The II Earl

In October, for the first time in its history, the world’s most infamous gentlemen’s dining club admitted that it failed to attract sufficient membership applications. So, farewell then, dear Bullingdon Club, taken from us this Michaelmas at the tender age of 236. Yours was not an easy life. Of course, there were the good times: the braying laughter of friends in high places; that reassuringly expensive dress sense; the broken glass and opened doors; those very smart photographs on all those steps and things. But, near the end, your ailments came in crowds. How unkind Evelyn Waugh was to write, in his prophetically named Decline And Fall, of your ‘epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands’. Illiterate? Uncouth? What rot! Don’t these people know that three of your younger sons – Johnson, Cameron, Osborne – recently made it to the pinnacle of government? (Never mind that the lat...

  These photos dating from the 1940s, in the archives of Tri-Kap fraternity. They were part of a senior's book, which would have been given as a memento at graduation. Because of the war, Dartmouth students graduated early, and thus men of all years are represented here. This fellow wears a classic Dartmouth sweater. Unfortunately, these days it's more likely to see this paired with sweatpants rather than a pair of wool trousers and a white collared shirt. On the back of the Photo, it says that dog's name is Duke. The pipe and wool sweater lend an air of nonchalance to this photo. 'Ol Fuzzy's sweater and wool pants combination is timeless and relaxed. I also like his Indian head cane, which you can still buy today. Playing cards in a striped suit and repp tie? You'd be lucky to see an outfit like this at a formal. T-shirt and blazer? Probably the most informal photo of the lot. Reminds me a little bit of Miami Vice.   One fi...

"A Club is a place where a man goes to be among his own kind." - Anthony Lejeune London is the mother city of clubs. There are famous clubs in many other cities around the World, but they all owe a debt to those original clubs of St James’s Street and Pall Mall; clubs which were designed to suit the life-style of the English gentleman; clubs which have played a significant role in the social and political history of Britain. During the ten years in which this book has been in preparation, a sad number of distinguished clubs have died and the English gentleman himself has become an endangered species. Already much of the material is irreplaceable, because it records things which have gone; but the book also – indeed mainly – celebrates an arcane tradition which is very much alive. Clubland is another country, redolent of the past, but, for its few thousand regular inhabitants, still an important part of their daily lives; a place occupied simultaneously by highly conventi...