Being thrown out of Decimus Burton’s fabulously pompous
Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall is something every Australian should
experience once. Ours, sadly, wasn’t a complete throwing-out, a
bodily flight down the marble under the stern gilt gaze of the
warrior goddess, but a somewhat less satisfying ejectus
interruptus. And it wasn’t because of our Australianness.
Xenophobia, like fox-hunting, is no longer legal. It wasn’t
gender, either. The Athenaeum admits women these days, even as
members, standards having slipped. No, it was dress.
Google lied. Google advised no dress code. My partner,
prudently, had anyway pocketed a tie, and borrowed a jacket. But it
wasn’t enough. There were pants, and the pants, Sir, simply will
not do. They weren’t jeans. (I was wearing those. But women, our
host explained, are regarded as untameable). My partner’s pants
were of the expensive, recently fashionable sort that come looking
a little distressed, a little worse for wear. It is, you might
think, rather a British look. But for the Athenaeum the look -
indeed the entire last century - might as well not have
happened.
The doorman summoned his boss, who tut-tutted eloquently from
several metres’ distance. But no sooner was our absolute
unacceptability made absolutely plain than our host appeared,
descending the vast stair. With booming voice and presence to match
he whisked us back up to the rugger-sized drawing-room muttering,
rather too loudly, “Never mind ‘em, just the bloody servants”.
Athenaeum membership, like monarchy, is successional. Our host,
the revered former editor of the world’s oldest architectural
magazine, that radical establishment pillar The Architectural
Review, was “put up” for membership by his predecessor, J.M.
“we’re all modernists now” Richards. Richards was in turn put up by
Hubert de Cronin “H de C” Hastings, editor from 1927 to 1973, who
was hailed in 1959 by the former assistant editor John Betjeman as;
“the Great Man of the Time. You invented modern architecture. We
are all your creations.” One thing about empire, it’s jolly good
for the ego.
For us, though, it had been a day of clubs. Lunch at the
famously intellectual Groucho, in Soho; dinner at the Ath. Wildly
different in outlook and leaning yet both designed to engender that
nose-pressed-against-the-glass feeling with which all London
Australians (and many Brits) are familiar.
Australians relate to Britain like the bad child who
nevertheless cannot wait to impress. We affect to despise her, for
her grey climate and greyer food, and yet, even now, we send our
best and brightest to joust in that bejewelled arena. To win fair
grail, slay the controlling dragon. And slay we do. We win their
architecture prizes, turn their disastrous Millennium Dome into the
hugely successful O2 (or Oz?) arena, design their Olympic village,
dominate the tabloids. So it is, in its way, rather wonderful that
the British sense of inviolable superiority persists, despite such
intimations of takeover.
Most Brits still think of Australia, if at all, as some
far-flung kanga-infested blessedly droughty paradise. It’s a
brand-mistake we reinforce with, for example, the Australia Day
Monopoly pub crawl. Many Brits have cuddled a koala and know that,
beneath the fluff there’s surprisingly little meat. And that, when
the drugs fade and the stupor dissipates, those claws can be
surprisingly sharp. Surprisingly vituperative.
So they’re not surprised that Germaine Greer, from her ancient
mill-house two doors down from Cambridge’s shiny and
sinister-looking Genome Centre (also called the Sanger Institute,
in deference to this Great Australian Proximity), makes a point of
climbing rhythmically up the great British nostril. They take Barry
Humphries’s recent nomination of Prince Charles as “person most
admired” as simple evidence that the royal honours are coming round
again.
All this they tolerate, so peaceably that visitors to Canterbury
Cathedral, where Thomas Beckett was quadruply slaughtered, may be
plied with a special “Australian connection” map that renders
ecclesiastical complexities in plain English and points out, among
other things, a footprint, near the martyrdom door, carved by John
Blaxland, brother of the Blue Mountains explorer, Gregory.
But they must be nonplussed by subsequent generations. By the
fact that our Kylie now shares with the Queen (and, I suppose,
Beckett) the distinction of being four times waxed, only in this
case by Madame Tussaud - the previous Minogue bottom having melted,
we’re told, under undue schoolboy affection. Kylie who - notably
more fleshlike in wax than in life - is the first fragranced
waxwork, and with her own beguiling perfume. The Tower of London
guard is a Queenslander who talks AFL while checking bags for
bombs. And our Cate is on an awards shortlist for playing the queen
who stiffened England’s collars.
And in that beginning was the end, really, for Elizabeth begat
Empire, Empire begat Commonwealth, and Commonwealth begat a London
where Jamaicans laugh and talk on the Tube, where Neighbours
stars are household names and the Walkabout pub chain celebrate
Australia Day as if everyone knew it from Anzac.
The Brit lit crit Terry Eagleton once prophesied (after the
event, and after Yeats) “the centre cannot hold”. But would someone
please tell the doorman?
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