A conspicuous instance is the Travellers’, a club which from the days of its foundation has always been somewhat capricious in electing members. The list of public men who have been blackballed here is considerable. The late Mr. Cecil Rhodes was rejected in 1895, and at different times the late Lord Sherbrooke, the late Lord Lytton, Lord Randolph Churchill, and other public men have met with the same ill fate.
The Travellers’ Club was founded in the second decade of the nineteenth century by Lord Castlereagh, the present club-house being built by Barry in 1832. Considerable amusement was aroused by the qualification for membership (which still exists). This laid down that candidates must have travelled out of the British Isles to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a straight line.
The supposed partiality of members for exploration was amusingly set forth by Theodore Hook in the following lines:
“The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the plains of Moselai.
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at charts of it.”
The club-house would appear to have been little altered since its erection, with the exception that a recess for smokers has been contrived in the entrance hall. The building, it should be added, narrowly escaped destruction on October 24, 1850, when a fire did great damage to the billiard-rooms. These were, by the way, an afterthought, and an addition to the original building; but they were by no means an improvement upon the first design, for they greatly impaired the beauty of the garden front.
The library at the Travellers’ is a delightful room, most admirably designed, with a fine classical frieze. A relic preserved here is Thackeray’s chair; but as the only connection of the great novelist with this club appears to have been a blackballing, the presence of such a memento seems rather strange.
Except the dining-room and the library, the interior of the Travellers’ Club is somewhat cold and bare. No pictures decorate its walls, and the general appearance of the place, whilst highly decorous, is hardly calculated to delight the eye.