The Journal · The Brantford Club
Private Club Guest Rules: Strangers and the Old Rule Books
In the 1890s, Canadian private clubs wrote their guest customs down, and they called guests “strangers.” The Rideau Club’s 1896 constitution devoted an article to them, the Toronto Club’s 1893 rules admitted “any stranger of distinguished rank or position,” and The Brantford Club, founded in 1898, recorded its own guests one line at a time in the Visitors’ Register.
The rule books of the Club’s founding decade survive, and they are wonderful reading: formal, exact, and unembarrassed. This entry quotes them as documents of their era, alongside the Club’s own Register, because nothing explains what a members’ club was better than the rules it wrote for the front door.
Could guests visit a private club in the 1890s?
Yes, and the visits ran on written rails. The Rideau Club’s constitution of 1896, two years before The Brantford Club’s founding, allowed a member to “introduce friends to breakfast, luncheon or dinner, at his own expense,” specified which rooms a guest could enter unaccompanied, and closed with a sentence of perfect Victorian finality about the visit’s end. The Toronto Club’s rules of 1893 went further for the eminent, empowering its committee to admit “any stranger of distinguished rank or position visiting Toronto.” A guest, in the old books, was an event with paperwork.
“Any stranger dining or lunching with a member may be introduced by him to the Billiard Room or Card Room… and having once left the Club House the privileges of such stranger shall cease.”
Constitution of the Rideau Club, Ottawa, 1896
- Rideau Club, 1896
- An article for “Strangers”: meals at the member’s expense, named rooms, privileges ending at the door
- Toronto Club, 1893
- Visiting privileges for the eminent, by committee resolution; temporary residents at five dollars a month
- National Club, 1900
- A working constitution prefaced by the club’s own origin story
- The Brantford Club, 1898
- A Visitors’ Register, one line to a guest: the date, the name, the residence
Reciprocity, in the original wording
The old books also wrote down the courtesy this Journal has described before: clubs receiving one another’s members. The Rideau constitution made it conditional and mutual, withholding visiting privileges from “any member of any Club in Canada which does not extend the like privileges to members of the Rideau Club.” Reciprocity was not a perk invented by modern membership brochures; it was a treaty system, and it still travels. The Brantford Club’s own 1901 Register page, with its guests from Winnipeg to London, England, is what the treaty system looked like in ink.
What the Club’s own book says
The Brantford Club’s founding documents are of the same family: a Charter with a seven-word purpose clause, Minutes that ruled on everything from the bar list to the telephone, and the Register by the door. The 1911 Resolution that a member was never to be interrupted by the telephone is the same instinct as Rideau’s guest article: the house in order, in writing. The era’s customs are quoted here as history, the way the ten-cent bar list is.
Everything above is the custom of another century, quoted from its own documents. How guests and hosting work at The Brantford Club today is answered person to person: one email, and a person replies.
Questions the record answers
Why did old clubs call guests strangers?
It was the legal-formal register of the era’s rule books: a stranger was anyone not a member, however welcome. The Rideau Club’s 1896 constitution and the Toronto Club’s 1893 rules both use the word without any coldness intended.
What were guest rules like in the 1890s?
Written, precise, and hospitable within their lines: meals at the member’s expense, named rooms a guest could use, special provision for visitors of distinction, and privileges that ended when the guest left the building.
How did The Brantford Club record its guests?
In the Visitors’ Register, one ruled line per guest with the date, the name, and the residence. The page reproduced in the Club’s centennial history runs from Winnipeg to London, England.
Sources: the Constitution of the Rideau Club, Ottawa, 1896; the Rules and Regulations of the Toronto Club, 1893; the Constitution of the National Club, Toronto, 1900; and the Club’s own centennial history for the Register and the 1911 Resolution.
The present custom is simpler
The door at 98 George Street has opened every year since 1898, and it opens by asking.
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