THE JACKPOT CLUB

Membership Committee The Corner Table Dining Hall Michaelhouse, Balgowan

Michaelmas Quarter, 1982


Master Robert [SURNAME WITHHELD] (Boarding House withheld for the Committee's convenience) Michaelhouse, Balgowan

Dear Robert,

The Committee has received and given due consideration to your communication of last Tuesday, slipped under the door of the prefects' study during evening preparation, requesting admission to the membership of this Society.

The Committee regrets to inform you that your application has been declined.

This conclusion was reached unanimously, on grounds the Committee does not propose to elaborate, save to observe:

The Committee will not be entering into further correspondence on this matter. Subsequent applications, however framed, are unlikely to alter the present outcome, but will continue to be received with the courtesy your persistence demands.

We trust this finds you well, and remain,

Yours sincerely,

The Committee The Jackpot Club

Reissue Record

Reissued, Michaelmas Quarter 1983 (D block). The applicant declined to accept the original decision; this Committee declines to accept the applicant.

Reissued, Michaelmas Quarter 1984 (C block). No new circumstances. Application rejected with no further commentary.

Reissued, Michaelmas Quarter 1985 (B block). The matter is becoming tedious. Reissued without comment.

Reissued, Christmas Quarter 1986 (A block). Final school year for all parties — including, particularly, this application. Farewell, Robert.

Reissued, 1991. Tenth-year Reunion. The applicant attended uninvited. The Committee adjourned to the bar without him.

Reissued, 1996, by post.

Reissued, 2001, by post.

Reissued, 2006, by electronic mail. Modest progress noted.

Reissued, 2011. The applicant has been heard, at certain dinner parties, to claim he has been a member all along. He has not been. Reissued.

Reissued, 2016. Thirtieth-year Reunion. The applicant lodged a renewed application via LinkedIn. The Committee does not use LinkedIn.

Reissued, 2021. Reissued and ignored.

Reissued, May 2026. Fortieth-year Reunion. Reissued in formal copperplate, laminated for posterity, and filed beneath the corner table for the convenience of future generations. The application remains under indefinite review, as it has since its first lodgement on a sheet of foolscap, Michaelmas Quarter 1982,outside the Junior dining hall, while the Committee was discussing matters of more immediate consequence.


A LETTER FOR THE ARCHIVES

From P. Morfopoulos, Midmar Dam, to H. Dijkman, Montreal


[Hotel name withheld], Midmar Dam Late June, 1991

My Dear Harold,

I write from a writing desk that has seen more use this morning than it strictly deserves, in a corner of a hotel near Midmar that I shall, on reflection, decline to name. You will understand why before the page is out. The Committee has resolved upon a matter that has been a long time arriving and which I now wish had remained a long time off, and you are entitled to the unsealed account before it reaches you in fragments from anyone else.

The Fifth Reunion, as you will have heard from those of us who attended, was creditable in its formal portion. The Class of '86 reconvened at Michaelhouse on Friday for the customary Chapel and Rugby business, and the Class did itself proud through Saturday lunch, by which point the official programme had concluded and the gentlemen of various inclinations dispersed to whichever post-reunion gathering had been most enthusiastically arranged for them.

That, Harry, is where the trouble began.

You will recall the Lambert twins. They were never Jackpotters — they had neither the temperament for it nor the patience to be ignored at the corner table for the requisite number of years — but they have always been precisely the sort of old boys who know how to fill a guest list, and who naturally place the Jackpotters near the top of it. The Club has always been invited to everyone's gathering; this is one of the small, unsolicited dividends of having quietly refused to invite anyone to ours. The Lamberts had taken over a hotel near Midmar for the post-reunion evening — a hotel of the sort one does not enquire too closely about, the selection of which became apparent shortly after dinner — and they had arranged, on their own initiative and entirely outside the Club's customary social register, an evening's entertainment in the form of several ladies of ill repute.

I will pause here only to record that these were emphatically not the ladies of St-Anne's and St-John's of our usual circle, whose company has been the civilising influence of the Club for forty years; these were a Lambert provision, in keeping with the Lambert imagination, and the Jackpot Club bears no responsibility either for their engagement or for what subsequently occurred.

Present at the Lamberts' gathering were Anton, Ollie, myself, and the Lamberts themselves; Prick, who had been invited because the Lamberts had not yet been informed by anyone that he had become the man we all knew he had become; and Ashman, who I am sure you will remember — a good solid oak, no Jackpotter but a gentleman of the older sort, the kind of man a sensible host invites because he does not yet know that he will be glad of him before the night is out.

I do not propose, in correspondence, to itemise the precise moment at which Prick lost his standing as a member of polite society. The narrow account is this: the ladies engaged by the Lamberts were obliged to abandon their professional engagement before its natural conclusion, on grounds that no amount of Lambert money was found to be sufficient to redeem. The matter was not concluded by Prick's compliance, which was not on offer. It was concluded by Ashman, who you will recall had taken up boxing at Wits the previous year and had become rather practised at it, and whose right hand — delivered with the economy that distinguishes the trained man from the merely angry — settled the question in a single act. Prick was carried, unconscious, to a vacant field under the stars and laid down for a recovery he did not fully achieve until well after lunch the following day.

The Lamberts apologised profusely to all concerned. They paid the ladies what they had been promised and a further sum besides, and they offered to send Ashman home in their own car. Ashman, who is a good solid chap, declined and walked back along the dam wall in the moonlight to clear his head, which is the kind of thing Ashman does.

The Committee — Anton, Ollie, and I — convened informally on the hotel stoep on Saturday morning, while Prick was still horizontally challenged and Ashman was outside settling his shirt. We deliberated, as you would expect us to, for the better part of the morning.

The matter required us to do something the Committee has never previously done. To remove Prick from the membership, we were obliged first to acknowledge, on the record, that he had ever been a member of it. You will recognise the administrative cruelty of this; we have spent the better part of a decade declining to formally affirm the memberships of even those people we hold most dear, and the requirement to set Prick's down so that we might strike it through struck Anton, at the time, as a small bureaucratic tragedy. He had a glass of something restorative and proceeded.

The grounds for the decision, as we agreed them, are three words — the first of which is the nickname conferred upon him in D block by general acclamation in 1983, and now ratified by the kind of conduct that turns a nickname into a description.

The motion was put. The motion was not voted on. The vote was not necessary. The formal letter went out to Prick three days later, by registered post. He has not, to my knowledge, replied. We do not expect him to. The Club's standing on his previous membership has, by mutual silence, returned to its prior state of unacknowledgement, save in this one record.

So, Harold. You were not there, and I have written this chiefly so that you should not feel ill-informed at the next Reunion, when the matter will inevitably be raised by someone who heard part of it and got the rest wrong. The Founders should have a complete account. You and Anton and Ollie and I are the Founders. Prick was never a Founder, and is no longer a member, and the corner table will be one chair lighter at every gathering hereafter.

Canada has, I trust, been treating you with the indifference all imperial outposts owe their newer subjects, and the second-son's licence to depart and make his own way is one Anton has been openly envying since the third bottle on Saturday night. Ollie sent his usual greeting, which is to say no greeting at all, but a request to remember him to your latest fling. The Lamberts asked, in their fashion, to be remembered to you also, though I suspect they were testing whether you knew yet, which you now do.

Come home when you can. The Club is one Prick lighter, three Founders the wiser, and the corner table still seats four.

I remain, as ever, your friend and obedient corner-table accomplice,

Peter "Morf" Morfopoulos 

Midmar, June 1991