The bizarre history of London’s private members’ clubs

At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the front window of the In & Out – the Naval and Military Club, then in Piccadilly. Exploding, it knocked everyone off their feet, including the barman Robbins, and trashed the Long Bar. But in the silence that followed came the unwavering request of senior member Commander Vaughan Williams: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.’

A subsequent cartoon in the London Evening Standard depicted the scene of devastation (no one was injured or killed) with a mess-jacket-wearing member calmly wondering what the barman had put in his pink gin: ‘But I’ll have another!’ That combination of sangfroid and eccentricity is perhaps typical of London’s private members’ clubs and is amusingly captured in this riveting history.

At first, London clubs were raucous coffee houses with back rooms for gambling. White’s, in St James’s Street, founded in 1693 by the Italian immigrant Francesco Bianco, was the pioneer, followed by other proprietary clubs where aristocrats could gossip and gamble, racking up vast debts.