As the evenings draw in, I am reminded each time I come to the clubhouse how the Caldwell construction cabins loom over Audley Square, making our corner feel dark and cramped. We have endured years of demolition, piling and construction work, and still the cabins will linger through next year. But in 2026 we will surely have light, trees and a new statue to greet us as we turn into the Square. We will then have an opportunity to smarten up our external brickwork and railings.
Alex’s message overleaf describes a range of interior redecoration and modernisation projects we have set in motion. The most ambitious by far will be the refurbishment of the Library, supported by a new debenture appeal to be launched on October 3rd. I look forward to seeing you there.
At its heart, a community like ours is sociable, providing opportunities for members to meet each other and be actively involved in the life of the Club. This can take many forms: attending events, being part of a club-within-the-Club, joining one of our sub-committees, volunteering for the archive transcription project. The pages that follow have details of all of these possibilities, and I hope you feel encouraged to try one or more of them!
Dr Pauline Foster, Chair of UWC General Committee
Issue number 18: Autumn 2024
Messages from Chair and General Manager.
Events October – December Clubs-within-the-Club
UWC Concert Series
From the Archives: Profile of Octavia Lewin (1869-1955).
Archive transcription project. The 2025 Debenture Appeal. Getting involved with the Club End Notes
From the General Manager
Dear Members,
I trust you can all look back on an enjoyable and restful summer.
Our Summer events calendar had lots going on but the highlight had to be the Enchanted Forest Summer Party. As you will see from the pictures overleaf, the Library looked fantastic transformed into a Woodland Wonderland, the UWC Craft Club providing decorated lanterns and paper flowers to enhance the spectacle. The Chefs completed the evening with an incredible menu including stuffed courgette flowers and sea bream with nettle and wild garlic pesto.
The month of August was its usual quiet self, giving us the opportunity to carry out necessary maintenance to the kitchens, and also giving the catering staff a well-deserved break before the busy autumn season. The Dining Room is now back in full swing with a brand-new menu for October. This can be viewed on the back page of this Magazine, and on the Members’ website where you can also make a reservation for lunch or dinner.
We used the summer months to make more progress on the bedroom refurbishment project. The 4th floor renovations are now complete, and we have moved onto the remaining 3rd floor rooms with the expectation that everything will be completed by the end of the year. There are more projects in the pipeline, including upgrading the ground floor toilet and further improvements to the kitchens. In the longer term, plans are afoot to renovate the Library, and to re-organise and replant our Garden. Watch this space!
It has been great fun working with the Events Committee over recent months to prepare the autumn and spring event calendar. We have welcomed some new members to the Committee who have already contributed some imaginative event ideas, some of which you can see on page 5 of this Magazine, and in more detail in the Autumn events trifold. This will soon be emailed out to you. It’s easier than ever now to sign up for events online; keep an eye on the Members’ events pages of the UWC website.
In other Committee news, we have inaugurated a new ‘House’ Committee to look the presentation of our beautiful Clubhouse (e.g. furnishings, decorations, Garden). We have also inaugurated a new Marketing Committee that will assist the GC with the strategic promotion of the Club and its facilities. Regarding Marketing, we were very pleased to welcome Victoria to the team in June as our new Marketing Executive. She has been hard at work over the summer to share with you and the wider world all the latest updates and scheduled Club events. I am sure you will notice how beautiful the autumn trifold is, thanks to Victoria’s flair for design.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Club soon, Regards, Alex
Awaiting guests for Enchanted Forest’ Summer Party
2025 Debenture Appeal
To support much-needed restoration projects in our Clubhouse, most particularly the Library, we are launching a new debenture appeal.
To many people, the term ‘debenture’ has somewhat archaic associations. You may never have encountered it. It is still in current use, however, and refers to a specialised loan, or bond. These have figured from time to time in the history of the Club, most significantly in 1921 when a debenture issue paid off the mortgage on our Audley Square home. For this 2025 appeal, each £500 debenture will give members the chance to play an active role in the preservation of our house, and a discount on their annual subscription.
The debenture appeal will be driven by a programme of events in which we explore the fabric of our house and its particular beauty. An inaugural talk, followed by dinner, will be held on Thursday 3rd October. Our honorary archivist, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, will speak about the original debenture, including the original document (see left), and Edward Bulmer, the notable architectural historian, will speak on English Design in Great Country Houses and Town Houses, such indeed as ours.
While tickets to attend in person are sold out, spaces are still available on zoom. But don’t worry if you cannot make the 3rd October; it is only the first in a series of events in 2025 to increase awareness and support uptake of the debenture appeal. You will have other opportunities to join in.
More precise details of the appeal will be released soon. Meanwhile, we hope that at the very least, the word ‘debenture’ is becoming familiar to you, if it was not before.
Programme of Events Autumn 2024
Places at all events can be booked online through the Members' Area of our website: www.universitywomensclub.com Alternatively, call Reception (0)207 499 2268 or email reservations@uwc-london.com.
October
Thursday, 3rd Library Talk: English Design in Great Country & Town Houses & the Acquisition of 2 Audley Square. Edward Bulmer and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan.
Wednesday, 9th Library Talk with Annabel Abbs: The Female Night Brain & Why it Matters
Wednesday 16th UWC Wine Club: A Wintry Wine Evening.
Thursday, 24th UWC Concert Series: Jazz from the Catriona Bourne Trio, with Guest Speaker Alyn Shipton
Saturday 26th Autumn Afternoon Tea in the Drawing Room, with live Piano accompaniment.
Tuesday 29th Library Talk with Paul Barwick: A Most Extraordinary Spy
Thursday 31st Samhain Aromatherapy Potion Making, with optional Halloween Menu Dinner.
November
Friday 1st Celebrating Diwali: A 3-course set menu of Indian food, followed by a screening of a Bollywood movie.
Wednesday 13th Wine Club: Beaujolais Dinner.
Thursday 28th Traditional Thanksgiving Buffet Dinner.
December
Monday 2nd Wine Club: Annual port-tasting
Friday 13th UWC Christmas Festivities: Lunch, Carol concert, Quiz, and Dinner.
Monday, 23rd –Thurs Jan 2nd Holiday closure
Dates and full details of meetings of other ‘clubs within the Club’ are given in the pages below: Wine Club (12); Book Club (14-15); Film Club (16-17); Reading Group (18).
UWC Music Concert Series, established and organised
by Eleanor Meynell.
While UWC members have always welcomed musical performances, especially those involving our own Drawing Room piano, these have tended to be one-off events. In recent years, thanks to the energy and organisational genius of UWC member Eleanor Meynell, whose contacts in within the world of music professionals are extensive, this has evolved into a regular feature of our events programme: the UWC Concert Series. Below, Eleanor explains in her own words how she came to join the Club, and then to set up music concerts for her fellow members:
“I joined the University Women’s Club because I found myself on a park bench one day between music rehearsals, juggling a score, a pencil, a cup of coffee and a handbag, thinking, ‘Hang on, I am a professional… I should have a calm place to gather my thoughts!’ A visit to the Club solved the problem; it was love at first sight
I adore setting places vibrating with the sound of music, excited conversations about composers, the meanings behind the music and special memories. And what better place than the UWC’s beautiful clubhouse! I reignited musical soirées at the UWC by harnessing my contacts and my association with Trinity Laban in Greenwich. Since November 2022, we have had around 8 concerts, following the same format. There is always a pre-concert talk in the Library related to the music we are about to here in the Drawing Room. I host this with an invited special guest. Previously, we have had the Director of Music from Trinity Laban, Aleks Szram, pianists Tim Horton and Roderick Chadwick, Oxford-based author and academic Dr Laura Tunbridge and BBC presenter John Shea.
I always love to hear members’ feedback and so, by popular request, the theme of our next concert is jazz. On Thursday October 24th , The Catriona Bourne Trio will perform a set from their recent album, Triquetra. The guest speaker will be the broadcasting and publishing legend Alyn Shipton, presenter every Sunday of the BBC Jazz Record Requests There is nothing Alyn doesn’t know about jazz! As well as being an authority on every corner of the jazz repertoire, he has played double bass professionally with all the greatest jazz musicians of our age.
This will be such a special evening, and I look forward to welcoming you there.”
Eleanor is an award-winning concert pianist and singer who has performed on most of the world’s major stages. Closer to home, she has played at the Wigmore Hall, sung at the Proms, the Royal Opera House and on countless film soundtracks at Abbey Road Studios. She teaches and coaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Goldsmiths University. A passionate advocate of the beneficial effects music can have on the brain, Eleanor is the founder of a social enterprise (Eleanor Music Services) which delivers interactive and live music to those living with dementia in care settings. www.eleanormusicservices.com
From the UWC archive.
The Club has always been politically neutral and therefore took no public stance on the women’s suffrage campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th century, and neither was any mention made in the Club’s own records of that period. However, tracing the personal history of some of the first generations of Members shows that many of them were involved in the fight for the vote. Most of them were suffragists, supporters of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) founded in 1897 and led by Millicent Fawcett. A smaller number were suffragettes, members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903.
One of the Members active in the feminist campaigns of the early 20th century was the pioneering physician Dr Octavia Margaret Sophia Lewin (1869-1955), who was elected as a Club Member in May 1921.
Campaigning for women's rights:
Dr Octavia Lewin (1869-1955)
Her proposer was another Girton alumna, Mary Bentick Smith, headmistress of St Leonards, a girls’ school in St Andrews. She was seconded by May Fawcett (née Fleming), wife of surgeon and physician John Fawcett and a keen supporter of medical charities.
Octavia Lewin studied Natural Sciences at Girton College, Cambridge, before training at the London School of Medicine for Women, which had been founded by Sophia Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in 1874. Octavia Lewin later specialised in ear, nose and throat disorders and was the first woman to lecture to the British Homeopathic Society
She joined the militant WSPU in 1906 but in 1907 she became a founder member of the breakaway Women's Freedom League (WFL).
Her active support of its tax resistance campaign led to her arrest and prosecution in 1908. She broke the law again in 1911 by writing across her Census form: 'No Vote, No Census. I absolutely refuse to give any information.'
A committed pacifist, during the First World War she worked at military hospitals in France, later serving as Aural Surgeon at the Endell Street Military Hospital, run by women under the direction of Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. Her experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, that killed many patients and staff at the hospital, led her to educational work on hygiene and the role of airborne infection in disease transmission. She later became Vice President of the Women's Public Health Officers' Association.
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. Honorary Archivist
Archive Legacy Project: preserving our earliest written records.
A big THANK-YOU to the members who volunteered their time in the summer to transcribe some sample pages from our earliest Candidates’ Books. Based on their feedback, we have been able to refine the transcription guidelines for the next stage of this project, which we are launching now with a further call for volunteers.
The aim is to compile a machine-searchable database of the women who applied to be become members of the University Ladies’ Club (later the University Women’s Club) in its first fifty or so years. The contemporaneous records were entered by hand into Candidates’ Books, which over the years have become fragile, and sometimes difficult to read. Searching for particular names is tedious and requires handling the books, whereas digitisation will enable faster (and remote) searches, and ensure easier preservation of the original documents.
So, if you are interested in contributing some spare time to this project, please get in touch with the General Manager (gm@uwc-london.com) You will be sent digital images of a few pages from the Candidates’ Books, along with a labelled Excel file for each page, and detailed guidelines on how to transcribe the information from the former to the latter.
The earliest volume in our Archives opens with the minutes of the meeting convened by Miss Gertrude Jackson in 1883, where plans for establishing a University Club for Ladies was first proposed. This first AGM Minute Book goes on to document the launch of the Club in 1886 and its subsequent rapid development up to 1905, while the second volume continues from 1906 onwards. Separate minute books were kept for the House Committee from 1886 and for the General Committee from 1887. Heavy use over the years has taken its toll of all our early records and the physical condition of five volumes in particular was increasingly fragile and the need for repairs was urgent.
The Archives Working Group enlisted the services of Mr Elgar Pugh, a specialist conservator who had recently retired as Head of Conservation at the National Library of Wales, after a remarkable 52 years’ service. Details of the work required were agreed and the repairs carried out by Mr Pugh in the spring. The accompanying ‘before and after’ photos tell their own story.
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Honorary Archivist
Lady Russell's china cupboard.
The image below reproduces pages 6 & 7 of the sale brochure for 2, Audley Square in 1921. They describe the main features of the rooms on the first and second floors. Highlighted for you at the top of page 7 is mention of a ‘china cupboard’ in the Drawing Room.
We don’t know how long the cupboard was used for its original purpose once the UWC had taken up residence, but as far back as living memories go the cupboard seems to have been used to store random non-china items. Most recently it housed a couple of empty cardboard boxes.
Now that the Club has a collection of vintage mixed tea china, you will be pleased to hear that we are restoring the cupboard to its original function. New shelving will mean that the items we need for our autumn and spring Afternoon Tea events will be conveniently on hand in the Drawing Room. We are sure Lady Flora would have approved.
Details of our Autumn Afternoon Tea on Saturday, October 26th are on the following page.
Autumn Afternoon Tea, with Pianist Siobhain O'Higgins
Our first Afternoon Tea took place on Saturday May 18th in the Drawing Room, and was a resounding success. There was special appreciation from country members unable to attend weekday evening events, that we had chosen a Saturday afternoon for this one.
We are very pleased to give Saturday Afternoon Tea a regular place on the spring and autumn events calendar. Accordingly, on Saturday October 26th we are offering a traditional Afternoon Tea with a distinct autumnal flavour.
The finger sandwiches will feature roast turkey & cranberry, smoked salmon & pink peppercorn cream cheese, roast beef with horseradish & celeriac, and artichoke with olive & roasted peppers. In addition, there will be pumpkin scones and orange & cranberry scones, both served with clotted cream and marmalade. On top of all this, there will be a cake selection with cinnamon & nutmeg pumpkin potato basket, an apricot & cardamom tart, and a slice of carrot cake with lemon zest frosting.
We will again be offering a range of teas from the Paris-based Dammann Frères Tea company, with a specially chosen blend redolent of clove and cinnamon spices to welcome in the autumn weather
To make this event even more special, we are delighted to be welcoming back pianist Siobhain O’Higgins to play a repertoire of autumn music on the Drawing Room piano.
It will be a such a treat to sit in the fading afternoon light of an October afternoon, in our beautiful Drawing Room, with piano music and a splendid afternoon tea feast served on our mis-matched china. You can book now on the events pages of the website, or by callling Reception (0)207 499 2268.
Wine Club update
For the UWC Wine Club 2024 is proving to be an extraordinary year. We’ve grown in size, tasted myriad wines (bubbly ones, pink ones, and more!), and made many wonderful friends.
Back in January, we welcomed in the New Year with a Sparkling Wine Tasting. This was a great success, and all the bubbles helped keep any hint of those post-holiday blues at bay. In February, we hosted the first-ever Wine Club Valentine’s Dinner the Library was packed, as members brought their friends, partners, and guests. To celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th, we had a fun and informative Women in Wine evening. We’ve had smaller events too, sprinkled throughout the year, from an informal Wine at the Bar Under the Stairs to our Kir Royal night for our Warm Weather Wines celebration in July.
Now, as we look towards cooling weather and the autumnal season, we’re preparing for another line up of cozy nights in the Library and Drawing Room. In October we’ll have a Wine Salon event, featuring an easy-drinking, friendly Fiano (white) paired with scrumptious autumnal canapés nutmeg-infused butter on bread, pumpkin risotto, and more. Then, in November, we’re hosting a Beaujolais Day event! Come join us for a truly special dinner in the Library, where we will try a New Beaujolais side-by-side with an oak-aged Beaujolais. We will be all French that evening, with a three-course, French country style dinner. Finally, you all must come to the Wine Club’s Annual Port Tasting in the first week of December.
We are a fun group, and our focus is on building friendships around a gentle appreciation of wine and food. All are warmly welcomed to attend from the wine-expert to the wine-curious to those who can’t name a grape varietal to save their lives but do believe that sipping a glass of wine with friends in the Club Library makes any night a special one!
Getting involved with your Club
An important feature of the University Women’s Club is that it is owned and managed by its membership We have freehold tenure of our clubhouse, and our rulebook stipulates that ‘The management of the Club is entrusted to a General Committee consisting of 12 members elected by the membership.’
While this gives us great freedom to run our own affairs (no looking over our shoulders at a landlord, or having to employ a management company) we do depend on a steady supply of volunteers to contribute time and talent to our various committees.
Accordingly, we are always on the lookout for members who might like to join a committee and help guide the Club forward. We are currently looking to co-opt someone onto the General Committee who has a background in finance, law or accounting. If you are interested, and feel you have the necessary experience, please get in touch with the General Manager (gm@uwc-london.com)
If you would prefer less of a commitment than co-option to the GC, there is quite a wide choice of subcommittees:
Events Wine
Works with the General Manager and the Events Manager to propose, discuss and plan a variety of members’ events through the year, and makes recommendations to the GC.
Works with the General Manager to refresh the wine list and agree pricing structure.
House Membership Election
Works with the General Manager on matters pertaining to the decoration and furnishing of the house and garden.
Marketing
Works with the Membership Secretary to review and approve applications for membership.
Works with the General Manager and the Marketing Manager to frame and implement a plan for UWC marketing goals, target audience, and specific measures, including reviewing and updating Marketing materials and the UWC website
If you would like to be involved in one of these sub-committee, the first step is always to get in touch with the General Manager (gm@uwc-london.com) to register your interest and ask for details
We of course understand that committee work might not be something everyone has time for. But there are plenty of other ways to support your Club:
• Come to an Open Evening where you can talk to prospective applicants about what it is like to be a member of the UWC. (We are offering the opportunity to stay for a buffet dinner at half price!)
• Spread the word about our amazing community to friends and acquaintances, and maybe recommend membership
• Regularly check the Events Calendar to avoid missing something you would have liked to attend
• And finally, follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. The links are in our emails.
Thursday 7th October:
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John Le Carré
Thursday 21st November Rhine Journey
Ann Schlee
‘The best spy story I have ever read’ Graham Greene
In John le Carré's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With inside knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré brings to light the shadowy dealings of espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. The time is the early 1960s. Alec Leamas is the head of the West German office of the British Secret Service. He’s been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the newly built Berlin Wall. His main adversary, Hans-Dieter Mundt of East German intelligence, has been successfully eliminating all of Leamas’ agents one by one, and Leamas has just witnessed the death of the last double-agent he had in East Berlin. Called home, Leamas expects he will be retired, but he is asked to stay out in the cold for one last mission: to take part in an elaborate sting to infiltrate the East German set-up and bring down Mundt. To do this he must defect to East Germany and frame Mundt as a double agent for SIS. But first he must establish a convincing cover story for himself – one that will make the East Germans believe that he is willing to betray his country.
At its publication during the height of the Cold War the moral presentation of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold made it revolutionary by showing the intelligence services of both the Western and Eastern nations as engaging in the same ruthless amorality in the name of national security.
‘Its sense of time, place and tone is perfect’ – The Observer
At first you might think that this book is a reissue of a slim Victorian classic. In fact, it’s a historical novel that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize and reissued this summer by Daunt Books.
The time is 1851, just three years since Europe was convulsed by workers’ revolutions, but already English tourists are returning to the Continent, travelling by paddle steamer down the Rhine, long celebrated for its romantic vistas. Among the sightseers are the sanctimonious Reverend Charles Morrison, his wife and 17-year-old daughter, and his unmarried sister, Charlotte, who has spent her life attending to the needs of others. Like the river upon which they are travelling, however, Charlotte contains hidden depths.
On the quay at Coblenz Charlotte mistakes a fellow passenger, Edward Newman, who is travelling with his family, for her great lost love, whom she was forced to give up years ago, at her brother’s insistence. From that moment, this extraordinarily evocative novel creates an aura of romantic, erotic tension that is as compelling as it is mysterious. Charlotte falls into a dream-like state filled with heart ache and latent fury, hardly able to tell her imaginings from reality. Inexorably she is drawn closer to confrontation with the enigmatic Newman, which ultimately dispels her fantasies and exposes her to the troubled politics of Rhenish Prussia.
Ann Schlee, the American-born writer, who married the English artist Nick Schlee, spent most of her life in England and died last year at the age of 89.
Thursday 19th December
The Pursuit of Love
Nancy Mitford
16th January:
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
If you would like further information about the Book Club, please write to Jeanne Langley at jslangley.uwcbookclub@gmail.com
Clever, clever Nancy. I am proud to know you’ – John Betjeman
When Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love was published in December 1945, it was an instant and phenomenal success. The critics praised it, saying there was ‘more truth, more sincerity, and more laughter than in a year’s output of novels’The public talked of little else.According to Mitford’s biographer, Selina Hastings, it was ‘the perfect antidote to the long war years of hardship and austerity, providing an undernourished public with its favourite ingredients: love, childhood and the English upper classes’.
Mitford wrote the novel when she was working as an assistant in our local bookshop – Heywood Hill in Curzon Street. Earning just £3 a week, she used to walk home to Maida Vale to save the bus fare.After publication the book earned her so much money, she felt she was sitting ‘under a shower of gold’.
The Pursuit of Love has many autobiographical elements. The heroine, Linda Radlett, is beautiful and feckless and is one of seven children in a family much like the Mitfords. The hero is a French duke, Fabrice, who is modelled on Gaston Palewski, Mitford’s lover. But the character who dominates all others is Uncle Matthew, based on Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale. Irascible and unreasonable, he is up at dawn hunting his younger children with bloodhounds and repeating his unshakeable conviction that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends!’
Although it was primarily a comedy, The Pursuit of Love was not without its tragic moments. Mitford’s father, whose opinion of the novel was awaited with some trepidation, was delighted with it but he cried uncontrollably at the ending.
‘Henry James’s great humane masterpiece’ – Hermione Lee
The Portrait of a Lady was first published as a serial in TheAtlantic Monthly in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881. Like many of James’s novels, it is set in Europe, mostly England and Italy, reflecting the author’s interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, often to the detriment of the former. It largely focuses on the themes of personal freedom, responsibility and betrayal.
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spiritedAmerican, is brought to Europe by her wealthyAunt Touchett, she inherits a great deal of money, and it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved ‘to affront her destiny’ and determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. After travelling to Florence, however, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the worthlessAmerican ex-patriate, Gilbert Osmond, and marries him. Isabel and Osmond settle in Rome, but their marriage rapidly sours, owing to Osmond’s overwhelming egotism and lack of genuine affection for his wife. Only then does Isabel discover that wealth is a two-edged sword and that there is a price to be paid for independence.
Astory of intense poignancy, with an ambiguous ending, Isabel’s tale of love and betrayal still resonates with modern audiences. It is one of James’s most popular novels and is generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early period.
Film
Club Programme October to December 2024
. The discussions take place on zoom, every second Tuesday in the month, starting at 7.00pm, London time. Overseas and country members are especially welcome to join us!
Tuesday 8th October High Plains Drifter (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
In his directorial debut, Eastwood explores the mythology of the heroic American Western. Reviews were, and remain, mixed. It has been described as a ghost story, an iconoclastic allegory, a satire on the Revenging Stranger theme, a nod to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and a pastiche of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. John Wayne was completely dismissive: “That isn't what the West was all about. That isn't the American people who settled this country."[ When the violence, death and double-dealing come to an end, the Stranger rides off into the distance and the complicit townsfolk who survived the ordeal live on to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.
Tuesday 12th November Queen of Spades (1949)
Directed by Thorold Dickinson
This fantasy-horror film is based on an 1834 short story by Alexander Pushkin. An impoverished Russian army captain hears that an elderly and wealthy countess had sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the secret of winning at cards. He stakes his own soul in a Mephistophelean bargain with her, intoxicated by the prospect of immense wealth and blind to risk of eternal damnation. Edith Evans and Anton Walbrook are wonderful as Countess Ranevskaya and Captain Suvorin, while the photography is full of shadows, mirrors and lurking evil. For decades after its initial release, this film was believed to be lost. Then, in 2009, a copy was discovered and released on DVD, with an enthusiastic introduction by Martin Scorsese.
For further information about joining in the Film Club discussions, contact Pauline Foster at pauline.foster.uk@gmail.com
Tuesday 10th December
The Apartment (1960) Directed by Billy Wilder
A lowly clerk at a large insurance company in New York City gains favour with his managers (and a promotion) by allowing them to book evenings in his midtown apartment for their adulterous affairs, even if it means him having to stay outside in the rain and snow until they leave. When he discovers that one of the women being brought to his apartment is the elevator girl he has admired for a long time, the farce-like comedy gives way to a story of true love triumphing over despair. The script (written in part by Billy Wilder himself) is brilliantly witty, and brilliantly delivered by Jack Lemon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred McMurray.
The Apartment is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and in 1994 was one of 25 films selected for inclusion to the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.
Is there a film you would like to recommend to the Film Club? It can be from any era, any genre and subtitled from any language. If it’s available to rent, we cinephiles will be happy to get to know it better. Send your suggestion to pauline.foster.uk@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to get it on the programme for 2025.
UWC Reading Group
Our newest UWC club-within-the Club is dedicated to exploring a wide variety of literary and non-literary genres. We have held three meetings so far, in which we have looked at a graphic novel (Cassandra Darke, by Posy Simmonds), a metafiction work in prose and verse (Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov) and a play (Oleanna by David Mamet).
The meetings are hybrid, which means you can come in person, or attend by zoom from anywhere in the UK or the world. Importantly, you do not have to read the work beforehand. If you have never explored a particular genre of the written word (such as playscripts, collected poems, or verse novels, or memoirs) but are curious about them and are looking for recommendations, just come along to listen, ask questions, and see if other people’s enthusiasm is infectious. There will be no plot spoilers!
Next up on the 14th November is André Makine’s quasi-autobiographical work Le Testament Français (1995). Sign up on Events pages of the UWC website, or email reservations@uwc-london.com
. Awarded both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, Le Testament Français is the first-person account of a young Russian boy growing behind the Iron Curtain, yet fascinated by his French grandmother's dreamlike memories of Paris before the Great War. She tells him of her terrible suffering under Stalin and during the Second World War, creating in the boy’s mind a mystical blend of memory and imagination of a place he had never seen, and starkly contrasting with the realities of Soviet Russia. The narrator is proud of his Russian identity but torn between this and the French one bequeathed him by his grandmother.
End Notes...
New to the Club?
At 1.00pm on each third Tuesday, members gather at the Club Table in the Dining Room for a chat and a good lunch. Afterwards, those with time to spare go out together to a gallery, museum or exhibition. Everyone is warmly welcome. This is a very good way to make acquaintances, and feel properly at home among your fellow members.
Coming soon in February 2025
We are planning to hold a panel discussion with the Women’s Higher Education Network, exploring the current landscape for women in academia. This conversation will celebrate significant achievements while addressing ongoing challenges and barriers that women face in higher education. The evening will include a prediscussion drinks reception.
Members’ Directory
A little reminder, and a nudge: There is a Directory tab on our website where members happy to share information can add their personal and /or professional profile, allowing other members with similar interests or backgrounds to find each other.
If you have not already done so, please consider opting-in to the Directory. If you have already added your details, do check from time to time that they are up-to-date.
For this event, we are seeking one or two UWC members working in Higher Education to join the panel. If you would like to be considered, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with the General Manager: gm@uwc-london.com.
