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The history of Britain's working men’s clubs is rapidly fading in our collective memory, arguably persisting in the cultural imagination mainly through popular shows like Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights. However, though the number of clubs and total membership has collapsed over the last generation from its peak of 4,000 clubs and four million members in the 1970s, there are still around 1,800 clubs in Britain, with just under a million members. These clubs embody the history of working people’s struggle to decide for themselves how they want to associate, socialise, organise, and build community, often in the face of suspicious authorities or paternalistic reformers. As non-transactional spaces where members can govern their own spaces outside of the public or private sector, they are more relevant than ever.
Today, the nation’s clubs present a mixed picture. Many have closed their doors, while others are underused, or converting to new uses and ownership. Some survive mainly by leasing space to other groups, serving as community assets beyond their use by members. In many cases, there is social conflict over their futures, and more rarely, there are examples of revitalisation. Within the context of a weakened civil society, characterised by falling participation in the governance of membership organisations, the state of Britain's social clubs provokes many questions about how to protect more than a century of community wealth represented by these physical assets, while also recapturing the self-supporting spirit of these overlooked civic institutions.
Can the story of Britain’s social clubs – both the assets and the type of civil society they represent – inform current debates on the relationship between democratic power, society, and philanthropy?
Patrician to citizen
The development of civil society is generally considered to be autonomous, taking place beyond the influence of the state or social elites, and its strength reflected in the size and number of voluntary associations. In the case of Working Men’s Clubs, this may lead to the false assumption they were largely started through the associational power of local workers across industrial Britain. Counterintuitively, these social institutions were the product of the Victorian concept of “rational recreation” that informed the era’s social reformers, and whose “improvement schemes” focused on both exerting social control and increasing the economic productivity of the new working class. To explore this political history, particularly focusing on the rejection of the patrician model for a democratic one, I’m going to briefly relay an important and recently published account of this British institution – Pete Brown’s Clubland: How the working men's club shaped Britain (2022).
Back in the 1860s, during the first decade of the club movement, the majority of working class men were still not enfranchised. But soon the legacy of the first mass movement for political reform – the Chartists – would result in the government introducing a series of “reform acts” that increased the percentage of the male population that could vote. This expansion of the franchise presented a challenge for many in government and social reform – how to devise a new concept of “good social citizenship”. With formal access to the electoral system, it was considered necessary to create a social contract that would define how these new citizens should contribute to both society and the economy, and a range of paternalistic schemes were launched to encourage “self-improvement”, “technical innovation”, and “aesthetic appreciation”. Alongside education, leisure became a “key battleground”, with everyone from liberals to socialists concerned with “saving” the working class from the pub and other such “habits”. The lack of opportunities for “rational recreation” would inspire a wide range of institutional interventions in Victorian Britain that would be shaped by the cultural and economic imperatives of the time.
One of the first major interventions was to expand the Mechanics’ Institute movement, which started in the early nineteenth century to provide adult education for working men. Its primary purpose was to transform a rapidly growing number of industrial workers into more “effective” and “productive” workers in an industrial economy. As proto-universities, lectures were often delivered by figures such as George Birkbeck – founder of the London Mechanics' Institution which evolved into Birkbeck, University of London – and George Jacob Holyoake, who is permanently remembered through his dedication on the Co-operative Union’s building in Manchester.
“Next came the Mutual Improvement Societies.” While they were often more autonomous than the institutes, and more likely to be created through the initiative of workers than employers, they were still not beyond the influence of philanthropists, clergy, and factory owners. These societies were mainly aimed at increasing the economic productivity of those in skilled trades, and in some cases, these societies enabled employers to extend their control over their workforce – such as the Gregg brothers of Reddish in Greater Manchester. Despite the investment in these institutes by philanthropists and industrialists, they mostly performed poorly. But why did they ultimately fail?
Here enters another social reformer, Henry Solly, a former Unitarian pastor who closely identified with Christian Socialism. For Solly, Working Men’s Colleges and Mechanic’s Institutes were too focused on education and failed to provide space for relaxation, socialisation, and amusement. In his opinion, what was needed was a “club” not an institute, an informal setting in which “more serious matters could gradually be introduced.” At this time, he became aware of a “smattering” of working men’s clubs, which he believed could be developed into a replicable concept for national expansion. So while Sollly “can not be credited with the idea of inventing them”, he did develop the concept and advocated for a club model that would combine recreational and educational activities. But even with these innovations, the early period of the working men’s club would still resemble the “moral nurseries” of the other institutions he had criticised, and despite his promotion of “self-help”, an over-representation of social elites would be a consistent feature of its governance.
To support his ambitions to launch a national movement, Solly decided to create a “parent organisation.” So, in 1862, the Clubs & Institutes Union was launched as a Charity Organisation Society, with a Whig MP appointed as its first president, and a constitution that recommended 50% of the council should be composed of working men. For the first few years, Solly’s main responsibility was to fundraise from peers, MPs, clergy, and philanthropists, and it involved significant time hosting the CIU’s wealthy patrons on field trips – poverty safaris – to see “enlightened workmen at play.”
But only three years after its formation, the CIU was already looking “shaky”. The wealthy patrons were losing interest and members were complaining that the clubs were merely “a secular version of the church’s cup of tea and tract formula.” With pressure from local clubs, the union’s ban on alcohol was raised for debate, and by the end of the same year, the CIU decided the “beer question” could be determined by each individual club. The lifting of the ban on alcohol, despite Solly’s personal bias towards temperance, would eliminate the most significant obstacle to the survival and independence of the clubs – the ability to generate self-supporting revenue.
Over the next decade, members would increasingly challenge the “patronage” model through intense debates over who should actually run the union and the clubs. With local clubs voting out “sluggish gentleman patrons” from committee positions, they were inspired by the models of self-management and economic participation in the UK’s co-operative movement. By the early 1870s, the “widespread ‘revolt against patronage’ was sweeping through the club world” and it would lead to calls for a federal model that would frame the debate on whether the future of the clubs would be “patronising or self-supporting.” Though it took a while, in 1889 the CIU registered as a “society” under the Industrial Provident Society Act, and became a representative body, accountable to its member shareholders, and the clubs themselves became democratic societies under local control.
A new social club movement?
Brown’s account of this history seems to have a strong resonance with our own time. With the recent explosion in the number of philanthropic foundations, the reduction or withdrawal of state provision, and a thinning of civil society, we’re now in a constant debate about the ways social reformers – now more likely to be known as “social designers” – are still overpowering the initiative of local communities through the creation of “highly curated spaces” that are based on the same underlying principles about how to achieve urban renewal.
The ongoing loss of these clubs – and the proven model of self-management and financial independence – is only reinforcing the fragility of democratic power in the face of multiple crises, depriving us of the space to socialise and organise across fractured communities, and leaving our social infrastructure vulnerable to trends in public funding and charitable grants. Given the current costs of acquiring or renovating physical buildings, there is still a role for philanthropy, particularly as it offers a potential route to democratise their wealth. But it’s important – as the history show us – for this to be determined at the local level.
Through our Centre for Democratic Business, at Stir to Action we are already working with partners to understand where and why clubs are at risk of closure, experiencing social conflict, or in the process of revitalisation. We see the potential for a national support programme - but this will require major funders – and our own sector – to see the value in the recovery and renewal of social clubs as a unique opportunity to expand the democratic economy in our everyday lives.
Jonny Gordon-Farleigh is the founder of the Centre for Democratic Business, and a writer on democracy in business and civil society. jonny@democraticbusiness.org
Written with support from Oliver Holtaway, a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths University.
