On a aspect avenue in Covent Backyard stands an imposing palazzo-style constructing, surprisingly misplaced amid the burger joints and neon marquees of London’s theater district. It homes the Garrick Membership, one among Britain’s oldest males’s golf equipment, and on any given weekday, a lunch desk in its baronial eating room is likely one of the hottest tickets on the town.
A customer fortunate sufficient to cadge an invite from a member may find yourself within the firm of a Supreme Court docket justice, the grasp of an Oxford school or the editor of a London newspaper. The percentages are that individual could be a person. Girls are excluded from membership within the Garrick and permitted solely as company, a long-simmering supply of stress that has not too long ago erupted right into a full-blown furor.
After The Guardian, a London newspaper, put a recent highlight on the Garrick’s men-only coverage, naming and shaming a few of its rarefied members from a leaked membership record, two senior British authorities officers resigned from the membership: Richard Moore, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Simon Case, the cupboard secretary, who oversees almost half one million public workers.
Solely days earlier, beneath questioning at a Parliamentary listening to, Mr. Case defended his membership by saying he was making an attempt to reform an “antediluvian” establishment from inside fairly “than chuck rocks from the surface,” a line that provoked derisory laughs. Mr. Moore’s membership appeared at odds along with his efforts to carry extra racial and gender range to the British spy company, often known as MI6.
Now, the membership’s 1,300 members are debating the way forward for the Garrick over lamb chops within the eating room, after-dinner drinks within the lounge beneath the primary staircase and in a WhatsApp group, the place they swap fretful messages concerning the newest developments. Some welcome the strain to confess ladies as lengthy overdue; others lament that doing so would perpetually change the character of the place.
“The Garrick Membership has an absolute proper to resolve who its members are,” mentioned Simon Jenkins, a columnist at The Guardian and a former editor of The Instances of London who’s a longtime member. “That mentioned, it’s indefensible for any social membership lately to not have ladies as members.”
“Judi Dench, for God’s sake — why shouldn’t she be a member?” he added.
Or Jude Kelly, an award-winning former theater director. Ms. Kelly, who now runs the charity Girls of the World, mentioned that excluding ladies from membership within the Garrick disadvantaged them of entry to an elite social circle the place skilled alternatives inevitably flowed with the brandy.
“We’re in 2024,” Ms. Kelly mentioned. “These are extremely senior individuals. Lots of them are espousing range and inclusion of their skilled lives. Being on the within for a very long time makes you complicit.”
The Garrick Membership isn’t the one personal membership in London that doesn’t admit ladies: White’s, Boodle’s, the Beefsteak Membership and the Savile Membership are additionally males solely. However what makes the Garrick distinctive is its star-studded membership record, which ranges throughout the worlds of politics, legislation, arts, theater, and journalism.
Members, primarily based on The Guardian’s leaked record, embrace the actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Cox and Stephen Fry; Mark Knopfler, the guitarist of the rock band Dire Straits; Paul Smith, the style designer; the BBC correspondent John Simpson; Oliver Dowden, Britain’s deputy prime minister; and, sure, King Charles III (on an honorary foundation).
The boldfaced names have lent the dispute further piquancy, particularly since a lot of them would appear the sort of bien-pensant progressives who would abhor any sort of discriminatory coverage. Certainly, Mr. Cox, Mr. Fry and Mr. Simpson are amongst those that have come out publicly in favor of admitting ladies.
The final time the members voted on the query, in 2015, a slender majority — 50.5 p.c — mentioned they supported it. However the membership’s bylaws require a two-thirds majority to vary the coverage on membership, and a brand new vote, if it have been scheduled, wouldn’t be held till the summer time. A membership official declined to touch upon the matter.
For all of the misgivings that members have about not admitting ladies, some predict they might nonetheless fail to succeed in the two-thirds threshold. The dispute has, maybe inevitably, turned bitter, pitting a handful of dedicated campaigners in opposition to a bigger, older group, a lot of whom are positive with ladies as company however are reluctant to rock a ship that has sailed grandly since 1831.
In New York Metropolis, personal golf equipment just like the Union League and the Century Affiliation started admitting ladies within the Eighties, usually beneath the strain of authorized judgments. However in London, the place golf equipment just like the Garrick are extra zealous about being social fairly than skilled networking establishments, defenders argue that the case for preserving male-only membership is extra justifiable.
These members say they go to the Garrick to drink wine, unwind and luxuriate in themselves. They crack jokes they wouldn’t make in combined firm. They don’t seem to be allowed to conduct enterprise; even pulling papers out of a briefcase is appeared down upon.
Some dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot. Jonathan Sumption, a lawyer and former justice within the Supreme Court docket, mentioned he supported the admission of girls, however added that those that opposed it have been entitled to their opinion.
“The Garrick Membership isn’t a public physique and the entire situation is simply too unimportant to make a fuss of,” Mr. Sumption mentioned. “It’s nonetheless a reasonably good membership.”
Mr. Jenkins, the columnist, agreed, suggesting that a few of the information protection had caricatured the Garrick as a vaguely sinister place the place males collect to plot in opposition to ladies. Girls, he mentioned, have been welcome on the communal desk within the eating room, maybe the membership’s most hallowed place.
The one room off limits to ladies is the members’ lounge, often known as Below the Stairs, the place males collect after dinner. But, as Ms. Kelly and different ladies notice, probably the most beneficial relationships are sometimes shaped in such casual settings.
To that extent, the Garrick is totally different from White’s, an much more unique males’s membership in St. James’s, the place Queen Elizabeth II was the one girl ever invited as a visitor. When President Donald J. Trump’s ambassador to Britain, Robert Wooden Johnson IV, held lunches there along with his senior workers, he couldn’t invite his personal political counselor as a result of she was a lady. Feminine workers on the embassy complained to the State Division, and he was urged to finish the follow.
However White’s and its old-line, Conservative-friendly brethren “are usually excessive Tory locations, the place the query wouldn’t come up,” mentioned Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, who resigned from the Garrick greater than a decade in the past.
“The Garrick membership is extra a mixture of actors, journalists and attorneys,” he mentioned. “Thus, it’s a extra pertinent query.”
