The Journal · The Brantford Club

Business Networking in Brantford: The Room the City Has Used Since 1898

Business networking in Brantford has a fixed address older than the word itself: The Brantford Club at 98 George Street, founded in 1898 by a Manufacturer, a Banker, a Publisher, a Barrister, and a Gentleman so the city’s working people would have one table in common. It still works the same way: not events, but acquaintance.

The Club’s founders would not have recognized the word “networking,” and the house still does not use it, but they built the thing itself and wrote it into a Charter. What follows is how business acquaintance has actually been made in this city since 1898, and why the method has not needed updating.

Where do business people meet in Brantford?

Brantford’s business people have met at 98 George Street since 1898, and the very first guest list proves the calibre of the method. On opening night, December 31, 1898, the company recorded in the Club’s centennial history was headed by the Honourable A. S. Hardy, then Premier of Ontario, with Harry Cockshutt and Lloyd Harris among those present: the province’s first minister and two of the city’s industrial names, at one table, on night one. That was not an event with lanyards; it was the roll of 1898 having supper. The Club has been the city’s standing introduction ever since.

What a club does that an event cannot

An event hands you strangers; a club keeps acquaintances. The difference is time. A card exchanged at a mixer has a shelf life of one follow-up email, while a member seen at lunch every second week becomes, without anyone scheduling it, someone whose word you can weigh and whose call you return. The Club codified the conditions for this as early as 1911, when the Minutes ruled that a member was never to be interrupted by the telephone: conversations here are allowed to finish, and business relationships are built out of finished conversations. The old clubs even wrote the introductions down; the rule books of the 1890s treated a guest brought to lunch as a matter of record.

The method, unchanged

The working parts today are the same ones the Charter assumed: a dining room under Executive Chef Eric Wasylenky where a lunch runs at the pace of the conversation, rooms where a meeting keeps its privacy, and a roll of members whose occupations still read like a working city’s index. The Canadian precedent is old and honourable: Toronto’s National Club was gathering its members for papers and debate at its “National Evenings” back in 1891, clubs being engines of acquaintance before they were anything else. Brantford’s version has simply never stopped running. Who the roll tends to attract, thinkers, builders, hosts, has its own entry.

Questions the record answers

Sources: the Club’s centennial history for the Charter roll, opening night, and the 1911 Resolution; Maple Leaves: Papers Read Before the National Club of Toronto (1891) for the National Evenings precedent.