Clubs & Homes
Chatham House, London
Anglo-American discussions at the Paris peace conferences in May 1919 on the need for rational, scientific analysis of international affairs spawned two new institutions - the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London. The latter, commonly known as Chatham House, became an important forum for international debate, conducted according to strict non-attribution rules, at its elegant St James’s Square address, a gift from wealthy Canadian RW Leonard. In the interwar years, Chatham House and its journal, International Affairs, were associated with many leading British internationalists, notably Lionel Curtis, Robert Cecil, Arnold Toynbee and Ivison Macadam. As these images show, Chatham House employees were largely female for much of the interwar period and included Margaret Cleeve, the RIIA’s long-serving and influential librarian and editor of International Affairs.
Further information:
For the RIIA’s webpages, which includes interesting material on its history, see: https://www.chathamhouse.org/
8 Chesterfield Gardens, London
Internationalism thrived in public places but also had to adapt to the political and social geographies of the spaces in which it manifested. In London this included the private spaces of ‘Clubland’, the gentleman’s clubs which clustered around the Round Table Conference venue of St James’s Palace. Prestigious clubs issued temporary membership to the more famous delegates, especially the wealthy Princes. While the Maharaja of Bikaner was offered membership of clubs ranging from the Athenaeum to the International Sportsmen’s Club, other delegates were met with indifference, or racial hostility (the Indian Christian delegate Dr SK Datta and his wife were turned away from 24 central London hotels, who claimed they had to take the ‘views’ of their American and British colonial clientele in to account). For such delegates a club equivalent was established in Mayfair, at which they could sleep, host parties, and retire after a long day’s work. Indian chefs were provided from Veerasawmy's, as was an amply stocked bar, to serve delegates during the long winter evenings and cold weekends. At the end of the second session of the conference in December 1931 a joint letter was issued to the two Social Secretaries, who ran the club, suggesting their efforts had ‘enabled all of us to come into close contact with each other and understand one another’.
Further information:
A brief article on the club from The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser: http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singfreepressb19301111-1.2.85
On London clubland culture: https://www.academia.edu/8372589/Amy_Milne-Smith_2011_London_Clubland_A_Cultural_History_of_Gender_and_Class_in_Late-Victorian_Britain
On the history of London clubs: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/lumen/2016-v35-lumen02444/1035921ar/
Chez Albert Kahn
Some internationalists used their homes to promote the cause. Albert Kahn (1860-1940), a rich banker from Alsace, converted his elegant house and gardens in Boulogne-Billancourt on the outskirts of Paris into a shrine to internationalism, welcoming leading intellectuals and politicians, including the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore shown in this photograph, for meetings and conferences. Kahn provided generous funds for young travellers, the future leaders of a borderless world, to circumnavigate the globe and also dispatched photographers to record the peoples of the globe, often in colour, for the Archives of the Planet, a project overseen by geographer Jean Brunhes.
Further information:
For more on Kahn, including examples of Archives de la Planète photography, see: http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/