October 18, 2008

The Other Club, by Sir Colin Coote. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1971, hardbound, 156 pages, illustrated with cartoons. Frequency: rare. Current bookshop range $35-75/£20-45.

Difficult to find, but always worth the search, is Colin Coote’s jolly history of the dining club founded by Winston Churchill and F. E. Smith in 1911 (and still going strong). Sir Colin, who knew Sir Winston for over forty years and compiled some of the earliest books of Churchill quotes, was entrusted with writing the history after Sir Winston’s death.

The death of the last of its two “pious founders” caused some to believe The Other Club might pass out of existence, but its Members decided otherwise. Coote was asked to write its history “because I was the second senior Member and practically the whole membership wanted the Club to continue in some shape or form. Lord Longford, an Irish Earl, was a Member and also chairman of Sidgwick & Jackson, who were the original publishers of certain famous authors such as Rupert Brooke, who was the son of my contemporary Housemaster at Rugby School. Lord Longford willingly agreed to publish my account, which the Club had commissioned, and having been a frank friend of Sir Winston from my ‘teens upwards, I tried to produce something neither fulsome nor fulminating. The book never aimed at a vast circulation, though it achieved a modest success among the Club’s Members and friends.”

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Sir Colin’s remarks come from correspondence, laid into Finest Hour’s copy of The Other Club, with former editor Dalton Newfield, who was trying to obtain enough copies to satisfy demand (a problem we still have). “I can well understand that it was not intended for vast circulation,” Newfield wrote Sir Colin. “My desire for twenty-four copies was based on the idea that if it is difficult to find now it would be more so in future, and twenty-four copies, referring to the longevity tables, should about do me for the balance of my life. Of course I also have your Maxims and Reflections, Sir Winston Churchill: A Self-Portrait, Wit and Wisdom and A Churchill Reader, and even though there is overlapping, I feel that each is a valued part of my collection. How fortunate you were to have known him so well.”

Also laid into our copy is Christopher Ford’s review in The Guardian of 13 November 1971, which nicely illuminates this literary gem…


TOUCH OF THE OTHER
by Christopher Ford


Imagine: The Club, exclusive, immemorial, resonant with the noises of gentlemen dining. Imagine, though, two splendid braggadocios, quite thinly disguised under the pseudonyms of Churchill and F. E. Smith. Our heroes suspect the pitter-patter of black balls. So what do they do? They start the Other Club. Here, too, gentlemen may dine, insulated from the hoi polloi; and, if the members seem to be much a political or military vocation, then where else would you look for gentlemen except landed on the grouse-moor?

This, then, is the backcloth, nay, the stage itself, for Sir Colin Coote’s latest literary adventure. And with such gusto does he ring up the curtain: “Nineteen Hundred and Eleven! What a year in which to be born! The Edwardian era, so like the Second Empire in France, was lying in the ashtray of history, like the last cigar puffed on his deathbed by its founder…”

Sir Colin was ever a fantasist, except perhaps in his days as managing editor of the Daily Telegraph. He personally wrote a book called Sir Winston Churchill: A Self-Portrait”; and he is a sort of Coalition Liberal. But now, at last, Sir Colin has found a subject worthy of a former Times leader writer. How like matadors do his characters bestride their political ring. Modestly he keeps on denying that his Other Club is merely a group of Churchillian sycophants; but the great man, together with that Smith among Smiths, are here as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger.

Their coruscating wit shines through these pages of history. Here’s Churchill replying to a speech by Smuts: “I have known him long, very long; I remember the first time I saw him. it was in the Colonial Office in 1906.” (Factually, remarks a footnote, this happens to be wrong.) Smith‹who once, when a judge called him offensive, said, “As a matter of fact we both are; the difference is that I’m trying to be and you can’t help it”–is given personal credit for The Other Club’s twelfth and final rule: “nothing in the rules of intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.” It was once said of a famous England cricketer that there was only one bigger head in the North: Birkenhead.

Where Sir Colin most excels is in his character-drawing. With how deft a twitch of the pen does he describe Lord Goddard, who was “as forthright about hooligans as about port.” (Coote can’t have been an ignorant tippler himself, in the great days. The Club ran short of brandy during the War: “After considerable research, I discovered an excellent 1875, a passable 1904, and an undated concoction with a kick like a mule. Churchill unhesitatingly chose the mule.”)

Like a sack of marbles on a hot tin roof the names drop. There was “Lord Tweedmuir, better known” (surely not?) “as John Buchan, who wrote tremendous adventure stories…with the pen of an angel,” and Alfred Munnings, “whose portrayal of horses was divine.” Don’t think, though, that the club isn’t democratic. “One of the distinctions which his command in Iraq won for Sir John Salmond was a membership of The Other Club.” J. H. Thomas, railwayman turned Cabinet Minister, was a member, too, even if “he was rather inclined to call mere acquaintances ‘real pals.'” Rejections? “The only candidate I recall being repulsed was Sir Samuel Hoare, who shared with Sir John Simon an extraordinary capacity for getting himself disliked, coupled with a fervent desire to get himself beloved. But he probably did not know that he had been a candidate.” Only two Prime Ministers, Baldwin and Macdonald, were not Members. Neither was ever proposed. Harold Wilson, though elected, never attended: “He is an agreeable table companion. He was not kept out, nor did he deliberately stay out.”

Oswald Mosley joined, proposed by Churchill and the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth. The profession of letters has been decently represented, not least by the author and by P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote to Sir Colin: “It must have been at my first dinner that I sat next to F. E. Smith. Conversation was a bit sticky at first, but when I asked him why he didn’t get his Rugger Blue in 1893, he never stopped talking and we got on splendidly.”

Sir Colin was ever a man of fine sensibility and delicate feelings. His thumbnail sketch of Frederick Lonsdale is of one “who wrote Wildish plays without having Wilde’s habits.” Later, one is at least allowed to suspect a telescope to a Nelsonian eye when he writes of a distinguished member: “Another problem is why he never married…probably he was not really interested in women as women and acutely disliked the prospect of sharing his privacy with anybody. In life, as in grammar, there is a neuter gender.” And, indeed, in literature.

Brendan Bracken’s lively imagination of himself is affectionately regarded: “Most of us when children played a game of ‘Let’s pretend.’ We fancy ourselves to be Horatius, or Leonardo, or Napoleon. It does nobody any harm, and is less pitiable than fancying in our second childhood that we are a poached egg.” It’s the author’s one slight error of tact, maybe, that Churchill gets mentioned three times on that page.

Sir Colin’s own final words can safely be left to speak for this rich panoply, this veritable “War and Peace” of our time: “And if even the trappings of companionship, the cadence of good talk, the contacts of fine minds, the clash of verbal conflicts, should be temporarily swamped by banality of brutishness, the theme and refrain of civilization will break through again and be heard. For the song was wordless, the singing will never be done.”


RULES OF THE OTHER CLUB

These are the original Rules, though as Sir Colin noted, some have altered. Rule 3 was immediately and frequently violated. As for Rule 6, “the Club is not immune from inflation; and these figures are variable”‹ but imagine what £2, a week’s wage for a workingman, bought for dinner in 1911. Rule 7 had the clear purpose of altering no votes between Government and Opposition. Although Rule 11 remains unchanged, there has been no Executive Committee since 1970 and its powers are exercised by the honorary secretaries. The Rules are read aloud at every meeting and graduate Members have long known them by heart:


1. The Club shall be called the Other Club.

2. The object of The Other Club is to dine.

3. The Club shall consist of no more than fifty Members and not more than twenty-four Members of the House of Commons.

4. So long as this number is not exceeded, any Member may propose a Candidate for election to the Committee, and the Committee may circulate the name of any other Candidate or Candidates (but not singly) to the Club for election at such time as they think fit.

5. The Club shall dine on alternate Thursdays at 8.15 punctually, when Parliament is in session.

6. There shall be an entrance fee of £5 and an annual subscription of £7 10s. £2 shall be charged for each dinner.

7. The Members of the House of Commons shall be paired from 8 o’clock until 10.30 p.m. unless they arrange to the contrary through the co-secretaries.

8. The Executive Committee shall settle all outstanding questions with plenary powers.

9. There shall be no appeal from the decision of the Executive Committee.

10. The names of the Executive Committee shall be wrapped in impenetrable mystery.

11. The Members of the Executive Committee shall nominate the Secretary, who shall receive no remuneration and shall be liable for all unforeseen obligations.

12. Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.

 

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