The magazine of the photo-essay
November 2016 issue
by Karen Knorr
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen takes us inside the hallowed halls of the most venerable
private gentlemen’s clubs of 1980s London, and considers the patriarchal values of
the English upper classes with photographs and texts constructed out of speeches
of parliament and the news at that time.
The book investigate the values that ally these classes to conservative aristocratic
values where primogeniture (the right by law of the firstborn son to inherit his
parent’s estate, in preference to daughters) is still an issue. Until the early 1970s a
married women still needed her husband’s endorsement for any household
purchases. Whilst women now have full property rights, they still remain under-
represented in key positions of governance and in financial and academic worlds. It
is still a boys club in which some women are honorary members.
With equality on the agenda and calls for more to be done, the timely release of
Gentlemen uses humour to explore attitudes amongst the English establishment in
the 1980s.
Knorr notes that despite being Prime Minister and head of the Conservative party,
Margaret Thatcher as a woman was not then, nor would be now, allowed full membership at the Conservative
Gentlemen’s club ‘The Carlton’. Old Etonians, like the former British Prime Minister prime minister David Cameron, have
belonged to such Gentlemen’s clubs. It is in these clubs that behind the scenes influence is still used to influence politics
and business today.