CLUBLAND EB

Pete Brown

• Publisher: HarperNorth
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008457570
• eBook ISBN: 9780008457556
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The untold story of a British institution

'Brilliant.' Alan Johnson

'Compelling.' David Kynaston

'The beer drinkers' Bill Bryson.' Times Literary Supplement

Ferment Magazine's Best Beer Book of the Year

Pete Brown is a convivial guide on this journey through the intoxicating history of the working men's clubs. From the movement's founding by teetotaller social reformer the Reverend Henry Solly to the booze-soaked mid-century heyday, when more than 7 million Brits were members, this warm-hearted and entertaining book reveals how and why the clubs became the cornerstone of Britain's social life – offering much more than cheap Federation Bitter and chicken in a basket.

Often dismissed as relics of a bygone age – bastions of bigotry and racism – Brown reminds us that long before the days of Phoenix Nights, 3,000-seat venues routinely played host to stars like Shirley Bassey, Louis Armstrong, and the Bee Gees, offering entertainment for all the family, and close to home at that. Britain's best-known comedians made reputations through a thick miasma of smoke, from Sunniside to Skegness. For a young man growing up in the pit town of Barnsley this was a radiant wonderland that transformed those who entered.

Brown explores the clubs' role in defining masculinity, community and class identity for generations of men in Britain's industrial towns. They were, at their best, a vehicle for social mobility and self-improvement, run as cooperatives for working people by working people: an informal, community-owned pre-cursor to the Welfare State.

As the movement approaches its 160th anniversary, this exuberant book brings to life the thrills and the spills of a cultural phenomenon that might still be rescued from irrelevance.

PART ONE

THE SOUTH

1

The Club and Me

Staincross Working Men’s Club, Barnsley

One of my earliest memories is of being held in someone’s arms, in a space that glowed.

I know the memory is authentic because it’s disjointed and incoherent, a bunch of sensory hollers from before I was old enough to link them together into a sequence that made narrative sense. It was mostly just colours and lights.

That’s why it stands out.

When I was little, an oil crisis and a miners’ strike combined to create power shortages and a three-day working week across Britain. I can just about remember winter nights when the black-and-white telly would snap off and the candles were lit.

For much of my childhood, the landscape was shades of black and grey even when the lights were on. When I was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, the town and its scattered satellite villages still owed their existence and modest prosperity to coal mining. We were promised they always would. At the bottom of our street squatted the ‘muckstack,’ a charcoal mountain of slag clawed out of the ground on the way to the rich coal seams beneath. It greeted us when we opened the living room curtains each morning, like a negative of the photo of an alp. Above the muckstack, the Pennine sky was a grey shell that rarely cracked. Our houses were (it turned out later) built of beautiful golden sandstone, but the soot from our chimneys had long since blackened them, as black as the faces of the miners when they came to the surface at the end of each shift. I’m conscious of the danger of laying this on too thick, but the main road that ran parallel to our street, connected to it umbilically by soot-blacked terraces, was actually called Blacker Road. This then, was the stereotypical North, where, as The KLF reminded us years later, it was always grim.

And that’s why Christmas blazed so brightly.

In places like Barnsley, the contrast between normality and Christmas was tuned so high, the colours bled. My proto-memory is of a large room in which every flocked wall, every inch of Artexed ceiling, is exploding with hanging decorations industrially cut from metallic paper. Technicolor tinsel drips from every corner and ledge. Perhaps there are fairy lights. Possibly – suicidally – it might be candles. But everywhere there is light, and every surface catches this light, refracts and multiplies it, until the air itself shines.

As a toddler, I have no concept of alcohol, no understanding of its power to liberate, no idea why we are here in this place. But I see it as a magical grotto that I never want to leave. (I might be embellishing now, but I think I bawl my head off when we eventually do). For the rest of my life, I will always scorn minimalist, supposedly tasteful, colour-coordinated Christmases, and regard any naked branch, wall or mirror in late December as an aesthetic and moral failing.

This wonderland transforms the people within it. Throughout my childhood, adults were stony-faced. Cracking a grin seemed like surrender, as if someone had breached their defences. When they spoke to each other they diverted their eyes to the sideboard or the mantelpiece. So to my infant eyes, the true miracle of the shining room is that now they are in it, these same people laugh. Faces that are usually lined and grey are now shiny and red. They lock eyes as they laugh. They are ostentatious in their generosity. The women are gorgeous in their long frocks, dangly earrings and blue eye shadow, and the men are open and warm, thawed out in the midst of the winter chill.

My childhood was not a happy one, and Christmas memories like these stand out as brief moments when everything was OK and everyone was bright and sparkling.

For a long time, I used to associate this first memory of what turned out to be Christmas with the pub. But as I grew older and began visiting the local pubs myself, I could never figure out which one it could have been. Obviously, the décor would have changed over the decades, but even accounting for the difference in scale perceived by a tiny person in an adult’s arms and a gawky teenager, my magical glowing place had been much bigger than any of the boozers in our village, or even in the town centre. My dad has been dead for a long time now, and there’s no reason why he’d remember one random Christmas from the late sixties or early seventies even if he was still around to ask. But thinking back, my parents hardly ever went to the pub at all. My dad, on the rare occasions when he drank, was a clubman.

***

Words are powerful. When you look at who controls their meanings, you can see where the power in a society lies.

Take ‘clubman,’ for example. Ask someone in the North what a clubman is, and they’ll tell you it’s a bloke who tends to do their drinking in a club – working men’s club, social club, ex-servicemen’s club, Labour club, whatever – rather than a pub. Ask an affluent, well-connected person in the South, and a clubman is a member of a gentlemen’s club.

Fine – some words have different associations for different groups of people: Mecca is either a chain of bingo halls or the most holy city in Islam, depending on your point of view. But the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘clubman’ as ‘a man who is a member of a gentlemen’s club’ – and that’s it, no possibility of a double-meaning. This is revealing of, at best, a profound ignorance of the reach and impact of the working men’s club movement, and at worst, a deep institutional bias against the history and interests of the working-class.

Likewise, ask a grizzled, veteran stand-up comedian, or a singer and TV personality such as Tom Jones or Jane McDonald what ‘clubland’ is, and they’ll tell you it’s a circuit of working men’s clubs, mainly in the north of England. Ask the internet, and it’s ‘St James’s, an area of Westminster in London where many gentlemen’s clubs were located,’ with no mention of its working-class equivalent.

Members of gentlemen’s clubs tend to be influential people – aristocrats, politicians, and men at the top of the business, professional, and military worlds. So, of course, they get written about – in history, academia, memoirs, even novels: Phileas Fogg famously circumnavigates the globe in eighty days using Pall Mall’s Reform Club as his start and finish point. There are enough books about the upper-class version of clubland to fill a small library. While the term ‘gentlemen’s club’ is now, hilariously, used more often as an attempt to paint a veneer of respectability onto strip clubs and lap-dancing bars, London’s lofty version of clubland is familiar to millions who would never actually be allowed through its doors.

However, if you want to read something about working men’s clubs, you’re going to struggle. There’s Clubmen, an official history of the Club and Institute Union (CIU) written by George Tremlett and published in 1988; a self-published book by academic and lifelong club-goer Ruth Cherrington from 2012; and a hard-to-find history workshop pamphlet from 1971. Throw in two or three academic papers, an unpublished PhD thesis and the odd chapter in a sociology textbook from the seventies, and that’s pretty much it. Of this collection, only Ruth’s book is commercially available at the time of writing.

Does this imbalance, this domination of the idea of ‘clubland’ and ‘clubmen’ by the upper-class versions of those words, reflect the relative social and cultural importance of working men’s clubs versus gentlemen’s clubs?

Hardly.

At their height, there were around 400 gentlemen’s clubs in London. The total membership of these clubs is not known, but let’s be generous and say that in total it ran to the tens of thousands. Hell, let’s pretend it’s Christmas and say, for the sake of argument, that the membership of gentlemen’s clubs at its peak topped 100,000. Or even 200,000 – but that’s probably getting a bit silly.

At the time I was being held in all that colour and light, working men’s clubs and social clubs were at their peak. In 1974, there were 4,033 clubs affiliated to the CIU, and at least as many again that were not affiliated to the Union. Over 4 million people – 10 per cent of the UK’s adult population at that time – were members of at least one CIU club, with thousands more on waiting lists. Each of these working men’s clubs had an impact not just on its members, but also their families, their wider communities, even the social life and popular culture of the nation, that far outstripped that of the comfortable colonnades where men of influence relaxed with the Daily Telegraph.

Today, this clubland peak – the peak of the real clubland, the one that matters – is frozen in time. In the popular imagination, if the gentleman’s club belongs to the late Victorians, the working men’s club remains stranded forever in the mid-1970s, the preserve of dinner-suited comedians doing dodgy gags about ‘the wife’s mother’ to a smoke-filled room of flat-capped men swilling pints of bitter and munching chicken in a basket, their wives beside them growing impatient for the bingo.

This stereotype may be accurate, as most stereotypes are. But it’s also hopelessly incomplete. Safely in the past, and resolutely working-class, this one-dimensional cliché gives us permission to laugh at the working men’s club, and to kick down at previous generations of members who didn’t define themselves by the brands they wore, couldn’t name a single Instagram influencer or had never eaten sushi.

It’s a stereotype that seems to have prevented any serious mainstream consideration of a movement that’s now 160 years old and has had a profound impact on millions of lives, quietly shaping the cultural fabric of Britain in ways that still resonate today. As soon as you start to dig, it’s frankly weird how little clubs are mentioned in books on Victorian leisure habits, or books celebrating everything important about the north of England, or books on what it means to be working-class. Clubs had a far bigger and broader impact in the UK than, for example, the Cooperative Movement, which deservedly has page after page of books devoted to it on a cursory Amazon search.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried.

Ruth Cherrington spent a decade trying to get her book on the history of working men’s clubs published before deciding to do it herself. I failed to interest publishers in the idea for this book for fifteen years before finally being introduced to the only one that saw its value. The rejections, all from London-based publishers, were always based on the same assumption: only old people in the north of England would be interested in reading about working men’s clubs. And the problem with that is, they continued, old people in the north of England don’t read.

Beneath the surface of the obvious issues with this statement, there lurks a telling insight into how we perceive the difference between history and nostalgia.

History is important. It helps us understand who we are, where we came from and how we got here. Only by knowing the past can we make sense of the present and prepare for the future.

We care about history so much it has become the battleground for present-day culture wars: removing a statue is erasing our history. ‘Rewriting history’ is a sacrilegious act.

Nostalgia, meanwhile, is the junk food, empty-calorie version of history. We look back to find comfort in the warm glow of a past that probably never existed in the first place, at least not as the golden light of nostalgia illuminates it. Nostalgia tells us nothing useful about the past, seeks to escape the present, and to resist the future.

For years, when I mentioned to someone that I was interested in writing a history of the working men’s club movement, what they heard is that I wanted to embark on an exercise in nostalgia. A history of working men’s clubs is, by definition, not proper history – it has nothing to offer the reader beyond prompting fond reminiscences of scampi and chips, Federation Bitter and Marti Caine. Like, say, a history of pubs, or fish and chips, the subject is not important enough to count as ‘proper’ history. It’s primarily northern and working-class, and because of that, it can’t tell us anything useful about who we are, where we’re from, or how we got here.

It’s not just working men’s clubs that fall foul of this bias: Professor Stephen Earnshaw, author of The Pub in Literature, and Professor John K Walton, author of Fish and Chips & the British Working Class, 1870–1940, both describe in their respective books how they were ridiculed by their peers for choosing these as serious areas of study. The latter even ended up in Private Eye’s ‘Pseud’s Corner,’ for daring to suggest that the foodways of working-class people in the early twentieth century was a valid area for a social historian to study.

This intellectual bias against the culture of the working classes is itself an integral theme that runs through the entire story of the working men’s club movement – in fact, the whole story starts there, with middle-class people looking down on the ‘lower classes’ and their leisure habits, and failing to see anything they could recognise as culture or worthwhile leisure pursuits. So it’s not surprising that this bias still exists today. When right-wing tabloids create a moral panic over a new form of dance music or portray young working-class people as drunken louts terrifying town centres, they’re doing the same thing they’ve been doing since the 1820s, sometimes – as we’ll see – even using the same language.

Outside academia, it’s not surprising that clubs are dismissed, given that the few references to them anyone might see invariably freeze them at their 1970s peak. The flat cap and slopping bitter image of clubs has been stamped onto the minds of every living generation – if they have any image of clubs at all – first by older relatives who were clubmen and women, then by distant memories of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which both celebrated and pilloried club culture on prime time TV between 1974 and 1977, and finally by Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights – a portrayal of club life in decline that absolutely had fondness at its heart, but allowed its audience to laugh at the characters portrayed at least as much as with them.

The irony is, the story of the working men’s club movement doesn’t start in the North at all, and it takes quite a while to get there. Both for southerners who look down their noses at the real clubland, and northerners who regard clubland as part of their identity, it’s going to be galling to learn that the foundation and early history of the working men’s club movement was overwhelmingly centred not amid the mills of Lancashire or Yorkshire’s pits, but in the salons and coffee houses of London.

This is not just another example of London grabbing everything that matters and keeping it for itself. While clubs would go on to thrive around the pitheads, factories and furnaces of the North, London was the hellish laboratory where clubs were first perceived as necessary – in full, close-up view of a ruling class that had conflicting emotions about the new, industrialised workforce they had created.

I first became fascinated by working men’s clubs while researching my first book, Man Walks into a Pub. I was tracing the history of licensing regulations and how they affected the evolution of the pub. In 1872, Gladstone’s Liberal government introduced a Licensing Act that forced pubs to close from midnight in London (and 11pm elsewhere) until 6am. These restrictions were applied to the pubs where the working classes drank, but not to gentlemen’s clubs. This hypocrisy let to rioting and attacks on clubs, and the eventual fall of Gladstone’s government.

The working men’s club movement was a decade old at this time, still small and struggling, and not really on the nation’s radar. If it had been, the 1872 Licensing Act might have been worded a little differently. It didn’t specify between different kinds of clubs, just stating that private members’ clubs, because they were private, were exempt from the rules that applied to public houses. Working men’s clubs pointed out that they, too, were private members’ clubs, and should therefore be subject to the same rules as the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s. Licensing authorities and judges were faced with a simple legal choice: recognise the equivalence of working men’s clubs or change the law so that their own clubs would be subject to the same rules as pubs. Working men’s clubs were duly recognised as being subject to club rather than pub regulations. While this ruling would be challenged many times over the next century and a half – not least by the breweries that owned the pubs – clubs found self-sufficiency through the profits on beer sold when pubs had to close, and their numbers boomed.

I loved this victorious defiance, at a time when the working classes had to fight for every scrap from the table, when people were transported or even executed for campaigning for every single right and comfort we now take for granted. It gave me the first inkling that there was something more to working men’s clubs, that this was a social and cultural movement through which the working classes defined themselves, protected themselves and improved themselves.

Clubs were run by committees elected by and for their members. Downtrodden working men gained roles and responsibilities that allowed them to prove they weren’t thick or incompetent, that they could run organisations with turnovers to rival those of some of the companies they worked for. Clubs offered dignity and status, cohesion and vital support to communities decades before the welfare state arrived.

And yes, they also sold chea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• PART ONE – THE SOUTH
• 1 The Club and Me
• 2 The Club and the Institute
• 3 The Club and the Pub
• 4 The Club and the Music Hall
• 5 The Club and the Radicals
• PART TWO – THE NORTH
• 6 The Club and Us (and Them)
• 7 The Club and the Turns
• 8 The Club and Games
• 9 The Club and Women
• 10 The Club and Change
• 11 The Club and the Future
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Book Credits
• About the Publisher