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The story of The Travellers Club, the oldest club on Pall Mall and a home-from-home for globetrotters for 200 years

To mark the bicentenary of The Travellers Club – the oldest club in Pall Mall – John Martin Robinson tells the story of an institution and its home, a purpose-built Renaissance palace. Photographs by Paul Highnam.

The Travellers Club was founded in May 1819, brainchild of Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary and British Minister Plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. He spoke of establishing a club in which men could meet socially with other travellers, visiting ‘foreigners of distinction’ and diplomats.

Throughout its history, these elements have been a strong part of the club’s character. To qualify, members had to travel 500 miles in a straight line outside England. A member quipped it had to be on land, otherwise ‘convicts from Botany Bay might have qualified’.

Photograph by Paul Highnam/Country Life Picture Library

The club emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, when war and trade had carried mariners, soldiers and officials across the world. For cultural travellers, conflict had deflected visits from the usual Grand Tour destinations to Greece, the Levant and Egypt.

Early members included five future Prime Ministers – Aberdeen, Palmerston, Canning, Lord John Russell and the Earl of Derby – as well as several Greek Revival architects/designers: Smirke, Wilkins, Westmacott, Thomas Hope and C. R. Cockerell, the latter the club’s architectural conscience.

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There were diplomats, such as the Earl of Elgin, who gave a plaster cast of the Parthenon Marbles, and his associates Lt-Col William Leake, who brought the Marbles to London, and William Richard Hamilton, Elgin’s secretary, who prevented the French from removing the Rosetta Stone from Egypt.

They were all trustees of the British Museum and several founders of the National Gallery joined them, including Sir George Beaumont, George Vernon and the Rev Holwell Carr, who all gave their collections to the gallery.

The founder chairman was the 2nd Lord Auckland, later Governor General of India and responsible for the unsuccessful First Afghan War. Other committee members included John Sawrey Morritt, friend of Walter Scott, who had surveyed the scene of the Iliad and bought Velásquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’, and Sir Gore Ouseley, the earliest British ambassador to Persia. Military figures in the early membership included the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Anglesey and Lords Raglan and Cardigan.

‘This house, in turn, proved inadequate as the membership grew’

The first foreign visitors were Russian: Count Simon Woronzow, ambassador to George III, and his son, Prince Michael Woronzow, commander of the Russian cavalry at Moscow in 1812 and governor of the Caucasus, who employed Edmund Blore to design a Moorish-Jacobethan palace at Alupka in the Crimea.

Most famous of the early diplomat members was Talleyrand during his four years as ambassador in London, playing whist most nights and for whom an extra handrail was added to the stair bannisters.

The early visitors also included writers, such as the American Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Frenchman Louis de Vignet. A less welcome guest, who caused trouble by taking books from the library and criticising the card accountant, was Prince Pückler-Muskau. He left a description of the club in his Tour of a German Prince in England (1832).

He was complimentary about the club as an institution, but less so about the members: ‘The English nobility haughty as it is, can scarcely measure itself against the French in antiquity and purity of blood.’ He described them as ‘new families, often of very mean and even discreditable extraction’ and commented that it was easy to muddle the servants for the masters, as the former had more ‘natural dignity’ and better manners.

In 1819, the club took temporary premises in Waterloo Place, which were adapted by Cockerell. These proved too small and rickety and it soon moved to a larger house at 49, Pall Mall. This was also converted for the club by Cockerell, who presented his plastercast of the Phigaleian Marbles from the Temple of Apollo Epikourios, which he had excavated at Bassae and secured for the British Museum. This was installed in the Coffee Room (now transferred to the library of the Barry building) and Lord Elgin’s plaster Parthenon Marbles in the Drawing Room. They gave the building a strongly Grecian character during its 10-year existence.

This house, in turn, proved inadequate as the membership grew. A perfect new site presented itself on the other side of Pall Mall when George IV moved to Buckingham Palace and Carlton House was redeveloped.

The Office of Woods and Forest (Crown Estate) were keen to spread the architectural grandeur of the Metropolitan Improvements along Pall Mall by encouraging new club buildings, which were more impressive than private houses. On either side of Waterloo Place were the United Service Club, designed by Nash, the Athenaeum by Decimus Burton and, opposite the former, the United University Club by William Wilkins.

In 1828, The Travellers secured the site of three houses immediately adjoining the Athenaeum for its permanent base. This was not without hitches, as George IV, with characteristic insouciance, kyboshed the original site deal by insisting on retaining a house on it for a member of his Household; the club accepted a slightly more constricted site, with a condition that the land behind was not built on, and so the setting of trees and grass in Carlton Gardens survives.

Under the chairmanship of Lord Granville Somerset, The Travellers chose its architect by competition. No other St James’s club has selected an architect by such a process.

In May 1828, it was resolved to ‘procure plans from no less than five eminent architects’ and to obtain cost estimates from an ‘experienced surveyor’. For the latter, they chose Joseph Henry Good, Surveyor to the Com-missioners for Building New Churches.

In fact, seven architects were approached initially and 11 in total. Many had already designed clubs. Two members of The Travellers were included: Robert Smirke and William Wilkins. John Peter Deering (a classical archaeologist and, with Wilkins, joint architect of the United University Club), William Atkinson (a pupil of James Wyatt), Decimus Burton, Benjamin Dean Wyatt (architect of Crockford’s and the Oriental, son of James) and Lewis Wyatt (James’s nephew).

The following week, four more architects were approached: Henry Harrison, Jeffry Wyatville, Charles Barry and Thomas Hopper (architect of Arthur’s Club). A couple more were subsequently asked: Ambrose Poynter and Edward Blore. Of these, Smirke, Burton, Lewis Wyatt and Jeffry Wyatville declined, but eight submitted designs.

As the drawings of unsuccessful entries were returned with thanks, all are now lost.

Cockerell was not on the sub-committee, but was on the general committee, and his fastidious criticism elsewhere of his colleagues’ work may explain why some were turned down; nearly everybody thought Blore uninspired and Poynter lacked distinction.

The palm was offered to the outsider, Charles Barry. At 33, he was the youngest to enter and had designed little except the Greek Revival Royal Institution of Fine Arts (now Art Gallery) in Manchester and some cheap Commissioners’ churches in Man-chester and London. The former may have been familiar to northern members, such as Edward Legh of Lyme or Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, but he cannot otherwise have been known to the committee.

His adventurous travels as a student to France, Italy, Greece and Turkey would have appealed to the club, but it was probably his track record with the Commissioners of New Churches that won him the job. Joseph Good was able to advise the club that Barry was experienced in keeping within approved building budgets and that advice may have been decisive. There was also the originality and excellence of the design, with its clever planning for the deep site and the novel deployment of Italian Renaissance palazzo architecture.

The competition design of 1828 was revised to meet the present, narrower site in March 1829 and then revised again to meet criticisms from the Crown and Athenaeum about the likely impact on the cornice of the latter.

Barry’s ingenious solution was to create recesses on both elevations adjoining the Athenaeum. This allowed slightly more interesting shapes for the main rooms and enabled the cornice of The Travellers to be returned at the sides rather than cut off, something that has always been admired.

Externally, Barry drew on Florentine and Venetian sources for the two elevations, Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini for Pall Mall and the Grand Canal for Carlton Gardens (where the lawns substituted for Venetian water).

Inside, the vocabulary stretched to include Grecian and English Palladian details, in the library chimneypieces or the carved-oak Grand Staircase. Enthusiasm for the latter may have come from the chairman of the building committee Gen the Hon Sir Edward Cust, with memories of his ancestral home at Belton in Lincolnshire.

Barry’s most novel stroke was the internal cortile in the centre of the plan, with the halls and landings arranged like arcades round it. This enabled light to reach the depths of the interior, including the kitchen, scullery and Still Room in the basement.

The building was constructed by Stokes (Paxton’s son-in-law); it was roofed in 1831 and first used to watch William IV’s Coronation procession. It was completed in 1832.

Barry’s architecture has always been cherished by The Travellers, which, over the decades, has allowed art and architecture students to visit and make measured drawings. There was only one blip in the record: Barry remained the club architect throughout his life, but after him, Hungerford Pollen advised. He was Cockerell’s nephew.

In order to allow in more light, Pollen removed Barry’s balconies from the library windows in 1867 and replaced them with ‘Baker Street’ iron balustrades. Following furious protests, not least from Barry’s younger son and biographer Edward, the club reinstated the balconies to the original design. Suitably chastened, it never attempted to alter the elevations again.

Over the years, several changes have been made to the interior. A fire in 1850 destroyed Barry’s billiard room and the Elgin plaster frieze. In 1910, the Coffee Room was moved up to the first-floor drawing room (Fig 3) to create a ground-floor Smoking Room.

The entrance hall was also tactfully extended, reusing Barry’s windows and chimneypiece into the cortile by the then club architect Macvicar Anderson. Few realise this not part of the original Barry design.

Anderson added upper storeys of bedrooms after the First World War. In the early 20th century, the club benefitted from the care and knowledge of a member, Hal Goodhart-Rendal, who, for a time, also acted as the club architect. He recommended Fred Rowntree as his successor and Rowntree designed the handsome First and Second World War Memorials and restored the club after it suffered bomb damage in 1940.

Goodhart-Rendal had restored and replicated the Colza chandeliers and other light fittings and produced a design for roofing over the main floor of the cortile to make a ‘saloon’. This was not proceeded with, nor was its revival in 1970 by Ian Grant, chairman of the Victorian Society, although he was responsible for re-graining the library in its original oak with a grant from the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division.

This was one of several late-20th-century restorations of original decorative schemes, including the repainting of the Coffee Room in Barry’s yellows and greys in 1988. The library remains the heart of the club and, as well as being one of the most beautiful rooms in London, it contains the finest collection of travel books in private hands, donated by members over two centuries. Its present flourishing condition with lectures and exhibitions attests to the continuing vigour of The Travellers after 200 years.

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Travellers Club

Gentlemen's club in london / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

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Summarize this article for a 10 year old

The Travellers Club is a private gentlemen's club situated at 106 Pall Mall in London , United Kingdom . It is the oldest of the surviving Pall Mall clubs , having been established in 1819, and one of the most exclusive. It was described as "the quintessential English gentleman's club" by the Los Angeles Times in 2004. [1]

The Travellers Club

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 by a cohort led by Lord Castlereagh and in 1832 moved to its present purpose-built clubhouse designed by Charles Barry. The Club's founding ethos was to establish a meeting place for like-minded gentlemen who had travelled abroad, and where they could also entertain foreign visitors and diplomats posted to London.

Distinguished members of the Diplomatic Service, the Home Civil Service and the Armed Forces have traditionally formed the backbone of the Travellers Club and we continue to have many among our members.

The Club maintains reciprocal arrangements with some 140 similar clubs throughout the world.

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Literary Review

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History , London

Thomas Blaikie

Bed linen & briefs, hair & spare, how deep is your basement, gold, frankincense & mozzarella, petal power, no catholics or californians, before the elbow bump, gravy with everything, peace maker & flower arranger, does she wear one to bed, wtf is grammar, members only, the travellers club: a bicentennial history 1819–2019, by john martin robinson, libanus press for the travellers club 367pp £35.

Who would write, let alone read, a weighty history (literally so: my elderly mother complained she couldn’t lift it), published in a luxury edition priced at £35, of the parish hall or Women’s Institute hut to be found in one of our lesser-known villages? But this is a history of the Travellers Club, 106 Pall Mall, London: patron, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh; premises, a superb Italianate palace designed by Charles Barry and completed in 1832; members, a blinding cascade of distinction over two centuries. ‘In the 1920s and 1930s’, John Martin Robinson writes, ‘diplomat members of the Club included Sir Horace Rumbold, 9th Bt … Eric Drummond, the 16th Earl of Perth, Ambassador to Italy, Esme Howard, 1st Lord Howard of Penrith … the Hon Ronald Lindsay … Sir Frank Lascelles … and Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.’ An appendix lists members who were or are Knights of the Garter.

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 with a distinctly anti-Brexit agenda of welcoming foreign visitors and bringing together those who had travelled principally to Europe, not necessarily on the traditional grand tour but as soldiers and diplomats too. You could only join if you’d journeyed five hundred miles outside the British Isles. In the time of social change after the Napoleonic Wars, the club was a howling success, always bursting out of one building into another, until finally settling into the Barry mansion in 1832, where it has been ever since. Members were not exclusively prime ministers or aristocracy, although it is noted that really hardcore travellers, such as David Livingstone, John Speke and Samuel Baker, were not members. After the Second World War, rather more wacky figures, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, Nigel Nicolson and Alan Pryce-Jones, got in. Today, the club appears to be in the hands of QCs and that species of immensely important person nobody has ever heard of.

A London gentlemen’s club is a London gentlemen’s club when all is said and done: a stately home in the middle of London, but with no bedrooms (originally at least) and, of course, no women, a place where one goes to meet people like oneself over ‘luncheon’ or dinner. These institutions have their own funny customs of which they tend to be immensely proud, so what appears to be the dining room at the Travellers is called the Coffee Room. Those of us who are not members might be inclined to peer in and find it all rather preposterous, but that would be sour grapes.

So what has actually been happening at the Travellers Club over the last two hundred years? The installation of a Turkish bath in the club’s second premises was quite an event, as was the serving of dinner at 7pm instead of 6.30pm, and later the provision of luncheon. There were spats with the Athenaeum, next door to the Barry building, regarding a light well which objectionable windows overlooked. That went on for fifteen years or more. Come 1867 and the committee was trying to replace Barry’s stone balustrade with iron railings to let in more light. Frightful outcry, stone reinstated at once.

Meanwhile, an errant laundry mistress was found to have placed a large number of the club’s tablecloths in various pawnshops in the neighbourhood. In the second half of the 19th century, a member said the tea was ‘nauseous’. The committee was appalled: they held a tea tasting and declared the tea ‘delicious’. This followed on from the terrible coffee incident, when the steward had to be told not to offer the previous day’s brew. But oh the joy of the Otis lift, installed in 1904, and the glory when Barry’s iron flambeaux outside the club were lit to mark great events, such as the wedding of the Prince of Wales. The kitchen chimney at 106 Pall Mall ‘in particular was prone to regular conflagrations’, Robinson writes, but rest assured that ‘Barry’s new building was always maintained in exemplary condition’. We also learn that ‘an unexpected off-shoot of the Crimean War was an increase in the number of members smoking … in the Club’.

Intermittently, Robinson is aware of the bathos of all this. The club’s members, he says at one stage, ‘were often up to their necks in public affairs as individuals in Britain and the empire. Generally, however, the Club concerned itself largely with its own business.’ Well, it’s a club, isn’t it? That’s the whole point: to be a little sealed-off world of its own and to have a book like this written about it which is really a catalogue or roll call rather than what is commonly understood to be a book. Everybody and everything must be included.

Robinson refers to ‘luncheon’ without irony and calls a recipe a ‘receipt’, but really is to be congratulated (and no doubt will be at some formal event in the club with speeches) for maintaining over 367 large pages a steady, dignified and perfectly smooth flow, punctuated by the occasional tiny little quip – just like the club itself, one imagines.

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Traditional Gentlemen's Clubs of London

• By londonclubs
• Published on : January 26, 2023
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The Travellers Club, located at 106 Pall Mall, is one of London’s oldest and most prestigious gentlemen’s clubs. Founded in 1819, the club was established for “gentlemen who have travelled out of the British Isles to a distance of at least five hundred miles from London in a direct line.” This membership requirement, along with the club’s luxurious and refined atmosphere, has made it a favorite among diplomats, politicians, and other accomplished individuals. At one point, so many members were linked to MI5 and MI6 that it was simply known as the Spooks Club.

The club’s building, designed by Charles Barry, is a stunning example of Palladian style and has been a London landmark for over 200 years. Inside, members can enjoy various lounges, reading rooms, dining rooms, an extensive library, and a billiards room.

In addition to its impressive facilities, the Travellers Club is also known for its rich history and distinguished membership. Past members include explorers, statesmen, and literary figures such as David Livingstone, Winston Churchill, and Rudyard Kipling. The club has also played host to numerous important events, including the signing of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale in 1904.

Despite its traditional and exclusive reputation, the Travellers Club is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive membership. Today, the club continues to attract a diverse range of accomplished individuals from various fields and backgrounds.

Overall, the Travellers Club is a true London institution, offering its members a luxurious and refined atmosphere, rich history, and distinguished membership, along with a commitment to promoting diversity and inclusivity. It is a perfect place for the distinguished traveler and for those who appreciate the best of British culture and tradition. Unfortunately, the clubhouse can be quite dead at times. Moreover, the dining room service, like at the Oxford & Cambridge Club, requires each table to fill in an order form. To members of other clubs, this can seem not only cumbersome but also rather strange and impersonal.

Hello I will be visiting London in October of this year. Being of curios temperament I wonder if i may visit your club perhaps enjoy a meal and or at least experience its historical significance. I’d be thrilled to hear back from you. Thankyou

Regretfully this is merely a blog about London Clubs. We’re not affiliated with the Travellers, and you would have to contact them directly. Generally speaking clubs will only allow visitors from reciprocal clubs.

I have been a member of the Travellers’ for 30 years, and in all that time I have never managed to find the billiards room. Perhaps you might let me know where it is?

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Modernisation creeps on as London gentlemen’s clubs open to women

Pratt’s is the latest establishment haunt to allow female members but others are still resistant to change

M ild signs of a potential willingness to modernise have been observed in some of central London’s establishment clubs in the past few weeks, led by the announcement that, after a wait of 166 years, women will finally be allowed to become members of Pratt’s.

The decision by the owner of Pratt’s has been met mostly with resigned acceptance by the club’s membership, which includes at least a dozen MPs, and has triggered renewed discussion of possible reform at the remaining hardcore handful of gentlemen’s clubs that refuse to admit women.

Members of the Beefsteak, another men-only dining club joined by MPs, actors and judges, believe it is now likely it will also be obliged to change its rules to admit women. A renewed drive by female campaigners was launched last week to persuade members of the Garrick, including Michael Gove and the actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh Bonneville, to allow women to join.

Meanwhile, at the Athenaeum (which has allowed women as members since 2002) an organised movement by about 70 members to block further modernising changes was rejected at last Monday’s annual general meeting, with an intervention from Theresa May , who shut down discussion of a series of motions aimed at preserving the club’s “traditional ethos”.

The need for reform is being felt at many of London’s Pall Mall clubs, despite their reputation as outposts of an unchanging Britain frozen somewhere in the 1950s, partly because rising food and energy prices have brought cost of living issues to the attention of members of clubs located in old, draughty buildings with high overheads.

Changes at Pratt’s – where the current and former Conservative MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Nicholas Soames and Hugo Swire are members – were brought in “with immediate effect” by the club’s owner, the Earl of Burlington, William Cavendish, without consultation in late May. However, there will probably not be any perceptible change to membership in the near future, because the process of proposing and seconding new members takes considerable time, requiring 25 people to support a nomination by writing their names in a book in the club and later committee approval.

“There has been chuntering, people saying, hmm we don’t like this, complaining that they weren’t consulted,” a Pratt’s member said, but he added that younger members were beginning to feel belatedly that the status quo was indefensible. “There’s a feeling that the legal grounds for these places to be all male is quite shaky.”

Emily Bendell, the founder of a clothes business who has been campaigning for the Garrick to change its rules to admit women, wrote last week to a handful of the club’s most prominent members, noting that eight years had passed since 50.5% of the club’s membership voted in favour of women members, a vote that fell short of the required two-thirds majority needed for rule change. “A second vote is long overdue,” she wrote.

“I’m sure you would not be a member of a club that excluded members on the basis of race, religion or sexuality, so we urge you to call for a new vote to allow female members at the Garrick.”

Her campaign has been met with bemusement by some (mostly male) commentators who question the need to fight for equality at a tiny group of elite institutions, but she argues that the existence of men-only clubs that have senior male lawyers and politicians as members “negatively impacts women’s professional advancement”.

Last week’s failed attempt by a splinter faction of Athenaeum members to resist modernising changes to the club centred on a desire to “restore quiet harmony”. Its failure suggested most members recognised that reform was necessary. A new sub-group within the club, named the 1824 group (the year the club was founded), sent a letter to fellow members protesting that: “We sense that the traditional ethos of our club is step by step being eroded and moving towards something which appears more like a corporate run facilities-based hotel/restaurant.”

The former prime minister Theresa May, who like her husband, Philip May, is an Athenaeum member, intervened with a procedural motion, blocking discussion of all motions proposed by the 1824 group, according to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, who was one of the 1824 group’s organisers. “I was literally shouted down,” he said.

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“We were trying to enshrine the perception of the club not as a business, but as a meeting place of intellectuals. A lot of us have become very dissatisfied very recently because the club is being driven at a furious pace towards incorporation as a business. There’s a commercialisation happening across clubland,” Fernández-Armesto added.

The Travellers Club (which has diplomats among its members), White’s (which has never allowed women inside the building, with the occasional exception of the late Queen Elizabeth II), Brooks’s and Boodle’s all remain resistant to admitting women.

Even at clubs that chose to let women in decades ago, the proportion of female members remains low. Although the Athenaeum began admitting women 21 years only, its membership remains overwhelmingly male; only 28% of the club’s 147 new members were women in 2022-23, only 7% were under 40 and only two new members were under 30.

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The Travellers’ Clubhouse and how its design was influenced by Charles Barry’s Grand Tour

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In this dissertation I adapted the idea of an object biography--looking at the whole life of an object from creation to current use or disposal first proposed by Igor Kopytoff--to cultural collections in three types of institution: a museum, historic house and a house museum. In particular I was looking at how the phenomenon of the Grand Tour and influences from the classical world have shaped our appreciation of the past through the collections we value today.

Claire Spadafora

This thesis examines the seventeenth-century roots of the Grand Tour, an educational trip to the Continent taken primarily by British aristocrats during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I explore three “atypical” Grand Tourists – Inigo Jones, John Evelyn, and Richard Symonds – who traveled from Britain to Italy during the seventeenth century, discussing each man’s motivations for travel, experiences while abroad, and the resultant intellectual and creative productivity each experienced upon his return to Britain. These three individuals are considered to be “atypical” because none were true aristocrats, and thus did not fit in with the group normally associated with Grand Tour travel in the seventeenth century, as men who traveled during this period were generally wealthy enough to afford the educational and leisure opportunities of travel abroad. I examine ideas about the self and the construction of the self that could be considered characteristic of seventeenth-century thinking, as well as the concept of gentlemanliness and its association with knowledge. By seeing each of the travelers discussed in this thesis in the context of these developing ideas, I demonstrate that Grand Tour travel helped each of these men to build himself into a figure of artistic authority, furthering his career, social position, and reputation as knowledgeable on matters of art. For all three men, travel to Italy functioned as a tool to “fashion” the self into something more, and to advance the self both intellectually and socially. I contend that a combination of aesthetic experience in Italy and the building of collections of works on paper – primarily prints, and some drawings – helped each man to represent himself as a person of expertise and a polite gentleman. Finally, as each man contributed to British culture – whether through writing, architecture, or collection building – each helped to develop the Grand Tour into the popular phenomenon it would become in the eighteenth century, a time when more non-aristocratic British gentleman began to see the educational and social values of travel to the Continent. The experiences, work, and collections of Inigo Jones, John Evelyn, and Richard Symonds helped to expand British interest in Grand Tour travel, and developed British taste for Italian art.

Ross Balzaretti

This exhibition ran from 29 April to 6 August 2016 and was co-curated by Ross Balzaretti and Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. It was opened by the explorer and author Levison Wood on 28 April 2016, an alumnus of the University. 4405 people visited the show and 651 attended the associated public events, including three public lectures (two sold out) and a screening of Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1953) with post-film discussion hosted by Ross Balzaretti and Dr Sarah Lutton of the BFI. There is an online legacy exhibition at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/exhibitions/online/grand-tourists-and-others/index.aspx

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Exeter Chiefs boss Rob Baxter casts doubts on financial viability of Club World Cup

Travel costs for teams travelling to play in the Champions Cup have been a hot topic

Rob Baxter, the Exeter Chiefs director of rugby, has insisted that a new Club World Cup competition must be financially viable and thoroughly planned before the inaugural tournament in 2028, adding that he would otherwise be “very hesitant”.

Plans for the inaugural Club World Cup competition were unveiled this week, with the tournament starting in 2028 and featuring 16 teams over the first four weeks of June. The new tournament would take place every four years.

Exeter were Investec Champions Cup winners back in 2020 and while Baxter appreciates the appeal of the competition, he was also cautious.

Baxter said: “If someone says to me that they’ve got the finances in place to cover everyone’s finances and travel costs, there’s a TV deal that all the clubs involved get millions of pounds, and that helps all the clubs become viable, thriving businesses, then I’d say it’s exactly what the game needs.

“If, as normal, what happens is ‘lets try and give it a go and see if we can make it work, and drive some interest’ then I will be very hesitant about it. You can very easily create bigger issues in the game trying to solve issues, as we’ve seen numerous times.

“Let’s make sure it’s genuinely viable before we start adding in more competitions, more games, more travel costs. It has to be a genuinely viable interest for more people watching more rugby.

“Doing the old argument of ‘do it and the game will grow’, clubs in this country can’t take that approach. We can’t go and see if it works in four years’ time – we just can’t do that. These things have to be a little bit more genuine and ready to go before we can commit to them.”

Travel costs for teams travelling to play in the Champions Cup quarter-finals have been a hot topic this week. SA Rugby revealed they have spent just short of £175,000 to fly the Bulls coaches and staff on business class ahead of Saturday night’s quarter-final against Northampton, with Baxter adding that his side’s trip to Toulouse had cost the club “in the 10s of thousands of pounds” and wondering what the impact would therefore be on a global competition.

“The desire to try it and the opportunity to do it is completely different to trying to make it a realistic situation. If you look at things now, we are in a European competition and the costs for us from Sunday, knowing the result in France, to booking and trying to find a plane, we are taking the smallest plane we can and our costs are going to be in the 10s of thousands of pounds. That is just now in a European competition.

“Take the reality of that and make it a world competition and go, ‘right we are going to look at this, this is the funding in place and this is what is going to happen’ – as much as we might all want to do it you do have to be able to afford it. The desire from the players and the team in this country to have a format at some stage where there is a way is fantastic. There is nothing negative about interesting games of rugby is there? That is what everyone wants, but at the same time you have to make sure everyone else wants to watch it, everyone else wants to be involved in it, not just the players and the coaches.”

Asked whether the extra games created by the competition would be a player welfare issue, Baxter noted that there tends to be “a golden period” between the first few games of the season and games into the high 20s when players are less likely to get injured, with injury prevalence then rising once you enter the 30s. Baxter also stressed that the onus on managing those game numbers was on international teams as much as club sides.

“It’s always going to be a matter of balance. If that’s the way it works, that 30 games is about what a player with these competitions is roughly going to play, and it sits within those parameters, we’ve got to believe what we see with our own eyes,” Baxter explained.

“If you have international players it’s not just for the clubs to manage them. It’s with the international game to manage them as well. We always seem to get this wrong – whenever we come back to player welfare, the only thing that ever seems to get discussed is clubs managing players. There never seems to be any chat about international teams managing players, or what happens then, it’s always this one scenario.

“That’s the key, if you’re going to manage game totals, it has to be across the board – you can’t just pick and choose, and it’s all rest periods for clubs, that’s not viable any more.”

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