In architecture, gastronomy, membership and purpose, the Reform Club was very much a creation of its age. It would be impossible to imagine its foundation twenty or thirty years earlier. Even its name is, I suppose, the most contemporary - and the most ideological - ever given to a major and lasting London club. The early membership was also symbolic of the period. The franchise had been significantly extended and made more rational in 1832, but it had certainly not been democratized. The Reform Club matched the franchise. It did not turn its back on the landed aristocracy any more than did the Liberal Party of Russell, Palmerston or Hartington. But it was in no way based upon aristocratic connection. Its members were prosperous, established, confident. There were few poor men amongst them. But its doors were more open to new men and to new categories - merchants, solicitors, surgeons, architects, professional men of letters and journalists, all categories alleged to be excluded from the generality of the clubs of the period. The position of the Club was thus assured throughout the three decades and a little more between the first and the second Reform Bills.
During its first half century the Reform Club was intensely political. The stated qualification for membership - or even for being introduced as a guest - was that of being a ‘reformer’, which may be thought not to be a very precise category. But it was interpreted sufficiently rigidly, and partisanly, that as late as the general election of 1880 a member was expelled for the offence of having publicly voted for a Conservative candidate.
Throughout this period the Club was essentially parliamentary as well as political. This did not mean that anything like a majority of its members were MPs. Despite a more ‘serious’ approach, it never rivalled Brooks’s record of having as a good half of its early members men who at some time in their lives were members of one House or the other (or both). But the nineteenth-century Reform Club probably contained more members who wanted to be MPs and were therefore happy that the tone should be taken from the Liberal benches at Westminster.
This showed itself in the library with its remarkable collection of parliamentary papers. It showed itself in the fact that Members of Parliament were admitted as members outside the quota and almost without question, provided they did not sit on the wrong side of the House. And, most clearly of all, it showed itself in the gearing of club hours to parliamentary habits. The hours were generous enough in any event. There was no question of weekend closing and refuge having to be sought in lesser establishments. On each day of the seven the clubhouse was open from eight in the morning until two the following morning, unless either House of Parliament should sit later, in which case the club was to remain open until an hour after the adjournment. To some substantial extent the clubhouse was run as an annexe to the Palace of Westminster, which I suppose their common architect, even though he gave them no common architectural style, made appropriate. Whether or not supper was laid out in the Coffee Room depended upon whether the House was sitting after 10 p.m.
The political if not the parliamentary emphasis was brought to an end by the Liberal union ist Home Rule split of 1886. It was not as visceral for the Reform Club as for Brooks’s which was based more on family tradition and where there followed a fine outbreak of mutual blackballing of the sons of prominent members. In the Reform, perhaps because it was less tightly knit, there was less bitterness. If the Club was not to be destroyed they had to live together in an approach to mutual tolerance, as is epitomized in the 1890 drawing of members which now hangs in the Audience Room. Of the nine most visible, seated in unnatural proximity, three were union ists, six were Gladstonians. It was like the Opposition front bench in the House of Commons, where they also sat cheek by jowl, one occasionally advancing to the despatch box to excoriate half the others.
However, there could no longer be any question of the Club applying Liberal political tests. By 1898, three of the five trustees were serving in a predominantly Conservative government. In the following year, nevertheless, the meeting to confirm the choice of Campbell-Bannerman as Liberal leader was held in the Club, the new leader himself having resisted abandoning ‘our hold on so excellent a property’. Asquith was also elected there in 1908, and eight and three-quarter years after that summoned the last general Liberal Party meeting ever to be held in the Club in order to explain why he could not serve in the Lloyd George coalition. It was an appropriate terminus ad quem. For thirty years, by that time, the Reform as a Liberal club had been a chicken running round with its head cut off. As a general club, however, it had a secure hold on life, which it has more than since maintained. It has continued to be in many ways a club of government, much involved with the public affairs of the nation, but not one to which even the loosest sort of political test could be applied. Its 1880 rule, exercised at either of the 1980s general elections, would probably have halved the membership.