Portraits and Miniatures

by Roy Jenkins

  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.

  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 Unionist 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 Unionists, 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.

  The two university clubs of Pall Mall came a little, but not much, before the Reform Club. They were like it in looking to a limited and defined catchment area (members of the two ancient universities) for members, although supplying general social club facilities. They none the less managed to achieve a subtle but considerable difference of spirit between themselves, and existed independently and within about six hundred yards of each other for nearly 150 years. They stood like two gatehouses, the one the most easterly and the other the most westerly of the Pall Mall clubs.

  The United University Club was the easterly one and was also the earliest of the Pall Mall clubhouses. It was designed by William Wilkins and completed in 1823. Wilkins was a prolific and distinguished early-nineteenth-century architect. He had already designed Haileybury School and Downing College, Cambridge, as well as substantially embellishing King’s College, and in particular adding the screen which fronts on to King’s Parade, in that university. Subsequently he was to do the National Gallery and the central building of University College, London.

  Next in Pall Mall came Nash’s United Services Club (now the Institute of Directors) in 1827, then Decimus Burton’s Athenaeum in 1830, then Barry’s relatively modest and tentative Travellers Club in 1832, and Smirke’s now demolished Carlton completed in 1833, and then the westerly gatehouse of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in 1838. This was also by Smirke, whose other London works were the Royal Opera House, the old General Post Office in St Martin’s-le-Grand, and the British Museum. No one could say that the new clubs did not employ the most notable and fashionable of architects. The group was crowned with the completion in 1843 of the Reform clubhouse, Barry having gained greatly in confidence and flamboyance over the eleven years since the Travellers. The Junior Carlton, by Brandon, since gone, was added on the north side of the street, in the 1860s. And in 1911 came the last great clubhouse to be built in London. Mewès and Davis gave the Royal Automobile Club the external appearance of a Beaux-Arts American railroad station and the internal feel of a Cunard liner.

  Long before amalgamation there were two other developments in the university club field. In 1864, waiting lists being long at both the others, the New University Club was set up, and in 1867-8 Alfred Waterhouse built it a gothic clubhouse on the upper west side of St James’s Street. Betjeman described Waterhouse as the greatest English architect since Wren, but, whether or not this was true, photographs do not suggest that his New University Club was his greatest success. It was more comparable with the Broad Street front of Balliol College, Oxford, than with his Manchester Town Hall, or the Natural History Museum in South Kensington or St Paul’s School
in Hammersmith (also, alas, demolished) or his second and unforgettable London club building, the National Liberal Club, completed in 1886.

  Even if inferior to those pinnacled Liberal glories in Whitehall Gardens, the New University Club did not suffer from F. E. Smith’s pretence that he had mistaken it for a public lavatory, perhaps only because it was less conveniently placed for his walk from the Temple to the House of Commons. It did, however, suffer from declining fortunes, demolition, and amalgamation with the United University Club in 1938. In the meantime, that club had decided it needed a more opulent and modern, even if less distinguished, façade than that with which Wilkins had provided it. Accordingly, in 1906-7 it commissioned Reginald Blomfield to re-model the clubhouse in what Pevsner disparagingly described as his Champs Elysées style. At the Oxford and Cambridge Club Blomfield was also set loose to design the entrance and the staircase as well as, after an interval, adding the bedroom floor. But Smirke’s framework, unlike that of Wilkins, was allowed to survive. It was therefore desirable that, when the amalgamation of 1972 took place, the Oxford and Cambridge Club was allowed to provide the clubhouse even though the United University Club provided most of the officers.

  The combined club has since prospered. But, unlike the Reform, which had no particular obligation to do so, it has not accepted women as full members. This is an anomaly for a club called the United Oxford and Cambridge University Club, for both those universities are now 40 per cent female.

  Ten Pieces of Wine Nonsense

  This is based on a not very serious talk delivered to the Wine Guild in March 1988.

  My Reputation both as a wine drinker and as a wine expert has long been exaggerated. While this has I think done me some harm politically, it carries with it the partly compensating advantage that some (but not all) hosts tend to give me better wine than they might otherwise do. Occasionally indeed they are misled by my alleged partiality for claret by providing such sustenance at all times and in all circumstances, as for example before or after a speech, when I would much rather have a stimulating or reviving whisky. However, they are right to the extent that, in so far as I know anything about wine, my knowledge is confined to the red wines of Bordeaux. It is not that I do not like Burgundy. It is simply that I do not know how to choose it.

  So you must expect a certain amount of bias in the following bits of wine gossip, anecdotes or old wives’ tales that I have randomly put together in no particular framework or order except for making them add up to ten.

  (1) Why is it that the greatest wines come from the very limits at which you can effectively produce wine of any sort. If you draw an arc from the mouth of the Gironde, looping around the Loire (not much great wine there) to, say Autun at the eastern end of Burgundy, then turning north to skirt Epernay and Reims in Champagne before turning east to take in the Mosel and the Rheingau, you will find with a minor exception to which I will come in a moment that there is nothing produced to the north or the west of it. It is the frontier of the European empire of Bacchus. The exception is southern England. As yet that produces no red wine, so I am essentially unqualified to judge, although remaining in this respect a little sceptical about the glories or the value for money of Hampshire. But does this pattern of Ultima Thule being the best suggest that if there were a climatic change, as was strongly prophesied a few years ago, the frontier would move north? Would the Bordelais become a more robust and less delicate region like the slopes of the Ebro, and the Weald and the Thames Valley become the difficult but fine new frontier region? Not, I think, in under a hundred years or so. I cannot see Château Moulsford replacing Château Mouton in less time than that.

  (2) How does New World wine compare with Old? I recently had to make two Australian bicentenary speeches and have aroused marked lack of enthusiasm by giving them what I thought was the relative accolade of being the third-best producer of red wine in the world. (My unspoken premise was that the second place should go to California, although maybe Spain ought to have been next, giving Australia only the fourth plinth.) More important than this, however, is how the ‘steady climate’ New World wines come out compared with the meteorological vagaries of Bordeaux and Burgundy. They always do very well on blindfold tastings. But that is a doubtful concours. It is, in my view, always better to know what you are tasting. It gives much more authority to your pronouncements. I also think that removing the variation of years from the equation (which the Californian or Australian climate effectively does) takes about a third of the fun out of wine. In addition, for my money, Bordeaux gives if not a bigger bang as least a subtler taste for a buck than California does. I therefore remain a strong and prejudiced Old World partisan.

  (3) What is the best rule for dealing with an unfamiliar restaurant wine list of moderate quality when parsimony makes one loath to go above the châteaux that are as unknown as is the list itself? The answer in my view is in such circumstances always go for the Graves. There is hardly such a thing as a bad red Graves. In any event it is of course very foolish ever to order wine of more than a modest quality in a restaurant. To pay 100 per cent (at least) mark-up on expensive wine is more akin to lunacy than to generosity. The sommelier of a distinguished Oxfordshire hotel/restaurant once won my heart by flatteringly rejecting my tentative order of about the fourth cheapest claret and saying, ‘Oh, Mr Jenkins, don’t waste your money. You’ll have much better wine than that at home. I’d have the house red if I were you.’

  (4) I once amused myself when I was President of the European Commission by arranging the main countries of the Community according to different categories of quality in their governments’ attributes, some of them frivolous as well as specialized to an official visitor. Thus for the ruthless brio of their motor-cycle escorts I put the French easily first, with the Italians second and the British and the Germans third and fourth. (It should be added that had the test been the performance of the economy the Germans, although not the British, would have moved markedly up.) On the quality of government entertaining, however, I without hesitation give the accolade to the British, with the Italians second, the French only third and the Germans again fourth. This was based entirely on the quality of the wine. The Elysée could not begin to rival the 1945 and 1961 first growths which, when I was last a minister, still lurked in the cellars of the Whitehall Hospitality Department.

  (5) Do I believe that I can perform precise feats of wine recognition? Alas, no, except purely by accident or by lucky cheating. I think it is a gift like ‘perfect pitch’ and I do not have it. My best recipe for recognizing is to get a quick look at the label. The second best is to know approximately what your host has in his cellar, and then decide at what grade in his stock he is most likely to rate you and his other guests.

  (6) What is the greatest wine feast I have ever had? In 1975 I attended a dinner for eight at which seven different bottles were provided. They were, believe it or not, Lafite 1953, Margaux 1929, Cheval Blanc 1934, Lafite 1961, Margaux 1900, Haut Brion 1929 and Haut Brion 1934. The host was, as the Sunday Times would now call him, Lord Victor Rothschild. He had probably acquired most of them for little more than £2 or £3 a bottle, and the replacement cost, while already considerable, would in 1975 have been barely a tenth of what it is today. The then Governor of the Bank of England, who was also present, might have found the bottles a more appreciating addition to his reserves than gold or dollars, let alone sterling.

  (7) What is the most spectacular wine present I have ever received? I have two candidates. In 1966 at a Bristol banquet I paid tribute to a great Bristol wine merchant, with whom I had long had dealings. He responded by sending me a single bottle of Lafite 1897. When we drank it about a decade later I managed what with shrinkage and ullage to get from it only about two-thirds of a decanter. It had a strange, haunting taste.

  Then in 1979 I sat next to a French minister at a Council of Ministers lunch. His constituency was centred on Libourne in the Gironde. I expressed some interest in certain areas of his domaine, most
notably Pomerol. Two weeks later he sent me a case of Pétrus 1970. Two months after that he committed suicide. I do not know what the moral of that is.

  (8) What is my best example of a throwaway wine remark? ‘We always drink the bad years frappé with the fish,’ I was once told at Château Lafite, as the unmistakable label with a little 1968 on it was brought in from the refrigerator.

  (9) Can you make too much fuss about wine? Yes certainly, in at least three ways. First by believing that if the wine is sufficiently splendid you do not need enough of it. Excessive reverence to about the equivalent of half an egg-cup is no way of enjoying oneself or of entertaining one’s guests. Second, by putting the bottle in horrible and pointless baskets or silver trolleys, a bogus and inconvenient piece of Edwardian vulgarity which has lingered on. Third, if you get too excited about what wine you drink with what food. I have always found red wine perfectly good with chicken, or with sole or halibut or turbot.

  (10) What is the most meaningless wine question? To my mind it makes no more sense to ask what is your favourite wine than to ask what is your favourite thread in a great tapestry that dominates a room, or to suggest that if you like a book you ought to go on reading it over and over again to the exclusion of all others. The occasional drinking of great wines needs a background of ordinary everyday drinking against which to stand out, and even amongst the stars it is the comparison with their peers that provides half the enjoyment.