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Mixing it with the men
WHITE'S is the only club in London that has never admitted women - apart from servants, of course. But never is never quite never, even among the most discriminating of men, and there have been two exceptions to this rule in my adult life, when White's opened its doors briefly to members of the opposing sex. One was for drinks on the occasion of the engagement of the Prince of Wales. The other was last Monday, when White's celebrated its 300th anniversary and women were allowed to dine there - one woman per member.
With very mixed feelings I went to both occasions. I have always admired White's for sticking to its guns, and never giving in to the half-hearted and insincere liberalism that, at last, has women lunching at the Athenaeum, but in the basement.
Hypocrisy in these matters adds insult to injury.
There is no good enough reason why people should not have private clubs that are exclusive. It may be painful for those of us who are excluded, but the freedom is surely more important than the grievance.
Yet it undoubtedly is a grievance, I felt very strongly, standing on the handsome staircase at White's on Monday. What a sense of themselves these men must have, or must have had, surrounded by such elegance and such comfort. At White's the style has the confidence of the throwaway line - understatement. Only at White's could a series of exquisite dishes - the usual, much loved nursery food had been suppressed in honour of the occasion -be announced, baldly, on the menu cards, as artichoke, turbot, vegetables and so on, without the slightest hint of vulgar persiflage.
How sustaining it must be to the morale to be so extraordinarily well served; the club servants showed a courtesy that is a fantasy to most of us -far better than in other clubs. How solid are the portraits on the walls - all men. And how opulent are the magisterial four-square wooden thrones, which look like seats of justice but actually are the lavatories. How natural must seem the power and influence that members for three centuries have enjoyed. And how restful it must be to know that never will the manly calm be interrupted by the trouble and strife - or, if not the wife, then the mistress, the ex, or the tart. But never no more.
I have often thought that whenever women get in on any male institution, it is because it is no longer worth keeping us out: as with Everest, MI5, 10 Downing Street and all the other men's clubs, so with White's. Our presence on Monday was a sign that the end is in sight. The names of the members are the names of families that were once great but no longer. The new members, much in evidence on Monday, according to a man near me, looked rather 'mildewy', and the power and influence have long since shifted elsewhere, partly, I am glad to say, to women. But for all the female networking that now goes on, we have yet to get such lovely premises.
IT was not very diplomatic of Lady Warnock to refuse to comment recently on the search for 'gay genes'. 'I really don't comment unless I am paid for it,' she said. Considering all that she has uttered, at the lift of a telephone, about this and that, from the horrors of Thatcherite philistinism to the mysteries of medical ethics, homosexuals might feel rather unfairly left out. Alternatively, of course, they might feel rather relieved to be spared.
But either way, Lady Warnock has a point. I should not like in any way to compare myself to her, but I felt just as she did when approached last week by a BBC local radio programme to hold forth about the evils of tourism. Had I been free, I should have done it, addicted as I am to attention in almost any form. However, it would have taken most of a morning, and I should have lost half a working day. Yet the BBC was offering no fee at all.
The assumption that people will automatically do such things comes from an entirely different economic climate, when people had secure, long-term jobs and when, if they took time off to hold forth in public, it was their employer's time.
All that is changing. Some people are still astonishingly generous with their thoughts - one immediately thinks of celebrities such as Rabbi Julia Neuburger, who can always be relied on for a challenging comment, like her recent fascinating remarks about her breasts. But one cannot, in these hard times, expect everybody to be so public-spirited.
DEMOCRACY has been on my mind all week, not in connection with the members of White's, who may not all be ready for it, but in connection with the tribal peoples of South America.
I have been saddened by talking recently to a friend in the world of ethno-biology; as far as I can understand the word, ethno-biology, for all its academic sound, canall too often be used in the race between Western pharmaceutical companies to rip off tribal peoples' medicinal plants and recipes.
In any event it seems that the latest fashion among Western pharmaceutical companies trying to set up deals with tribal peoples is to insist that democratic practices should be written into the contract. What nonsense] It reminds me of the way the Westerners brought Christian missionaries into 19th-century China on the opium clippers, inflicting both simultaneously on the helpless Chinese, with the result that the Celestials were understandably confused. Observers heard them speak, in one word, of 'Jesus-opium'. Now perhaps shall get Proportional Representation-Oil of Evening Primrose.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 25, 1993
