The Evening Standard reports London’s Travellers Club has recently experienced agitation from a portion of its membership demanding that the Club should “join the 21st Century” by opening its membership to women.
Club Chairman Anthony Layden responded with an admirably thorough report, which placed the controversy in fine perspective, quoting extensively the arguments and remarks of members on both sides, and which then delivered judgement.
When I became Chairman in 2010 I observed at that year’s AGM that the Travellers seemed to be doing pretty well, and said I intended to keep it on its existing course rather than seeking any radical changes. I believe “Steady as she goes†is still the right course in the interests of our Club and all its members. I have been surprised to learn, in the course of the discussions of the last few months, how diverse are the ways in which different members use and enjoy the Club. (A fellow member of the General Committee, who has often contributed wisely to our discussions, said at our last meeting that he himself did not come to the Club to talk to other members; he had never sat at the members’ table.)
I believe that continuing to create an atmosphere in which members can use the Club in different ways, an atmosphere of tolerance, mutual respect and ready conviviality, is the key to our continued success. It may be that those who value the Club as a place for all-male conversation, and those for whom this is not important, will never fully understand each other’s points of view, let alone come to see things the same way. We all hold different views for a myriad of reasons; conversations at the Club would be pretty dull if we did not!
I hope this report may help to make each side’s views a little clearer to the other. And as I said at the beginning of this report, I hope and urge that those who would personally favour change will hold back from pressing for it for the time being. It does not seem to me that it would accord with our traditions for them to seek to impose change on fellow-members whose enjoyment of the Club this would impair.
.
Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.
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Despite the Club’s present enthusiasm for “all-male conversation,” the Travellers Club is, in fact, the model for Conan Doyle’s Diogenes Club featured in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
“There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger’s Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.”
—- The Greek Interpreter
Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: A Guide to the Great Clubs of London, 1963, reports:
“The chief tradition of the Travellers’ is that members do not speak to one another. …
The Travellers’ maintains its non-speaking reputation even at luncheon or dinner when members come in with books, newspapers, or magazines in their hands, practically daring anyone to talk to them. Neither talk nor guests, by the way, are tolerated in the library which has a large number of early travel books, diplomats’ memoirs and books in French. There is occasionally some furtive conversation in the (mezzanine) bar, but most members only learn to know each other either on Sundays or in August when they are allowed to use the Garrick. For there, anyone who comes to the luncheon table with a book or newspaper has it firmly removed frok him under the instructions of the secretary by the redoubtable Barker, with the words, ‘Excuse me, sir; it isn’t dome at the Garrick.'”
Road & Track simply marvels at the astounding overreach of proposed eco-tyranny.
In an effort to further reduce pollution in Great Britain, new regulations have been proposed that would effectively ban all classic cars from London’s city center. R&T understands that the mandate, which was first floated last February, would establish an Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ), disallowing all pre-2005-registered vehicles from entering a prime area of downtown London effective 2020. …
Britain, always fertile ground for irony, also seems to have forgotten that its auto industry hasn’t contributed anything truly noteworthy to the motoring zeitgeist in roughly half a century (with a few notable exceptions, such as the McLaren F1). Thus, the ULEZ would take every great English car ever made—the Jaguar E-Type, Aston Martin DB5, Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, the Lotus Esprit Series 1, and even the original city car, Issigonis’s Mini—and promptly ban them all from entering the most visible area of the nation’s capital.
Take a moment to let that sink in.
Well-intentioned? Sure, but the proposed ULEZ is ignorant at best and outright draconian at worst.
Photo from Rafal Heydel-Mankoo of a feature found in the dining booths of Bob Bob Ricard, a posh restaurant featuring Russian & English cuisine in London’s West End.
[T]hese are a few of a growing number of guerrilla stickers that have recently appeared on the network.
They use the same fonts and designs as London Underground’s famous branding.
But they subvert the intended message making often amusing but sometimes serious points about anything from overcrowding to Tube etiquette.
Some commuters are amused by the stickers, including London blogger, Annie Mole, who says: “A number of them are funny and it breaks up the journey a bit.”
But British Transport Police (BTP) warned: “The costs of graffiti are substantial for the railway industry in terms of repairs and clean-up, and can leave permanent scars on the infrastructure.”
The population of wild foxes in London has exploded in recent years. Though attractive animals, foxes can be nuisance scavengers toppling your garbage can in the same fashion as raccoons, but foxes are also liable to eat the family cat. One overly-ambitious fox earlier this year made headlines by trying to carry off a four-week-old baby in South London. The infant survived, but lost a finger.
Boris Johnson, the current flamboyant mayor of London, apparently recently had his cat attacked, and Johnson was provoked to come out against the 2004 Hunt Ban, and (amusingly) express support for fox hunting in metropolitan London.
Boris Johnson has called for fox hunts in London to deal with the problem of increased numbers of the animals in the capital.
The mayor of London described how he was enraged after his cat was attacked and was tempted to go out and ‘blaze away’ at the fox with his air rifle.
There are around 10,000 foxes in the capital out of a total 33,000 living in urban areas across the UK, around 14 per cent of the total population of the animals.
Earlier this year a four-week-old baby had his finger ripped off by a fox.
Mr Johnson said it was time to brining in culling to keep numbers in check.
‘This will cause massive unpopularity and I don’t care. I’m pro liberty and individual freedom. If people want to get together to form the fox hounds of Islington I’m all for it,’ he said.
‘I got wild with anger not so long ago because I thought our cat had been mauled by a fox. I wanted to go out with my 2.2 [sic] and blaze away.’
Was it the mayor or reporter Tariq Tahir who thinks that air rifles are chambered in “2.2”?
The concept of fox hunting in heart of London, alas! neither Boris Johnson nor Tariq Tahir will be aware, is actually a famous literary theme.
In 1932, Gordon Grand published a wonderful story, titled The Silver Horn, A Nocturne of Old London Town, in The Sportsman, the opulent monthly catering to the wealthy and well-educated American sporting community, edited by Richard Danielson and published in Boston from 1927 to 1937.
One of the female members of the Millbeck Hunt tells Arthur Pendleton a story of observing during a recent visit to the metropolis a tipsy gentleman in evening dress, carrying a silver hunting horn, and hunting a notional pack of hounds through the heart of London’s fashionable West End. She describes the hunt in marvelous detail, remembering every check and incident of the hunt, producing a splendidly imaginative piece of sporting whimsy.
The story is a masterpiece, which manages to convey the technical sophistication and aesthetic charm of hunting through a verbal account of an entirely imaginary hunt in incongruous surroundings.
The Silver Horn was published the same year by Eugene V. Connett’s Derrydale Press as the title story of a collection of Grand’s foxhunting stories. The same story was also published privately in very small editions to be presented as gifts in Montreal in 1935 and Honolulu in 1941.
In 1927 Claude Friese-Greene shot some of the first-ever color film footage ever taken around London. He captured everyday life in the city with a technique innovated by his father, called Biocolour. The British Film Institute used computer enhancement to reduce the flickering effect of the original Biocolour and bring us this striking rare film which transports us back through time.
And they clearly have terrific noses for food, as this Sun story repeated by MSNBC demonstrates.
A fox cub was found living at the 72nd floor of the U.K.’s tallest skyscraper, it was reported Friday.
The animal, estimated to be six months old, had lived for at least two weeks on scraps of food left by workers about 945 feet up in the under-construction Shard tower in London, The Sun newspaper said.
Pest controllers managed to catch the fox and it was released near London Bridge after a health check, the tabloid reported. London is home to a large population of urban foxes.
“It was unbelievable,” local government official Les Leonard told The Sun. “To get up there the fox would have had to climb 71 sets of stairs and an old-fashioned ladder.
“We finally caught him in a large fox cage, baited with chicken carcasses.”
The East London Advertiser story recounts some moments of excitement for the British Army bomb disposal team.
A loud triple bang was heard and vibration felt in a wide area of East London tonight as ‘Hermann the stubborn German’ Second World War bomb was detonated by the British Army.
The massive 2,200lb (1000 kg.) unexploded wartime device discovered by marine engineers dredging the River Lea at Bromley-by-Bow on Monday was finally defused tonight and the explosives packed inside burned off with a controlled explosion.
But the amount of explosives the 6ft by 2ft ‘Hermann’ was packing surprised most experienced Army engineers.
It would have torn a hole in the East End up to a-quarter-of-a-mile wide if it had exploded—64 years to the day after Allied Forces landed at Normandy on D-Day 1944. This was Big Hermann’s revenge.
There was still half-a-ton of high explosives left burning at 7pm, an hour after it was detonated.
Bob disposal experts have been describing ‘Hermann’ as “proven to be very stubborn†and having developed “a personality of its own, almost like a petulant child.â€
‘Hermann’ was stubborn from the outset, booby-trapped to thwart any daring Army sapper.
It had remained dormant for 67 years, buried in the muddy riverbed until it was unearthed at low tide by a mechanical digger.
But it didn’t remain silent for long. It started ticking again on Wednesday, after nearly seven decades, following four failed attempts to defuse it by Army experts.
Tonight’s controlled explosion displaced 400 tonnes of sand which had formed a protective ‘igloo’ around the bomb.
The officer in charge, Major Matt Davies, told the East London Advertiser: “We were not exactly sure what to expect. The sand managed to contain the blast, which is what we wanted it to do.
“There are so many different ways these bombs were made in the 1940s that you can never tell exactly how long it would take.â€
He added: “If it had gone off in wartime there would have been large fragments up to a mile away which could have destroyed buildings and sewers.
“This is the biggest unexploded bomb we have found in central London.â€
The sappers used a laser-guided water jet to cut two circles in the thick metal casing to run steam hoses to liquefy the high explosives packed tightly inside.
One Army engineer was sent back repeatedly to the ticking device to pour a salt solution into it, then used a powerful magnet to stop the timer.
Police Commander Simon O’Brien said: “The engineer is a hero and has done Londoners a great service. It was a serious situation.†…
Pol Supt Phil Morgan said: “They spent 12 hours neutralising the fuse which was booby trapped and had ‘tamper’ devices fitted.
“If it had gone off, the blast would have reached more than 40,000ft in all directions, from Bow as far as Stratford.â€
The bomb was just a few hundred yards from the huge Bromley gasworks, a prime target for the Luftwaffe when Britain was at war.
It was a team of marine engineers widening the riverbank to take barges for London’s 2012 Olympics construction who unwittingly found ‘Hermann.’
“Our mechanical digger suddenly hit this large metal object about 6ft long on the riverbed,†engineer Andrew Cowie told the Advertiser on Monday, less than an hour after the discovery.
“We had waited for the tide to go out and were working against time. We couldn’t believe what we found. It was massive.
“We called the foreman over and he quickly evacuated the site. We were taking no chances.â€
ArabianBusiness.com boasts that Dubai is in the process of replacing London and New York as world capital of the financial industry.
Dubai is picking up the mantle of the financial capital of the world, as global banking sectors London and New York continue to fade on the back of the global credit crises.
The new mantra in New York and London is “Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye”, as job losses mount in both cities while opportunities in the east continue to rise.
Lehman Brothers on Tuesday became the latest investment bank moving one of its most senior positions to the UAE. Philip Lynch, the bank’s co-head of equities for Europe and the Middle East, will be relocating to Dubai after serving more than two decades in London.
The US investment bank, which has axed over 6,000 staff in the last nine months, said the move was aimed at serving the growing needs of clients in the Gulf region and the wider Middle East.
Lynch will find himself in good company. Barclays last month dispatched Roger Jenkins, one of London’s highest-paid bankers, to the emirate as chairman of investment banking and investment management.
Earlier in May Citigroup, which has so far cut 1,500 jobs because of the global credit crisis, announced it would send Alberto Verme, co-head of global investment banking from London to Dubai. …
The relocation of roles from London and New York to Dubai, and to a lesser extent Mumbai and Shanghai, reflects the reshaping of global opportunities for investment banks.
With a surge in oil revenue, rapidly rising infrastructure needs, and the emergence of sovereign wealth funds at the head of M&A activity, the Middle East and Asia have become crucial for global investment banks looking to remain profitable.
