The Bowtieologist

On Thursday of last week, I was about to walk into the evening’s usual manoeuvres when a dashing member of the Savile’s Club arrived in jodhpurs and a riding jacket having just dismounted his beautiful Triumph Bonneville. He was accompanied by a beautiful, redhead–Continental with that rather fetching dust haze from a proper road journey. They had been riding back from Somerset since noon and had worked up a healthy appetite for cocktails and hearty yet refined food. The Savile Club clearly was the perfect answer.

One of the burdens of London life today is that we devote too much time to work and too little to the sophistication of elegant unwinding. It is easy to mix only with one’s office colleagues and then trundle home to the demands of home life without a healthy decompression between. Too much noise, too many delayed trains and tubes, too little of the unexpected makes for dullness.

The wonderful thing about clubs is that they offer variety, intelligent but not overbearingly intellectual friendship and engagement over a glug of something served in crystal. You can meet vaguely like-minded souls from other occupations. You can attend lectures and special lunches if you desire, and in the evenings there are occasional less than usual gathering such as the Eccentric Club, to which I was kindly invited to hold a speech about the art of wearing bowties and what it requires and entails, from mindset to dexterity.

A matter for just a few gentlemanly types you may say? Well it is too easy to look like a prize idiot when sporting a bow tie rather than the habitue of Gooodwood Estate comfortable in best tweed or the pages of James Bond (any of the characters you might choose, James Bond is a brand not a person and one that will be forever associated with looking dashing and living in the world of The Club).

So whilst getting ready to impart the world-changing truth on such important subjects as ribbon width and how one’s facial features impact the shape of a bow I found my mind wandering to the whole world of Clubs and gentlemanly life.

Think about it, the word “club” is an elastic affair. It can mean a discotheque, a sports association or an after-work boozer for trendy 30-somethings where the barmaid wears a string vest and hails you with the words ‘ello darlin’ or “ hiya mate”.

To me, a Club ought to be a comfortable home-away-from-home, a urban billet where they serve good but not over-fussy dishes, where they have a few reasonably priced bedrooms ( just in case ), where the staff make an effort to be smart, courteous but not overbearing and where a chap can retire to a low-slung, deep-buttoned leather armchair with a copy of that morning’s newspapers, maybe to catch up on some incongruous style columnists drivel as a guilty pleasure without being told off for snoring. That’s my sort of club, anyway.

The Savile Club in Mayfair, one block up from Claridge’s Hotel and one down from Grosvenor Square at whose far end glowers the 1960 monstrosity of the U.S. embassy, is an 18th century affair done up in the ornate Parisian manner with twirl cornices and mirrors at every turn. If you called its architectural style wildly camp you would not be entirely wrong.

All I can say is that I could not have imagined a more beautiful setting and, returning to my subject, a better audience for this speech opportunity. In other words mixed in with a smattering of happy drunks, the odd bore and the occasional ex-convict were a wonderful collection of professionals, composers, hot air balloonists, refined gentlemen of independent means and ladies with life stories that could make your average Victorian executioner blush. What a perfect place. What a perfect evening.

Thanks to David De Vynel and Imants von Wenden for the invitation.

Photo credits @Annadvk