LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB
I WAS for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, and I was an
honorary member there for a long time at an earlier period, when I first
came home from Australia and the waiting list was full.
I sometimes hinted to the then secretary that I had out-lived my month
of honorary membership several times over. His answer was invariably the
same: “Rules are intended to be enforced against disagreeable people.” I
remained an honorary member till I went away to America in 1888. Some
years afterwards, when I returned from America, I became an ordinary
member.
At first I loved the Savage. There were not many author-members, it was
true, who ever put in an appearance, except Christie Murray and Patchett
Martin—Barrie was a member, but he was never there. The Club did not run
to authors. What celebrities there were were chiefly actors and artists.
But it was a club that consisted more of the admirers of the arts than
their professors, men who packed the dinner-table every Saturday night,
and made an enthusiastic audience for the actors and musicians and
reciters, who did “turns” to amuse the company and get their names known
to the public, if they were not already popular favourites, like W. H.
Denny, Fred Kay, Odell, Willie Nichol and Reggie Groome.
I have known the Savage Club long enough to remember Brandon Thomas and
Seymour Hicks being regarded as brilliant amateurs, who never would be
anything more. But both were very favourite performers at giving
sketches accompanied by the piano. Penley was often there, but never
would perform. One of the favourite _jeunes premiers_ of musical
comedy—I forget which—used to sing “I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby” every
Saturday night.
Before I went to America, while I knew hardly any one in Bohemia, and it
was all new to me, I loved those Saturday nights. We had a bad
half-crown dinner, in which I generally sat between quite uninteresting
people—well-off furniture dealers and that kind of thing, who were most
of them, however, keen and intelligent patrons of music and the drama,
and belonged to the Savage for that reason. Most of them, too, were old
members, with a large number of friends at whom they fired good-humoured
banter across the tables. I found them willing to take one into their
good-fellowship in the readiest manner, and occasionally one was
rewarded by finding oneself near an affable celebrity.
But the conversation was seldom in the least bit intellectual. Books
were treated as non-existent in the Savage of that day. There were
hardly any, even in the library, except poems given by the poets
themselves. I was always heartily glad when the dinner was over, and the
fusillade of ordering drinks was over, and the performance began.
The club-house was situated then, as now, in Adelphi Terrace, a fine row
of Georgian houses standing on a sort of marine parade above the bank of
the Thames. If you looked over the railings on the opposite side of the
road, you would expect to find a beach like Brighton’s. I have never yet
looked over these railings, so I don’t know what there is below, but
there must be vaults, which are used for something, under the road, in
such a valuable locality.
The room where we held the dinners and these brilliant club concerts was
only separated by a wall from David Garrick’s dining-room. He made the
mistake of living in the wrong house.
The theory why we dined at 6.30, was that popular actors and singers
could dine with us, and give us a turn before they went to their
theatre. In practice, they very seldom came, unless they were having a
holiday, voluntary or otherwise. But there were always enough of them
“resting” to give us a brilliant evening.
For some little time after dinner the Club did not settle down
sufficiently to make its favourite performers willing to give their
turns. It made too much noise over diluting whisky with soda, and
manœuvring to get the waiter’s attention. This gave the new aspirant his
chance. If he was timid and low-voiced, he did not always get the
attention of the room, but it was not difficult to get the chairman to
call on him. I know by experience how difficult it was to get any old
“hand” to sing first. I called upon the bores first, when I was in the
chair. There were several of them, whom the Club had grown into the
habit of tolerating every Saturday night, so they had earned a right to
be called on. They all said that they had colds, and afterwards, when
the performance was at its height, sent round notes that they felt
better, and would try to give a turn if I called upon them now. But I
ignored the notes so long as I had any one else to call on. They were
mostly reciters; almost any kind of song will go in a club which takes
up a chorus.
Some of the humorous reciters were very good. The club was never tired
of hearing Robert Ganthony give a scene in a Metropolitan Police
Magistrate’s Court; or that youthful octogenarian, Fitzgerald, the
artist, mimicking a rehearsal at Astley’s in the old days; or Odell, the
idol of the Savage, going through his wonderful repertoire. Early in the
evening, Walter Hedgcock, the Crystal Palace organist, would give us the
song he never could publish, because he was blocked by an earlier
setting—Kipling’s “Mandalay.” It was delightful music, and was
eventually published as the “Mousmee,” with words which I wrote for him
in the metre of “Mandalay.” Hedgcock did not mind coming on early,
because he could always pick up the audience with the first bars of
“Mandalay.”
Townley, who was Registrar of Births and Deaths at St. Pancras, I
think—except on Saturday nights and Sundays—was our funniest singer; he
was a natural comedian. The Club always insisted on its favourites
singing the same songs. He had to sing a song called “Hoop-la,” or
something of the kind. Willie Nichol had to sing “Loch Lomond”;
Cheesewright had to sing “The Three Jolly Sailor-Boys”; Denny, who was
afterwards our honorary secretary, did generally give us something
recent from the music-halls. But the old “hands” eyed him half
resentfully while he did it.
I soon came to regard Odell as an oasis, because, though the Club made
him sing and recite the same things Saturday after Saturday, he had a
blessed gift of gag. In the midst of his ballad about the Fleet, the one
Warham St. Leger wrote for _Punch_, he stopped one night to tell us how
he lost his last engagement. It was in a piece based on the wreck of the
_Princess Alice_, the Thames steamer in which so many lives were lost.
Odell played the part of captain of the steamer, and all went well till
one night, as he expressed it, just at the fatal moment, when the people
in the stalls were taking off their coats because they were so
perspiring with excitement, he could stand the tension no longer, so he
took out his watch and said, “It’s just five o’clock. I wish I had gone
back by the penny ’bus.” The audience rose in their places, and stoned
him with whatever came handy, and he pretended that after that he never
could get an engagement.
As I don’t drink after dinner, and don’t smoke at all, I began to find
these concerts very tiring as soon as I knew all the performances by
heart. But there was no other place of meeting except the bar. We badly
needed a smoking-room, adjoining the dining-room and the bar, where
those who had brought interesting people with them could introduce them
to interesting Savages, without losing touch with the evening, as they
did if they went up to that melancholy library, which has probably been
given over to some legitimate purpose, like _Bridge_, long ago.
I frequently agitated for this smoking-room, and I believe that they got
it eventually. The bar did too good a business; you did not see people
getting intoxicated; its habitués carried their liquor too well. But I
have seen one man drink as many as thirty-three whiskys-and-sodas in a
single evening, and I saw him the other day—twenty years
afterwards—looking as fit as possible.
Gradually I came to the conclusion that as there were so many other
interesting things happening on Saturdays, it was not wise to give my
Saturday evenings up to the Savage, and there was “nothing else to” the
club in those days. It had not then become the favourite lunching-place
of the great editors, an important venue for authors.
So I retired from the Savage, as I retired from the Devonshire a few
years afterwards. When one of the committee of the Devonshire asked me
why I retired from it, I said that I only used it for funerals, and that
I was retiring because they had made that an extra. This was a fact. The
windows of the Devonshire Club are one of the best places for seeing a
royal funeral—or, of course, any other royal procession. The committee
discovered this, and put on a charge of ten pounds a seat, to pay for
the decorations of the Club. So many people wanted these seats that they
had to be balloted for. The action of the committee was justified. But,
as I had not used the Club since the funeral of Queen Victoria, when I
found that I could not see the funeral of King Edward from its windows
without balloting for the privilege of paying ten pounds for it, I sent
in my resignation, and paid a guinea for a seat from which I could see
the funeral for the whole length of Oxford and Cambridge Terrace. I went
with Norma Lorimer and Markino, who painted a wonderful picture of it.
The people on whose roof we hired the seats from the contractor, asked
us to lunch, and became quite intimate friends. They proved to be Mr.
Sanderson Stuart and his daughter—the youthful genius of sculpture.
We used to get most notable guests at the Savage—was not the list headed
by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. I was in the chair the night that
Nansen was the guest of the evening. It was on the eve of his departure
for the North Pole, and I hammered the table and asked the Club if they
would allow me to invite our guest to write his name on the wall behind
his seat, to remain there till he came back again. They assented with
rapturous applause, and the name is there still, glazed over. I have
told in another chapter what he said to the “Savage” who wished to
accompany him to the Arctic Circle.
The Savage Club is, undoubtedly, one of the institutions of London, and
every literary visitor to these shores should see one of its Saturday
nights.
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