London's gentlemen's clubs began as legal refuges for aristocratic gambling
White's, Brooks's and Boodle's, the first gentlemen's clubs of London's West End, owed part of their appeal to a legal loophole: gambling was banned except in members-only establishments. From those card tables grew a whole institution, and by the late 19th century London had more than 400 clubs.
Men from Britain's upper classes began founding private social clubs in the 17th century, and in the 18th they took over much of the social role of London's coffee houses. St James's, where many clustered, is still nicknamed clubland. A typical club offered a bar, library, reading and card rooms, billiards, a formal dining room and often bedrooms. The richest were built by the architects of the grandest country houses, letting members of modest income live amid splendour.
Their popularity exploded in the 19th century, peaking around the 1880s. Clubs formed around politics, literature, sport, travel, regiments, schools and universities, so the list of clubs almost maps what counted as respectable Establishment life. By then nearly any man with a plausible claim to be a gentleman, including doctors and lawyers who worked for a living, could find one to admit him, unless he was judged unclubbable. Waiting lists could stretch to sixteen years.
For many they functioned as a second home. Young graduates arriving in London often lodged at their club for a few years until a rented flat became affordable, and expatriates used the East India or Oriental clubs as a base. Historians also see them as a retreat from family life, where elite households were constantly on display, and as enforcers of separate spheres, the idea that men ran the public world while women kept the home. Gossip, governed by house rules on privacy, bound members together and helped some climb socially.
Most men belonged to one club, but a few collected them. Harold Macmillan reportedly sheltered in half a dozen, and Lord Mountbatten is believed to have held nineteen memberships in the 1960s. The model spread across the former Empire, and Moscow's English Club, founded around 1772, shaped aristocratic opinion for over a century.
Source: Gentlemen's club
