Identifying the Diogenes Club in Sherlock Holmes
/To mark the publication of my new book on the history of London clubs, I am sharing here an article I first published in the Autumn 2019 volume (69:3) of the Baker Street Journal, which tries to address the long-running controversy over whether the fictional Diogenes Club was based on a real-life club.
The Diogenes Club:
A Response to David Leal, and the Case for the Junior Carlton Club[1]
Seth Alexander Thévoz
David Leal's lively article ‘What was the Diogenes Club?’ homes in on several new clues in identifying Mycroft Holmes’s legendary club, and the author ultimately plumps for his own club, the Reform.[2] However, for all the article’s considerable originality, I find myself agreeing with little of its reasoning, and certainly not with its conclusion. Tempting though it might be to write a playful riposte, making the case for my own club, the National Liberal (a natural base for Mycroft in Whitehall), I will instead draw here on my own work as an historian of ‘Clubland’ to argue for why the Diogenes is probably a non-existent composite, with elements of the Athenaeum and Marlborough Clubs – but that if it were based on one club, then it would have to be the Junior Carlton Club. The Junior Carlton has long been overlooked by Sherlockian scholars as a viable candidate.
There has been a distinguished pedigree of authors speculating as to the ‘true’ identity of the Diogenes Club.[3] If there is something close to a consensus, it is that expressed by Leslie S. Klinger, that the Diogenes did not exist, and was an untraceable composite of many different clubs.[4] Nevertheless, Sherlockians have long been intrigued by the idea that the Diogenes is “only an alias”, in Edward Donegall’s phase.[5] There is, of course, much precedent for this – John H. Watson was no stranger to barely concealing the names of real places behind thinly-disguised pseudonyms. In ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, for instance, he wrote of ‘the atrocious conduct of Colonel Upwood in connection with the famous card scandal of the Nonpareil Club’[6] which any contemporary reader would have instantly recognised as a reference to Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon-Cumming’s role in the 1890 Royal Baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft.[7] Yet much of the literature has sought to reconcile most rather than all of the clues as to the ‘real’ Diogenes Club.
Most literature arguing for the Travellers Club derives from a widely-quoted New York Times review of Charles Graves’s 1963 book about modern-day London clubs, which quotes Graves on Travellers members maintaining silence – an unusual feature by the 1960s, but not in the 1880s.[8] Following on from this, S. Tupper Bigelow made a less-than-convincing case for the Travellers, arguing that in order for Mycroft Holmes to have been “a founder” of the club in 1819, he would have been 104 years old in 1888 (and presumably aged 111 by the time of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’), and that he was 70 years older than his brother Sherlock, rather than the stated 7 year age difference.[9] Other theories are easily disproved – David Marcum improbably suggested the residential address of 77-78 Pall Mall for the Diogenes[10] (despite it serving as the Marquess of Ailesbury’s townhouse from 1862-92)[11], and the apartments opposite at 48 Pall Mall for Mycroft’s rooms. Yet these serviced apartments at No. 48 were not built by Hyman Henry Collins and Marcus Collins until 1894-7 – too late for the 1888 events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, or the 1895 events of ‘The Bruce-Partington Submarine’.[12]
Before I set out my disagreements with Professor Leal, I should note that his article has much to commend it. He has delved further into the archives than any other writer who had previously tried to address this question; and his article contains several shrewd deductions. He is correct in pointing out that Mycroft Holmes, who was reluctant to stray as far north from Whitehall as Baker Street, is unlikely to have been a member of the Travellers Club, membership of which requires having travelled to a location over 500 miles from London.[13] He is also correct to conclude that it was rare for career civil servants to join openly political clubs (which typically required members to sign a declaration of principles), but that there were already precedents for civil servants who joined political clubs by the 1880s.
Ordnance Survey Map of Pall Mall, 1894, with the Junior Carlton Club on the north of Pall Mall, and the south of St. James’s Square, https://maps.nls.uk/os/
Nonetheless, the article is built on a series of flawed assumptions.
Professor Leal places great emphasis on how a political club such as the Reform could contain some members who were civil servants, because “the first nineteenth-century civil servants to join [the Reform] were statisticians.”[14] Yet crucially, Mycroft Holmes is never described as a statistician. He “has an extraordinary faculty for figures, and audits the books in some of the government departments.”[15] Beyond the rather flimsy resemblance that both occupations involve numbers, there is the world of difference between the skills of a statistician and an auditor.
Professor Leal curiously insists, like Charles Merriman before him, that the Diogenes had to have been based on one of the clubs of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a member.[16] This is highly questionable. In the late-Victorian age of gregarious clubmen, with most of the restrictions on male guests lifted by the 1860s, it was the norm for writers and editors to be intimately familiar with a range of clubs to which they never belonged – yet which they were constantly flitting in and out of as guests. Consider, for instance, P. G. Wodehouse's repeated references to the National Liberal Club,[17] when he never belonged to that club, and was in fact a member of its nearby conservative rival, the Constitutional Club.[18]
Another questionable extrapolation is Professor Leal’s assertion that “the Reform Club library was larger and more comprehensive” than that of the Travellers, and that its sheer variety would have been of more use to Mycroft's line of work than the travel-centred literature of its neighbouring club.[19] This is true, and makes the Reform Club a more likely candidate than the Travellers. Yet Professor Leal omits to mention that in 1888, the largest library in all of Clubland belonged to the Athenaeum, making that an even more likely candidate by this rationale.[20]
One possibility: the Marlborough Club
Professor Leal argues that Mycroft's status as a founder of his club “rules out all Pall Mall clubs except the one that required friendship with the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII)”[21] This Club, the Marlborough, is not as improbable as it may sound. The Marlborough has tended to be all too easily dismissed – S. Tupper Bigelow noted, for instance, that Charles Graves’s 1963 book Leather Armchairs “says little” about the “long since disappeared” Marlborough and New Athenaeum Clubs, and that “If they are beneath his notice, they should be beneath ours, and, a fortiori, Mycroft’s as well.”[22] Judge Bigelow does not seem to have grasped that Graves was writing a survey of contemporary London clubs in 1963, and that listing long-dissolved clubs was well outside his remit.
The Marlborough Club was based in a narrow but deep building at 52 Pall Mall. It was founded by the Prince of Wales, against a backdrop of rumour and press attention on the Prince’s dissolute lifestyle. The Prince very much enjoyed being a clubman, yet Clubland was rife with gossipers.[23] In setting up his own club, the Prince inserted a singular clause into the rules: that he, personally, retained the right of veto over candidates for membership. Owned and underwritten by the Prince as a proprietary club, it primarily existed as a means for him to continue with his drunken carousing in the most discreet company.
The Marlborough Club has several points in its favour. It was that great architectural rarity, a Pall Mall club with a bow window. (In fact, it had two, one atop the other on the first and second floors.) It was founded in 1868, when Mycroft was 21, making it plausible for him to have been a founder member.[24] King’s Place emerged onto Pall Mall as a passageway along the side of the Club’s deep, narrow building, offering a viable prospect for him to have had lodgings nearby, among the bazaar of picaresque shops which lined the alleyway, and the residential accommodation above. It was located some way opposite from the Carlton Club, on the north side of the street (although as Klinger concedes, if Holmes was walking from St. James’s Street, the Marlborough would have been reached long before the Carlton).[25] Angel Court, although it did not at the time connect through to Pall Mall, also ran alongside the Club, connecting with King Street at the rear, providing a further candidate for nearby accommodation.
Marlborough Club, 52 Pall Mall, 1868
Given this background, and the Club’s consequent reputation for being a gathering of the Prince’s “Yes-Men”, it is not difficult to see how it could have acquired a reputation as “the queerest club in London,”, with Mycroft as “one of the queerest men” among “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town”.
Nevertheless, the Marlborough’s louche reputation meant that to characterise its members as exhibiting “shyness…misanthropy... [and] no wish for the company of their fellows” would be going a step too far. It is possible that this could be reconciled in considering the very different hours Mycroft kept to the Prince of Wales’s “fast set”. Not all members would have conformed to the Marlborough Club’s caricature, and it was inconceivable that such a socially well-connected club would not be considered respectable. The Prince was fond of staying up late for all-night gambling, in sharp contrast to Mycroft’s fixed late-afternoon and early evening hours in the Club, and it is quite possible that the kinds of members who frequented the Club at different times of day were themselves different; indeed, that the “no conversation” rules varied at different hours. Many a night-time bordello has been the very soul of respectability and even prudishness in day-time.
Another possibility: The Athenaeum
Neither should the Athenaeum be entirely disregarded as a possibility for the Diogenes Club. The off-hand dismissal of the Athenaeum by Professor Leal is perplexing – it is held up as “unlikely”, “almost impossible” even, and is regarded as having been “as much a national honour society as a club.”[26] This latter point, surely, makes an even stronger case for why a man of Mycroft’s expertise would not only be a member, but could draw upon the expertise of fellow members in his singular occupation. The Athenaeum was considered sine qua non in its status as a pillar of the Establishment, with its cross-section of members who were authorities in every major field.[27] I would concur with the late Edward Donegall, that its concentration of experts in the arts, literature and science made it the perfect base of operations for Mycroft.[28] It was a leading trendsetter for the later clubs of Pall Mall, in its external architecture (the first Classical Revival building on Pall Mall),[29] internal architecture (the first to be designed around a large, central atrium),[30] balloting practices,[31] and social prestige. It was, in short, the quintessential club.
It also matched many of the details of the Diogenes, including positioning “some little distance from the Carlton”[32], the presence of glass-panelled internal doors, the members’ disdain for conversation in several club rooms, and the scope for Mycroft to have had rooms opposite, on Carlton House Terrace.
I share Professor Leal’s reasoning that Mycroft’s line of work would probably have necessitated access to a good library. As the Athenaeum contained Clubland’s finest library at the time, it would have been a more logical choice than the Travellers or Reform – and Mycroft was nothing if not logical. It should be conceded, however, that the emphasis that both Professor Leal and I place on the Club’s library is not necessarily supported by the canon. Holmes singles out “comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals” at the Diogenes, but makes no reference to any well-stocked library.[33] Newspapers were a Clubland fixture, but not all clubs had libraries.[34] Moreover, Whitehall had plenty of fine in-house libraries in the major government departments, including the Foreign Office’s legendarily well-stocked example, so it is far from certain that Mycroft would have needed to supplement his workplace’s libraries with a private club’s library.
The two points against the Athenaeum are, of course, the non-existence of any bow window, and Mycroft’s status as a founder, when the Athenaeum was founded in 1824 – some 23 years before he was born.
Junior Carlton Club, 30 Pall Mall, J. Macvicar Anderson, 8 June 1887.
The only candidate for which all the evidence fits: the Junior Carlton Club
One particularly problematic detail for any Sherlockian scholar to reconcile is Sherlock Holmes's mention in 1888 that Mycroft was “A founder member”[35] of the Diogenes. Using Baring Gould's chronology, with a birth date of 1847, Mycroft would have been far too young to have been a founder member of the major Pall Mall clubs, including the United Service (established 1815), the Travellers (1819), the United University (1821), the Athenaeum (1824), the Oxford and Cambridge (1830), the Carlton (1832), and the Reform (1836).[36] Professor Leal insists that “no Pall Mall club was founded at such a time (except the Marlborough)”, and speculates that “this part of the narrative was possibly misdirection by Watson.”[37] This overlooks the presence of a major Pall Mall club which was founded at precisely the right time: The Junior Carlton Club at 30 Pall Mall, established in 1864, with a clubhouse opened in 1869, opposite the Carlton Club and the War Office, and originally designed by the same architect as the Marlborough Club, David Brandon.[38]
A 17-year-old Mycroft Holmes could easily have joined as a Junior Member. This would have been fully in keeping with the nature of supply-and-demand among applicants to clubs. As I have written elsewhere, the chances of a nineteenth century man from even the most landed background promptly joining an established club were rather slim;[39] and this would both reinforce Sherlock Holmes's claim that his brother was a founder member of the Diogenes Club, and would count against Professor Leal's easy dismissal of this detail. Existing clubs each had a strict cap on the maximum number of members they contained, meaning that they generated a waiting list of candidates eagerly awaiting the next available place, and it could take a candidate literally twenty or thirty years to even come up for election.[40] By the 1880s, most major Pall Mall clubs had a waiting list at the upper end of the scale. The only way to join an existing club was to wait for the current members to resign, or for them to die of old age; all the while the queue grew exponentially longer. My study of ballot books shows that it was not abnormal for men to put their names down for club membership in their teens, nor for them to experience a decades-long wait.[41] Nor was it unheard of for the Junior Carlton in particular to have teenagers amongst its founder members in 1864, such as the 15-year-old cartoonist and cartographer Fred W. Rose.[42]
Even if he had submitted applications to established clubs as a teenager, a 41-year-old Mycroft in 1888 is unlikely to have yet been elected to any of them, much less to have been a long-standing member.
It was the exponential growth in club waiting lists, in both the number of candidates and the length of wait, which prompted a flurry of “Junior” clubs to be founded from the 1860s onwards (the Junior Army & Navy Club, the Junior Athenaeum, the Junior Constitutional Club, etc) – including the Junior Carlton Club in 1864. Other new clubs set up around this time, without the “Junior” prefix, were also set up to address this very problem.[43] The nature of supply-and-demand in ‘Clubland’ meant that prospective members were far keener to set up new clubs which they could immediately begin using, than to wait interminably for the vague promise of eventually joining an established club in their old age. This contributed to the soaring growth in ‘Clubland’, from around 30 clubs in the early 1860s, to over 250 by the early 1890s.[44] Most of these “Junior” clubs were located on a series of nearby streets – Albemarle Street, Dover Street, Haymarket, Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, or Suffolk Street. Only the Junior Carlton stood as a “Junior” club on Pall Mall.
We do not know which university Mycroft attended, but S. C. Roberts deduced that “Mycroft could not have attained such a position [as he did] if he had not had an expensive public school and university education behind him.”[45] Baring-Gould suggests that he went up to Oxford in 1865, at the age of 18.[46] If Mycroft joined the Junior Carlton at the age of 17, then it is likely that he did so with a view to having a base in London. As per Baring-Gould, the Holmes family lacked deep roots – the brothers had been born in Yorkshire, but their father Siger Holmes had only returned from India in 1844, and the years 1855 to 1864 had been spent with the family travelling around Europe. When they returned in 1864, Siger took the lease on a house in Kennington, and so his precocious 17-year-old son co-founding a club on arrival can be seen as an attempt to set down some roots in London.[47]
The Junior Carlton has long been overlooked as a viable Diogenes candidate, probably for three main reasons: (1) it is no longer there, with the original building having been demolished in 1963, and so its existence is easily overlooked by those making a recce of Pall Mall today; (2) it was a political club for conservatives, and so membership meant signing a declaration of support for the Conservative Party and its leaders in parliament – although if the highly politicised Reform Club is to be considered a viable candidate, then so should the Junior Carlton; and (3) it was on the north side of Pall Mall.
When one thinks of Pall Mall, the south side invariably dominates, with its almost continuous row of grand, purpose-built nineteenth-century clubhouses, constructed on the grounds of the former royal palace, Carlton House, which was demolished in 1826. Yet the north side of the street also had its fair share of clubs by the 1880s. The north side was a patchwork of different buildings of wildly different ages. The sheer prestige of a Pall Mall address meant that many newer clubs were keen to site themselves anywhere on the street, and this included the Junior Carlton, the shape of its lengthy, oblong building being necessitated by the row of terraced houses backing onto the south side of St James's Square, which had to be demolished to make way for it.[48]
Yet the Junior Carlton was well-located to be the Diogenes Club. Coming from St. James’s, Holmes stopped “at a door some little distance from the Carlton”[49] – a description which perfectly fits the Junior Carlton Club, diagonally opposite the visually striking Carlton, on the other side of the street.
Further evidence for the Diogenes being a political club like the Junior Carlton is offered by Sherlock Holmes’s observation that his brother is “always there from quarter to five to twenty to eight.”[50] This presumably coincides with Mycroft’s mealtimes, since one of the main attractions of a club was the ability to dine well, and inexpensively.[51] Given the prohibition on speaking to fellow Diogenes members, one cannot imagine mealtimes taking long, and Mycroft would have rapidly left after a silent dinner. It should be noted that political clubs such as Brooks’s favoured serving dinner at 7pm prompt, to slot around parliamentary sitting hours, tallying perfectly with Mycroft leaving the building forty minutes later.[52]
Further evidence for Mycroft having belonged to a political club was put forward by William D. Jenkins, who noted that the commonly-ascribed dates for ‘The Greek Interpreter’ and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1888 and late 1895) both tallied with the Unionist governments of Lord Salisbury; and moreover, that Mycroft’s stated salary was far too low for him to have been a career civil servant in a senior role, but that this could be explained by his having been a political appointee within the civil service. Jenkins further argued that Sherlock Holmes’s oft-quoted comment that Mycroft “occasionally is the British government” emphasises the temporary nature of his role, as a political appointee, out of office whenever the Unionists were out of office – as was the case for five months in 1886, and again in 1892-5.[53] (Jenkins’s own conclusion, that the Diogenes was actually another conservative establishment, the Unionist Club, is easily disproved: Jenkins was clearly unaware that the short-lived Unionist Club closed down after just four years in 1892 – three years before the events of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’.)
The Junior Carlton was intended to be different from other clubs. It was larger and architecturally grander, yet less prestigious, than many of its Pall Mall neighbours – and not simply because of the presence of the word “Junior” in its name. The original Carlton Club had been founded to support the Tory cause in 1832, and was initially limited to 800 members. Despite a couple of modest extensions to that cap, the Carlton’s waiting list had spiraled out of control, and in the Club’s first 35 years, the list grew from 78 candidates to 1,107.[54] In creating a Junior Carlton Club with a capacity for 2,000 members, it was hoped to ease the pressure on the Carlton. Yet the Junior Carlton was not merely a decanting spot for the Carlton, and had a different composition. It was less of a haven for MPs and peers – across the 1865-8 Parliament, the Junior Carlton had just 43 MPs, compared to 328 at the Carlton.[55] It attracted all manner of political ‘fixers’, manipulators, wheeler-dealers, agents, organisers, and conservative study groups. It had some of the grandest facilities of any London club; but from the outset it also had a frosty, even adversarial dynamic amongst members, with frequent complaints and disciplinary matters brought to the attention of the Committee and General Meetings.[56] It is not too far a stretch to picture its members frostily refusing to talk to one another, as was common in even the most harmonious of clubs. Nor were the members the most congenial of clubmen – the rules made it very clear that they needed to be restrained: “No books, papers or periodicals that are the property of the club or supplied by the circulating library shall be taken into the lavatories. Nor may any member place his feet on any sofa or chair or wet umbrella into any of the rooms.”[57] Few other clubs would have felt the need to spell this out to their members.
To deal with the question of politics, Professor Leal reasons that as the Liberals who constituted the Reform Club believed in the values of “Peace, retrenchment and reform”[58], he asserts, “This could be a description of Mycroft, as it is difficult to imagine him or Sherlock as advocates of war and protectionism and opponents of reform.”[59] There is little evidence to support this assumption. As Professor Leal concedes, the canon says little on politics, and it is unlikely that Sherlock Holmes himself was a particularly political figure; and the canon says nothing at all about Mycroft's politics. If Mycroft were, for the sake of argument, a man of deeply conservative temperament, it does not follow that his brother Sherlock would have shared these views, as Professor Leal supposes – the speculation about the shared politics of the Holmes brothers reads more as wishful thinking. A desire for peace was not a Liberal monopoly in the 1880s; an era anyway marked by colonial wars across Africa which enjoyed support from Liberals and Conservatives alike. Nor was there any hint of Mycroft expressing much zeal for reform. Furthermore, if Mycroft Holmes were to have held very conservative views, and his brother Sherlock were to have been the apolitical character he seems likely to have been, then it is doubly understandable why Sherlock would have been reluctant to raise political topics around Mycroft, for fear of reigniting long-simmering family arguments. Holmes's evident disapproval of the two Conservative characters in 'The Naval Treaty', a detail stressed by Professor Leal,[60] only reinforces this notion. And Holmes’s description of the Diogenes, that “I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere”, takes on a very different meaning if we assume that he does not share the views of the Club’s members, but revels in their being silenced.
A further reason for advocating the Junior Carlton Club is the ‘club topography’ which Professor Leal cites in favour of the Reform. He rules out several other clubs, due to Watson’s description of the Diogenes:
[Holmes] led the way into the hall. Through the glass paneling I caught a glimpse of a large and luxurious room, in which a considerable number of men were sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook. Holmes showed me into a small chamber which looked out into Pall Mall[61]
Professor Leal is correct that neither the Athenaeum nor the Travellers Club correspond precisely to this description. The Athenaeum's ground floor hall did indeed have a small room facing Pall Mall to the right of its main entrance, used for receiving visitors; but the entire left third of the ground floor was dominated by the “Coffee Room” (the prevailing Clubland term for the main dining room). It is not impossible that the men “sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook” were doing so at their own separate tables (for the Athenaeum's diners are seated on small tables), refusing to talk to one another; but this involves some imaginative reinterpretation. Meanwhile, the Travellers suffers a similar problem, as its ground floor “Coffee Room” of the time (subsequently used as the Morning Room since 1911) runs the entire length of the building's front along Pall Mall (apart from the front entrance on the far right), offering no scope for a visitors' room to the left, while its side walls adjoin with two other clubs, offering no scope for a sideways view onto the street. Professor Leal accurately highlights how the Reform Club matches Watson's description, with its ground-floor Reading Room and Audience Room for visitors. What he overlooks is that the same also holds true of the Junior Carlton Club, which had a members-only Morning Room and Smoking Room, and a Pall Mall-facing Strangers’ Smoking Room for receiving guests, all on the ground floor.[62]
There is another vital clue as to the Junior Carlton having been the Diogenes: the presence of the distinctive “bow-window of the club” in the only room where members and guests can speak.[63] Professor Leal concedes that “there are no bow windows” in the Audience Room of the Reform Club, “or in any other room of the Reform, Travellers, or Athenaeum that faces Pall Mall.”[64] The bow window is a staple of club literature, due to its presence in earlier eighteenth century clubhouses along St. James's Street. (White's and Boodle's, the oldest and second-oldest clubs in London, each have famous bow windows, along with various celebrated anecdotes around them.)[65] But the major Pall Mall clubs of the nineteenth century were built to very different architectural styles, and most lack bow windows. Going against the grain, the Junior Carlton had bow windows, facing Pall Mall.
David Brandon’s original 1869 Junior Carlton clubhouse had a single south-facing bow window on the ground floor, at the far west end of the Pall Mall facade.[66] But in 1880, the Junior Carlton acquired Adair House next door, and set about extending the Club to the east of its original site.[67] After the Club suffered a serious terrorist bombing in November 1884,[68] architect J. Macvicar Anderson extensively remodelled the Club both internally and externally in 1885-6, with the annexation of the eastward Adair House having expanded the Club’s floor plan by over 40%.[69] The remodelling included the addition of a second bow window on Pall Mall, at the east end of the south-facing side.
Ground-floor plan of the Junior Carlton Club, after the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse.
A visitor in 1888 would have walked into the Club’s main hall, and found a pillared passage on the left leading to the enormous Morning Room, a strictly members-only enclave, where members could read the newspapers.[70] This was a prime candidate for the “large and luxurious room, in which a considerable number of men were sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook”, and would have been fully visible to anyone standing in the hall.[71] A photograph taken in March 1888, just six months before the events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, shows that the door to the Junior Carlton’s Morning Room, visible from the hall, embedded glass panelling, just as Watson described.[72] Meanwhile, heading over to the right from the main hall, one would have found a series of three interconnected smaller Smoking Rooms, with one possessing a bow window overlooking Pall Mall, and one of them marked on the Club’s architectural plans as the “Strangers’ Smoking Room”.[73] This could easily be the “Strangers’ Room” described as “a small chamber which looked out into Pall Mall”.
View of the Hall of the Junior Carlton Club, with the Morning Room visible through the glass-panelled doors on the left, March 1888, J. Macvicar Anderson.
The only flaw in this is that only one of the three Smoking Rooms was labelled a “Strangers’ Smoking Room” in the architect’s plans – and that was not the same one that possessed a bow window.
However, this need not be an insuperable obstacle. Firstly, the surviving plans were in fact drawn up in 1935. It was quite common in Clubland for similar or adjoining club rooms to be switched around in function over the years with some frequency, particularly when a building had only just opened and was still experiencing teething troubles. In 1889, for instance, the National Liberal Club flipped around its (members-only) Smoking Room on the lower ground floor with its Visitors’ Smoking Room on the upper ground floor, after members complained that the former afforded little privacy from the street outside, with the public easily peering in from above. The two rooms had identical floor plans one atop one the other, and were easily switched, just two years after the building opened in 1887. Similarly, it is not far-fetched to suggest that with the Junior Carlton’s ground floor containing a Morning Room, Bar and Smoking Rooms that were all considered members-only, there may have been a period of experimentation after the building’s 1886 rebuild, whereby a different one of the three Smoking Rooms was temporarily designated the Strangers’ Smoking Room. All three Smoking Rooms were contained in the former Adair House, so all three were “new” rooms to the Club. All this would have been long before the 1935 plans recorded the post-1886 internal configuration.
Even the “Diogenes Club” pseudonym may itself be a not-so-subtle clue. The original Carlton Club was founded in 1832 to rally conservatives against the Reform Bill, and was marked by a consistent streak of scepticism directed at the “Age of Reform”, at the succession of Liberal plans to remould the constitution, and at the rapid social change Britain was undergoing. The Junior Carlton, by all accounts, was even more avowedly partisan than the original Carlton, and more sustained in its assaults on change and political reform – an issue still very much alive in the 1880s. What could be more appropriate in describing a club full of avowed opponents of reform, than to name it after Diogenes the Cynic?
Mycroft’s lodgings
One of the main sticking points in locating the Diogenes is the location of Mycroft's lodgings. Vital linguistic clues are offered by Holmes's observations that “Mycroft lodges in Pall Mall”, that the Club on Pall Mall “is just opposite his rooms”, that Holmes visited “my brother's rooms in Pall Mall”, and that “His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall—that is his cycle.”[74] As Klinger notes, “Whitehall” in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ refers to a wider district as well as a street, so this potentially broadens out our horizons to the wider Pall Mall area.[75] There are two plausible prospects on or near Pall Mall.
Cumberland House, 85-87 Pall Mall, 1765-1908; by 1888 it was interconnected with a network of surrounding buildings (note the house on the far-left, one of the candidates for Mycroft’s lodgings). Courtesy of the Victorian London website, http://www.victorianlondon.org/organisations/waroffice.htm.
If we take the Junior Carlton Club to be the Diogenes, then the obvious candidate is the gargantuan Ordnance Office and War Office building directly opposite. Cumberland House, a late-Palladian mansion, stood at 85-87 Pall Mall, on the south side of the street. From 1806 until its demolition in 1908, it served as the Ordnance Office; and from 1858, it housed the War Office as well. The building’s layout was a complex one, embedding a rag-bag of neighbouring houses and buildings, and knocking them through into a tangled web of “thirteen rambling buildings”.[76] Two buildings, east of Cumberland House, were on Pall Mall, directly in front of the Junior Carlton Club. These houses had been residential in design, and so it is not inconceivable that this much-derided rag-bag of buildings would have included some government-owned apartments. We know that Mycroft worked in Whitehall, not Pall Mall; but the Ordnance Office, which was tasked with the requisition of munitions and military supplies, would doubtless have required skilled auditors such as Mycroft, and so it is quite conceivable that he acquired the use of some government-owned apartment under the Office’s aegis, in exchange for occasional services. This ongoing Ordnance Office connection would also offer some insight into Mycroft’s keen interest in the development of the Bruce-Partington submarine, from its earliest stages of planning.[77]
A further circumstantial piece of evidence can be found in the two individuals whom the Holmes brothers sighted from the Club’s bow window overlooking Pall Mall, one a billiard-marker, the other an elderly Non-Commissioned Officer, who had only recently been discharged after serving some years in India. The billiard-marker could have easily come from almost any club in Pall Mall. But the soldier would have been less easy to place. None of the Pall Mall military clubs admitted NCOs – they were all strictly officers-only. The War Office building opposite the Junior Carlton, on the other hand, offers an obvious point from which this soldier would have been coming or going.[78] Mycroft’s additional observations that the man was widowed with two children could have made it quite plausible that the recently-discharged soldier was enquiring about his pension.
There is another possibility, which supports the Athenaeum, Travellers and Reform Clubs. To the rear of the south side of Pall Mall runs Carlton House Terrace, made up of twenty houses constructed on the grounds of the old Carlton House. Numbers 3-9 Carlton House Terrace directly face the back of these three clubs on the south side of Pall Mall, with only the Clubs’ rear gardens between them. The street’s prestigious John Nash-designed villas were mainly residential in the late nineteenth century, with a succession of rich and influential occupants, including three current or future Prime Ministers; plus the Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens, a small cul-de-sac at the end of the terrace. (The Duke of Holderness in ‘The Priory School’ also resides there.) Professor Leal argues that “Mycroft may not be rich, [but] he is not poor”, citing his £450 annual salary as $60,000 in today’s money.[79] Even with such income, it is inconceivable that Mycroft could have afforded lodgings on one of London’s premier streets, without considerable financial assistance.
With so many of these buildings having been in the hands of significant government figures, it is not too great a leap to see how and why a man in Mycroft’s position might have been offered free or subsidised lodgings by the government. This is particularly plausible if one considers that Number 3 was occupied by MI6, Britain’s intelligence service with roots going back to at least 1909.[80] Relatively little is known about the tenure of their occupancy – a residency for at least two decades after World War II has been confirmed, but it is unclear how long they had been there for, or how long they remained. An obvious incentive for maintaining a British intelligence presence on the street would have been the location of the German Embassy at Number 9 from 1849 until 1939 (with an interregnum from 1914-1919, for self-evident reasons) – a point referenced in ‘His Last Bow’, as “things are moving at present in Carlton Terrace”.[81]
It is therefore easily tenable that if the Diogenes were based on the Athenaeum, Reform or Travellers Clubs, Mycroft could have resided on Carlton House Terrace opposite.
Conclusion
It is unlikely that the Diogenes Club was a pseudonym for the Travellers or Reform Clubs. Mycroft’s deep reluctance to travel made him unlikely to have ever qualified for Travellers Club membership, while none of the grounds advanced by Professor Leal for the Reform Club bear up under sustained scrutiny.
The most likely conclusion, of course, is that the Diogenes Club was a composite – a figment of Watson’s febrile imagination, embodying both affection and satire for the oddities of London’s Clubland. Two stories established that Watson was a clubman himself, and Holmes once referred to how “You returned from the club last night”, though the only clues offered to its identity were that it had billiards tables that Watson seldom used, and his non-familiarity with the Diogenes Club means he probably did not frequent that section of Pall Mall.[82] It is therefore likely that his gentle mockery of the Diogenes pointed to affection rather than disenchantment with Clubland. This conclusion certainly offers the most leeway for creativity, and is to be embraced by all who delight in the many pastiche adventures of the Diogenes Club.
Yet it is also plausible that it was merely a pseudonym for a real club, as was the case with much of Watson’s storytelling. In weighing up so many of the “usual suspects” – the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Reform, and the Marlborough – our personal conclusions come down to how much we suspect Watson of engaging in willful misdirection. If this is the case, then the Athenaeum and Marlborough Clubs deserve recognition as likely candidates. The problem with this approach is that it depends on willfully ignoring some evidence, and selectively picking which evidence supports each club. If we are to look at the totality of the evidence, and to take all of Watson’s narrative at face value, then we are inexorably drawn towards one conclusion: only the Junior Carlton Club matches the Diogenes Club’s full description.
Dr Seth Alexander Thévoz is the author of Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is Honorary Librarian of the National Liberal Club.
FOOTNOTES
[1] I should like to thank Kayleigh Betterton of Birkbeck College, University of London, and Dr Tim Oliver of Loughborough University London, for their constructive comments after seeing a draft of this article.
[2] David L. Leal, ‘What was the Diogenes Club?’, Baker Street Journal, 67:2 (Summer, 2017), pp. 16-26.
[3] There was already considerable interest in the Club by the 1960s – see Charles O. Merriman, 'In Clubland', Sherlock Holmes Journal, 7:1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 29-30; S. Tupper Bigelow 'Identifying the Diogenes Club: An Armchair Exercise', Baker Street Journal, 18:2 (June, 1968), pp. 67-73.
[4] Leslie S. Klinger (ed.), The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 640-641.
[5] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 591.
[6] ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902).
[7] Michael Havers, Edward Grayson and Peter Shankland, The Royal Baccarat Scandal (London: Souvenir Press, 1977).
[8] Review of Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Collins, 1963); in Orville Prescott, ‘Books of the The Times’, New York Times, 30 November 1964; quoted in ‘Letters’, Baker Street Journal, 15:2 (June 1965), p. 126, and ‘Letters’, Baker Street Journal, 18:3 (September 1968), pp. 183, 186.
[9] Bigelow, ‘Diogenes’ (1968), pp. 67-73.
[10] David Marcum, ‘Pall Mall: Locating the Diogenes Club’, Baker Street Journal, 67:2 (Summer, 2017), pp. 27-33.
[11] John Thole, The Oxford and Cambridge Clubs in London (London: Oxford and Cambridge Club/Alfred Waller, 1992), pp. 97-8.
[12] ‘Pall Mall, North Side, Existing Buildings’, in F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volume 29, St. James’s and Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 343.
[13] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 20. This point is also made in Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 640.
[14] Ibid., p. 16.
[15] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[16] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 22; Merriman, 'Clubland’ (1964), pp. 29-30.
[17] P. G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally (London: Everyman, 2011 [first pub. 2011]), p. 101 ; P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Archibald and the Masses’, in P. G. Wodehouse, Young Men in Spats (London: Everyman, 2002 [first pub. 1936]), p. 202. ; P. G. Wodehouse, ‘All’s Well with Bingo’, in P. G. Wodehouse, Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (London: Everyman, 2000 [first pub. 1940]), p. 12.
[18] Sophie Ratcliffe (ed.), P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 64, 1n.
[19] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 23.
[20] The National Liberal Club subsequently had an even more extensive library than the Athenaeum, but even though its clubhouse had opened in 1887, its Gladstone Library would not formally open until 1892, making it implausible as a serious candidate for the 1888 events of ‘The Greek Interpreter’, where Mycroft’s routine is well-established.
[21] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[22] Bigelow, ‘Diogenes’ (1968), p. 70.
[23] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 131-139.
[24] Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960), p. 344.
[25] Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 641.
[26] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 16, 22.
[27] Ralph Nevill, London Clubs: Their History and Treasures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912), pp. 279-282
[28] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 591.
[29] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), p. 240.
[30] Ibid., p. 46.
[31] Mordaunt Crook, ‘Blackballing’, in Fernández-Armesto (ed.), Armchair Athenians (2001), pp. 19-30
[32] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[33] Ibid.
[34] White’s, for instance, had no library, and a number of its members saw this as a source of pride. Thévoz, Club Government (2018), p. 149. See also the extended discussion of Clubland newspapers in Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: Volume I – The Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981).
[35] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[36] Seth Alexander Thévoz, Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), pp. 22-23.
[37] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 23.
[38] Barry Phelps, Power and the Party: A History of the Carlton Club, 1832-1982 (London, Macmillan, 1982), pp. 34-36.
[39] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 82-93.
[40] Ibid., pp. 82-93; J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Locked Out of Paradise: Blackballing at the Athenaeum, 1824-1935’, in Felipe Fernández-Armesto (ed.), Armchair Athenians: Essays from the Athenaeum (London: Athenaeum, 2001), pp. 19-30; Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 35-57.
[41] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 90-92.
[42] Rod Barron, ‘Politics Personified: Fred W. Rose and Liberal & Tory Serio-Comic Maps, 1877-1880 – Part 1’, Barron Maps blog, 11 March 2016, http://www.barronmaps.com/politics-personified-fred-w-rose-and-serio-comic-maps-1877-1880-part-1/.
[43] Examples include the Devonshire Club founded in 1874 (provisionally called the Junior Reform Club before its launch), and “the New University Club…was founded, in 1864, to accommodate those awaiting election at the older clubs.” Thole, Oxford and Cambridge Clubs (1992), p. 25. Both were on St. James’s Street.
[44] Seth Alexander Thévoz, ‘Club Government’, History Today, 63:2 (February, 2013), pp. 58-59.
[45] Quoted in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), p. 593.
[46] William S. Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 16.
[47] Ibid., pp. 11-17.
[48] F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: Volume 29, St. James’s and Westminster, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 341.
[49] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[50] Ibid.
[51] Thévoz, Club Government (2018), pp. 143-147.
[52] Ibid., p. 144.
[53] William D. Jenkins, ‘The Adventure of the Misplaced Armchair’, Baker Street Journal, 19:1 (March, 1969), pp. 12-16.
[54] Ibid., p. 91.
[55] Seth Alexander Thévoz, ‘Database of MPs’ club memberships, 1832-68’, www.sethalexanderthevoz.com/database-mps-clubs/.
[56] To reach this conclusion, one need only look at the catalogue of members’ disputes which punctuate MS ‘Junior Carlton Club General Meeting Minutes, Volume 1, 1865–1967’, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[57] Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 96.
[58] A phrase which evolved in the 1820s, in the run-up to the Reform Act which gives its name to the Reform Club. E. A. Smith, Lord Grey, 1764-1845 (London: Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 279.
[59] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[60] Ibid., p. 19.
[61] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[62] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[63] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[64] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[65] See Marcus Binney and David Mann (eds), Boodle’s: Celebrating 250 Years, 1762-2012 (London: Boodle’s/Libanus Press, 2013); Anthony Lejeune, White’s: The First Three Hundred Years (London: A&C Black, 1993).
[66] ‘Plate 120c: Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall, Ground-floor plan, published 1867’ in, Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960).
[67] Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of Clubs (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 96.
[68] Charles Petrie and Alistair Cooke, The Carlton Club, 1832-2007 (London: Carlton Club), p. 210.
[69] ‘Plate 120c: Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall, Ground-floor plan, published 1867’ in, Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: 29 (1960); Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive. A comparison of the 1869 and 1886 floorplans makes it clear how dramatic the expansion was.
[70] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[71] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893).
[72] J. Macvicar Anderson, ‘Junior Carlton Club, 30 Pall Mall, Westminster, Greater London’, taken on 21 March 1888, hosted by the Historic England website, http://viewfinder.english-heritage.org.uk/search/reference.aspx?uid=215925&index=5928&mainQuery=westminster,%20london&searchType=all&form=home.
[73] Plans of the Junior Carlton Club (1935), embedding the 1885-6 rebuild of the clubhouse, Junior Carlton Club archive, London Metropolitan Archive.
[74] ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893); ‘The Final Problem’ (1893); ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908).
[75] Klinger (ed.), Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I (2004), p. 640.
[76] Piers Brendon, The Motoring Century: The Story of the Royal Automobile Club (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 135.
[77] ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908).
[78] I am grateful to Dr Tim Oliver for making this shrewd observation.
[79] Leal, ‘Diogenes' (2017), p. 17.
[80] Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).
[81] ‘His Last Bow’ (1917).
[82] ‘The Dancing Men’ (1903); ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902).