Another Beefsteak Club was that at Cambridge, the members of which belonged to the University. This club, now for some years in abeyance, was a quaint survival from the past, and exactly reproduced the dinner of eighteenth-century sportsmen. Twenty-five years ago, when it still flourished, it usually consisted of but four or five members, but guests could be invited. The dining costume was a blue cutaway coat with brass buttons, and buff waistcoat, the tie being secured with a bull’s head. The dinner was entirely composed of various dishes of beef, beer only being drunk; some curious old songs were sung, and the toasts, regulated by inflexible precedent, were drunk in port from glasses of a size regulated by immemorial custom. Amongst these toasts was the health of the late Mr. Bowes, who, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, won the Derby with Mundig. This horse, after a tremendous struggle, beat Ascot, belonging to the present writer’s grandfather, by half a neck.
The dinners used to be held at the Red Lion Inn, the head-waiter of which hostelry, Dunn by name, was supposed to be the only individual alive accurately acquainted with the exact rules and traditions of the club. The proceedings were enlivened by music played on a fiddle by a well-known Cambridge character, White-headed Bob.
The Cambridge Beefsteak Club possessed a good deal of plate, valued at about £1,500. It had also an income of some £200 a year, arising from sums of money left to it by former members.
A somewhat similar Cambridge dining club was the True Blue, which also had few members. They met several times in a term, wearing eighteenth-century dress and white wigs; as a matter of fact, the cost of this costume often deterred men from joining, as did the rule that a new member should drink off a bottle of claret at a draught. This unpleasant custom, which might well have been modified, seems to have killed the club, for I fancy that, like the Cambridge Beefsteak, it has not met for many years.
A remarkable little provincial club which flourished at Norwich at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the Hole-in-the-Wall Club, where a number of clever men used to meet. One of the principal figures here was Dr. Frank Sayers, a poet of no mean inspiration, a sound antiquary, an elegant scholar, and an accomplished gentleman. His accustomed chair was kept for him every Monday, and it would have been a profanation had any other occupant filled it. He was a man of admirable wit, and the characters around him, which no skill of selection could have got together in any other club or in any other town, afforded unfailing objects of his innocent and unwounding pleasantry.
Amongst other eccentric frequenters of the Hole-in-the-Wall was Ozias Lindley, a Minor Canon of the cathedral, and Sheridan’s brother-in-law. He was subject, beyond anyone living, to fits of absent-mindedness. He out-Parson-Adamized Parson Adams. One Sunday morning, as he was riding through the Close, on his way to serve his curacy, his horse threw off a shoe. A lady whom he had just passed, having remarked it, called out to him: “Sir, your horse has just cast one of his shoes.” “Thank you, madam,” returned Ozias; “will you, then, be kind enough to put it on?” In preaching, he often turned over two or three pages at once of his sermon; and when a universal titter and stare convinced him of the transition, he observed coolly, “I find I have omitted a considerable part of my sermon, but it is not worth going back for,” and then went on to the end.
Hudson Gurney, at one time M.P. for Newport, Isle of Wight, was also a frequenter of the snug club-room of the Hole-in-the-Wall, and used to bask in the sunshine of Sayers’s festive conversation. His own heart, too, at that time beat high with frolic and hilarity. Hudson’s was, from his earliest prime, a clear, distinguishing intellect. He was a well-read man, and his poetry, no fragment of which is in print, except his admirable translation of the Cupid and Psyche of Apuleius into English verse, was by no means of a secondary kind.
At this club William Taylor smoked his evening pipe, and lost himself in the cloudier fumes of German metaphysics and German philology. Taylor’s translation of Bürger’s “Leonore,” though apparently now forgotten, was said to be better than the original. While his erudition was unlimited, however, it was principally concerned with books that were not readable by others. His most amusing quality (and it was that which kept an undying grin upon the laughter-loving face of Sayers) was his everlasting love of hypothesis, and it was impossible to withstand the imperturbable gravity with which he put forth his wild German paradoxes. He proved, to the thorough dissatisfaction of those who knew not how to confute him, and to the unspeakable amusement of those who thought it not worth their while—and that, too, by a chemical analysis of colours, and the processes by which animal heat and organic structure affect them—that the first race of mankind was green! Green, he said, was the primal colour of vegetable existence—the first raiment in which Nature leaped into existence; the colour on which the eye loved to repose; and, in the primeval state, the first quality that attracted man to man, and bound him up in the circles of those tender charities and affinities which kept the early societies of the race together.
At one time Edinburgh was celebrated for its quaint clubs, one of which was the Soaping Club, the motto of which was, that “Every man should soap his own beard”—that is, “indulge his own humour.” The Lawn-market Club was an association of dram-drinking, gossiping citizens, who met every morning early, and, after proceeding to the post-office to pick up letters and news, adjourned to the public-house to talk and drink. The Edinburgh, a “Viscera” club, flourished till quite a late date; the members of this were pledged to dine off food from the entrails of animals, such as kidneys, liver, and tripe. This club seems to have rather resembled the more modern Haggis Club.
There were at one time a number of parochial clubs in London. That of the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, which still exists, and which consists of “Past Overseers,” possesses a unique heirloom, which is at the same time an important chronological record of public events.