I don’t normally listen to Radio 4’s Book of the Week but I shall be tuning in this morning and for the rest of the week.
The featured book is Clubland: How the working men’s club shaped Britain which I read last year and enjoyed enormously.
Written by Pete Brown, an award-winning journalist best known for writing about beer and pubs, it was published only after a long and frustrating search for a publisher.
According to Brown:
The rejections, all from London-based publishers, were always based on the same assumption: only old people in the north of England would be interested in reading about working men’s clubs. And the problem with that is, they continued, old people in the north of England don’t read.
This intellectual bias against the culture of the working classes is itself an integral theme that runs through the entire story of the working men’s club movement.
I am delighted that not only did he eventually find a publisher but this labour of love is now getting the national exposure it deserves.
I’m curious though to hear how the book has been abridged for radio because it’s a long and fascinating story with numerous twists and turns.
A tremendous amount of research has gone into the book so I learned a huge amount about the history of the working men’s club ‘movement’ - which began in the middle of the 19th century - how it evolved, and the long-running rivalry with pubs.
At its peak in the 1970s there were over 4,000 clubs affiliated to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) and over four million club members, '10 per cent of the UK’s adult population at that time'.
Since then, Brown notes, working men’s clubs have been in decline.
Today in Britain there are over 100,000 clubs of all kinds, 40,000 of which operate from licensed premises. Most are sports clubs, but around 6,000 are social clubs, and of these, 2,000 are working men’s clubs. Just 1,500 of all these remain affiliated to the CIU, compared to 4,000 in the 1970s.
I should explain that my own interest in the subject is driven by two things: one, an interest in social history, and, two, the smoking ban.
In 2009, two years after the introduction of the ban in England and Wales, it was clear that land-locked inner city pubs, many of them working class backstreet boozers, had suffered disproportionately from the ban.
At the same time there were reports that working men’s clubs were struggling too. I had never been to a working men's club and knew little about them but after the ban was introduced we were contacted by the manager of a club in Luton, which I was invited to visit.
It was very similar to some of the clubs Brown describes in Clubland. Anonymous on the outside, cavernous on the inside, and – mid afternoon – almost empty apart from a handful of elderly members nursing a pint and a packet of crisps.
That visit was one of the reasons why, when Forest launched the Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign in 2009, we were determined to include working men’s clubs. It took a while but eventually we persuaded the CIU to support the campaign following which I was invited to attend a CIU dinner and AGM in Blackpool, the former at Blackpool Football Club, the latter at the famous Winter Gardens.
That was when I first began to fully understand the Union and the struggles their member clubs were having, as I wrote here.
In truth, as Brown explains in some detail, pubs and clubs have been bitter rivals almost from the get go and although it isn't mentioned in the book this was no more evident than when the pubs demanded a level playing field when it was suggested that private members' clubs, including working men's clubs, might be exempted from the smoking ban.
The ban is mentioned several times in Clubland but I get the impression that while Brown accepts that ‘its effect is still felt’ he isn't entirely convinced by what some see as its devastating impact on clubs (and pubs):
The smoking ban and Covid hit everywhere, but while the smoking smoking ban is still blamed for the closure of many pubs and clubs, many more survived.
A bigger problem facing working men’s clubs today, Brown suggests, is their image:
In the popular imagination, if the gentlemen’s club belongs to the late Victorians, the working men’s club remains stranded forever in the mid-1970s, the preserve of dinner-suited comedians doing dodgy gags about ‘the wife’s mother’ to a smoke-filled room of flat-capped men swilling pints of bitter and munching chicken in a basket, their wives beside them growing impatient for the bingo.
If you are unable to listen to the abridged audio version on Radio 4, do read the book. It’s a treasure trove of social history - from gin shops to bingo to snooker to popular entertainment (and much much more) - and I loved it.
PS. Pete Brown grew up in a working class family in a house with an outside toilet and was, I believe, the first member of his family to go to university.
I suspect we might not agree politically but, by coincidence, he went to St Andrews where I was at school and an even bigger coincidence is that while he was there he worked in The Niblick, the very same pub where I bought my first under-age pint, aged 15, in 1974.
As I never get tired of saying, it’s a (very) small world.
