Winston Churchill

ABOUT BOOKS
"Neither Fulsome
Nor Fulminating":
Colin Coote's The Other Club
The Other Club, by Sir Colin Coote.
London: Sidgwick &
Jackson Ltd., 1971, hardbound,
156 pages, illustrated
with cartoons. Frequency:
rare. Current
range on the secondhand
market $50-100/£30-60.
Difficult to find, but always
worth the search, is Colin
Coote's jolly history of the dining
club founded by Winston Churchill
and F. E. Smith in 1911 (and still going
strong). Sir Colin knew Sir Winston for
over forty years and compiled some of
the earliest books of Churchill quotes.
The death of the last of its two
"pious founders" caused some to believe
The Other Club might pass out of existence,
but Members decided otherwise.
Coote was assigned to write the Club's
history "because I was the second senior
Member and practically the whole
membership wanted the Club to continue.
Lord Longford, an Irish Earl, was
a Member and also chairman of Sidgwick
& Jackson, who were the original
publishers of certain famous authors
such as Rupert Brooke, who was the
son of my contemporary Housemaster
at Rugby School. Lord Longford willingly
agreed to publish my account,
which the Club had commissioned, and
having been a frank friend of Sir Winston
from my 'teens upwards, I tried to
produce something neither fulsome nor
fulminating. The book never aimed at a
vast circulation, though it achieved a
modest success among the Club's Members
and friends."
Sir Colin's remarks come from
correspondence, laid into Finest Hour's
copy of The Other
Club, with former editor
Dalton Newfield,
who was trying to obtain
enough copies to
satisfy demand (a problem
we still have). "I
can well understand
that it was not intended
for vast circulation,"
Newfield wrote Sir
Colin. "My desire for
twenty-four copies was
based on the idea that if
it is difficult to find
now it would be more
so in future. Of course
I also have your Maxims
and Reflections, Sir
Winston Churchill: A
Self-Portrait, Wit and
Wisdom and A Churchill
Reader, and even though there is
overlapping, I feel that each is a valued
part of my collection. How fortunate
you were to have known him so well."
Christopher Ford's review in
The Guardian of 13 November 1971
nicely illuminates this literary gem.
Touch of the Other
Christopher Ford
Imagine: The Club, exclusive, immemorial,
resonant with the noises
of gentlemen dining. Imagine,
though, two splendid braggadocios,
quite thinly disguised under the pseudonyms
of Churchill and F. E. Smith.
Our heroes suspect the pitter-patter of
black balls. So what do they do? They
start The Other Club. Here, too, gen-
The Co-founders of The Other Club in Punch, 2 November 1910.
(Monypenny's Life of Disraeli had just been published).
Mr. F. E. Smith: "Master of epigram—like me!"
Mr. Winston Churchill: "Wrote a novel in his youth—like me!"
Together: "Travelled in the East—like us. How does it end?"
tlemen may dine, insulated from hoi
polloi; and, if the members seem to be
mainly of a political or military vocation,
then where else would you look
for gentlemen except landed on the
grouse-moor?
This, then, is the backcloth,
nay, the stage itself, for Sir Colin
Coote's latest literary adventure. And
with such gusto does he ring up the
curtain: "Nineteen Hundred and
Eleven! What a year in which to be
born! The Edwardian era, so like the
Second Empire in France, was lying in
the ashtray of history, like the last cigar
puffed on his deathbed by its
founder..."
Sir Colin was ever a fantasist,
except perhaps in his days as managing
editor of the Daily Telegraph. He personally
wrote a book called Sir Winston
Churchill: A Self-Portrait"; and he is >>>
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