History

The ‘three years as a principal administrator’ qualification was introduced in 1921, and in 1926 a principal administrator entitled to be considered for membership of the Club was defined as ‘an officer directly responsible to the governing body for the administration of the hospital and representing the governing body in its absence’.

Minutes record the first of a series of guest speakers, eminent in the hospital world, who were to include in due course at each February meeting, such members of the peerage as the Earl of Arran, Viscounts Hambleden and Knutsford, and Lord Riddell. In addition, as the minutes clearly disclose, the Club meetings of the 1920s were concerned with discussions on a variety of interesting and important topics. These ranged from Lord Cave’s Ministry of Health’s views on co-operation between hospitals, both voluntary and municipal; to the Local Government Bill of 1929, waking hours of patients, co-operative advertising, sweep-stakes, brighter out-patient departments and the use of publicity agents. The trend continued into the 1930s, and in the Club’s golden jubilee year at a meeting on 25th October 1935, it was generally agreed ‘that some matter of general hospital interest shall be included in the agenda for each dinner of the Club’. To list the speakers and their subjects over the past forty years (impressive though they are) would be both tiresome and time consuming. A few taken at random are Sir Wilson Jameson in the Club’s diamond jubilee year speaking generally on hospital matters in the run up to the NHS; Mr C W Guillebaud in 1956, on his committee’s report on NHS costs; Mr H V Hodgson, Editor of the Sunday Times, in 1960 on hospitals and the Press; Sir Arthur Porritt in 1963 on his Medical Services Review Committee report and, of course, just for the pure fun…

The decision that it should be so was taken in 1952, and prior to that, while the special, usually non-dining meetings tended to be in hospitals, the three ordinary dinner meetings each year were not unexpectedly held in institutions dedicated to gastronomy rather than to healing.

Members accepted that they must change with the changing times and, to their eternal credit, agreed in the early 1980s to the acceptance of women as members, speakers and guests. The official reception held on Thursday, 21st March 1985, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Club was, in consequence, most apposite in more ways than one. Not only was it held within two days of the actual 100th birthday of the Club and at the very hospital where the Club was founded (at Bart’s in Gibbs’ Great Hall) but also the guest of honour at the reception who spoke so charmingly to literally every one of the hundred or more members and guests present, was a woman – HRH The Duchess of Gloucester.