The Journal · The Brantford Club

A City Club and a Country Club: What Each Is For

A country club is organized around its grounds and its game; a city club is organized around its table and its company, downtown, year-round. They are not rivals but complements, which is why towns like Brantford have long kept one of each: the course for the season, and a house like The Brantford Club at 98 George Street for every working week since 1898.

The question arrives most often from people who already belong somewhere: is a downtown club a different thing from the club with the fairways, and is there a reason to keep both? The honest answer is that they were never the same institution, and the old towns knew it. Here is the difference, plainly, and what the downtown kind is for.

What is the difference between a city club and a country club?

The difference is what the membership is organized around. A country club’s centre of gravity is its grounds: the game, the season, the drive out. A city club’s centre of gravity is its table: lunch on a working day, dinner with a client, a meeting in a private room, all within walking distance of the offices and the Court House. Brantford is fortunate in having both traditions kept well; the Brantford Golf and Country Club keeps the grounds-and-game kind, and The Brantford Club has kept the downtown kind since 1898, in an Italianate house older than the city itself. Neither replaces the other, because they answer different days of your calendar.

What a city club adds

The city club’s case is the working week. It is where a Tuesday lunch happens without a tee time, where a client dinner sits five minutes from the office, and where the company is drawn from every occupation on the roll rather than one pastime: the Club’s own founding list ran a Manufacturer, a Banker, a Publisher, a Barrister, and a Gentleman. It is also indifferent to weather. A course belongs to its season; a dining room under Executive Chef Eric Wasylenky, a lounge, and rooms kept since 1898 belong to all twelve months, which is precisely when a working life needs them.

The tradition of keeping both

Holding a town membership and a country membership has never been a contradiction; it is the old pattern of a complete civic life, one address for the game and one for the week, and it is the living pattern too: many of The Brantford Club’s own members keep a country club membership alongside their town one. The reciprocal customs of clubland, written into constitutions as far back as the 1890s rule books, assume exactly this world of multiple memberships honouring one another. A second membership is a small thing to add and an old thing to have, and nothing about it asks anyone to choose sides in a city that benefits from both houses doing well.

Questions the record answers

Sources: the Club’s centennial history for the Charter roll and the house; the 1890s club constitutions in the Journal’s records for the reciprocal customs; the City of Brantford’s heritage record for the house and its dates.