Like many men of his day, Selwyn did and said many things which a later age would call very snobbish. Happening to be at Bath when it was nearly empty, he was induced, for the mere purpose of killing time, to cultivate the acquaintance of an elderly gentleman he was in the habit of meeting in the Rooms. In the height of the following season Selwyn encountered his old associate in St. James’s Street. He endeavoured to pass unnoticed, but in vain. “What! do you not recollect me?” exclaimed the indignant provincial. “I recollect you perfectly,” replied Selwyn, “and when I next go to Bath I shall be most happy to become acquainted with you again.”
Though Selwyn appears to have preferred White’s, he did not entirely confine his attention to it. It was in his day the fashion to belong to as many clubs as possible—Wilberforce, indeed, mentions no fewer than five to which he himself belonged: Brooks’s, Boodle’s, White’s, Miles and Evans’s in New Palace Yard, and Goosetree’s, on the site of which stands the Marlborough. As their names imply, all these clubs were originally mere coffee-houses, kept by men of the above names, the most celebrated of whom, next to the proprietors of White’s, was Brookes, or Brooks, who founded the present club in St. James’s Street.
CHAPTER IV
BROOKS’S, THE COCOA-TREE, AND THE THATCHED HOUSE
At one time considerable rivalry existed between White’s and Brooks’s. Great festivities took place all over the country in the spring of 1789, and both White’s and Brooks’s gave balls, which seem to have occasioned much unpleasant feeling between the party of the Prince of Wales and that of the Court.
Pitt was a member of both clubs (having been elected to Brooks’s in 1781, on the proposal of Fox), but he had a decided partiality for White’s.
The Prince detested White’s as the chosen club of Pitt, who had opposed him during the King’s illness, and, as soon as the entertainment was announced, forbade his friends to attend it, and it is said, together with the Duke of York, sent their tickets to be sold at a public library.
Three weeks later, on April 21, Brooks’s followed with a grand ball at the Opera House, one of the tickets for which is framed in the “strangers’ room” on the ground-floor of the club. As a matter of fact, the Prince’s conduct towards the ball at White’s gave a party character to that at Brooks’s, with the result that all the ladies of the Court refused to attend.
Brooks’s was originally in Pall Mall, on or near the site of the present Marlborough Club, and the precise date of its removal into St. James’s Street cannot be positively fixed; but certain it is that the existing house was built by Brooks, from designs by Holland, the architect, in 1778, and in a letter to G. Selwyn, dated in October of that year, T. Townshend—afterwards first Viscount Sydney—says: “As a proof of our increasing opulence, I need only show the New Opera House, which is now fitting up at a monstrous expense … and Brooks’s new house, fitted up with great magnificence, which is to be opened in a week or ten days.” It was in consequence of these great expenses that the annual subscription was doubled.
The originator of Brooks’s seems to have been the Scotsman Almack, whose real name was Macall, and in its early days the club consisted of 150 members at an annual subscription of four guineas, with the proviso that, “in case that proportion falls short of 400 guineas on the whole, such deficiency shall be made good to Mr. Almack.” But this small number of members soon expanded, and by 1776 had been doubled, by successive additions of twenty, thirty, fifty, and fifty. Fifteen years passed, and in 1791 another 150 were added, and 100 more in 1816, bringing the numbers up to 550. Twenty-five more were added in 1823, and a like number in 1857, bringing the total up to 600, at which it remained till 1901, when it was raised to 650, the present number.