‘I resigned my membership when I heard about it all – too much bad karma in those clubs now. I haven’t stepped inside one since. Although actually,’ she says conspiratorially, ‘if you ask me, something hadn’t felt right at Home for a while.’ That’s certainly a sentiment echoed by some former members from Home’s earlier days. There are even those who would trace the start of this perceived rot – a certain sense that among all the glamour and opulence something valuable had been lost, that the rot had set in – to the very start of the Ned Groom era.
Certainly nobody has ever accused Ned of having an exaggerated respect for the past.
Founded in 1887, named after the great Victorian actor-manager Henry Home, intended as a place where theatrical professionals （performing and non-performing） could meet, drink, attend to their correspondence, play cards, and dine, The Home Club （as it was known until 1994） has owned and occupied the same five-storey townhouse on Bedford Street in London’s Covent Garden almost continuously now for 135 years. For all that time the building, and the club, have remained under the same line of ownership, handed down through the Groom family – bar the occasional skipped generation – from son to son to son.
Less stuffy, less prestigious, than the Garrick （from which Home himself had been blackballed in 1874）， The Home Club’s membership peaked in the 1920s at almost 1,500 people. Then, and well into the 1930s, it was a favourite for actors appearing in the West End to retire to for a post-show nightcap. The kind of place where you might find Ivor Novello settling down behind the piano, or brush past the young Olivier, the young Gielgud, on the dark, steep, narrow stairs. All through the war, all through the Blitz, it remained open, albeit with the curtains closed. In the 1950s John Osborne came in as a guest for dinner a few months after Look Back in Anger opened and called everyone fossils and mummies. In the 1960s Oliver Reed drank there, famously urinating – mid-anecdote, brandy glass in hand – into the fireplace. By 1992, when Ned Groom inherited the club from his grandfather, its active membership had fallen to seventy-one people, the joke in circulation being that was also pretty close to their average age.
Part of the appeal of The Home Club, for its long-standing members, had always been its idiosyncrasies. For example, because the original head barman from the 1880s was named George, all subsequent head barmen were, by convention, also referred to by members as George: there were photographs on the central stairwell of all the Georges, numbered I to XI. George III was notoriously rude to Americans. George IV was notoriously rude to women. George VII was notoriously rude to everybody. The walls of the library were decorated with lithographs and drawings and paintings of Henry Home in the roles that had made him famous – as Shylock, as Othello, playing the world’s oldest Hamlet at fifty-five. Food, famously bad, from a galley kitchen in the basement, was not served after 8 p.m. Spirits were not served in the afternoon. Those who had not mastered the knack of catching George’s eye often found it difficult to get served anything at all.
‘The Home Club,’ Ned Groom told an interviewer for the Daily Telegraph in 2004, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the club’s big reopening as Home under his management, ‘was the kind of place that everyone gets nostalgic about now, but you would feel less misty-eyed if you’d been there at the time. Often I used to be up on the top floor, late at night, curtains drawn, candle on the table, having a drink with my grandfather as he went through the accounts, and all of a sudden there would be a squeak and something furry would run across your foot. You also have to remember, I used to see that place in the daylight. The dust on the wine glasses. The stains on the carpet. And he loved the place, my grandfather, just as I loved it, and just as I loved him, but he never had the resources or the energy to turn things around. You know, it’s funny, and I always tell this story, but when we did that big refurb, the big relaunch, all these journalists – from The Times, from the Observer – did their pieces about their one magical night at The Home Club, the night some jolly raconteur at the bar told them the most wonderful stories all evening about Sir Ralph Richardson or whoever, and what a wonderful slice of the old West End it all was – and I tell you, if they had come in the next night, exactly the same guy would have been telling exactly the same stories to whoever happened to be sitting on that same stool. And every time you tried to do anything to get anyone under eighty in, all the other members would be up in arms about it. And there wasn’t a thing you could do with the building, because it was Grade I listed. And every month, on top of all the hours I spent in chambers or in court, I was hanging up my wig and then haggling with suppliers, negotiating with creditors. It was impossible to keep running it the way it had been – we’d have been shuttered within a year, sold to some bloody banker as a London bolthole. It simply was not financially sustainable.’