Present were James Winston (a former strolling player, manager and important theatre antiquarian), Samuel James Arnold (a playwright and theatre manager), Samuel Beazley (an architect and playwright), General Sir Andrew Barnard (an army officer and hero of the Napoleonic Wars), and Francis Mills (a timber merchant and railway speculator).

[14] The club was named in honour of the actor David Garrick, whose acting and management at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the previous century had by the 1830s come to represent a golden age of British drama.

On 1 February 1832, it was reported that the novelist and journalist Thomas Gaspey was the first member to enter at 11am, and that "Mr Beazley gave the first order, (a mutton chop) at ½ past 12."

Slum clearance being undertaken just round the corner provided the opportunity to move into a brand-new purpose-built home on what became known as Garrick Street.

All new candidates must be proposed by an existing member before election in a secret ballot, the original assurance of the committee being "that it would be better that ten unobjectionable men should be excluded than one terrible bore should be admitted".

At a general meeting on 15 October 1831, the barrister John Adolphus suggested that members should present their duplicate dramatic works to the club, and that these should go some way towards forming a Library.

[17] James Winston, the first secretary and librarian of the club, was one of the principal early benefactors and his gifts included minutes from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as his own Theatric Tourist.

These presentations formed the nucleus of a Library which now holds well over 10,000 items, including plays, manuscripts, prints (bound into numerous extra-illustrated volumes), and many photographs.

Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books were left to four beneficiaries: his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the Garrick Club.

[21] In January 1961 the Soviet naval attaché and spy Yevgeny Ivanov was introduced to osteopath Stephen Ward at the club by Colin Coote, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, which would lead to the subsequent Profumo affair.

[22][23] The broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge resigned from the club in 1964 after being asked for a transcript of an American television interview in which he had criticised the British royal family.

[24] Muggeridge said it was "preposterous ... that the committee of a club like the Garrick should consider themselves entitled to adjudicate upon the propriety or otherwise of what a member may choose to say in public".

[25] The majority of serving politicians are members of the Conservative Party; these include the former deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the former levelling-up secretary, Michael Gove, Gove's levelling up department colleague Simon Hoare, the former minister of state for Brexit opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former justice secretary Robert Buckland (now chair of the Northern Ireland select committee), Daniel Hannan, a member of the House of Lords and adviser to the Board of Trade and Kwasi Kwarteng who was elected as a member days before he was appointed as chancellor of the exchequer.

Following the Guardian reports, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and the prime minister’s most senior policy adviser and the leader of nearly half a million civil servants, and Richard Moore, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), announced their resignations from the club on 20 March 2024.

[1] From the business world, members include Crispin Odey, the hedge fund manager and founder of Odey Asset Management that has had to close following an investigation report documenting the alleged sexual harassment and assault of 13 different women;[30] Nigel Newton, chief executive and founder of the publisher Bloomsbury, best known for publishing the Harry Potter series; Peter Straus, the literary agent, and Rocco Forte, the British hotelier and chairman of Rocco Forte Hotels, and Paul Smith, the fashion designer and owner of the eponymous brand.

Members of the press include Paul Dacre, the journalist editor-in-chief of the DMG Group, the publisher of the Daily Mail among other publications, John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs correspondent, and Sir Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times.

Such awards have been granted for service including acting as ambassadors to Moscow, Rome and Washington, senior roles at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations, the Foreign Office and the European Commission.

For the first time in the club's history, women would also now be allowed to visit the cocktail bar before 9 o'clock in the evening and venture "under the stairs", an area hitherto reserved for members.

[34] The Garrick Club consulted with the barrister Michael Beloff on the implications of the rules in law and asked him for a legal opinion concerning the admittance of female members.

Beloff advised that although the rules do not explicitly preclude women from joining, they state that "no candidate shall be eligible unless he be proposed by one member and seconded by another".

[31][3][4] Beloff stated that there was "now a cogent argument" that the Law of Property Act 1925 means the masculine and feminine pronouns (he and she) can be used interchangeably in contracts.

John Simpson, the journalist, foreign correspondent and chief editor for world affairs at the BBC, who has been a club member since 2001, has said,[1] I'm profoundly and passionately in favour of opening the Garrick's membership to women, because I feel the continued bar to their joining is an embarrassing blight on an otherwise delightful institution.Likewise, Stephen Fry has said he feels "ashamed and mortified by the continuing exclusion of women from our club".

[1] Simon Case, head of the civil service argued that he wished to "make the change from within" in referral to the Club's exclusion of female members.

In 2015, Baroness Hale, as the then-president of the Supreme Court, protested about the club's continued exclusion of women and the acquiescence of its members in that policy.

[9] In September 2020, the entrepreneur Emily Bendell threatened a legal challenge over the club's refusal to admit women as members under the terms of the Equality Act 2010.

'Forty-five years ago, I was left standing outside the Garrick while my supervisor took my fellow pupil Tony Blair inside [to the club's centre table].

The collection continued to grow with many being presented by artist members, such as Clarkson Frederick Stanfield and David Roberts, who with fellow scene painter Louis Haghe painted a series of large canvases, especially for the Smoking Room at the old Clubhouse.