People often ask me how I came to spend so much time researching private members’ clubs, particularly the clubs of London. It seems to have happened more or less by accident - back in 2009, having gone “back to school“ to do an MA in history, I began using clubs as an example in some coursework, because I noticed that many had well-preserved archives which had barely been touched by historians - and that being “gold dust” in the discipline of history.
The following year, I began a PhD jointly supervised by Warwick University and the History of Parliament Trust, on "The Political Impact of London Clubs, 1832-1868", which focused on politics in the private members' clubs of St. James’s between the first two Reform Acts; and the abiding legacy of such clubs on modern British political culture. The doctorate was awarded in 2014. A revised version of the research was published by I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury in 2018, as Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs. The database I compiled for this research can be found here.
Key questions I sought to address in the PhD included:
Precisely what was the role of so-called “club government”? In an age when party alliances were very weak, just how strong were the alliances forged in and around clubs? Was there any noticeable link between how MPs voted, and their club memberships?
What was the role of clubs in centrally managing political parties?
To what degree did clubs intervene in national elections in the constituencies? How common was such intervention?
How politicised were the “non-political” clubs?
How accurate were the popular portrayals of clubs in this period?
As with so much of my other work, the underlying question is "Where does power lie?"
My work in this area has not limited to the traditional gentlemen’s clubs of St. James's and Pall Mall, but also has an eye to the growth of increasingly politicised working men’s clubs, the spread of women’s clubs and mixed-sex clubs, and the global spread of clubs by European empires and their colonial and post-colonial legacy. London clubs as a major form of social engagement were a Victorian obsession, and some work has been done in recent years on their vast social impact. My work aims to stress their central role in the world of politics, so as to better explain the emergence of a distinctively British “clubbable” political culture.
Since the PhD, I have broadened the scope of the work. My doctoral research involved forcing myself to become an expert on these institutions, and I had so many questions on clubs in general that I embarked on a broader, “popular history“, Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs, published by Robinson in 2022, which is aimed at demystifying clubs, and explaining how they came to be evolve into the shape they have.
My third book, London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, stemmed from the myriad of questions I get about clubs today (“Seth, it’s all well and good your telling us about the history of these places, but what are they like now?“), and so it attempts to give some insight into present-day London Clubland. I have also travelled extensively around clubs worldwide, and both spoken and consulted in them across four continents, and take a keen interest in writing about the global dimension of clubs, past and present.
More broadly, as well as numerous chapters and articles, I try to share my thoughts on the evolution of clubs through my Clubland Substack, which I started in the summer of 2024.