up in 1882 by people who would not normally belong to the Lundsen Clubs. They were people with liberal politics and there were already plenty of aristocratic. clubs of all kinds, including some liberal-inclined ones. And so it was set up by a Welsh solicitor named Arthur John Williams, who said, we need to have a base in London to carry out politics. At the time, the liberal government was trying to expand the franchise through the Third Reform Act, which was brought him a couple of years later in 1884. And so what they were trying to do was get ahead of that and

say, let's have the kind of people who will be involved in politics through a sort of mass membership politics and have a club for them. And it's still liberal of the small L. It still has some political affiliation, although not as strictly dogmatic as. before, and it's primarily a social club, but it exists as a sort of memorial around these sort of radical political ideas. It was on the sort of radical fringes of British politics at the time. And they would do things like mass events. In the 19th century, when they had general elections, they used to have several thousand people watching the results to the National Liberal Club had wired over from around the country. And they didn't have television. What they did have was a

telegraph wire, and they would paint the result onto white flags, which they would stretch out across the balcony and shine electric lights on so that you could see the constituency results come in seat by seat. So yeah, there's been an awful lot of fun stuff there over the years and they had quite a hard time. I mean, the book goes into, if you want, the most sort of damning scandal of any club.

They got comprehensively asset stripped by a fraudster and confidence trickster in the 70s who ran the club for about nine months. And so, I mean, I refounded the library nine years ago. They didn't have one for several decades. It used to be the largest in clubland and now he sort of converted what was an empty room into that. But yeah, it's a fun project with a sort of rich cultural history.

And I'm surprised all the time by the stuff that we're finding in the archives. And very often you're finding clubs, because the bottom line has been about, can we survive as a business? Can we keep the finances going? There's not been a lot of attention paid to the archives. And very often when you can find the archives, they're really rich and really, really interesting. And things like, for example, betting books, the best source of gossip from past centuries is to look up. betting books, because people are literally writing down bets based on what they've been gossiping about. And you have a really good idea of, you know, are you interested in high-brow-brow stuff,

low-brow stuff, whatever it is? So I'm constantly surprised by this. Oh, my, what kind of bets were people making? What's the best bet that you found? The really well-known one in Brooks's in the 18th century was Lord X, bets, 10 guineas to Lord X, that he can fuck a woman from a balloon at a height of no fewer than 500 feet. The column on which you write whether the bet's actually been fulfilled, the art is blank, so we don't know. I suspect it wasn't.

But remember, the balloon would have been a really modern piece of technology back then. The mile high club. Well, the 500 metres or 500 feet high. This was impressive stuff for its time. But nothing's new, is it somebody's invented a balloon, now someone's going to try and shagging it?

Yeah. Oh, my God, love that. What do you think is the future of the clubs? as my last question to you, because we started by you saying that it's kind of like a dying institution. Do you think they're going to be revived? Do you think they have a future? What do you see? Well, I think they have been a dying institution for most of the last century. Weirdly, they've had a bit of a revival in the last 30 years, and that's a bit counterintuitive because they still have this terrible image. I mean, just objectively speaking, seeing their

membership figures, they have shot right back up. That was originally something that started in the 80s with lots of yuppies with cash to spend and say, where can we go and be conspicuous consumers of things. Oh, look. Let's do what they did in the 18th century, these very grand houses. But that's kicked off a wave of new copycat clubs, you know, places like home house and Soho house and the Groucho Club. And you don't think of them in the same breath, but actually they're doing exactly the same things and providing the same services. And if you look at the 19th century clubs of scandalous, lus, drug fuel, alcoholic all night long reputation of their head is quite close to the image of these places. So to answer your question, the clubs that are doing quite.

well, not only the new ones, and they can sometimes have a bit of a high turnover, but actually the old traditional clubs that have learned from the new ones that are modernising, and for the first time in the century are saying, let's have co-working spaces, let's have people hustling in here, let's drop these affectations around dress codes and just let people come as they are and use it as a leisure place. Strangely enough, they're rediscovering all the stuff that the Victorians found so useful about clubs. So I'm not a pessimist about the future of clubs, but I think they will probably evolve a little bit, but in some form or another,

something very much like a club is probably going to be with us for quite a while yet. Seth, you have been so enlightening to speak to. If people want to know more about you and more about your work, where can they find you? I'm online, I have a website, Seth-A-E-Ev-O-S-C-O-C-O-C-C-E-O-Z.

No-O-W-E-E-E-E-O-Z. No one could ever spell or pronounce my name, which is the bane-E-V-O-Z. The name is spelled T-E-E-V-O-Z. Anyway, my book is Behind Closed Doors, the secret life of London private members clubs and it sets out in great detail quite a lot of fun things around this.

And are you on social media? Can people follow you? I am. I'm S-A-T-E-E-O-Z. Thank you so much for joining me today. You've been so much fun. Pleasure, Kate. Thanks. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode and thank you so much to Seth for joining me. You've been a complete revelation. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe

wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We're not elite. We'll take anyone. Join me again, Betwixta Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.