Boodle’s
Established: 1762
“I like this
Club.”
-Winston
Churchill
Addresses
1762-1782:
49-51 Pall Mall
From
1782: 28 St. James’s Street, SW1
Entry
Restrictions
Men only;
from the late 1980s, women can obtain Associate Membership
Famous Members
David
Hume
Adam
Smith
Edward
Gibbon
Beau
Brummel
William
Wilberforce
Laurence
Olivier
Lord
Cherwell
Winston
Churchill (Honorary Member)
Harold
MacMillan
Ian Fleming
Skills Augmented:
Accountancy; Animal Husbandry (Biology); Fishing;
Ride: Horse; Rifle; Track
Areas of Speciality:
Fly-fishing; Fox-hunting; Horse Racing; Coarse
Fishing; Pheasant Shooting; Grouse Hunting
History
Lord
Shelburne – the future Marquess of Lansdowne and Prime Minister - founded this
club as think-tank for his political career in 1762. The original address was
at 49-51 Pall Mall; in 1782, another club – the Sçavoir Vivre – became defunct
and Sherburne’s organisation took over their premises at 28 St. James’s Street.
Boodle’s has been there ever since.
The Club has
been called Boodle’s since very early days, the name deriving from that of its
first head waiter Edwin Boodle. The building was designed by the architect John
Crunden in 1775 and the ground floor underwent a refurbishment between the
years 1821 and 1834 organised by John Buonarotti Papworth.
Although it
started life as a Tory establishment, Boodle’s rapidly shed its political raison d’etre and began accepting
members from both sides of the ideological divide. More than anything, Boodle’s
is known as a retreat for country gentlemen who need to escape from the
pressures of Town whenever business takes them there. Boodle’s is a tweedy,
horse-y kind of a place, a retreat for readers of “Country Life” magazine.
Open fires
are a theme in the lounges here as are oil paintings of rural scenes and
especially of prize-winning horses and other domestic animals. Like White’s,
Boodle’s has a grand bow window overlooking the street; one Duke who favoured
this position answered, when asked why he liked sitting there, “I like to see
the damned people getting wet.”
In the last
third of last century next-door property development allowed Boodle’s to take
advantage of the construction and build a ladies’ lounge. This is a
subterranean extension which encroaches onto the neighbouring block and
resembles the main bar of a luxury liner. This breaking-down of the “Men Only”
prerogative has won Boodle’s many friends amid the younger generations and has
bolstered membership through recent financial downturns.
Ian Fleming
liked Boodle’s and, in his James Bond books, based M’s fictitious gentlemen’s
Club Blades on it. Many of the descriptions of Blades accord well with member’s
knowledge of their real life establishment
*****
“‘You know
that terrible stuff that Sir Miles always drinks? That Algerian red wine that
the wine committee won’t even allow on the wine list. They only have it in the
Club to please Sir Miles. Well, he explained to me once that in the Navy they
used to call it the Infuriator because if you drank too much of it, it
seems it puts you in a rage. Well now, in the ten years that that I’ve had the
pleasure of looking after Sir Miles, he’s never ordered more than half a carafe
of the stuff.’ Porterfield’s benign, almost priestly countenance assumed an
expression of theatrical solemnity as if he had read something really terrible
in the tea leaves. ‘Then what happens today?’ Lily clasped her hands tensely
and bent her head fractionally closer to get the full impact of the news. ‘The
old man says, “Porterfield. A bottle of the Infuriator. You understand? A full bottle!” So of course I didn’t say anything
but went off and brought it to him. But you mark my words, Lily,’ he noticed a
lifted hand down the long room and moved off, ‘there’s something hit Sir Miles
hard this morning and no mistake.’”
- Ian
Fleming, The Man with
the Golden Gun
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