How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain
Pete Brown
HarperNorth, 2022
Having previously reviewed a book about a club at one end of the spectrum (The Athenaeum) it was interesting to read a book on clubs at the other end – working men’s clubs – and learning that the two aren’t very different as there are the same ingredients of having a place where you can relax and feel at home, either on your own or with pleasant company.
“As one Huddersfield clubman told Brian Jackson, ‘I always feel that when you are in a pub, and your glass gets down, they all start looking at you.’ Whereas in the club, ‘Y’ not compelled to have a drink. You can come in and read the paper or have a game of dominoes and no one pesters you” (Pages 158-9).
The Club and Institute Union (CIU) was founded in 1862. Today there are 1,600 clubs in the CIU, with a million members, “down from 7 or 8 million in the 1970s” (page 255).
The working men’s club movement was originally set up by the upper classes to keep men out of the pubs and give them a place for self-improvement. But the clubs only took off when working men themselves took ownership and developed them to include games and entertainment.
“Throughout the twentieth century, the working men’s club movement provided more sports and games than any other organisation in the world. We could choose impressive figures from any year, but lets go with 1988, by which time the movement was in decline. If the number of trophies awarded within the CIU is an indicator of the popularity of a sport or game, the top of the charts ranks as follows: Darts – 424; Dominoes – 399; Snooker – 270; Cribbage – 252; Angling – 158; Bowls – 132; Pool – 110. Trophies were also presented…for Don, All Fours, whippet-racing, Euchre and Phat.” (Pages 223-4).
Pete Brown mixes a history of the movement with visits to several current clubs:
Barnsley: Staincross Working Men’s Club.
Leeds: Garforth Working Men’s Club,
London: Mildmay Club; Langham Club; Walthamstow Trades Club; and White Swan.
Rotherham: Greasbrough Club
Stockport: Reddish Working Men’s Club.
Sheffield: Sheffield Lane Working Men’s Club.
Newcastle Upon Tyne: Newcastle Labour Club.
Wakefield: Red Shed.
Although many are called “working men’s clubs” the title is misleading – they all include women, unemployed and retired people as members.
Brown is unhappy with how Government restrictions during Covid affected the clubs:
“The country drifted in and out of Covid-19 lockdowns, through tiers, alert levels and metaphorical traffic systems. The hospitality industry was punished far more than any other despite a complete absence of evidence that it was particularly responsible for the spread of Covid. Against this backdrop, most clubs remained closed, unable to operate under – or even keep up with – the constantly improvised restrictions that were imposed on them by a government that had no idea what it was doing.
About half the clubs on the first list I’d drawn up to visit would never reopen.” (Page 56).
On his visit to the Sheffield Lane Working Men’s Club:
“I chose a small table, well away from anyone else, and got out my book. When I was about half way down my pint, a woman in her seventies came in, bought herself a gin-and-something, walked over and sat down so closely to me, our thighs were touching…There were acres of empty seats around us, no one else within about ten yards. Over the next ten minutes or so, she greeted other men who came in, bought pints, and sat alone at tables well apart from each other. But she said nothing to me, didn’t look at me. The other men she greeted were the early day regulars. They all knew each other. But they didn’t sit together when they found each other here. They had their daily ritual, not just the greeting, but the pattern of owning the space.
I was sitting in this woman’s seat.
Slowly, without making any sudden movements, I finished my drink as naturally as I could, made sure I had everything, and stood up. As soon as I did so, the woman slid across six inches into the space where I’d been sitting. From the corner of my eye, I could see her body relax.” (Pages 77-8).
He discovers the social dynamic in that club:
“You sit on your own, not bothering anyone else. If there’s someone you know sitting at another table – and if you’re a regular here, there always is – you might say something to them. But you don’t get up and walk over uninvited, and you don’t invite them to your table. Either move might look a bit too forward. So you chat across the room, because you can, because the music’s not too loud, and because there’s no reason to keep what you’re saying private from anyone else. This way, the conversation can stop and start at any time. There’s no need to try and continue it if there’s a lull…you can switch off, go back to your pint, or gaze at the screen…until someone has something else to say.
They talk about football, neighbours, relationships, and the past. The hospital and the buses. The people they love. The people they’ve left. Hedge trimmers. Ailments and illnesses. The traffic. Vans.” (Pages 78-9).
The clubs were generally very old fashioned in that most had little or no media presence. Even the national body the CIU was quaintly way behind the times:
“the CIU remained resolutely incommunicado. I scanned every page of their ancient-looking website to see if I could find contact details for current members of the national executive. I managed to find names, but a day’s searching suggested not a single one of them had any presence on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. There didn’t seem to be much point trying TikTok, YouTube or Snapchat.” (Page 56).
He tells how he had hired a room at the Mildmay Club in London for a party and then asked about joining as a member:
“Loads of our guests at the party asked me how to book the place for their own events, or even join the club. Towards the end of the evening, I started chatting to our bartender.
‘How do we go about joining?’
‘…Well, we only have new membership nights once or twice a year. You have to come in then.’
‘When’s the next one?’
‘They put a poster up downstairs in the main bar.
‘But I can only go in the main bar if I’m already a member.’
‘Yes that’s right.’
‘So there’s no way of me joining unless I already know someone who is a member who’s prepared to let me know.’
‘They need to nominate you as well’.
‘Right.’
‘With no website to check, and no email address to write to, it would take me another four years to finally join the Mildmay. There was a changing of the guard on the committee. Some new people set up a website and even a Twitter account and started announcing when the new members evenings were. Eventually someone knew someone who knew someone who knew a member, and the chain finally reached me.” (Pages 108-109).
Another cause for the decline in membership is the fragmentation of society and the rise of individualism:
“men working in the same factory, going back to the same streets, the same pubs and clubs, were replaced by men and women commuting to jobs in the service industry…all working different jobs on different shifts with little union support and a diminished sense of collective identity…More than that, ‘I’ has become more important than ‘us’. You are special. You are unique. You are worth it. You are a brand yourself, and every brand focuses on what makes it different from everything else rather than how it fits in.
The other big shift was that when we got home from work, we increasingly preferred to stay there…For those times when you still wanted to go out, the pub felt more aspirational than the club” (Page 258).
And:
“they live their social lives online – this is where they build communities and friendships.” (Page 264).
The future is not all doom and gloom:
“Alan Banks has been concert secretary at Garforth Working Men’s Club for thirty years, but he does a lot more than just booking turns. ‘We appreciate our members and they appreciate us. We ask them what they want. We use it as a community space for the kids of members to come in…Line dancers every Monday and Thursday and we’ve three snooker teams…We’ve a choir what’s coming in, rehearsing…We’ve got brilliant cleaners so it always looks good.’” (Pages 274-5).
Brown says:
“With good people on the committee, clubs can thrive. The problem is, if the club is already struggling, how do you get those good people in to rescue it?
Too often, if an institution like a pub or club is struggling, they attempt to appeal to people’s better nature to ‘save’ the place, with slogans like ‘use or lose it.’ But this makes supporting a club seem like an act of duty, a chore that only magnifies the fact that it’s struggling. It’s human nature that we tend to avoid being associated with failure. Instead clubs need to make people want to come to them.” (Pages 275-6).
The need for new leadership with a fresh vision reminds me of Holy Trinity Brompton’s process of church planting, when a core group of keen trendy younger people with an energetic leader join a struggling church and restore its fortunes (see my book review of Love Church):
Brown recommends: 1. Embrace social media. 2. Promotion to community groups. 3. Create some atmosphere. 4. Hold open days. 5. Food.
“Older members often resist change, which they see as gentrification or ‘yuppiefication,’ but for most clubs there’s not really an alternative. Clubs with an ageing demographic need to attract younger people to survive, and these days, each younger generation wants something different from what their parents or grandparents wanted. The club accommodates changing tastes or it doesn’t get new members.” (Page 282).
Such surface changes need not change the core of what a club provides – a place to feel at home, in the company of others.
August 2023
Adrian Vincent