With respect to smoking, the habitués of clubs have experienced a great change. Formerly the smoking room, if any, was small and far away; now the luxury of the club is concentrated in it, and the question is rather in what rooms smoking is not to be allowed. Very few clubs retain the old tradition that smoking is a thing to be discouraged and kept out of sight.
Other signs of change are the increase in the cost of membership and the later hours for dining. It need hardly be said that the clubs pay great attention to their kitchens. We have it on the authority of Major A. Griffiths (Fortnightly Review, April, 1907) that the salary of the chef is between £200 and £300 a year.
The customs of the clubs with regard to the admission of visitors vary. At one end of the scale is the Athenæum, which will not allow its members to give a stranger even a cup of cold water, and allows of conversation with strangers only in the open hall or in a small room by the side of the doorway. At the other end are clubs which provide special rooms for the entertainment of visitors, and encourage their members to treat their friends hospitably, and to show them what the club is able to do in the matter of cooking and wines.
The social ethics of clubs vary in like manner. In some clubs, notably those of the Bohemian type, but including several which would claim not to belong to that group, mere membership of the club is a sufficient introduction to justify a member in addressing another, and conversation in the common rooms of the club becomes general. This is delightful—within limits: it is not always possible to create by the atmosphere of the club a sentiment that will restrain all its members from sometimes overstepping those bounds of mutual courtesy and consideration which alone can make such general conversation altogether pleasant. The greater clubs go to the opposite extreme, and members of them may meet day after day for many years in perfect unconsciousness of the existence of each other; yet, even in these, the association of those who know each other outside the club, but without its opportunities would rarely meet, though they have similar interests and pursuits, is a very desirable and useful thing. Many an excellent measure, originating in the mind of one member, has been matured by conversation with others, to the general good. So may the Clubs of London continue to prosper and flourish.
[THE INNS OF OLD LONDON]
By Philip Norman, LL.D.
To write a detailed account of London inns and houses of entertainment generally would require not a few pages, but several volumes. The inns, first established to supply the modest wants of an unsophisticated age, came by degrees to fulfil the functions of our modern hotels, railway stations, and parcel offices; they were places of meeting for business and social entertainment—in short, they formed a necessary part of the life of all Londoners, and of all who resorted to London, except the highest and the lowest. The taverns, successors of mediæval cook-shops, were frequented by most of the leading spirits of each generation from Elizabethan times to the early part of the nineteenth century, and their place has now been taken by clubs and restaurants. About these a mass of information is available, also on coffee-houses, a development of the taverns, in which, for the most part, they were gradually merged. As to the various forms of public-house, their whimsical signs alone have amused literary men, and perhaps their readers, from the time of The Spectator until now. In this chapter I propose to confine my remarks to the inns "for receipt of travellers," so often referred to by John Stow in his Survey of London, which, largely established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, continued on the same sites, mostly until years after the advent of railways had caused a social revolution. These inns, with rare exceptions, had a galleried courtyard, a plan of building also common on the Continent, which came perhaps originally from the East. In such courtyards, as we shall see, during Tudor times theatrical performances often took place, and in form they probably gave a hint to the later theatres.