'Deplorable publicity' Club considers legal advice as calls for change grow

Yesterday morning an email was sent by the Garrick Club's chairman to all 1,500 members informing them that the club was "urgently considering" new legal advice indicating that its rules already permitted the admission of women as members.

- Amelia Gentleman

"We are all obviously very concerned about the club's current situation after a week of very unpleasant publicity which we all deplore," the club chairman, Christopher Kirker, wrote. The club's committee would be considering the new advice with its solicitors, he added, and would contact members again on 4 April.

He urged members not to make any public comment on the situation, and also expressed a wish that people who were "considering their future in the club" to wait for the outcome of the meeting first.

"We are aware that there are strong views," he wrote. "But let us not be hasty. All is being carefully considered." Despite the chair's plea for discretion, there was no shortage of club members who were happy to share their views on this latest twist in an eventul week within the club's heavy grey stone building in central London.

"Not be hasty? It's beyond satire.

Members have been discussing whether women should join for over 50 years," said a member of the clergy who joined the Garrick around the turn of the century, who, like all members interviewed, asked not to be named.

This week had been a turning point in attitudes towards women within the club, he said. "Many people here still believe it's a man's world, that men can still call the shots there is this psychological assumption that nothing really has changed. But the resistance is crumbling. It feels like 1989, when chunks started to be knocked out of the Berlin wall."