WHERE MEN CAN BE BOYS IN LONDON
By Lisa Anderson
Chicago Tribune
June 19, 1985
LONDON — The English upper classes, who like to think they set a good example, have a wild side that Americans rarely glimpse, or even suspect.
The doubtful may confirm this with a glance through the champagne-soaked party pages of the cheeky Tatler magazine, or with a visit to the even cheekier School Dinners Club.
At this campy London club, members check their dignity at the door and happily romp back into the adolescence they spent—or wish they had spent—at one of the posh private schools the English call 'public.'
That these schools, along with an excellent education, are known for cold quarters, miserable food and assorted humiliations at the hands of older 'boys' and masters is apparently of little consequence. Survivors tend to remember these as the best years of their lives.
The School Dinners Club understands this perfectly and obliges. Members are greeted by a headmaster/maitre d', dressed in a black academic gown and mortarboard, who patrols the dining room, occasionally 'caning' errant 'boys' who fail to raise their hands before leaving the table or neglect to eat their 'greens and veggies.'
Indeed, once across its threshold, all 4,500 of the club's scattered members, no matter how tender or tottering, are 'boys' again. Although there are some female members, the club caters primarily to men, who pay for this retreat into their salad days with an annual membership fee of 45 pounds (about $56), or 5 pounds (about $6.25) for a temporary overseas membership.
Dinners, from the traditional school dinner fare (roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and lumpy mashed potatoes awash in gravy) to more sophisticated Continental cuisine (Mediterranean prawns "whacked onto the grill—very stimulating"), cost from about $6.25 to $10.50.
The club was founded in 1981 by a young Englishman named Peter Byfield, who re-created the atmosphere and food of a typical public school dining room and went it one better. "He thought how nice it would be to be served by every chap's fantasy: schoolgirls, you know, Belles of St. Trinian's," said David de Mountfalcon, the club's managing director.
Thus, assisting the headmaster is a bevy of curvy, tart-tongued School Dinnergirls outfitted in naughtily modified school uniforms: white shirt, rep tie, pleated navy miniskirt, black stockings, garters and spike heels. At the Baker Street club, the complement is filled out by Peepee, an exquisitely pretty, sassy young man in hot pants with the kind of male legs one sees only in the chorus line of 'La Cage Aux Folles.'
The result, a peculiar cross between Eton and 'Animal House,' has been so successful that the club now occupies two premises. One is in the City, London's central business hub, which does a lively lunchtime business in its stained-glass, 14th-Century digs. The other, on Baker Street, off Portman Square near Marble Arch, packs them in for dinner in its 60-seat dining room. "We have two main rules, really," said de Mountfalcon, a rather donnish young man with curly hair and steel-rimmed spectacles and who played the headmaster at the Baker Street club on a recent evening.
"The first is that members should be courteous to the girls—no manhandling. The second is that we don't allow the throwing of food. When I get parties of public school boys in here, all they want to do is throw food, but we're very strict on that," he said. Quite.
"We try to assure people of discretion—not that discretion is needed," he hastened to add. "It's a fun place with nothing at all untoward going on."
Indeed, at about 7:30 p.m., as the club began filling up, the place gleamed with pinstriped propriety. Neatly dressed businessmen sat in the small mahogany bar, chatting quietly against a background of soft classical music. In the adjacent low-ceilinged dining room—cozy with wood paneling, bookcases and antique prints of schools—well-pressed executive types sat in twos or fours on nail-back leather chairs at pink-clothed tables. One long table was taken by a dozen international Ford car dealers in town for a meeting; another was filled with 20 yuppie men attending a stag dinner for a young lawyer.
If any of them noticed the scantily clad School Dinnergirls, none of them so much as flickered an eyelash. Pretty dull stuff, what?
De Mountfalcon coolly appraised the room, smiled and predicted, "By 11 o'clock all these demure gentlemen in suits will be rocking and rolling and having a good time."
He was wrong. By 8:45 p.m., finished with their dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and other more sophisticated fare, many of the 'boys' had doffed their jackets and were on their feet toasting the queen.
One of the Ford dealers, a middle-aged man from rural Lancashire, leered wolfishly at Jerry, the tall, blond, Eve Arden-esque School Dinnergirl assigned to his table, and asked if she'd go out with him.
"What do you think this is, McDonald's take-away? Calm down," she boomed back, good-naturedly patting his balding pate.
In public school fashion, Jerry asked her charges to pass their used plates down to the end of the table, a request met with a chorus of boos.
"Well done," she intoned as the last plate clinked onto the top of the stack. "Nice, clean plates." The 'boys' beamed back.
The evening had begun heating up, the mood subtly controlled by de Mountfalcon's deft manipulation of the music. By dessert, the music had segued from pleasant pop to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' frantic 'Green Onions.'
Invigorated by this blast from their past, some of the men began making grabs at passing School Dinnergirls, who swiftly cuffed their ears. Some of Ford dealers began roving from their table. One, clutching a bottle of claret, stole Jerry's tray and stashed it under the table as his flushed friends howled their approval.
"Now, behave yourself. Time and place, time and place," Jerry warned them.
"At the end of the day, some of the guys get a little O.T.T. (over the top)," said de Mountfalcon absently, as an airborne dinner roll whizzed by.
"This is the part of the evening when I have to watch very carefully. It's a powder keg."
Not a powder keg, precisely; more like a frat party. By 10:30, Russell Booker, the 24-year-old bridegroom-to-be, was wearing his old school tie around his head, his friends were dancing on the table—yes, on the table—and the Beatles were wailing 'Can't Buy Me Love.'
Across the room, a bespectacled Japanese businessman had leapt onto his chair and was doing the twist. Over at the Ford dealers' table, a Knee-Trembler was in progress.
A specialty of the School Dinners Club, the Knee-Trembler is a frothy confection of ice cream and whipped cream spoon-fed by a Dinnergirl sitting on the recipient's knee, hence its name.
The evening's lucky 'boy' was Fred Kent, a visiting Australian from Brisbane, who ended up covered with the stuff. "This is something a bit different, but quite pleasant," he spluttered from behind a peak of whipped cream.
Nearby, Stan Shelton, a yuppie foreign exchange broker from Boston, watched with amazement as a conga line, composed of shanghaied Dinnergirls and their sweaty charges, snaked by. "First of all, I'm terribly appalled by the attitude of the Englishmen toward women," he said. "These girls deserve medals."
By about 11:30 p.m., the euphoria mellowed into nostalgia as the tapes crooned old dance-hall songs. The 'boys' howled along to such favorites as 'Shine On, Harvest Moon' and 'The White Cliffs of Dover,' before finally packing it in.
"There's one big difference between public schools and this place:
They're not licensed (for liquor)," quipped Duncan Grenfell, a middle-aged businessman and former public school boy (Kingswood) and who has been a member of the club for four years. Further, he observed, the club provides a solution to a rather obscure problem that apparently plagues the international traveling businessman.
"When he comes to a big city like this, he goes home and he's asked if he's 'done it,' explained Grenfell, arching an eyebrow. "Here, he hasn't been unfaithful to his wife—in fact, he hasn't done anything wrong at all—but he feels that he has, somehow, done something."
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