Army and Navy Club
Architects, C. O. Parnell and A. Smith, 1848–51
The northernmost forty-three feet of the site of
the Army and Navy Club, fronting St. James's
Square, was occupied until 1847 by a private
house surviving from the 1670's. By present numbering it would have been 22.
The site of this house was granted on 24 March
1672/3 by the Earl of St. Albans and Baptist May
at a rent of £13 5s. 2d. per annum to trustees for
Edward Shaw of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,
gentleman, (ref. 484) who later obtained a grant of the
site of No. 3 (see page 83). In October Shaw
and his trustees sold the site and the house built on
it to Charles II's mistress, Mary Davis, for the
comparatively small sum of £1800. (ref. 485) 'Madam
Davis' first appears here in the ratebook for 1675,
and remained until 1687, although in 1686 and
perhaps at other times she probably sub-let the
house to a tenant. (ref. 6) Nothing is known of the
building of the house, although the fact that it survived with little structural alteration longer than
any other of the original houses in the square
suggests that it was solidly built, and in this possibly
shared a characteristic of the houses in the square's
south-western corner.
In May 1749 Thomas Brand of the Hoo,
Hertfordshire, bought the house for £4500 from
the Earl of Buckinghamshire (ref. 486) and from 1751 to
1777 the house was occupied in succession by him
and his son, also Thomas Brand. (ref. 487)
In 1771 the younger Thomas Brand employed
Sir William Chambers, who had worked for the
elder Brand at the Hoo, to carry out work on the
house in the square. He evidently suggested to
Chambers that the front of the house should be
coloured with a yellow wash, but in May 1771
Chambers, while reporting that work was going
on expeditiously, advised against concealing the
brick front. 'Upon Examination I find it is a very
neat piece of Brickwork like Marlborough house;
it would therefore be better only to clean it and
point the Joynts as any Colour that can be laid
upon it will wash off in a few Years and will even
at first look but very indifferently whereas the red
brickwork is very perfect in its kind and will be
kept in Countenance by the Queens house Marlborough house etc., etc.' (ref. 488) In June Chambers
reported that the greater part of the work was
done, (ref. 489) but it was not in fact completed until
December, when Chambers thought it looked
'vastly well'. (ref. 490) It is difficult to determine what
was done at this time. Sums of £400, £500 and
£800 owed to workmen are mentioned in Chambers's letters, but it is not clear whether they were
exclusive of one another. Chambers's comment
in December shows that the appearance, external
or internal, was significantly modified, but plans
of 1799 and a water-colour of 1815 (Plate 133)
make it apparent that the original house was structurally unaltered at those dates. It may be that
Chambers satisfied Thomas Brand's desire for the
concealment of the brick front and his own objections to a 'wash' by covering the brick piers of the
front with the stucco shown in the 1815 watercolour and which was certainly in place by 1799. (ref. 491)
If so, the house was probably one of the first in the
square to be stuccoed.
In March 1799 the house was bought by
Samuel Thornton, a director of the Bank of England, (ref. 492) who had evidently come to some firm
agreement to make the purchase in the previous
year. (ref. 493) The sale was negotiated by Soane, who
was already associated with Samuel Thornton in
his work at the Bank of England and who also
altered his country residence at Albury in
Surrey. (ref. 494) By February 1799 the Thorntons
had moved in, hopeful of 'the Divine blessing . . .
for the next and many succeeding years', and
'found it sufficiently comfortable to order it to be
repaired and painted against the ensuing winter'. (ref. 493)
This was done, including the painting of the
stucco on the front, by the autumn of 1799, at a
cost of a little under £500. (ref. 495) In the course of the
summer Soane had made plans of the house which
show its seventeenth-century character and had
produced designs for an alteration which would
have included the removal of the entrance to the
southernmost bay of the front and of the staircasewell to the back of the house. (ref. 496) This was not,
however, carried out, and the house retained its
original structure until its demolition.
The ground-storey plan made by Soane (Plate
133b) shows an almost square house with the
staircase hall south of a large room in front, and
two smaller rooms flanking the secondary stairs at
the back. A large closet projected from the south
back room, and smaller closets and lobbies were
formed in the thickness of the massive cross-wall,
containing the fireplaces of the back rooms and
dividing the front rooms from the back.
The front (Plate 133a) seems to have been
designed to conform with the general appearance
of the houses in the square, although it may have
been more elaborately treated than most of them.
Each of the three storeys contained four evenly
spaced windows, uniformly dressed with wide
architrave and cornice, and linked by plain aprons
to form vertical features of dressed stonework projecting from the piers of fine red brickwork,
admired by Chambers but destined to be covered
with mock-jointed stucco. The top-storey windows had no cornices as their architraves reached
the underside of the modillioned eaves-cornice of
wood, above which rose the tiled roof with its four
segmental-pedimented dormers. Stone steps rose
to the doorway in the opening left of the middle
pier, the two-leaved door being framed in a
moulded architrave, below a cornice-hood resting
on consoles.
After the death of Samuel Thornton's daughter
from a fever in May 1802 he was 'induced by an
apprehension of infection to remove immediately
from the house in St. James's Square', (ref. 497) but he
later returned, and in 1815 further repairs and
renovations were carried out, costing some
£390. (ref. 498) In October 1818 Samuel Thornton and
his trustees, having received 'a favourable offer', (ref. 499)
sold the house for £11,000 to the Hon. W. S.
Ponsonby, later Lord de Mauley. (ref. 500) In October
1846 Lord de Mauley and his trustees and mortgagees sold the house to the Army and Navy Club
for £19,500 10s. (ref. 500) and it was demolished in
1847. (ref. 6)
History of the club
In 1837 Sir Edward Barnes and a few officers
recently returned from service in India, finding
from the number of candidates on the waiting list
of the Junior United Service Club that there was
little chance of a young officer being admitted to
that club for some years, proposed to establish an
army club to which all officers on full or half pay
in Her Majesty's Army should be eligible. The
Duke of Wellington, whose patronage was sought,
declined to become either a patron or a member
unless membership of the club extended to officers
of the Navy and Marines. This suggestion was
accepted (ref. 501) and on 28 August 1837 a meeting of
officers of both services was held to elect a committee of management and to form rules and regulations. The Oxford and Cambridge University
Club was then about to leave its temporary home at
No. 18 St. James's Square and move into its new
home in Pall Mall. A lease of No. 18, which
stood at the north corner of St. James's Square and
King Street, was obtained, and there the Army
and Navy Club was opened for its members early
in 1838. (ref. 502)
Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Barnes (1776–
1838), the founder of the club, had served in the
Peninsular War and been wounded at Waterloo.
He was Governor of Ceylon from 1824 to 1831
and Commander-in-Chief in India from 1831 to
1833. He died on 19 March 1838, two weeks
before the first general meeting of the club. (ref. 503)
By 1844 the club was well established and in
1846 it moved to larger premises at Lichfield
House, now No. 15 St. James's Square. The
search for a site for the erection of a permanent
house had begun in 1843, and in 1846–7 six freehold houses forming a compact block at the west
corner of Pall Mall and George Street (fn. a) were purchased for the total sum of £48,770. The most
important of these was Lord de Mauley's house on
the west side of St. James's Square. (ref. 504)
In January 1847 The Builder reported that the
club intended to hold an open competition for the
design of the new building and that prizes of £200
and £100 would be awarded for the two best
plans. (ref. 505) In the following month, when printed
particulars of the competition were evidently in
circulation, The Builder urged the committee of
the club to 'exhibit the designs for a certain time
before coming to a decision', and to have the benefit
of professional advice in the selection of the best
design. (ref. 506) Unfortunately this sensible advice was
not followed, for the committee made its own
choice, which was subsequently confirmed in
April by a ballot of the entire club, and the designs
were not publicly exhibited until after the
decision had been made. The successful architect
was George Tattersall of St. James's Street, followed by Messrs. F. Fowler and Fisk of Sackville
Street. (ref. 507)
The competition attracted sixty-nine entrants
but the general standard was probably low, and
such famous club architects as (Sir) Charles Barry,
Decimus Burton and Sir Robert Smirke do not
appear to have competed. According to The
Builder, the best plan was that of Messrs. Fowler
and Fisk, but the most remarkable elevations must
surely have been the two flamboyant Gothic
designs sent in, one by George Truefitt and the
other by George Gilbert Scott, and the Moorish
design by Owen Jones, of which The Builder tartly
observed that 'the plan generally seems to have
been neglected, the mosaic pavements excepted'.
Truefitt's exterior (illustrated in The Builder,
22 May 1847, p. 242) resembled a Flemish town
hall, whereas Scott's design was said to have been
based on the Palais de Justice at Rouen and
featured a great oriel window. (ref. 508)
Tattersall's winning design was much more
orthodox. A drawing preserved in the London
Museum (Plate 116a) shows a rather pompous
building of two storeys in a brash classical manner.
The lower storey has simply dressed windows in a
rustic face, with a Doric portico of three bays to
mark the entrance, and the upper-storey windows
are set in arched recesses between Corinthian
columns. The angles of both storeys are emphasized and adorned with statues in niches, while the
crowning balustrade ends with martial trophies
and is broken over the entrance by a pedestal
adorned with bas-reliefs, surmounted by lions
and a large group, apparently symbolizing
Britannia and Neptune.
The Builder deplored the absence of professional
advice in the choice of a design and pointed out
that in Tattersall's plan 'the space devoted to the
purposes of the club is very meagre, indeed quite
insufficient'. (ref. 508) This view appears to have been
shared by the club, for at an extraordinary general
meeting on 11 May 1847 it was decided to enlarge
the site by the purchase of another house in Pall
Mall, and to hold another competition limited to
the six architects who had received the largest
number of votes at the ballot in April. This time
professional advice was to be taken by the committee before making their decision. (ref. 509)
The six architects in this second competition
were George Tattersall, Messrs. Fowler and Fisk,
Messrs. C. O. Parnell and A. Smith, H. B.
Richardson, A. Salvin (who was invited after the
withdrawal of G. S. Clarke due to an accident)
and Sydney Smirke, who had entered for the first
competition but had withdrawn his design before
the exhibition. The committee selected Parnell
and Smith's design, and submitted it to John Shaw,
one of the official referees employed by the Office
of Metropolitan Buildings, for a report. His opinion
was favourable and by the end of July 1847 the
architects had been commissioned to proceed. (ref. 510)
Parnell and Smith submitted the same plans in
both competitions, and their success in the second
was probably due to the striking appearance of the
Venetian exterior which promised to rival the
east wing of Sydney Smirke's new Carlton Club,
then nearing completion on the opposite side of
Pall Mall, and whose elevations were based on
Sansovino's Libreria di San Marco at Venice. (ref. 511)
The building of the club-house began in March
1848, the contractor for the erection of the carcase being William Trego, whose tender was for
£19,656. (ref. 512) In the absence through illness of the
Duke of Cambridge, the president of the club,
the foundation stone was laid on 6 May 1848 by
the chairman of the committee of management,
Lieutenant-Colonel H. Daniell. (ref. 513) In August
1849 the tender of Messrs. Smith and Appleford
for the completion of the building for £15,671
was accepted, (ref. 514) and the club-house (Plates 116,
119) was opened for members' use on 25 February
1851. (ref. 515) The ceiling enrichments in carton pierre
and papier mâché were executed by Messrs. Jackson (ref. 515) and the smoking-room was painted by
Frederick Sang and Signer Romoli. (ref. 517) The total
cost of the building, exclusive of 'excavations,
concrete etc.' and of the furnishings (£10,000),
was £54,000. It may be that Alfred Smith played
a more important part in the design of the clubhouse than his partner C. O. Parnell, for Smith
was elected 'Honorary Visitor' to the club. (ref. 501)
The club was now in a prosperous position,
with a membership in 1851 of 1600 and a waiting
list of 834 candidates. (ref. 518) Within a few years of its
inception it had established itself on equal terms
with the older Service clubs, and its many distinguished members included Prince Louis
Napoleon, who in 1848 lived in King Street, and
who after his return to France presented the club
with the Gobelin tapestry which still adorns the
staircase of the inner hall. (ref. 519) Commenting on the
success of the club The Illustrated London News
remarked that 'the admission of friends constitutes
a leading feature in this Club, and to which it owes
much of its rise and popularity, having been the
first military club wherein such an indulgence was
permitted'. (ref. 517) A more important and lasting
advantage which the club enjoyed over all its great
neighbours on the south side of Pall Mall was the
possession of the freehold of its site.
In 1857 a window commemorating those members who had been killed in the Crimean War was
erected on the west side of the inner hall. (ref. 520) It
was 'composed of the "Brilliant-cut Glass" invented by Messrs. Mark Bowden and Co. of
Bristol', by whom it was made. It exhibited a
number of tablets bearing the arms of the club and
the names and dates of battles; the architraves were
of Siena marble with panels of black marble, on
which were inscribed in letters of gold the names
of the fallen officers. (ref. 521) The window was removed
during the rebuilding in 1925, and was re-erected
in a different part of the hall in 1927. (ref. 520)
In 1864 it was found that the Caen stone with
which the exterior of the club was faced had decayed badly; the cornice was restored and the
balustrade renewed at a cost of £475. Decay continued and in 1886 the bad stone was cut out and
replaced with Portland, and the whole face treated
with a preservative wash—a treatment which was
repeated in 1892. (ref. 522) It is worth noting that the
Caen stone which was used on the façade of the
Carlton Club also proved unsuitable in the London
atmosphere, and was finally completely replaced
in 1923–4.
The first important interior renovation of the
club-house took place in 1878–9 under the superintendence of H. R. Gough, when the smoking-room was enlarged and a new house dining-room
was constructed. (ref. 523)
In 1883 and 1893 the club had rejected opportunities to enlarge its premises by purchasing the
two adjoining houses in Pall Mall. In the early
years of the twentieth century the demand for
bedroom accommodation for members increased
considerably, and in 1919 the club purchased
Nos. 46, 46a and 47 Pall Mall for £56,011.
These houses did not immediately adjoin the club
on the Pall Mall front, but were connected with
the back of the club at the western end of the
smoking-room; they were bought subject to the
existing short-term leases. (ref. 524) In 1924 No. 7 Rose
and Crown Yard, immediately to the north of
No. 47 Pall Mall, was purchased for £2025. (ref. 525)
Building operations began in the winter of
1924–5, the architect in charge being C. W.
Ferrier and the contractors Messrs. Higgs and
Hill; the club was closed to members from
August 1925 to July 1926. At the old house the
work included the demolition of the old smoking-room and the building of a new one, the overhaul
of the exterior stonework and the rebuilding of
much of the kitchen. The new house provided
chambers, bed-sitting-rooms, bedrooms, a ladies'
drawing-room and dining-room and a squash
court, as well as shop premises on the ground floor.
The total cost of this enormous building programme was £167,471, and work was not completed until March 1927. (ref. 526)
Architectural description
The entrance arcade, central in the east front,
opens to a shallow loggia of three bays (the middle
one now glazed in to form a lobby) and thence into
a vestibule, 26 feet wide and 16 feet deep. Two
doorways, flanking a glazed arch, lead to the
stair hall, a lofty oblong apartment measuring
26 by 40 feet (fig. 35). On the south side is the
large morning-room, 71 feet long and 27 feet
6 inches wide, entered from the vestibule, and on
the north side is the coffee-room, 81 feet 6 inches
long and 30 feet 6 inches wide, plus a recess 8 feet
9 inches deep, forming an ante entered from the
stair hall. The back wing, extending west behind
the coffee-room, contained a servery, the strangers'
coffee-room, and the house dining-room, both
later absorbed by conversion into a smoking-room
and now rebuilt as a cloakroom. On the first floor
is the library, 49 feet by 28 feet 3 inches, which,
with the library annexe, is above the morningroom. (ref. 527) Other rooms on this floor are the committee-room (or Nelson room) over the vestibule
and the writing-room (now a luncheon-room) over
the east part of the coffee-room. On the second
floor are the rooms, mostly top-lit, for billiards,
cards and smoking, and servants' dormitories.
Externally, the club-house is a whole-hearted
essay in the Venetian Renaissance style of the
early sixteenth century—Sansovino seen with
Victorian eyes (Plates 116b, 117). In fact, the
lofty ground storey is nearly a direct copy of the
'sea storey' of the Palazzo Corner della ca'
Grande, the chief difference being that the lower
windows are less salient and lack the flat segmental
pediments of the original. The upper storey recalls
the Corinthian third storey of the same building,
as well as the second storey of the Libreria di San
Marco. The faults of the building under review
are obvious—it is garish where its prototypes are
rich, and coarse where they are delicate—but it
masses splendidly and forms, with the well-related
Junior Carlton Club, an effective counterpoise to
the great club-houses on the south side of Pall
Mall.
The two elevations differ in length but are
uniformly treated, each having a lofty ground
storey of a Doric order, divided into bays by rustic
piers, and an upper storey where the arch-headed
windows are placed between engaged Corinthian
columns, these sustaining a richly decorated
entablature proportioned, not to the columns, but
to the full height of the front. The entrance front,
on the west side of St. James's Square, is nine bays
long with an accented centre of three, and the
return front to Pall Mall has six equal bays. The
area balustrade—with plinth, square-section balusters and pedestal-die panels of vermiculated stone,
and handsome cast-iron flambeaux-standards rising
from the pedestals—largely conceals the plain
plinth of the ground storey. The tall piers dividing
the bays are formed of smooth-faced stones, laid
in wide and narrow courses alternately, with channelled horizontal and vertical joints (the latter
occurring only in the narrow courses), and they
finish with Doric caps below an unbroken mutule
cornice. Vermiculated stones are used for the four
piers in the middle of the entrance front, which
are united by arches to form a triple arcade,
emphasizing the entrance. The arches rise from
plain imposts and have heavy keystones each
carved with a mask—the middle one a bearded
male (? Neptune), that on the left a female
(? Bellona), and that on the right a male (? Mars).
All the other bays contain two windows, one
above the other. The lower is a tall light in a
rustic Doric frame, and the upper is almost square
and flanked by enriched scroll-consoles. (Here,
the upper window is merely a clerestory light,
whereas in the prototype building it serves a
mezzanine floor). The engaged plain-shafted
Corinthian columns of the upper storey rest on
plain pedestals, linked by the projecting balustrades in front of the first-floor windows. These
columns are arranged in pairs along the Pall Mall
front, with pilasters at each end, but on the St.
James's Square front paired columns flank only the
middle four bays, and single columns divide the
three bays on either side. Each bay contains a tall
round-arched window (its lunette glazed but blind)
in an arch formed by plain pilaster-jambs with
Doric imposts, and a moulded archivolt broken by
an enriched scroll keystone. The huge crowning
entablature comprises a moulded architrave, a
deep frieze carved with putti riding dolphins, and
military trophies on a groundwork of acanthus
scrolls, and an enriched cornice with dentils and
scroll-modillions. The front is finished with an
open balustrade, appropriately divided into bays by
panelled pedestals.
Figure 35:
Army and Navy Club, St. James's Square, ground-floor plan. Based on a plan of 1851
The stair hall and the principal ground- and
first-floor rooms are decorated in a style best
described as Louis Quinze revival, although much
of the ornament, which is modelled in carton
pierre and papier mâché, is naturalistic and seems
to anticipate the 'art nouveau' manner. The
general effect, however, is rather cold—gilding is
entirely absent and there is little colour—the influence of Stafford House (now Lancaster House)
is apparent, but the work under review hardly
compares with that masterpiece of French Rococo
revival. The most noteworthy features are the
stair hall, the morning-room and the coffee-room.
The stair hall (Plate 118) is oblong in plan and
rises through the two lofty storeys to a flat laylight ceiling, surrounded by a deep cove. The
stone staircase begins with twin flights, rising on
the long east-west axis to meet at a low-level
landing. From this a single flight rises south, on
the short axis, to a second landing where the stair
divides into two branches, cantilevered from the
wall, these continuing, with intermediate landings,
to the first-floor landing, a gallery cantilevered
out from the long north wall. The soffit of each
step is moulded to a bracket profile, as in
eighteenth-century work; the stairs are railed
with an elaborate balustrade of cast iron; and the
landing gallery has a coved soffit and a serpentinecurved front. The lower part of the walls is simply
panelled, but each face of the upper stage is divided
into three bays—one wide between two narrow—by panelled pilasters with consoles merging into
atlantes which support the forward breaks in the
main entablature. The three bays on the east side
are open to a gallery landing, but the others are
closed by plain wall faces. The cove is divided by
enriched ribs and in each angle is a Baroque cartouche amid scrolls and palm-branches. One
curious feature to be noticed is the arched fireplace
let in to the front of the first low landing, the flue
following the rake of the stairs; another is the
almost makeshift approach to the library, by
means of a quadrant landing in the south-east
angle of the stair hall, the corresponding landing
in the south-west angle being merely a respond.
The morning-room (Plate 119a) is the most
successful of the interiors, its great height (some
twenty-two feet) being effectively reduced by the
use of a quadrant cove, broken by groined intersections, surrounding the flat ceiling which is
modelled with three large panels, an oval flanked
by circles. The coffee-room (Plate 119b) has a
flat ceiling of three sections, each divided by ribs
into a simple geometrical pattern of compartments,
those in the raised middle section being glazed to
form a lay-light. The walls are divided into bays
by plain pilasters finished with elaborately
modelled console-brackets which support the
cross-beams and lateral ribs of the ceiling. In
each bay is a round-headed panel, those over the
three fireplaces being filled by large plate mirrors,
and most of the others containing uniformly
framed full-length portraits. The library is lined
for most of its height with satinwood bookcases,
linked by pedimented features which frame the
large mirrors above the two chimneypieces.
Most of the chimneypieces in the principal
rooms are of Baroque or Rococo inspiration, and
were carved in white marble by Alfred Brown, (ref. 528)
but in the committee-room on the first floor is a
white marble chimneypiece of refined design,
probably late eighteenth-century, with female terminal jambs and a large frieze tablet of Adam
character, to which had been added an overmantel
of white marble framing a Vauxhall plate lookingglass, which must date from the early eighteenth
century. There is also a French Empire chimneypiece of white marble, said to have come from
Malmaison, and now gracing the ladies' coffeeroom in the new annexe. Besides an interesting
collection of painted portraits and a fine marble
bust of Queen Victoria by Alfred Gilbert, the
club contains some remarkable furniture, massive
and highly ornate but of impeccable craftsmanship,
which was specially made, and presumably designed, by Messrs. Gillow.