The Club(23)

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.’

The chambers to which Groom is referring is One Knight’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn, a private family practice specializing in high-profile divorces where he was a barrister until shortly after the club was left to him, aged twenty-nine.

On the death of his grandfather in 1992, Ned and his younger brother Adam inherited – in unequal shares – the business and title deeds to the building. A long-running family dispute is alleged to have been the reason their father, Richard Groom, was passed over. Some have suggested that this came as rather a shock to Ned’s father. There are some who believe it was a shock to Ned too.

‘I think we were all a bit surprised, at the time, when he decided to give up the law,’ says Sebastian Shaw QC, a commercial litigation barrister from Blackwell Row, a neighbouring chambers. ‘He loved the law, and he was bloody good at it, too. Bloody good. The number of cases Ned Groom won before he left the bar – celebrities, CEOs, oligarchs – was almost unheard of at his age. Juicy stuff, that – not like the dull contracts most of us deal with,’ he says, self-deprecatingly. ‘That memory, that quick wit, that single-mindedness. Anyone who ever got in an argument with the man knows he’s like a dog with a bone. Even in those days he was the most tremendous show-off. Loved to be up there in court, the centre of attention. They call politics showbusiness for ugly people – well, you can add the professional bar to that too.’ He chuckles. ‘I remember a lot of people being completely gobsmacked that he would give all that up to go off and take over what was a pretty dingy and uninspiring sort of place back then.’

Ned wasted no time in trying to shake things up. He rewrote the menus, deep-cleaned the dusty old spaces and shut the guest bedrooms entirely after an outbreak of bedbugs. He approached banks for loans, applied for planning permission to gut and refurbish the old building, the top three floors to be taken up with luxurious suites designed to attract the right sort of clientele. He decided to rename it Home: simple, elegant, modern. He repeatedly clashed with English Heritage, trying to convince them to permit his vision: a twenty-first-century club in a late-eighteenth-century shell. The drinks prices were hiked, monthly fees increased. Existing members struggled to pay and, some felt, were compelled to leave. Every time someone started telling a story about the old days Ned was said to insist the barman turn the music up a notch.

Then, in the small hours of 16 September 1993, the first news reports began to emerge of a fire in Covent Garden, smoke billowing in great grimy clouds above Bedford Street, which had seemingly started in The Home Club’s basement kitchen (a fuse box was later identified as the most likely culprit) but quickly spread to the first, then second, then third floors and prompted the evacuation of much of the street. Over the course of the next few hours, despite the best efforts of several teams of firefighters, it spread to consume the entire building, leaving it a smouldering shell.