Thring saw the need of widening our basis as clearly as I did, but we never could carry our board with us to make an enlargement of the franchise sufficiently drastic, because they wished to be guided by the feeling of the men who used the Club most, and their feeling was decidedly against it—mainly, I believe, because they thought that the extra members we wanted to relieve the finances would make the Club too full to be restful. So in one way and another the old Club was drifting on to the rocks when Algernon Rose (with Charles Garvice as his chairman, and Cato Worsfold as honorary solicitor) took the matter in hand as honorary secretary. I did not see the throes. I was out of England on one of my wander-years.
Rose, with a clear-sighted policy, boundless energy and self-sacrifice, and inexhaustible tact, not only pulled the Club out of the fire, but has made it one of the most flourishing organisations in London, with two hundred town members, three hundred suburban members, five hundred country members, and six hundred oversea members. He could easily have a thousand town members if he wanted them, but the town membership is strictly limited to two hundred, and the suburban to three hundred, because that is the limit of habitués which the premises can accommodate. Unfortunately you can’t have five-day members at an Authors’ Club like you do at a Golf Club.
And nowadays members use the Club in a way they never did when I was the honorary secretary and we exhausted our ingenuity in efforts to make the club more inhabited through the week. The increase of attendance at the Monday night dinners is one of the most wonderful things of all. Week after week they have enormous dinners, and Rose provides a brilliant succession of famous guests of the evening. The other Tuesday I read a report of an Authors’ Club dinner in the Daily Telegraph which filled three columns.[[4]]
[4]. Among the guests of the evening at the Authors’ Club since Rose took it over have been musicians like Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Walter Parratt, Sir Frederick Cowen, Mr. William H. Cummings, Sir Hubert Parry; supreme scientists like Sir George Darwin, F.R.S., Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Sir William Ramsay, F.R.S., Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., Prof. Schäfer, F.R.S.; great lawyers, like Lord Chancellor Halsbury, the late Lord Chief Justice, and Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton; men who have been great outside the Empire like Sir Robert Hart, and Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, and Mr. F. C. Selous, the mighty hunter; great politicians, like Lord Milner, and Lord Wemyss; great explorers, like Sir Ernest Shackleton; great artists, like the late Sir Hubert von Herkomer; distinguished foreigners, like the American Ambassadors, Whitelaw-Reid and Page; well-known literary men, like Harold Cox, secretary of the Cobden Society, Maarten Maartens, Sir Owen Seaman, Sir Sidney Lee, W. B. Maxwell; and great actors, like Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree.
The Club retains practically all its old outstanding names, including that of Thring. Thring for many years was the Authors’ Club personified. He not only conducted its business; he peopled the club. Men went to lunch there because they knew they would meet Thring. They dropped in after business hours because they knew that Thring, at any rate, would be there. He kept the social life of the Club, as typified in the Club pools, and so on, going, and he was the friend of all the members, except those who desired to remain unsociable. And, in consequence, he always had his finger on the pulse of the Club.
The questions of club discipline which came up before the board in its early days were some of them of the most extraordinary nature. One man hated hearing clocks tick, and whenever he was left alone in a room always stopped the clock. Somebody else wished to have him turned out of the Club, but the Chairman said he did not see how it could be regarded as ungentlemanly behaviour, and proposed that no action should be taken, but that we should take it in turns never to leave the honourable member alone!
The Rev. John Watson, who, under the pen-name of “Ian Maclaren,” suddenly burst into fame with Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush when he was forty-four years old, was a Liverpool clergyman, the minister of the Sefton Park Presbyterian Church. He had long enjoyed a reputation in his circle in Liverpool for story-telling and as a public speaker. His speeches were as good as his stories, and admirably delivered. His personal charm was as great as the respect in which he was held. He was very humorous. He told us one night, when he was our guest at the Authors’ Club, that his boy at Rugby had said to him, “Father, I suppose that your books are all right to some people, or you would not be able to do so much for us. But couldn’t you write something which would be good enough for me to show the other chaps?”
One wonders if this was the boy who is now the head of Nisbet’s great publishing house. If it was, how pleased he would be to have the publication of some of the books that were not good enough “to show the other chaps!”