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1996
AN OASIS IN LONDON'S WEST END
By: T.R.K
Often I would wander down Oxford Street, to get away for a
while from the stress and insanity of owning and running a business. I
would turn off across the road from Bond Street Underground station,
into Stratford Place. The Oasis I was heading for was a grand house at
the far end of this short street fronted by an elegant row of Georgian
houses, gleamingly painted, with long damask curtains mostly open,
revealing large high-ceilinged front rooms, perhaps a chandelier.
The Oriental Club, a very British, men-only institution
defies easy description: straddling the blind end of this pretty
street, Palladian and imposing, like a scaled down version of the
British Museum without its portico and pillars. Here was a Raj gin
palace, with its discreet brass name plate with the imprimatur of an
Indian elephant on it.
The Club was founded by
and for the benefit of members of the East India Company in 1824. The
founding members included the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Malcolm.
Stratford House, its present location was built around 1770. It is a
typical Georgian house, and even with all the alterations during late
19th century still retains it original character. It has had a number
of distinguished owners, including the Grand Duke Nicholas, son of the
Czar of Russia! The facilities include two drawing-rooms, two
smoking-rooms, a card-room, a TV room, two dining rooms, a snooker
room, a private dining-room and 35 bedrooms.
Inside were a motley collection of ageing colonials,
ex-Bankers,
ex-directors of Commonwealth corporations, retired Tea estate managers
from Coorg and Shillong and Darjeling, the odd Maharajah in a Saville
Row suit and certainly a number of Asians entitled to be addressed as
Your Excellencies. This archetypical gentleman's Club (women are not
allowed in the Bar with its magnificent ceiling and with the painting
of Tippu Sultan surveying it from the far end, or into the smoking-room
or the dining-room at lunch time) boasted once that unlike other Clubs
a stone's throw away in St James, the Oriental was refreshingly free of
media celebrities and politicians. It was never mentioned in gossip
columns and did not have to blackball unsuitable social climbers
applying for membership.
That was in the very
early 1970s when as a guest of an English member of the club, I drank
and dined at the Club as frequently as one would visit a local British
pub. My friend Ian was a perfect paradigm of all the qualities you
expected of a member of the Oriental. He was born in Kanpur, educated
later in Simla and Dehra Doon, and sailed to England at 18, having
witnessed the Hindu-Moslem riots and the carnage as a young school boy
arriving at Delhi Railway station in 1947. Ian was always dressed in
impeccable pinstripes. He wore a bowler and carried a silver-topped
walking stick that his grandfather had acquired in India.
Ian always drank Pink Gin, at the members' bar on the ground
floor, past the famous carved teak chair of Tippu in the lobby.
It was easy for me
always to find Ian, if I needed this tranquil fastness, a wink away
from the frantic hypermarkets of Oxford Street. When the bar closed, he
would repair to the dining room, accompanied very often by a fellow
member. The Club lunch menu always included Kedgeree, Egg Curry,
Mulligatawny, Dover Sole, the British traditional roast, sausages and
mash and the Club claret was certainly cheap enough to be consumed in
serious quantities. A little later, he would go up a magnificent sweep
of stairs, past a bill board festooned with a confetti of Reuters News
telexes, past the magnificent library, past the russet, green and gold
paintings of Raj days in India, in to the sombre and dark womblike
space of the Smoking room.
This was the room I
loved to be in with my friends. I would always find Ian seated in his
favourite chair near the window overlooking the Members' free car park;
close enough to the call bell for the Club waiters to be summoned. Dark
green leather armchairs usually accommodated a host of members, some
fast asleep with half opened newspapers, in front of a glass of port.
The hubbub of the voices of the plantation Managers and the old Raj
civil servants, the smell of cigar smoke, laced with the mild apple of
French brandy completed the picture. This to me was a paradise where
you could withdraw into the community or stay apart and write letters
to your aunts and sisters in India on the Club stationery with its
emblem of an elephant, and its telegraphic address of "Ganpath". During
these 25 long years I had no need to be a member; I never sought it or
thought about it. It was my club by association: my friend Ian would
always be there, regular as the dainty clockwork of his yellowing gold
watch, either at the Members' bar or somewhere within the deep silence
of the Club. Then early in 1994 Ian had a brainstorm. He was selling up
his London home and all his worldly possessions, save what he had
brought with him from India as his heirloom. At 60-something he was
setting sail to India, never to return. He declared that he was deeply
uncomfortable in the 1990s England; its market place values were not
something he could abide. I was coerced by Ian and his friends to join
the Club. I needed two sponsors and four co-sponsors who knew me well.
I had no problems after 25 years as a guest.
Today there is a diminishing number of discreet ex-colonials at the bar
at noon; instead there are young Bankers in expensive Sidi suits, Patek
watches and Italian shoes, entertaining their American banking
fraternity. I have seen note-book computers and pocket phones making
surreptitious appearance in the dark corners of the smoking room,
although these are strictly forbidden by Club rules. The elegant
cloakroom with its endless supply of hand towels and it mechanical
shoe-shine is where you are expected to leave behind your business
gadgetry. Once I committed the ultimate faux pas by presenting a sheaf
of papers to a non-member business-friend at the bar, for a discreet,
snappy inspection. A venerable fellow member fixed me with a rebuking
stare that certainly encouraged me to terminate this un-clubman-like
conduct. The Club is there for members to converse, drink, and enjoy
themselves. Perhaps these are the values enshrined inside these
palladian havens for men to club together. It is never unseemly to lose
your sobriety here in public, but it is a cardinal sin to transact
business, even sotto voce.
Perhaps it is all
those memories of afternoons whiled away with friends in pleasantly
escalating inebriation, or perhaps it is the calm splendour of its cosy
interior, its discretion and its old world virtues of an overt
gentleman, the Oriental is where I retreat to get away from the
insanity and stresses of modern living.
1188 Words