So the Garrick Club, my beloved and enduring watering hole and eaterie will not ban ladies from its totemic central table, after all. Thank God, reason has prevailed.
Due to unavoidable work commitments, I was sadly unable to attend last night’s special meeting of members which voted against a motion that endeavoured to get round the Equalities Bill, by making the table ‘members only’, thus excluding women who are guests but not full members .
Women guests have been granted gradual access to previously restricted areas of the club in recent years, including the central staircase, and have contributed to making the Garrick all the more convivial, and entertaining. It has meant some members less inclined to use the Club like a public schoolboy den or an officers’ mess.
And yet what makes the Garrick so special is its eclectic mix of interesting male members and I am glad to hear that last night’s meeting was generally good humoured and civil with opposing views given generous air time..
I am told that the restrict-women brigade lead orator – a well known ‘silk’-slightly let the side down, failing to make proper use of his microphone and losing the order of his notes.
By contrast the defence of the Club’s current policy of allowing women guests to the main table was amusingly put by a member of the acting profession, assuming a fictitious Lordly role, as noble and engaging as Garrick himself.
Jimmy, your post is not entirely fair. The “well-known silk” to whom you refer is Anthony Butcher, by far the most distinguished and effective chairman of the club in the 20 years that I have been a member, and the man who secured the club’s future by negotiating the Pooh money. He is now old and rather frail, and had asked for the courtesy of the podium – not so much for convenience but as equal treatment with the chairman’s own highly partisan speech – but was curtly refused: He did, as your informant told you, fail to make proper use of the microphone (which I can attest was very awkward to manage standing up, being on a short flex from the armrest of one’s chair) and as a result dropped his papers.
My own principal objection to the situation is that it is divisive. Some members will bring women guests to the table, but most would not dream of doing so. Their presence will inevitably alter the robust nature of male centre table discussion. But that, no doubt, is progress of a sort.