March 9, 2004
By Lucille Davie
IN the passageway leading to one of the pubs in the Rand Club you might find it strange that there are only 10 signs of the Zodiac depicted in beautiful stained-glass windows. The two missing signs are Virgo and Aquarius, the signs symbolised by women.
The Rand Club in Loveday Street
This, and many other subtle and not-so-subtle gestures indicate that this 116-year-old gentlemen's club is still clearly a place where men like to hang out . . . without women, despite having opened its doors to women in 1993 (after much debate and holding two referendums on the issue, according to city champion Neil Fraser). Eleven years later it only has 50 women members of a total of 1 650 members.
Tony Thomson, general manager of the club, says that although there's a drive to recruit more members, he feels that the major benefits of the club - reciprocity with 100 similar clubs worldwide, and networking with members of those clubs - don't appear to entice women into joining the club.
It may be a matter of history too, though. For the past 80 years women have had to slip into the club through a back entrance in Fox Street, around the corner from its grand front entrance in Loveday Street. Only in the late 1980s were women allowed in the front entrance.
When women need to spend a penny, they have to walk a long way - the women's loo is discreetly hidden down a passage.
These days, of 40 staff members only seven are women. And it's preferred, please, that they do not linger in the entrance hall.
There are a few women visible . . . on the walls as portraits. There's a stunning portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in regal costume half way up the grand stairway, staring down impassively at members. On the second floor there's a photograph of the late Queen Mother. And in the restaurant there's a portrait of Queen Victoria.
The truth is, it seems, "there're a lot of old members who don't like ladies", says one of the female staff members.
But there are other factors beyond the control of the club that must have influenced the signing up of women. The club's fortunes have been affected by the general exodus of businesses from the city centre, from the late 1980s onwards. People have relocated to the convenient suburbs and hardly ever visit the CBD.
The club is on an active drive to recruit more members, approaching businesses in the vicinity, particularly the youth. The minimum age for membership used to be 34 but it's been reduced to 23. An extra bonus these days is that people won't be asked to supply their bank balance, a requirement for membership in years gone by.
Club management is also trying to make the club a venue for weddings, conferences and other functions. Last year there was a wedding reception held at the club every month. So far this year there's one booked every weekend.
Colonial tradition
All this aside, the club retains its elegant, old-worldiness that characterises these gentlemen's clubs around the world, built in the colonial tradition of enshrining proper male behaviour, decorum and comradeship, with a good dose of snobbishness thrown in.
Rene de Villiers and S Brooke-Norris in The Story of the Rand Club (1976) argue that the Johannesburg club always was a little more down to earth than other clubs in the country, and around the world.
"But the Rand Club was never completely like that: it certainly had its own special comradeship, but it was never simply a colonial manifestation, as was sometimes seen in other parts of the world. What made it vitally different from many of the great clubs established in the English tradition abroad in the second half of the last century [19th] was the turbulent social, political and financial background of Johannesburg, and the fact that the club grew up at the centre of what became the greatest gold field the world has so far seen, with a cosmopolitan and colourful population, people of all nationalities, drawn to the Transvaal by the glamour of gold and dreams of fortune."
The first Rand Club, built in 1887
The second Rand Club, built in 1889
The present Rand Club was built in 1904, on the site of two earlier clubs. The first one was built in 1887, a year after Johannesburg was established, a single storey of wood and iron, with a wraparound verandah. Two years later that building was torn down, and the second Rand Club was built, in Elizabethan style, with turrets and long wrought-iron balconies running around the two-storey building.
South Africa's most famous imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, was instrumental in deciding the Rand Club's location.
GA Leyds in A History of Johannesburg, recounts how the site of the club was decided: "Rhodes on his first visit to Johannesburg is said to have walked up Commissioner Street from the site of the Corner House, and reaching Loveday Street, then bare veld, said: 'Here we must have a club'."
Rhodes, together with other Randlords, put up the money for the building of the club. Rhodes' contribution is acknowledged with a striking full-size painting of him hanging in the Rhodes Room in the club.
Design and interior
The present attractive four-storey building was designed by Leck and Frank Emley, the architects of The Corner House, built in 1902, and the National Bank Building, completed in 1904. When Leck died in 1907, Emley teamed up with another architect, Fred Williamson, and together they created the design for the original Wits University campus, on Beaux-Arts neo-classicism style, a set of flat buildings dominated by classical columns.
The entrance foyer of the Rand Club is dominated by huge simulated porphyry columns and a grand staircase leading to a colonnaded gallery.
The walls are lined with dozens of portraits of men - mining magnates, parliamentarians, city bosses and presidents (President Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and Mayor Amos Masondo have joined the parade), eccentric foreigners, one of whom, a German tyrant by the name of Julius Gustav Schultze, lived on the top floor of the building with his dog, until his death in 1911.
In those days the fourth floor consisted of rooms, much like a hotel. Now they're rented out as offices. The rest of the building is largely taken up with dining rooms, pubs, a billiards room and a library, all decorated in antique furniture, with gorgeous sweeping-to-the-floor curtains, chandeliers, richly-patterned carpets, fireplaces, Persian rugs and brass and copper fittings. The stained-glass windows are wonderful, with patterns that are rarely seen these days.
It boasts Africa's longest bar, a half moon shaped bar in a large pub, at 103 foot long (32 metres), a great room to spend a couple of hours in.
There're the Rhodes Room, the Len Oates Room, the Leisk Room, the Anglo-Platinum Room . . . clearly indicating the benefactors of the club.
Hunting trophies punctuate the portraits on the walls, together with fox hunting scenes, original Punch cartoons, stuffed pheasants in a glass case, and a collection of bronze standard weights and measures of the old Oranje Vrij Staat Republiek.
Mahatma Gandhi visited the club sometime in the early 1900s. There's a small bronze statue of him. President Paul Kruger must have also visited. His miniature statue is standing opposite Cecil John Rhodes in the entrance hall.
It's an old-fashioned, anachronistic world. Staff members refer to their colleagues and members by the rather archaic titles of Mr and Mrs.
But that doesn't mean it's an unhappy place to work in. When asked what it's like to spend five days a week in this rarified environment, one of the female staff said: "It's wonderful to work here, to be amongst this history. It's like walking into home."
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