Blades Club
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009) |
Blades is a fictional, private club located in Park Street, Mayfair in central London in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Described as the most exclusive club in all of London, it allows gambling, mainly high-stakes card games, but is more celebrated for its gourmet catering. Membership is limited to 200; prospective members must show a net worth of at least £100,000, in cash or gilt-edged securities, and exhibit appropriate gentlemanly behavior before they can be considered for admission. It is believed to have been based on Boodle's, a club of which Fleming was a member, though Boodle's itself is mentioned in the novel Moonraker.
Members are required to win or lose at least £500 per year at the tables, or else pay a fine of £250. Only freshly minted coins and notes are paid out as winnings and change. In addition, when members stay at the club overnight, their cash and change are taken away in the morning and replaced with new money. According to Moonraker, no bills are ever presented for meals; these costs are prorated among each week's winners and deducted from their profits. However, The Man with the Golden Gun contradicts this statement with a passage in which M returns from lunch at the club, having paid with a £5 note in order to receive new money as change.
Known members of the club have included Sir Hugo Drax (in Moonraker), Auric Goldfinger (as mentioned by M in Goldfinger) and M. The Chairman of Blades is Lord Basildon. M regularly lunches at Blades and occasionally dines there. James Bond is an occasional guest at the club of his boss.
In the James Bond film Die Another Day, 007 confronts villain Gustav Graves in the fencing room of a London private gentlemen's club, though references to this being called (appropriately) Blades were dropped from the final film.
In Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal, Blades is mentioned in passing in an obscure cross-reference to Fleming's novels, as the club where the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service plays cards with "some of the men at the Very Top."
