MY BROTHER and I spent our holidays as children with an uncle and aunt who were members of various clubs. Not, alas, night clubs or even tennis clubs, but stuffy establishments where we were taken to eat lunch and where club members could stay.
The uncle had several clubs in St James’s and the aunt belonged to a club in Curzon Street in London where she would take us for our half terms. When we first went there, it was full of elderly ladies playing bridge or drinking tea. They wore hats, glared at one if one talked above a whisper. But one half-term was enlivened when the aunt, scanning the world from her bedroom window through her opera glasses (which of course no aunt travels without!) saw her goddaughter working in an office across the street. Naturally she flung open the window to gesticulate and bellow out greetings. She caught her goddaughter’s attention all right, in fact the whole office was thrown into turmoil as the goddaughter was working for MI5 and soon the street and even the rooftops had plainclothes policemen with a bulge under an arm pressed into doorways or crouched behind chimneys.
The Curzon Street Club was an ornate building with some strange architectural features including small interior windows opening from the staircase into various rooms below. Looking through these peep holes, I noticed that the clientele was changing, no longer old ladies, but youthful gentlemen held the cards, and the women were much more glamorous. Dark glasses seemed de rigueur and often coming down to breakfast I would spy the card-players, jacketless and with ties, loosened still playing. One night my brother slipped into a room hoping to try his hand at roulette, but alas he found the stakes were £100 a throw, a sum which was not covered by his pocket money. From then on we plotted as to how we could sink into this den of iniquity, but before this could happen the aunt came on a titled gentleman of her acquaintance in the lobby where he told her dramatically that he was ruined and was about to shoot himself. He also explained that the Curzon Street ladies’ club had become a gaming club. The aunt resigned her membership immediately and joined the English Speaking Union which had an unblemished reputation.
Back in Co Cork, the uncle and aunt belonged to the Cork and County Club on South Mall. Every Thursday, we would lunch in the ladies’ dining room. Though men could use the ladies’ part of the club, no woman was allowed to enter into the male precincts in the front of the club. Our door was in a back lane otherwise used for dustbins. The ladies’ lobby was paneled with varnished pitch pine and there was uneven terrazzo on the floor. On the gentlemen’s side there may have been merry laughter and riotous behaviour, but it was not like that on the ladies’ side. The windows were frosted glass and the dining room walls decorated with pictures of heaving seascapes. The few scattered couples would acknowledge our presence with a discreet nod and then continue murmuring to each other in low voices over their cutlets.
After she had finished her messages, the aunt, my brother and I had tea in the ladies’ drawing room where we read Vogue and the Sphere in front of a fire. The only lively moment was if one of the members had taken the aunt’s parcels home by mistake.
The Cork and County Club, opened in 1829 in a building designed by the Paine brothers. It had originally been The County Club, until it united with Cork Club. But they may have regretted this, as at the end of the 19th century, a committee member from the city accused another member of cheating at cards – poker to be precise. The fact that the accuser, Richard Piggot Beamish, owner of the well-known brewery, did not play cards and had not witnessed the game and that the accused, Joseph Pike was a longstanding friend and neighbour, did not deter him from reading out the hearsay evidence at a meeting of the committee.
Joseph Pike, the chairman of the Cork Steamship company, sued for libel. Beamish pleaded, that as senior committee member of the club, he had to conduct an investigation. The jury generously returned a verdict for both plaintiff and defendant! They said the plaintiff did not cheat, but that the defendant did not mean any harm when he accused him of it. Though Pike’s reputation remained unblemished, it was perhaps rather odd that his mama should have presented the judge in the case with a handsome residence in Douglas shortly after the verdict.
A very much more serious event happened on the night of the July 17th, 1920 when masked men pushed passed the doorman, ran into the smoking room, where they fired several shots at Col Gerald Smyth who sitting down with four other men. He leapt to his feet and got as far as the hallway before dropping dead.
Col Smyth was a much decorated officer during the 1914-18 war when he had been six times seriously wounded and lost his left arm while rescuing an injured NCO. Earlier in the year, he had been made the RIC divisional commissioner for Munster and as such, a month before in Listowel, he had made a speech in which he is quoted as having incited the members of the RIC to take reprisals on the local populace. Later he denied this, saying he had been misquoted in the Freeman's Journal.
Such was the unpopularity of Gerald Smyth that only half the number of jurors needed for the inquest could be persuaded to attend and no engine driver would bring a train with his body back to his home in Banbridge.
In Banbridge, after his funeral, there was a furious reaction; £40,000 worth of damage was done to Catholic buildings in the town by rioters and Catholics could not be employed in the factories unless they signed a document to say that they would not support Sinn Féin.
The Cork and County Club closed in 1989 – I never did see the gentlemen’s part of the club. Oh how I wish I had made a stand for women’s lib by pushing through the green baize door to see the delights and comforts beyond.
Melosina Lenox-Conyngham died on October 1st, 2011