Brooks's...

Brooks’s

Established: 1764

 

“There was something peculiar about a Whig house and a certain similarity between them. The black and white marble hall; the painted ceiling; the Roman busts; the pictures which several generations of young noblemen had brought back from their European tours (then a necessary part of education); the fine library, and a certain air of distinction.”

-Harold Macmillan, The Past Masters

Address:

St. James’s Street, W1

Entry Restrictions

Men only; women are allowed as evening guests on special occasions

 

Famous Members

Charles James Fox (1749-1806)

William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)

Robert Peel (1788-1850)

Lord Halifax (1881-1959)

Harold Macmillan (1894-1986)

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003)

 

Skills Augmented:

Accounting; Bargain; Credit Rating; Gambling; Law;

Areas of Speciality:

Liberal British Politics; Journalistic Policy; Business & Finance; Current Political Trends; Foreign Affairs; Backgammon

 

History

Brooks’s was first established at a private premises in Pall Mall, from a group of 27 gentlemen including four dukes. Its purpose was to provide a meeting place for those of Whig sensibilities, in direct opposition to those Tory members of Whites. The original meeting place was “farmed” or managed by Scots Club organiser William Macall, known more generally as William Almack, who passed management over to his lieutenant – a fellow named Brooks – who facilitated the move to the new location in St. James’s Street. Although Mr Brooks died only three years after the new premises was established, the name stuck.

The Club building was designed and built by architect Henry Holland and was finished in 1778; in aspect, it resembles a grand country house, with rooms for backgammon and an extensive library. It lies directly across the road from Boodle’s, and the two Tory Clubs – White’s and the Carlton Club – are just down the road. A smaller associated Club – the St. James – occupied the block next door; Brooks’s took over this establishment in 1978, amalgamating the two organisations under the Brooks’s title.

The original purpose of the Club was to provide a home away from home for gentlemen of Whiggish persuasion, to which they could retire whenever it suited them (and whenever domestic life became too unbearable). Gambling was a prevalent activity and outrageous amounts of money where reported to have changed hands there. Notably amongst the Clubs of London, Brooks’s instituted a tradition whereby the subscription fee for membership was deducted from the pay-out from a member’s gambling when they went to cash in their chips; it was considered unseemly to have to present a member with a bill for their membership dues.

Gambling was a somewhat alarming addiction at Brooks’s from the early days, with sessions of whist carrying on for consecutive days and nights at a time. The Whig politician Charles James Fox was known as a reckless and enthusiastic game-player and often bankrupted himself, relying upon his fellow members to bail him out of financial difficulties on several occasions. A certain Mr Thynne resigned in disgust from the Club for having won at cards only £12,000 in two months; the Club records note this event with the comment, “and that he may never return is the ardent wish of members”. Like White’s, Brooks’s has a betting book wherein the more unusual wagers are recorded for posterity; one bet from 1785 runs to the effect that "Ld. Cholmondeley [pronounced ‘Chumley’] has given two guineas to Ld. Derby, to receive 500 Gs whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a balloon one thousand yards from the Earth." The outcome from this wager is not appended.

From the start, Brooks’s aimed to provided substantial meals for its members and in this it succeeded very well. However, variety was not a spice that prevailed in the Club’s kitchens. Bored by the unending repetition of the bill of fare, members set up a protest which resulted in the creation of Watier’s, an on-site restaurant attached to the Club, in 1806.

A fire severely damaged the Great Subscription Room and the front morning room directly below it in the 1970s but this wasn’t the worst calamity to hit the place: in 1974, IRA terrorists threw a bomb into the outer dining room around 10 o’clock in the evening. The blast succeeded in wounding three waiters closing up after the day’s trade but missed the Home Secretary – a Club member – who, it seems, was the intended target of the attack.

Brooks’s has a long and distinguished membership and is acutely sensitive to the need for a tradition of family members. There are members who can trace their forebears back to seven or eight generations as members of the Club. With the amalgamation of the St. James’s Club in the 1970s, entry was opened to European dignitaries, literati and members of the diplomatic set, connexions which have strengthened and broadened the society of the Club. It remains to this day, one of London’s most exclusive gentlemen’s Clubs.

 

“That evening I was to dine with the Chancellor who had been saying to me for some days that he ‘had to talk to me alone, and would take me out to Brooks’s’. So we drove off in his great big Daimler, unloaded ourselves halfway up St. James’s Street and went into the Club. Upstairs is the gaming table with a slice cut out to give room for Charles James Fox’s tummy. At the bar down below were Mark Bonham-Carter and other willowy young men. It’s a classy Club, not at all like the Garrick, and after we’d had a drink we went into the dining room and had claret and gulls’ eggs and were gentlemen together.”

-The Crossman Diaries

 

Boodle's

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

 

London Club Membership Rules...

“‘Come and dine with me.’

‘I am not a member of the club.’

‘We don’t care at all about that. Anybody can take in anybody.’

‘Does not that make it promiscuous?’

‘Well, no; I don’t know that it does. It seems to go on very well. I daresay there are some cads there sometimes. But I don’t know where one doesn’t meet cads. There are plenty in the House of Commons.’”

-Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children.

An old stand-by for newcomers to Call of Cthulhu is to play the Dilletante character. The virtue of this type of role is that it comes with money, and has a certain amount of social cachet; the downside is that Dilletantes are usually bland and unfocussed: players usually end up recreating the “upper-class twit” à la Wodehouse, or trying to emulate Jay Gatsby. These characters have cash and position, but it’s rare that they have anything else.

Their virtue is that they give inexperienced players an easy entrée to the world – kind of like coddling an egg; the problem with them is that they usually have so little to offer an investigation.

These rules provide a way around these issues. By having a Dilletante character become a member of an established Club, it gives them a focus and a reason to keep an eye on their precious Credit Rating (and, it must be said, a reason for insidious Keepers to try and mess with said Rating!). It no longer becomes a given that goes with the territory; it’s now a very real process that the character has to monitor carefully.

(Please note that the bulk of this material concerns English characters centred around London society. There were Gentleman’s Clubs in New York and Boston as well (even American versions of the British ones) so if your campaign is a trans-Atlantic one, use these guidelines as a template for establishing Clubs in those locales. But for now, back to Old Blighty:)

All Dilletante characters – including the women, but not Americans - will have attended either Oxford or Cambridge, if desired, and clear rivalries exist between the two universities. As well, most characters will have residences either in the country or in “Town” (i.e. London) and quite naturally will have Club memberships. These Clubs were established to provide networking opportunities for individuals with particular hobbies, philosophies, backgrounds, or talents in common: thus membership to these associations can augment characters’ abilities. Except where noted, in addition to information-gathering and skill-augmentation, Clubs have the practical value of being a ‘home away from home’: meals and rooms are available to members at short notice, and members often used their Club as a base when arriving back from overseas or before heading out of the country. Sometimes, after a full night of theatres and restaurants, the Club was a good place to crash rather than hauling oneself all the way home.

*****

General Information & Roleplaying Mechanics:

Membership

“It would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than that one terrible bore should be admitted...”

-A member of the Garrick Club, 1870

Eligible characters should divide their starting Credit Rating by 30 to determine how many Clubs that they are members of (any fractions can be used to gain “associate membership” to another Club, which allows access but does not augment skills – see below). Thus an eligible character with a 42% Credit Rating could be a full member of Brooks’s and an associate member of the Carlton.

Membership is not automatic; one must be nominated by an existing Club member and voted in by the other members. New characters may assume that they were nominated by their fathers, uncles, or guardians; existing characters must roleplay their way in – working with the Keeper to find a sponsor and endure the voting session – or resort to a simple mechanic of rolling under their Credit Rating to win the vote.

Failing to gain entry to a particular Club usually means no later attempt is possible; however, this is not hard-and-fast. Clubs keep records of failed attempts at membership and the internal rumour-mill will keep replaying the reasons why a fellow was unsuccessful. Usually, the pertinent reason for being denied entry – poor behaviour in Court, a scandalous affair, or something similar – will need to be addressed before a second attempt can be made; with some of the political Clubs a simple change in government is enough to clean the slate. Be aware though, that the one who nominates a black-balled candidate is often required to resign their own membership for bringing forward such an eminently unsuitable prospective member.

Full membership allows the character to freely access the facilities available at the Club’s headquarters. These include rooms to spend the night, with meals provided, access to the bar (including running an ongoing tab), the library (if present), the dining room, newspapers, billiards rooms, card tables, and other useful impedimenta. The full member also has access to VIP areas established at major sporting events (such as Ascot) and gains reduced entrance fees – or free entry – to various theatre and gallery events. They have the right to vote in regard to membership nominations, or changes to the Club’s rules or management. They receive regular newsletters outlining forthcoming events and are automatically invited to functions held on the Club’s grounds. They may bring guests into the Club (if this is allowed), but must observe their behaviour and keep to those areas where guests are tolerated.

Club membership is paid for by subscription. This is normally several hundred guineas per annum and is paid generally each August. Non-payment, or delayed payment, will result in sharp drops in the character’s Credit Rating skill until the situation is rectified. In extreme cases, the character may be denied access to Club facilities, or may even be asked to resign their membership!

If - Heaven forbid! – your Credit Rating drops, for every 30 points lost, you lose access to one of your Clubs. Each time you try to enter a Club, roll your Credit Rating: if you fail, the Club denies you access … and probably asks you to pay your bill!

Associate membership means that you can enter the dining room, or bar, of the Club and relax in certain of the lounges. You do not have voting rights, cannot operate a tab longer than your present attendance, and you do not have residential options. You may receive invitations to events, as well as any newsletters the Club produces, but you can be asked to vacate the premises if “secret Club business” is about to take place there. You may not bring guests. As well, entry is not free: an associate member must sign in with the porter at the front desk and tender a nominal entry fee (anywhere from £1 to £100, depending on the establishment).

Characters from mainland Europe, or America, may be able to wangle associate membership to a Club, if they gain sponsorship from four full-members and do not get “black-balled” by a secret ballot during the consideration of their membership. Such characters must have at least 75% in their Credit Rating skill and then may only join one Club. When applying to join, roll your Credit Rating: if you roll above this number, you’ve been voted out!

Honorary membership to any Club is the exclusive preserve of Royalty (usually English Royalty, but this is sometimes waived in favour of European heads of state). The only non-Royal to have been awarded this distinction is Sir Winston Churchill.

Entry Restrictions

Clubs, by their very nature, aren’t open to everyone. Generally speaking, to be a member of a Gentleman’s Club, you need to be a gentleman, in the strictest sense of the word. Female characters have few options in club-land; although, after World War One, new Clubs which allowed female membership came into being.

Added to this, many Clubs accepted members of a particular political stripe, or who had served in the military. Still others accepted members who had certain accomplishments in academic or theological circles. Others required more nebulous qualifications, such as the ability to speak engagingly at a public dinner, or to be a “good sport”. Where these limitations exist, they will be highlighted in the Club’s description.

Famous Members

Sometimes, it’s cool to stumble into a noteworthy individual while on the trail of an investigation: Clubs are natural places where this can happen. Keepers who enjoy having their players rubbing shoulders with the famous, may check the list provided with each Club’s description and, if the dates suit, can work a meeting into their story.

Conduct

“A member of White’s once said that a Club ought to have only two rules: 1) That every member should pay his subscription, 2) That he should behave like a gentleman. Inevitably, there are behavioural lapses...”

-Anthony Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London

While at one’s Club, one is able to “let one’s hair down”; however, one should always be mindful that the older and more influential members are always on hand to assess one’s performance. No less a person than the Prince of Wales has been forced to resign from their Club for breaking the rules (smoking inside, in his case).

No-one ever wanted to attract the title of Club Bore, despite the fact that every Club has one. Worse still, was the crime of letting-in someone completely tedious to bother the rest of the members, either as a guest or as a nominated potential member. Doing so could get you barred, or ditched!

Guests are always tricky, especially if they are members of a rival Club. Most Clubs had a small room just inside the front door to which one could withdraw with one’s stockbroker, or lawyer, for a quiet conversation; this was usually the limit afforded to the guest of a member as well, although some Clubs were more lenient. Remember that if a guest is required to dine or front the bar during their visit, they or their sponsoring member must pay an entry fee.

Members may never invite guests to stay overnight at the Club. This is quite simply beyond the pale. However, one can arrange for one’s valet or some other member of one’s staff (typically a chauffeur) to lodge with other members of staff at the Club and to carry on their duties for their masters. Of course, their services while at the Club could be called-upon by the rest of the members also, owing to the fact that – while resident - they act under the aegis of the Club, as temporary staff.

During August, a Club may shut down to allow repairs, re-painting or other refurbishment to take place (and to recover from the members’ indiscretions). At these times, which happened once in every five or so years, another Club would sponsor the ousted members, allowing them full privileges at their establishment. At these times, the members of the sponsored Club could suffer a serious social bollocking if their behaviour wasn’t up to snuff.

“They were quite decent little fellows; no trouble. Buy their suits off the peg of course...”

-A Guard’s Club member after billeting the Savile Club

Skills

Each Club has a range of listed skills, which it augments. Characters with full Club membership can add +3 to one of the Club’s listed skills; +6 to another of the listed skills; +9 to another listed skill and +12 to another skill, either adding to their own existing skill, or picking up the skill if their original rank for that ability is “0”. A skill may be modified only once by this method and cannot be raised over 90%.

Other Language refers to a language that is pertinent to the Club’s origin – Greek for the Athenaeum, for example (see your referee if in doubt). Generally speaking the range of languages will be confined to French, German, Latin or Greek: Akkadian or Farsi will have to be heavily justified!

Drive or Ride skills must be pertinent to the Club in question, in order to obtain the benefit (e.g. Ride: Elephant is not a skill that can be gained from attendance to most London Clubs). Unless specified or qualified, Drive refers to Automobiles or Carriages, and Ride to Horses.

Note that Credit Rating is also a skill that can be augmented by membership at certain Clubs, reflecting the prestige that such membership can confer. In these cases, a character’s skill can only be augmented after they have made all of the rolls required to gain admission.

Information gathering

Your Club can be a source of vital information in the course of an Investigation! Generally, the kind of information that one obtains from a Club is of the social type, sometimes referred to as “gossip”. Nevertheless, if one needs to find out about someone’s background - their political leanings, ability to handle finances, general trustworthiness – these things are easily ascertained by an afternoon’s conversation in the Club lounge. Generally each Club has areas of speciality about which information is readily available; more incendiary, or valuable, information can be found depending upon the sort of roll a character comes up with in the course of play. Club members may have heard things about people critical to an ongoing investigation, or Club staff may have revealing “dirt” to dish on fellow members. Occasionally, a waiter may be tempted by a few sovereigns to eavesdrop upon another member’s conversation while pouring the brandy...

Characters seeking such information should make a Luck Roll or a Library Use Roll (whichever is the greater) to determine a result. This roll is modified by and shortfall between the character’s current Credit Rating and their normal score; that is, if for some reason their Credit Rating is suffering a -20% penalty, their competency at sussing out Club information suffers the same penalty.

The range of Club specialities in terms of skills allows other information to be discovered too. If the party’s investigation has unearthed a strange-looking dagger, a day at the Oriental Club might locate someone who had not only seen such a weapon before, but might even know the particular tribe for which it is a feature. Determining a question of Parliamentary procedure, identifying the top-scoring batter during the cricket season in ’03, knowing what sort of engines drive a Sopwith Camel: these are the kinds of knowledge-based answers that a Club’s coterie of experts and aficionados can reveal. Spending a day at the Club and nosing around, allows a character to make a 20% roll against any skill for which the Club is famous, in order to answer a single question.

Embassies

For foreign characters, the Embassy of your nation acts in a similar fashion to a private Club. While membership does not augment your starting skill set, it allows you to sniff out information at a flat 20% for any question, after spending a day there in conversation. Most embassies have bars, lounges and libraries, dining rooms and accommodation for short periods, if needed; at worst, your character might be billeted with a member of the diplomatic staff.

However, if your Credit Rating drops for any reason, the Embassy will bar you - as a poor exemplar, or security risk - in the same manner that a Club does.

“Foreign” Clubs

Many countries on the European mainland had Clubs structured along the same lines as the British ones. In most respects, these are identical to the London premises, although for the most part, they will be older and may espouse certain mystical or quasi-religious activities as part of their traditions. Many university towns have fraternities dedicated to the advancement of learning...or at least of varsity extra-curricular activities. Some of those Heidelberg fencing schools were pretty wild affairs!

 

Clubs in the US were a feature, predicated upon the model demonstrated by the London Society; in fact, many London Clubs opened branch establishments in places like New York, Boston or Washington. Across the Empire, from Johannesburg, to Rangoon, to Melbourne, to Shanghai, Clubs took root and prospered: the defining trait of these establishments is that they were often more luxurious and, if anything, more exclusive than their London archetypes.

Keepers are urged to use one of the London Clubs as a basis for designing these organisations.

*****

White’s

Established: 1693

“...the common rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies...the bane of half the English Nobility.”

-Jonathan Swift

Address(es)

1693 - 1697: 4 Chesterfield Street, W1

1697 - 1753: 5 Chesterfield Street, W1

1753 – Present: 37 St. James’s Street, SW1

Entry Restrictions

Men only; there is a six-year waiting list. Between the years 1783 and 1832, only Tory party members or affiliates could join.

Famous Members

King George II (1683-1760)

Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745)

Spencer Compton, 1^st Earl of Wilmington (1673-1743)

Henry Pelham (1694-1754)

Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1^st Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768)

William Cavendish, 4^th Duke of Devonshire (1720-1764)

John Stuart, 3^rd Earl of Bute (1713-1792)

George Grenville (1712-1770)

Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2^nd Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782)

William Pitt the Elder, 1^st Earl of Chatham (1708-1778)

Augustus FitzRoy, 3^rd Duke of Grafton (1735-1811)

Frederick, Lord North (1732-1792)

William Petty-FitzMaurice, 2^nd Earl of Shelburne (1737-1805)

William Cavendish Bentinck, 3^rd Duke of Portland (1738-1809)

William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)

Henry Addington (1757-1844)

William Wyndham Grenville, 1^st Lord Grenville (1759-1834)

Spencer Perceval (1762-1812)

Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2^nd Earl of Liverpool (1770-1828)

George Canning (1770-1827)

Frederick John Robinson, 1^st Viscount Goderich (1782-1859)

Arthur Wellesley, 1^st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)

Charles Grey, 2^nd Earl Grey (1764-1845)

William Lamb, 2^nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848)

Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850)

Beau Brummell (1778-1840)

Randolph Churchill (1911-1968)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (1909-2000)

Peter Quenell (1905-1993)

David Niven (1910-1983)

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967)

David Cameron (1966-) (Resigned)

Skills Augmented:

Accounting; Bargain; Bicycling; Credit Rating; Drive: Aeroplane; Gambling; Law

Areas of Speciality:

The Tory Party; Business & Finance; Current Political Trends; Avionics; the Tour de France

History

White’s is the oldest and perhaps the most prestigious of the London Clubs. It was first established as “Mrs White’s Chocolate House” in 1693 and was one of a rash of coffee houses which proliferated throughout London at that time. Charles II, alarmed by the number of clandestine, dissenting organisations which grew up around these houses, banned coffee (and chocolate) throughout England, but was forced to rescind the ban eleven days later when real threats of rioting in the streets became an issue.

Mrs White’s Chocolate House was established by an Italian immigrant named Francesco Bianco, but generally known as “Francis White”. In 1697, the coffee house moved across the street where it developed a sort of schizophrenic nature: within White’s was established an ‘Old Club’, an inner circle of operators that were the embryonic form of the later gentlemen’s Club. A ‘Young Club’ was established as well, formed from the group of individuals awaiting entry to the inner circle.

A fire destroyed the premises despite the exertions of member King George II, who urged the bucket lines onto heroic efforts in order to save the building. New premises were obtained at the top end of St. James’s Street and opened for business in 1753, incorporating the Old and the Young Clubs as one entity. The Club – “White’s” - has been at this location ever since.

Initially, the Club was organised along apolitical lines; however, after Prime Minister Pitt resigned his membership of Brooks’s Club down the street for being “too Whiggish” and settled in at White’s, White’s became the unofficial Tory headquarters from about 1783. Once the Carlton Club became established – whose entry demanded Tory party membership – White’s began to blur the political distinction of its membership once more.

The morning room of White’s contains a huge bow window which overlooks the street. Beau Brummell was known to occupy a seat at this viewpoint so that he could comment upon the sartorial quality of the passers-by. It was also at this window that Lord Alvanley won £3,000 betting with a friend as to which of two raindrops would get to the bottom of the window pane first. In later years Sir Winston Churchill, an honorary member of the Club, had a seat reserved for him in this spot.

White’s is known as a gambling establishment and was severely criticised for this fact, as the quote above from Jonathan Swift testifies. There is a “Betting Book” in the Club which details some of the more extravagant wagers that have been conducted on the premises, including a bet that a man couldn’t survive twelve hours underwater; many bets on the outcome of engagements during the Penisular Wars; and a bet by a man with his brother that he would never bet more than a guinea on anything ever again (the amount was for more than a guinea).

 

Within White’s at the start of the Twentieth Century a group of the members developed a fad for bicycling and the Club is known for its interest in cycling events. Indeed, it holds several races during the year along with many bicycle excursions where staff are sent out ahead with picnic hampers to greet the cyclists as they arrive at their destination. During the two World Wars, White’s also supplied its own wings of pilots to the war effort, made up from the aircraft enthusiasts which populated its ranks.

White’s has a close association with the King’s Theatre and the Royal Drury Lane Theatre in the West End and the porter sells reduced-price tickets to productions showing at those venues to Club members.

*****

“‘I live at the Albany,’ said Endymion.

‘You live at the Albany!’ repeated St. Barbe, with an amazed and perturbed expression.

‘I knew I could not be a knight of the garter, or member of White’s – the only two things an Englishman cannot command; but I did think I might some day live at the Albany.’”

-Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion

 

Review: 'The Rats' by James Herbert (RIP)

 

Herbert, James, The Rats, Pan Books/Pan Macmillan/Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London, 1999.

Octavo; paperback; 197pp. Near fine.

 

I’m somewhat in catch-up mode on this one: I’ve never read a James Herbert book before and now, a month or two after he’s popped his clogs, I’m looking to see what the fuss was all about. I mainly blame Frank Herbert (because I always confused the two authors, growing up) and Stephen King for not getting here sooner. Stephen King because, well, if something is so prevalent and mainstream, it has to be no good, right? My experience of King’s work is that his first few books are okay and then they get increasingly self-involved and desperate – like he’s not writing because he likes it, but because he’s paying the rent. In the days when bookstores used to have ‘Horror’ sections (not a ‘Paranormal Romance’ department), I’d always be looking for Lovecraft, or Ramsey Campbell, or Guy N. Smith; there inevitably was just a wall of Kings and Herberts for me to pass over. Anyway, I’m here now and I thought I’d share my findings with you.

James Herbert (1943-2013) could write!

This, my first discovery in this foray, was a moment of clear relief. I’ve waded through a lot of absolute drivel in the recent past and so it was a delight to settle into something that wasn’t going to be a painful exercise. Herbert paints a snappy picture: his descriptions are apt and engaging; his dialogue works; his scene setting is a case of deft brushwork; his characters have psychological insight and depth. Unlike Stephen King – whose prose I find workmanlike at best (apart from Salem’s Lot – I don’t know what he was sniffing there, but he should have spent more of his cash on it) – Herbert had a storyteller’s ease and lightness of touch about what he did. There’s very little contrivance about what he wrote; I never find myself sitting back and asking “seriously?” Even when it’s about giant rats or ghosts. I never find myself gritting my teeth in anticipation of the woeful inevitability that I can see coming over the hill.

Too many writers nowadays seem to be writing in a vacuum. I’ve read quite a bit of recent stuff that has no emotional engagement and certainly no skill in transmitting the emotional qualities of the story the authors are trying to tell. There’s an old chestnut that writers should write about what they know, but too many current writers seem hell-bent on ignoring this salient piece of advice. For a case in point see my recent review of Alex Grecian’s The Black Country. Mark Z. Danielewski’s appalling House of Leaves is another. It’s like the new crop of writers out there feel that it’s more about their rock-star lifestyles and their interesting haircuts than the ability to pen a single, readable, piece of prose.

For example China Miéville. There’s a lot of talk about his books but after getting through all that there’s not a lot left behind. Is he Fantasy? Is he Dark Fantasy? Is he Horror? Or Steampunk? Or Science Fiction? It’s very European of him to avoid pigeonholing in this fashion, but I don’t kill trees if I can help it, so I want to know what I’m getting into before putting down my cash. For starters, how do I pronounce his name? All I can find online are potted monotribes about his funky politics...

Not so James Herbert. His books stand on their own merits, not the promise of something else coming down the production line which will build to a grander picture, or some steganographic code embedded in the text that only the true aficionado will be able to discern. It’s obvious that he walked the very streets that he wrote about and was able to convey every nuance of those locations and the people who populate them. He conjures his settings with an economy of words and conveys vivid sensation. And each of his books begins and ends a single story. (Okay, not all of them, but I’ll get to that...)

There is a problem. There had to be; it’s me writing this after all. In fact there are two, but one is barely worth mentioning so I’ll deal with it first.

Sadly, especially given that he’s just died, his books have dated. Like Ramsey Campbell, James Herbert was a writer of a particular place and time and his writing borrows of the ideals and practises of that continuum. In Campbell’s case, he writes characters that reek of the West Country in the 1970s, but he seems to rise above and to question the automatic behaviours of his creations; some of them even die as a result of their societal expectations. In Herbert’s case, it’s an instance of him sniffing what he was shovelling: he writes like a 70s London lad with all of that decade’s cringe-worthy attitudes and mores. It’s a small point, especially from someone who likes their literature about 90 years out of date, so I’ll just note it and move on. My big issue with Herbert’s stories is character disposability. This needs some explaining.

I mentioned above that Herbert provided psychological depth to his characters. This is good in that his creations seem that much more vivid and real; it’s bad because, whenever he starts dishing out psychological insights for a particular person, you know that individual is about to meet a gruesome end. I’ve read enough by now that, whenever I start to read about the tough upbringing and gruelling life story of some recently introduced player, I get a sinking feeling of inevitability. The more I learn about someone in one of Herbert’s books, the greater the likelihood that a giant rat will be tunnelling into their brain within the next three pages. Having read and learned so much about a character, I like to stick with them for awhile and see how they get on; as it is, meeting them is kind of like being left alone abruptly with that nervous partygoer who, you’ve heard, only has those violent turns occasionally, despite no-one knowing exactly what sets them off...

Conversely, Herbert’s main players don’t get nearly as much detail as the throwaway characters, to the extent that it feels as if he enjoys sketching these real-life, believable individuals, just so that he can mash them into nothingness in the most grotesque ways that he can imagine. It feels more than a little Hannibal Lecter-ish.

For the record, I’ve read The Rats (1974), the novel which put Herbert on the map as a horror writer, and The Ghosts of Sleath (1994), the second in a trio of books starring his first recurring character, psychic investigator David Ash (I know, I probably should have started with the first in the series, but it was there at the secondhand shop, and I wanted to see how it would stand up on its own). Of the two, I enjoyed The Rats most of all: the story was straightforward - by which I mean it was whole, in and of itself, not obvious - and the manifestations of horror truly gruesome. Ghosts, on the other hand, kept referring back to the previous book – Haunted – far too much and, like its predecessor, had a premise that was a bit too ‘clever, clever’ for its own good: ghosts haunting people, I get; ghosts haunting other ghosts? That’s stretching things. (For the record too, the premise of Haunted is that a set of ghosts hire the psychic detective to investigate their own nest, just for giggles. See what I mean?) So, on the basis of this, I don’t think I’ll be seeking out any more diversions with David Ash, psychic at large; I wouldn’t object, however, to reading another early diversion in Herbert’s oeuvre, such as The Fog, or The Spear.

I started this review vaguely apologising for never having dipped a toe in this particular pool of nightmare matter; now I find I’m enjoying the prospect of having expanded my reading circle.

Four tentacled horrors from me.

The Mythos Down Under

“And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush – the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.”

-Henry Lawson, “The Bush Undertaker”, 1896

Australia has three major connexions with the Cthulhu Mythos and the works of H. P. Lovecraft: it is the location of the City of the Great Race (“The Shadow Out Of Time”, 1936); it has strong inferential connexions to the Dreamlands; and it is the location of an idol of the Great Old One, Cthulhu, taken from R’lyeh in 1925 by the crew of the SS Alert (“The Call Of Cthulhu”, 1928). Furthermore it is the gateway to Antarctica and the Elder Thing cities hidden there (“At The Mountains Of Madness”, 1936). The country is also host to a large community of Chinese immigrants and China is the land where the leaders of the worldwide Cthulhu Cult reside (according to the evidence gained from the cultist ‘Castro’ by Inspector Legrasse in “The Call of Cthulhu”). Australia is also the gateway to the South Seas for many Westerners, to Easter Island, to Ponape and the Andaman Islands - places where the Mythos has an ancient grip (as revealed in the Ponape Scriptures, translated by Exekiel Hoag).

Throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s Sydney was the home to many Theosophist cults: Golden Dawn recruit Annie Besant stayed there and, along with Bishop Leadbeater, established the Order of the Star of the East, along with local entrepreneurs Thomas Bakewell and Giordano Bruno. Walter and Marion Burley Griffin, both Theosophist acolytes, came to Australia to design Canberra, the nation’s capital, and stayed to form a schism sect from a base in their residential Castlecrag estate in Sydney, creating an antipodean home for the study of Anthroposophy.

Given these connexions to the Unspeakable, we should take the most likely inroads for horror narratives one by one. They are as follows:

The Dreamlands

The indigenous peoples of Australia have a belief system based on something which they refer to as the ‘Dreaming’. This is a slippery notion, in that the term encompasses a wide range of meanings depending upon its use. In one sense, it means a body of myths and legends associated with a local tribe or language group; in another sense, it refers to a system of laws and regulations which control the conduct of the local people; in yet another sense, it simply means a time long ago, before living memory. An individual tribe has a ‘Dreaming’ in the sense that the community has a history which can be related by the elders of the tribe and which promotes a sense of communal identity; as well, an individual has their own ‘Dreaming’, which refers to their own experiences, especially the course of their spiritual development. The term also has a connexion to the subconscious and the night-time images perceived during sleep, experiences which are equated with journeys of the soul and encounters with magical creatures and events. This is where we come closest to Lovecraft’s notion of Dreaming as an escape from Earthly environments.

A major plank of the “Dreamlands Theory” (if such a term can be coined) is that the Dreamlands of one planet are significantly different from that of another. Thus the Dreamlands of Cykranosh (Saturn) are quite unlike Earth’s Dreamlands. The Dreaming Skill, which allows such adepts as Randolph Carter to re-organise the Dream landscape to suit their own purposes, argues that cultural differences have as much a part to play in the way that the Dreamlands are constructed as anything else. With this in mind, we can start to look at the way the Australian Aborigines might have created their Dreaming, as an adjunct to their own spiritual lives.

In the short story “Through the Gate of the Silver Key”, Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price talk about a mysterious cavern entrance surmounted by the sculpted image of a white hand; the indigenous Australians are not known as a culture which works stone but they have plenty of cavern entrances marked with the painted image of a white hand, usually daubed with white ochre (such as in the image above). Through a Mythos lens, this could easily be seen as their way of marking those locales where penetration through to the Dreamlands is possible for those with the knowledge or skill to do so.

Without resorting to a complete re-writing of the gaming material already available to outline the Dreamlands and its occupants, it is easy to postulate that the Aboriginal Dreaming lands lie some distance from the map familiar to most explorers of Earth’s Dreamlands. After all, following Lovecraft’s literary line of placing unknowable peoples, things and places ‘over there’ in locations unmapped and inaccessible (e.g., Kadath or China), these dreamlands could well be simply an unexplored, inaccessible region, say, to the west of those Dreamlands countries and kingdoms of which we are most familiar.

With this rationale, it becomes possible to reinterpret certain beings of the Dreamlands through the mythology of the Aboriginal people. The strange, vampiric Yara-ma-yha-who, for example, starts to look somewhat like a Haemophore; Tjinimin, the bat-creature who stole fire from the earth in certain tales, could possibly be an incarnation of Nyarlathotep, especially given his ‘Father of all Bats’ avatar; the Rainbow Serpent could possibly have been a dhole. Is Purelko, the afterlife of certain tribes of the Arnhem Land region, a place within the Dreamlands? Are the night-dwelling Nadubi some species of Glaaki-worshipping creature capable of using their god’s spines to steal away the lives of others? Are the Mimi a race of advanced Dreamlands beings who abandoned the Earth millennia ago? There are all sorts of possibilities...

The Great Race of Yith

The distant north-western deserts of the Australian Outback are the location of the city called Pnakotus, occupied by the great Race of Yith upon their arrival on Earth four-hundred million years ago. The exact whereabouts of this city were lost, unrecorded, until the Peaslee Expedition of 1934, which undertook the first mapping and excavations there.

The Yithians occupied the bodies of tall, cone-like creatures which their searching minds discovered already dwelling on Earth. It is largely speculative as to whether these creatures were originally sentient and intelligent, as the Yithian mind transfer is designed to displace the resident intellect and make room for the invading mind. It is known that the Yithians moved on from these forms to occupy the bodies of a beetle race on another world, leaving their massive cone bodies to die off in a mass extinction in the desert sands. Who knows what fate befell the original minds of these mortal husks?

Long-time players of Call of Cthulhu may have come across the campaign series “Masks of Nyarlathotep”; if so, then the antipodean material provided therein is an excellent (although, in several places, inaccurate) rendering of uncanny events in Australia’s north west and could be used in conjunction with the material given here to stage an extended adventure.

The Worldwide Cthulhu Cult

In March of 1925, the stars were almost right: R’lyeh the corpse city rose from the depths of the sea and Great Cthulhu’s slumber was temporarily interrupted. A crew of sailors aboard the SS Alert made their way onto the island and became lost in the corpse city: only two of them made it back to the ship; only one of them returned – however briefly – to civilisation.

On the ship, which made its way, battered and torn, back to Sydney Harbour, was an idol to the Sleeping God. It was taken from the ship and placed within the collections of the Australian Museum where it remains to this day, accompanied by a speculative description as to its cultural origin and the material of its construction, both of which defy analysis. It was on display to the public until a frenzied would-be thief attempted to smash his way into the case and abscond with it; nowadays it resides, tucked away, in the Museum archives.

The issue with this piece of artistic impedimenta is not so much the discernment of what it stands for, but rather, the understanding of what it means to others. The faithful who would worship before this unholy image, or mercenary types who would claim it in order to sell it back to the faithful, are legion, and it is supposed that the defences which keep it locked within Australia’s first museum are wholly insufficient to the task of its maintenance.

The Tcho-tcho Menace

The original, suppressed, version of Kelly’s cartoon from “The Bulletin”

Wherever there has been a discovery of gold and a subsequent rush to unearth it, so to there has been an inrushing of Chinese nationals to join in the spoils. The Chinese term for Canada for instance, translates as “Golden Mountain” and many Chinese journeyed there in search of wealth, many never to return. No less eager were those Chinese who rushed to Australia (the “New Golden Mountain”) when the discovery of gold was announced in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851; and lurking amongst their numbers, like rats accompanying a steam-ship’s travels, were the insidious Tcho-tcho.

These degenerate meddlers are known to sink down solid roots amid the organised crime of whatever culture in which they find themselves. Further, they have a track record of infiltrating secret communities, and Australia, in the first half of the Twentieth Century, was awash with exclusive cabals, from the Communist Leagues to the fascist New Guard and every permutation of political and mystical flavour in between. This was ripe terrain for the Tcho-tcho; something they could really get their nasty, pointy little teeth into.

As well, reading from Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola novels (A Bid for Fortune etc.), certain mystical regalia from Chinese secret organisations were smuggled into Australia during the late 1800s and various powerful agents – including Dr Nikola himself - were sent to retrieve them. Can we not see the hidden hand of the Tcho-tcho in these incidents?

Metaphysical Research: Spiritualists, Theosophists and other philosophies

Interest in Spiritualism was widespread throughout the English-speaking world from the late Victorian era all the way through to the Second World War. No less than any other country at this time, Australia was also caught up in the fascination. On top of this, the country was also visited by the two great contemporary speakers on the subject – both for and against – Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As well, Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine and its sequel Isis Unveiled were making inroads into the spiritual landscape of the nation, supported by such outspoken proponents as Arthur Deakin, Walter and Marion Burley-Griffin, and Annie Besant. Theosophical communities took root and still exist today, along with the offshoot faith Anthroposophy, developed by Rudolf Steiner during his stay in the country.

The Burley-Griffins designed the new capital city Canberra to be a mystical generator of spiritual energies, an effort which fell short of the mark through political in-fighting and economic reticence; the Sydney Theosophists built a huge auditorium on the waterfront near Kurnell from which to view the impending Apocalypse (which didn’t come about due, no doubt, to some last-minute, behind-the-scenes intervention); and witchcraft had taken root in the Botany Bay colony from the earliest times: how else do you explain all of those staked corpses that were unearthed at the crossroads of Bridge and George Streets during the re-development of the Rocks?

Other Stuff Mankind Was Not Meant to Know About

In the 20s and 30s Australia was still largely a place unknown: the environment was treacherous and deadly; the landscape was as inimical to human life as the creatures that thrived within its ranges. The indigenes that seemed capable of inhabiting the Bush were so far removed from the Invader’s concept of civilisation that they may well have been alien creatures. Add to this that the “civilised” coastal fringes of the country were rapidly filling up with races, cultures and creeds so multifarious and disparate, that, beneath an eggshell-thin facade of social conformity, wild and strange chaos was brewing.

The bringing of “Kanakas” to the canefields of Queensland brought an influx of resentment and revenge: what strange island magicks might it also have brought to enact that vengeance? Wild Afghan tribes were brought to the inland deserts to aid in the construction of railroads and telegraph lines: we know from Alhazred’s foul tome, the weird things that also come out of Middle Eastern deserts. Early anthropologist and missionary Daisy Bates journeyed to the Outback to work with remote aboriginal tribes: her reports told of cannibalism and infanticide, crimes which could never thereafter be substantiated. The Australian Museum offered £5000 for the provision of an actual Bunyip skull or hide: after receiving several sets of remains, they quietly withdrew the offer and never mentioned it again.

German aviators disappearing in the western deserts (although their aircraft and campsite were located intact with no signs of distress); majestic steamships vanishing forever off the west coast of Western Australia with all hands; ruined pyramidal structures unearthed in the southern Queensland forests; ancient African coins discovered in the reef sands north of Cape York.

Wherever you scratch the surface of Australia, you find something uncanny.