There are also always experiences and problems in common between universities. As the large, ebullient, and resplendently besashed Communist Mayor of Bologna, a serious commercial (and gastronomic) city which looks after its art treasures but does not allow itself to be dominated by tourism, said to me as he drove me back to my hotel from the Prefect’s lunch for President Cossiga: ‘There is a tradition of hostility between town and university here, but we have recently decided that, as a substantial part of our reputation seems to come from the university, we had better strengthen our links with it.’ I have noted with pleasure that, in my short experience, the Lord Mayor of Oxford has never missed an Encaenia. I doubt, however, if he (or recently more frequently she) would have emulated the Bolognese Sindaco’s feat of responding with pride to my remark that his city was famous for its large pedestrian zones by proceeding to drive me through them at approximately 60 m.p.h.
Anniversaries in Pall Mall
This essay is based on parts of two talks: one a lecture given in 1986 for the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Reform Club and the other a dinner speech in 1992 for the twentieth anniversary of the amalgamation of the Oxford and Cambridge and the United Universities Clubs.
The Pall Mall clubs were born in a different century from the St James’s Street ones and were to some extent a reaction against them. Those who founded them saw themselves as part of an age of improvement and not of imitation. They were unimpressed by the fashionable rakishness of Brooks’s, White’s and Boodle’s, and wanted to create something newer, grander, more wholesome, with less gambling, less debauchery, and perhaps fewer cockroaches as well. The bourgeois palaces of Pall Mall were to outshine the louche if aristocratic stews of St James’s Street. To paraphrase what W. S. Gilbert was to write in Iolanthe half a century later:
Hearts for more pure and fair
May beat down Pall Mall way
Than in the squalid air
Of rich St James’s.
The origins of the Reform Club, which eventually achieved the greatest of all the palaces, epitomized this approach. The first Reform Bill and the new politics that flowed from it obviously provided the first strand of inspiration. Paradoxically, however, it was the Tories who reacted first to the new need for political organization and in 1832 established the Carlton Club only a few yards from what became the site of the Reform Club. There it remained until it was severely bombed in December 1940.
The Liberals were three and a half years behind. This was partly due to the Radical/Whig dichotomy, and partly due to the complication of relations with Brooks’s. The Whigs did not much want the Radicals in Brooks’s, but were even less keen on their forming a club of their own. The Radicals, notably Molesworth, Parkes and Hume, determinedly wanted a club and did not want to be in Brooks’s anyway, despite or maybe because of the fact that it provided every single member of Melbourne’s 1834 Cabinet. They were in a semi-Groucho Marx position. Eventually the Whigs, notably Edward Ellice, Lord Grey’s brother-in-law and his Chief Whip at the time of the Reform Bill, later Secretary of State for War, decided that unless they wished the Radicals to go off on their own, they had little choice but to join with them in forming a new model club. And out of that decision the Reform Club emerged, as an entity in 1836, as a complete and splendid edifice by 1843.
The ‘reformers’, however, although they did not want to imitate the old, aristocratic, proprietary gaming clubs, were not looking for the simple life. ‘The family motto is service,’ said a recent Lord Rothschild, ‘and by God we get it.’ The ‘reformers’ were looking for the best, and by God they got it. The names most naturally associated with the first twenty years of the Club are neither Ellice nor Molesworth, nor even Russell or Palmerston, but Charles Barry, the architect, and Alexis Soyer, the cook. And what remarkable jobs they both made of their confections, Barry’s happily the longer lasting. It makes his neighbouring creations, the Travellers Club and Bridgewater House, look inferior, the first too cautious, the second too imitative, and his most massive monument the Palace of Westminster too undisciplined.
Soyer could not create quite so permanently, although he did pretty well by chef-ly standards. It is interesting to note that the financial relations of neither with the Club were wholly smooth. The ‘reformers’ believed in the best, but they did not believe in paying more for it than the going rate. Barry and the General Committee went to arbitration before his total fee of £3934 (I suppose about the equivalent of £150,000 today) was agreed. Soyer had many disputes on issues from butchers’ bills to insolence to members before he finally resigned in 1850.