Cabbages & Kings: Clubs that take pride in prejudice

“Though there be trials all along the way
The goal is heaven, traveller do not stray
The cup is but a metaphor for grace
Ignore the distractions of this sad place
Why should I heed the whispers of the breeze
When the tallest cypress whispers lies like these?”
From Sophy the Sufi
by Bachchoo

Groucho Marx famously said that he would not like to belong to any club that would have him as a member. The London smart set — mediawallas and the scions of pretension — did in the ’80s, in respect to that remark, set up the “Groucho Club”. It admits everybody — or at least those who can be proposed and seconded and can afford the annual fee. Not so the Scottish Muirfield Golf Club which has this week run into a national controversy for its refusal to allow women members. The club is legally entitled to set barriers to the gender of their membership. They have broken no law, as a club is recognised as an association within which the will of the members prevails.

In the present climate of world opinion, I am certain they would not be entitled to debar an Asian, an Afro-West Indian or anyone else on the basis of race. Gender and women seem to be legally fair game. The Muirfield spokesperson — sorry! “spokesman” — said they allowed women into the club as wives and guests who could have a drink at the bar. They just couldn’t be members. Now I am sure that the women of Scotland will deem this ban a disgrace. If I were a Scottish woman (Fallulla McDundee?) I would reverse Groucho’s maxim and wouldn’t want to belong to any bigoted club who wouldn’t have me as a member.

There are very few institutions in Britain, with the exception of mosques and Islamist-influenced schools, academies and associations, which enforce gender separation. Today’s feministic thrust for equality has seen to that, and Muirfield is now regarded as a Neanderthal remnant and something of a joke. When Muirfield’s gender discrimination hit the news a friend asked me if Indian clubs had inherited the same prejudice from the Raj. I said I didn’t know about gender discrimination but I did know that Indian clubs were very selective.

Some years ago, a friend and his 18-year-old son were staying with me for a few weeks in London. They had a fixed flight back to Mumbai and when I urged them to cancel the tickets and stay some more days they said they had a deadline. The son had to attend an interview to be accepted as a member of a Mumbai club. I was told that this was one chance in a lifetime and if he passed the interview he could be a member for life. It was a very exclusive club.
“So who decides? “ I asked
“There’s a committee, but really the secretary’s vote is the deciding one.”
“So who’s this all-powerful secretary?” I asked.
They gave me a name.

Memories of my schooldays came back. The same name belonged to a lad, something of a character, who was in my schooldays in Bishops’ School, Pune. He was known for coining nonsensical phrases. He would, without rhyme or reason, suddenly on impulse shout “chamari bawdi, naki samari” or accost people with “soo soo kooroomooroo!” We all knew the phrases meant nothing. They were markers of identity for this lad who invented and perpetrated them as the currency of defiance. He would shout them out at bewildered teachers or chant them in the playground. Other phrases — “Sont billees” and “Zhaagar billees” — invented by this same young lad became part our frivolous vocabulary. They were stubbornly meaningless and were deployed in any context whatsoever.

So I said to my friend’s son “Just go to the interview and say ‘soo soo, kooroomooroo”, and I’m sure the phrase will be recognised by its inventor, the secretary saheb”. I know the boy got his membership, but not whether he used my suggested tactic. In the days of the Raj and in inherited institutions since, gender discrimination prevails. My father was an officer in the British Indian Army before Independence and then in the Indian Army. His regimental mess was a sort of club and a no-go area for women except on ladies’ nights. My mother used to tell the story of how she had to get the regimental colonel’s and his wife’s approval before she could marry my father. She was invited to tea to be looked over and gain their approval.

Apart from the regimental mess, I don’t know if British Indian clubs discriminated on the grounds of gender, but they certainly did on the basis of race. The famous story in Mumbai is of the foundation of the Willingdon Club. The Bombay Gymkhana was the Raj club to which Lord Willingdon, the governor of Bombay at the time, attempted to take some Indian guests. His guests were refused entry and in high dudgeon Willingdon stormed out, relinquished his automatic membership and founded the Willingdon Club, which selected its members of course but didn’t discriminate against them on the basis of race.

A second Mumbai story — and I am sure there are parallel ones in other cities of the Raj — is that of the Breach Candy Club. Even years after Independence it would not admit non-whites as members. It was George Fernandes, a union leader at the time, who led a demonstration of Indian protesters who walked into the club en masse and, it is said, jumped into the swimming pool displacing most of the water from it. The club was subsequently desegregated.

Muirfield has been banned from the Open golf tournament as a consequence of the row over gender discrimination. The club argues that at present member’s wives and female guests are admitted free. As members, they would have to pay. Perhaps a mass female demonstration should clog the fairways and greens?