Clubland Heroes – a classic antidote to boredom in isolation

With people experiencing unaccustomed periods of enforced leisure in their homes, the question of how to find a congenial distraction from the longueurs of isolation has become urgent for many. Of course, in this electronic age, millions will already be engaging on social media or accessing videos online from a variety of sources. There is, however, one invaluable means of escape from present miseries that should not be underrated: reading books, especially fiction, at a time when the mind craves intelligent distraction.

And what vehicle could better serve this purpose than the genre of escapist literature that flourished in the inter-War years and, to a lesser extent, in the 1950s and 1960s: adventure stories in which heroic, well-bred Britons faced fearful odds to defeat the forces of the ungodly? Most people alive today were too young to have been aware of the first publication, in 1953, of Richard Usborne’s classic Clubland Heroes. But many will recall the buzz of interest when its second edition came out in 1974, creating ripples of pleasurable excitement throughout the Worsthorne/Deedes asteroid belt orbiting planet Telegraph.

Clubland Heroes was subtitled “A nostalgic study of some recurrent characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper.” It focused on those  three writers, just two years after Colin Watson had published his generic survey of detective fiction, Snobbery with Violence.

Usborne was already middle-aged (he only narrowly escaped Edwardian status, being born ten days after the death of Edward VII) when he wrote the first edition, making him a late beginner in the writing profession. The attention this first book attracted was the making of him. In America, P G Wodehouse read Clubland Heroes with admiration and, surprisingly for one so reticent and withdrawn from mainstream literary circles, asked his publisher if Usborne might be induced to write about his (Plum’s) life and work.

Usborne obliged and the outcome was another minor classic, Wodehouse at Work. For the remainder of his life Usborne became the world’s leading authority on Wodehouse. The link between Usborne’s two famous books was the institution of the West End club; Wodehouse had shrewdly spotted a man who knew his Crumpets from his Beans and could write authoritatively about a milieu shared, at the more adventurous extreme, by Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and Jonah Mansel with, at the silly-ass level, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little and Lord Emsworth.

Clubland Heroes had two immediate effects: by highlighting a genre of “thriller” novels that delighted schoolboys aged nine to ninety, it sent the older cohort back to reread their boyhood favourites, while it operated as a gateway drug for some young men who then developed an addiction to the Yates/Buchan/Sapper canon. The book remains the vade mecum for all aficionados of adventure stories featuring clean-cut heroes frustrating the fiendish schemes of criminals and foreign conspirators.

Usborne’s choice of his three authors was slightly incongruous since he selected them purely on the grounds that they were his favourites. That had the merit of injecting a degree of contrast into the book, making it more interesting. Usborne’s treatment of each of the writers merits an individual article, but the broad trajectory may briefly be described here.

Dornford Yates is the most interesting and least understood of the three. His prose style, which owed something to the Authorised Version of the King James Bible and to the Book of Common Prayer, lent his prose – particularly its inverted sentences (“That Adèle was in Austria seemed certain…”) – an occasionally portentous tone. The apparent contradictions between his light-hearted, generous characters and his own personality have generated much discussion among commentators.

Usborne examines his heroes’ readiness to kill unlawfully those whom they regard as deserving of execution and concludes it is an extension of the code of the public school Prefects’ Room, which he then traces back to Horace Walpole. He also identifies key differences among his subjects: “Buchan and Sapper were not strong on love. They wrote of friendship. Yates wrote of love and kisses.”

Usborne fell foul of the litigious Yates when writing Clubland Heroes, the cause of the controversy in itself an esoteric feature of the clubland mentality: “I should have been aware that the word ‘cad’ was then (I doubt if it still is) a dangerous one.” Usborne had employed the term in a more modern sense of “a baddie as opposed to a goodie. To Yates, of an older generation and more careful culture, ‘cad’ carried a specific class connotation.” Yates objected to certain snobbish attitudes being inaccurately attributed to him.

Although little of the action in the three authors’ novels is set in clubs (the committee would have taken a dim view of hooliganism on the premises), the clubland mystique is central to the “totem”, as Buchan called the protective network of connexions that allowed clubmen to operate outside the law. In Blind Corner, the first of Yates’s Jonah Mansel novels, Jonah and the narrator Chandos (“I had lately been sent down from Oxford for using some avowed communists as many thought they deserved”) first meet through the accident of Mansel mistakenly taking the coat belonging to Chandos from the lobby of their mutual club (Brooks’s, according to Usborne).

But, as Usborne’s meticulous research demonstrates, membership of good clubs was not restricted to heroes: some villains were members too. Sapper’s chief villain, Carl Peterson, had penetrated the Royal Automobile Club. Jonah Mansel’s opponent Friar belonged to the Athenaeum. Usborne detected, from a literary implication by Buchan, that Dominick Medina, opponent of Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, was a member of Boodle’s. The German spy caught by Yates’s Berry Pleydell in 1914 belonged, shameful to record, to the Travellers.

Although beyond the remit of Usborne’s study, some have claimed James Bond as a clubland hero; in fact, his membership of Blades does not equate to a good St James’s Street or Pall Mall establishment, nor is his code of behaviour up to the standards of Bulldog Drummond, Jonah Mansel or Richard Hannay.

The old school clubland heroes were giants. Take, as a red-blooded example, Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot: “In the caravanserais of Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires.” Sapper’s Hugh Drummond would lack the cosmopolitan skills to achieve such a reputation, but he is no less formidable. Jonah Mansel is equipped to fight the good fight anywhere.

Since literary commentary became hijacked by leftists it has become fashionable to sneer at the clubland genre as outdated, xenophobic and “snobbish”. In fact, close study reveals many clubland heroes, like Arbuthnot, are comfortably at home with people of other cultures and the charge of snobbery – against which Yates was prepared to go to law – is, allowing for the social attitudes of their times, largely misplaced. It is likely that many of those critics’ venom is generated by the private awareness that they and their “woke” values would have provoked the contempt of men with truer moral compasses.

Clubland Heroes is beautifully written, meticulously researched and hugely entertaining. It is ideal reading matter for anyone who is cabined, cribbed, confined by the current difficulties. After that, if it stimulates the appetite for adventure, a wide world of colourful adventure lies open to the returning initiate or aspiring neophyte, inexpensively available online, first or second hand. As the protagonists of such stories are wont to say, there is not a moment to be lost.