The Journal · The Brantford Club
What a Club Must Not Lose
The Brantford Club’s centennial history keeps a warning from clubland’s own literature: when a great club dies, what the obituaries mourn is never the building or the wine, but “an old fashioned charm, a gentle courtesy.” A club can replace everything except its manners.
Every institution keeps one text that frightens it usefully, and the Club’s is a short one. Somewhere in the writing of the centennial history, the author reached past Brantford entirely and set down what was said when one of the famous old clubs failed, because the lesson travels. This entry is about that lesson, and about how a house at 98 George Street has kept on its right side since 1898.
What makes a private club worth keeping?
Not the leather, and not the letterhead. The literature of clubland, from the coffee-house genealogies of the 1870s to the surveys of the 1910s, keeps arriving at the same answer the Club’s own book endorses: a club is worth keeping while it stays kind in an old-fashioned way, unhurried, personal, and courteous past the point of fashion. The moment a club becomes merely a building with a fee attached, the obituary is already half-written. The warning the centennial history preserves says it in eight words.
“an old fashioned charm, a gentle courtesy”
What was mourned when a great club closed, as the Club’s centennial history keeps the warning
How a house stays on the right side of the warning
The Club’s records read like a long answer to it. The rule of May 28, 1911 that a member was never to be interrupted by the telephone is courtesy written as legislation. The Stewards remembered by name, pie and all, are the charm kept on payroll. Even the refusal of rum was a house minding its manners in its own particular way. None of it was grand; all of it was gentle; and the house that practised it is still setting tables while grander rooms elsewhere have gone to the obituaries.
The warning, applied to a second century
A club entering its second century has one job the first century already defined: keep the courtesy old-fashioned while keeping the house alive. The kitchen changes, the rooms are renovated on the record, the Journal itself is new, and the manners are not allowed to move. That is the whole covenant, and it is why the Club’s book preserved another club’s obituary in the first place: as a promise to its own future, filed where the future would find it.
Everything in this house can be replaced except the way it treats people.
Questions the record answers
What did the old clubs lose when they failed?
By the account the Club’s centennial history preserves, the mourning was never for buildings or cellars but for an old fashioned charm and a gentle courtesy, the things a club cannot buy back once they go.
How does The Brantford Club keep its character?
By writing it down and living in the records: named Stewards, courtesies made into Resolutions like the 1911 telephone rule, and a house kept in daily use at 98 George Street since 1898 rather than preserved as a museum.
Is the warning still taken seriously?
Seriously enough that the centennial history preserved it, and seriously enough that this Journal reprints it. Institutions keep the texts that keep them honest.
Sources: the Club’s centennial history, privately printed for the hundredth year, which preserves the warning; the same book’s Resolutions and Steward records for the Club’s own practice.
The people who carried the courtesy are in The Stewards; the temperaments it serves are in who joins a city club.
