Britain’s Hell-Fire clubs had a fiendish reputation, but how much of it was true?

The Hell-Fire clubs that emerged at the start of the 18th century had disappeared by its close. Being clubbable was one of the tenets of an age that claimed sociability as a virtue. The Enlightenment saw the flowering of literary and scientific clubs, philosophical clubs, political clubs; there were decadent clubs such as the Society of Dilettanti and the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, and serious clubs such as the Kit-Kat Club and the Lunar Society, which set out to change the world. The Hell-Fire clubs were a parody of the more earnest and improving societies: rather than discuss theology, their members would curse and blaspheme; instead of reading learned tomes they wrote lewd verses, and as Lord neatly puts it, "when scientific societies experimented with laboratory apparatus, the Hell-Fire clubs experimented with their own bodies". So elite were some that a certain Cambridge club, like the exclusive Junta dining club in Zuleika Dobson, had only one member.

Lord divides the "Hell-Fire genre" into three groups. First there were the gangs such as the Mohocks, a well-organised group that consisted of a few rich young men — one member was the son of the Earl of Sandwich — who rampaged through London in 1712, apparently attacking people at random and smashing the windows of houses. The hysteria surrounding the Mohocks' activities makes it difficult to get a real sense of the damage they caused, or even, according to some historians, whether they existed at all. The Spectator described them as "a Noctornal fraternity" ruled by a president with a "Turkish crescent engraven upon his forehead", whose object was to wage war against mankind.

The qualification for membership was to be able to drink beyond "reason or humanity", and one means of attack was "tipping the lion" — squeezing the nose flat to the face and boring out the eyes with a finger. Jonathan Swift wrote that the Mohocks "play the Devil about town every night, slit people's throats and beat them". Lady Strafford reported that they "put an old woman into a hogshead and rooled her down a hill, they cut off soms nosis, others hands and several barbarous tricks without any provocation". Lord wonders whether they were "asserting their masculinity through violence" or "exerting gentlemanly freedom in a society that was putting pressure on them to conform to a moral code?" I wonder what Ross Kemp, "TV hard man" and gang specialist, would have to say.

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