Garrick Club

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The Garrick Club, London

The Garrick Club is a gentlemen's club in London. Founded in 1831, it moved to its present home on Garrick Street in 1864, and has a waiting list of candidates for membership^{[citation needed]}. The current waiting list is over eight years. The original assurance of the committee was “that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted.” The exclusive nature of the club was made clear when reporter Jeremy Paxman applied to join but was blackballed with one member stating that, "he was full of himself". He was later admitted.^[1] Notable past members include Charles Dickens, J. M. Barrie, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Kingsley Amis, Edward Elgar^[2] and A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh.^[3]

The club is favoured by a natural mixture of literary men, actors and barristers; by the time the last reach the end of the waiting list, many of them will have become judges. The Literary Society meets at the club once a month.

The original plans state that "The Garrick Club is instituted for the general patronage of drama; for the purpose of combining the use of a Club, on economic principles, with the advantages of a literary society; for bringing together supporters of drama; and for the formation of a theatrical library, with works on costume." It also has a significant art collection and various theatrical artifacts.^[4] The main staircase is dominated by a portrait of the great actor David Garrick in costume as royalty, not by the usual huge picture of royalty as is customary in such venues.

The club's location at 13 and 15 Garrick Street, between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, is unusual, being nearer theatreland than the smarter Pall Mall and St. James's areas favoured by most such clubs. It is only ten minutes' walk away, in the direction of Legal London. The Garrick does not admit women as members, unlike its New York counterpart The Players' Club of Edwin Booth in Gramercy Park, which began to do so in 1989. The Players purpose was largely modeled upon the Garrick's when it was founded in 1888. Since these two clubs are so similar, it is natural that they would exchange temporary membership privileges for visitors. This led to a confrontation when one of New York's leading producers (female) had a show on in London, tried to have lunch at the Garrick, and couldn't get in. In exasperation, upon return to New York, she resigned her membership of the Players.

On 30 April 2007 Fleur Deeson and Sophie Morris made Garrick Club history by becoming the first women to be admitted to a club talk. The talk, held in the Garrick library, was an account of the history and ecology of Tanzania's Kilimanjaro, the world's highest freestanding mountain at 5895m, and was given by Marcus Risdell, mountaineer and Garrick Club curator.