What is the Garrick Club? Men-only members club votes to let women join for first time

No woman has ever been a member of London’s Garrick Club.

Members were so outraged by actor Hugh Bonneville’s suggestion that Joanna Lumley join in 2011, some scrawled expletives and tore up the nomination page.

Founded in 1831 as a place where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, it would make sense for the Absolutely Fabulous star to be among its members.

But her gender was just too much for the Garrick men to bear.

One wrote: ‘Women aren’t allowed here and never will be.’

That looks set to change 193 years since it was founded after members voted to allow women to join on Tuesday.

It’s been under pressure to change its long-standing policy for decades.

But it refused to budge until The Guardian revealed its closely-guarded membership list for the first time in March.

What is the Garrick Club?

The Garrick Club’s purpose-built 1860s grey stone home in the heart of London’s West End reflects its lifelong association with drama.

Named after 18th century actor David Garrick, it still views itself as club geared towards ‘the general patronage of drama’.

It was always intended as a place where actors, patrons and others involved in the dramatic arts could meet and mix away from the eyes of the outside world.

Still today its ‘sophisticated and cosmopolitan’ membership is packed with world famous actors.

When its membership list emerged this year, the bosses of the Royal Ballet School, English National Opera and Royal Opera House were on it.

There are also judges, journalists, politicians and businessmen in their ranks.

As paying members, they’re allowed use of the clubs luxurious facilities.

Amid the chandeliers and walls adorned with portraits, the club has a theatrical library, billiards room, private and public dining rooms, roof terrace and computer room.

It even has 17 bedrooms members can make use of seven days a week.

The rest of the club is only open Monday to Friday, with reduced service after breakfast on weekends and some closures for holidays and during summer.

Business, photography and mobile phone use are strictly prohibited outside of certain areas.

Members can bring guests, who can access some of the club’s spaces, but ‘all bills for the entertainment of visitors should be paid by the member’.

What have they voted for?

Nearly 60% of the Garrick Club’s members who voted chose to admit women as full-fledged members, not just guests tucked on the edges away from the dining room’s central table.

It came after several hundred members, many wearing the club’s pink and green striped tie, participated in a two-hour debate.

The decision means current members can now nominate women to be considered for membership.

A previous vote in 2015 saw 50.5% of members voting to allow women to join, falling short of the two-thirds majority required to change rules.

How much does membership cost?

The Garrick Club’s membership fees are largely shrouded in mystery.

Estimates range from at least £1,000, with The Guardian putting the annual figure at £1,600 to access the building.

It’s not even the most expensive of London’s exclusive members’ clubs.

Membership of the South Kensington Club costs more than double that, with an annual fee of £3,500 on top of a joining fee of £1,000, Business Insider reported.

The Garrick Club actually dropped its prices in 2009 in a bid to lure in new members, the Express reported.

How to join

Joining the Garrick Club is no simple affair.

To be admitted, a member must first write your name in a red, leather-bound book.

Other members must then second your nomination, with two pages of signatures required to get you to the next stage of consideration.

After that, you’ll be invited to dine at the club before your nomination is discussed by a committee.

But you might find yourself despised enough by existing members to have your name blacklisted.

As the club’s website says: ‘It would be better that 10 unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted.’

It hopes this will ensure ‘the lively atmosphere for which the Club was so well-known in the nineteenth century continues to invigorate members of the Club in the twenty-first century’.

The process can take at least two years, but the club’s chair Christopher Kirker said ‘one or two exceptional ladies’ could be admitted sooner, The Guardian reported.

Joanna Lumley has been suggested for fast-track admittance by some members as an apology for the behaviour of some of the club’s men 13 years ago.

Who are some of its famous members?

The Garrick Club currently has roughly 1,500 members, including the UK’s reigning monarch King Charles III.

Simon Case, the current cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, resigned his membership in March just 24 hours after saying it is ‘easier to [reform] if you join it and make the change from within rather than chuck rocks from the outside’.

MI6 chief Richard Moore also resigned his membership just two days after The Guardian revealed a list of members.

Other rich, famous and powerful people on the list included:

• Benedict Cumberbatch, the Harrow-educated and Oscar-nominated actor who starred in The Imitation Game, Hawking and Sherlock.
• Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden, the 10th most influential right-winger who has prepared every Conservative leader for Prime Ministers’ Questions for 20 years, according to the New Statesman.
• Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary who launched two failed bids to become leader of the Conservative Party.
• Former QI quiz show host and Blackadder actor Stephen Fry, who rose to fame as one half of the Fry and Laurie comedy duo with House actor Hugh Laurie, who is also a member.
• Kwasi Kwarteng, whose 38-day reign as Chancellor ended with him being dismissed by Prime Minister Liz Truss for implementing her own economic plans.
• Disgraced multimillionaire hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, whose Odey Asset Management company closed last year after a Financial Times investigation revealed sexual assault and harassment allegations from numerous women.
• Former Conservative cabinet secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose ‘unabashed poshness’ has seen him dubbed the ‘Honourable Member for the 18th century’.

• Football manager Roy Hodgson, who led the England team to the quarter finals in the 2012 Euros before, two years later, they were knocked out of the World Cup group stages for the first time since 1958.
• Multi-award-winning Scottish actor Brian Cox, who played the Rupert Murdoch-inspired character Logan Roy in the HBO series Succession.
• Actor Hugh Bonneville, who may just be living up to the elite lifestyle of his palace-dwelling character in ITV’s Downton Abbey.
• Band of Brothers and Homeland actor Damian Lewis also seems to be emulating his role as Henry VIII in BBC miniseries Wolf Hall.
• Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of Daily Mail and General Trust, who was then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s favourite, and unsuccessful, candidate to become chair of media regulator Ofcom in 2021.
• Supreme court judge David Richards, the most senior of the various barristers, judges and solicitors in the Garrick Club’s ranks.
• Queen Elizabeth II’s private secretary Christopher Geidt, who went on to serve as Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser before quitting amid revelations about the then prime minister’s rule-breaking lockdown parties.
• Marcus Setchell, the gynaecologist who delivered Prince George, second in line to the throne after his father Prince William.
• BBC News world affairs editor John Simpson.

Members of the Garrick Club who are now deceased include:

• Charles Dickens, the Victorian-era author of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and great Expectations.
• H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds.
• Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1950 to 1951.
• T. S. Elliot, a US-born poet who won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.
• P. G. Wodehouse, prolific writer of the Wooster and Jeeves books, which have since been criticised for including racist language.
• Michael Redgrave, actor and father of Vanessa Redgrave.
• Laurence Olivier, the two-time Oscar winning actor who the Laurence Olivier Awards are named after.
• Hugh Cudlipp, editor of the Daily Mirror in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Hartley Shawcross, the lead British prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials.
• Robin Day, who presented BBC’s Question Time for the first decade after it was launched in 1979.
• Richard Attenborough, the Jurassic Park actor and brother of broadcaster David Attenborough.

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