Savile Club

Savile Club
	Front of the clubhouse in 2023
Founded	1868; 156 years ago
Type	Gentlemen's club
Location	69 Brook Street, London W1; (the clubhouse since 1927);
Website	savileclub.co.uk

The Savile Club is a traditional gentlemen's club in London that was founded in 1868. Located in fashionable and historically significant Mayfair, its membership, past and present, includes many prominent names.

Changing premises

Initially calling itself the New Club, it grew rapidly, outgrowing its first-floor rooms overlooking Trafalgar Square at 9 Spring Gardens and moving to the second floor. It then moved to 15 Savile Row in 1871, where it changed its name to the Savile Club, before lack of space forced the club to move again in 1882, this time to 107 Piccadilly, a bow-windowed building owned by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery. With its views over Green Park, it was described by the members as the "ideal clubhouse". However, after 50 years' residence, demolition of the building next door to create the Park Lane Hotel caused the old clubhouse such structural problems that, in 1927, the club moved to its present home at 69 Brook Street in Mayfair, a house built with leases granted by the Duke of Westminster in the mid-1720s. In 1850, Edward Digby, 2nd Earl Digby commissioned Thomas Cundy II to add the Doric porch to No 69, satisfying a Victorian desire for greater privacy as well as warmth. This had previously been occupied by the Dowager Duchess of Cleveland from 1866 to 1883 and was later the former home of "Loulou" Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt, a Liberal Party cabinet minister, and his wife Mary Ethel Harcourt, Viscountess Harcourt. The building, a combination of 69 and 71 Brook Street, owes its extravagant Dix-huitième interior to Walter Hayes Burns, the father of Lady Harcourt and the brother-in-law of financier J. P. Morgan, who commissioned William Bouwens van der Boijen of Paris to adapt it for his wife Mary Lyman Morgan to entertain in a suitable style at home. It thus includes an elegant hall, a grand staircase and a lavish Louis XV-style ballroom. Following the marriage of her youngest daughter in 1926, Lady Harcourt decided to dispose of the lease of Brook Street, which she did 12 months later to the Savile Club.^[1]

Savilians

Savile Club members are known as Savilians and the Club's motto of Sodalitas Convivium implies convivial companionship. The traditional mainstays of the Savile are food and drink, good conversation, playing bridge and poker, and Savile Snooker. This is a 19th-century version of the game, whose rules were first written down in the mid-20th century by Stephen Potter. It is a form of volunteer snooker, with some unusual features (the brown ball is spotted behind baulk on the opposite equivalent of the black spot, and counts eight; yellow and green are not used, "push shots" are allowed, fouling a ball with one's tie has no penalty, and sinking two reds at once means a score of two, for example).^[1]

The dining room includes two long club tables, derived from the Club's original table d'hôte (a contrast to the contemporary habit of other clubs, where members tended to eat à la carte at small separate tables). In the Victorian period, the Savile was known for its freedom of conversation and conviviality.

Evolution

Some traditions have been lost: regular cigar club dinners went with the smoking ban, but have since been revived in memoriam on the terrace (weather permitting); "the penny game" (a form of bowls, using coins rolled down grooves in the banisters of the grand curving staircase), disappeared with decimalisation; Friday-night candlelit dinners in the Ballroom for wives and girlfriends disappeared with changes in fashions and attitudes. The musical tradition continues, with informal lunchtime and evening concerts, jazz evenings, sponsorship of music students and an annual St Cecilia's Day concert, where Club members perform. A strong science connection has been revived with regular "Science at the Savile" talks. Other traditions have evolved: the preferred dress is still jacket and tie, but the code has been relaxed slightly to allow for the less formal attire worn in offices today; mobile phones are generally banned but can be used in the Club's old telephone area.^[1]

Prominent members

Acting and the theatre

Art, illustration and cartoons

Broadcasting and journalism

Films

Sir Michael Balcon
Sir Charlie Chaplin, KBE (temp. Hon. Member in 1956)
Joseph McGrath
Gareth Neame, OBE, DL
Ronald Neame, CBE, BSC
Michael Powell
Emeric Pressburger

History and the military

Mathematics and computing

Medicine

Sir Frederick Grant Banting, KBE, MC, FRS (Hon. Member in 1932)
Arthur Bell, paediatrician (Club Chairman)^[3]
Sir Bryan Donkin
George Fayad
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, OM, PRS
Charles Rycroft

Music

Politics and political theory

Science

Writing

Other occupations

Colonel Eustace Balfour (architecture)
John Browne, Baron Browne of Madingley, FRS (industry)
Stanley Kalms, Baron Kalms of Edgware (industry)
Sir Sidney Colvin (museums)
Mandell Creighton (CoE bishop)
C. B. Fry (sports)
Henry Sidgwick (philosopher and economist)

Fictitious members of the Savile Club include Bill Haydon, the aristocratic polymath and British intelligence agent at the heart of John le Carré's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and William French, wine merchant and Master of Wine (failed), in Alexander McCall Smith’s The Dog Who Came in from the Cold.

References

^ ^a ^b ^c Garrett Anderson. Hang Your Halo in the Hall: the Savile Club from 1868 (1993)
^ Autobiography, With Brush and Pencil, published 1925
^ "Arthur Doyne Courtenay Bell", rcplondon.ac.uk, accessed 30 October 2023
^ Composers at the Savile Club, SOMM CD 0601 (2019)
^ "Savile Club Library".
^ Kipling, Rudyard (1990). Pinney, Thomas (ed.). Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0521355155. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
^ John Howard Wilson, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), ISBN 0-8386-3885-6
^ James Sully, "My Life and Friends. A Psychologist's Memories" (E. P. Dutton & Company, New York, University of California, 1918), ISBN 978-1371590116

Bibliography

Garrett Anderson, "Hang Your Halo in the Hall!": The Savile Club from 1868 (The Savile Club, 1993)
Anon, The Savile Club 1868–1958 (privately printed for members of the Club, c. 1958)
Anon, The Savile Club 1868–1923 (privately printed for the committee of the Club, 1923)
Clive Aslet, Seduced by the dix-huitième: 69-71, Brook Street, Mayfair W1, the Home of the Savile Club (Country Life, 2014)
Jeremy Barlow. Notes to Composers at the Savile Club, SOMM CD 0601 (2019)
Morton Cohen. Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship (1965)
Lejeune, Anthony (2012). The Gentlemen's Clubs of London. London: Stacey International. ISBN 978-1-906768-20-1.
Robin McDouall, Clubland Cooking (Phaidon Press, 1974)
Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ISBN 978-0-230-12076-1.
Matthew Parris, Great Parliamentary Scandals (Robson Books, 1995)
Thévoz, Seth Alexander (2018). Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs. London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-78453-818-7.
Thévoz, Seth Alexander (2022). Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs. London: Robinson/Little, Brown. ISBN 978-1-47214-646-5.