January 7, 2009

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.”

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.”

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