Tamsin Lonsdale

Although she has been running her own remarkable business, The Supper Club, in the US for 15 years now, Tamsin Lonsdale still has about her more than a little of the Hampshire girl and Bedales student that she once was.

She describes her many years at Bedales with affection, wryly notes her rebellious streak and her simultaneous capacity for self-discipline and explains how school and university, together with a natural entrepreneurial spirit, paved the way for a hugely successful commercial career.

Not long ago, Tamsin Lonsdale, back from her home in Miami to catch up with her many family and friends in the UK, took time out to re-visit the school at which she had spent so many years. How much had Dunannie, Dunhurst and Bedales changed since the days when Tamsin began her long educational odyssey there?

“The countryside was the same, for sure, just that it was obviously now on a much smaller scale,” reflects the Hampshire born and bred Tamsin.

“When I first saw the green lawn at Dunannie, it looked absolutely huge to me. The beautiful meadows and trees hadn’t changed at all. I guess that within the school, there seemed to be a few more rules than there had been in my day and a bit more structure, which works for a lot of people. The Bedales of my time suited me so well and as a free-spirited, somewhat rebellious kid, I loved it!”

Tamsin’s enthusiasm for school life was such that she began boarding as soon as she possibly could. “You had to drive yourself to do different things and to take advantage of the opportunities you found at Bedales,” she observes. “As I said, I was a rebel, but I also knew when to knuckle down and get the work done, particularly as we headed towards A Levels. Girls, I tended to find, were a bit more proactive than our male contemporaries, perhaps better at being self-starters, and in that respect, I’d say that they might have got more out of what Bedales had to offer all of us.”

For Tamsin sport was one of those opportunities that she particularly relished.

“I adored it,” she says. “I was definitely more ambitious than skilled as a sports person but I tried loads of things – hockey, netball and long-distance running, for example. I even ran for the county! Back at home, I had always ridden horses a lot as well, so being outside was important to me. I was totally unmusical and not brilliant at art so my other main interests were being social and the fashion of the time. We were always trying to figure out the right outfits to wear and in many ways, my fellow students and friends were probably the biggest influences I had at Bedales.”

Is there, in Tamsin’s opinion, a Bedalian type? “I’m sure of it,” she replies. “Very often, they are laid back, creative and extremely discerning about who is worthy of their respect. Because I went out of my way to be naughty and also because my nature was to try anything that I was told not to, I went over the line sometimes and even managed to get suspended for an attitude problem….it was just a case of pushing boundaries and I did clean up my act later. Mum, who was pretty strict with me and my sisters, and Dad, who was a bit more relaxed, were both pretty supportive even when my behaviour wasn’t totally brilliant.

Having by her own admission freewheeled her way through GCSEs, Tamsin applied herself much more zealously to her A-Level studies in English, History and Economics, inspired by the idea of studying business and accounting at Edinburgh University. “Working for myself and running my own business was always the goal for me (Tamsin’s father was renowned among other achievements for founding the wildly successful The Jean Machine),” she says. “Even as a youngster I had that entrepreneurial spirit – I wanted to open a shop, sell clothes and be busy.”

Tamsin recalls a number of Bedales teachers and other staff members with affection:

“Graham Banks for English would be one who made a big difference and Alastair Langlands, although he wasn’t my classroom teacher as such, was another influence – a very liberal and kind man. Ruth Whiting in history was extraordinary, you could never get away with anything less than your best with her but she was a great teacher and such a lively and interesting character.”

By the time her A Level results had confirmed Tamsin’s place at Edinburgh, she was ready to spread her wings. Most of her gap year was spent in Australia; having properly acquired the travel bug, she spent a number of university vacations discovering a variety of exotic locations around the world. At university, meanwhile, Tamsin interspersed some serious studying (she graduated from Edinburgh, slightly to her surprise but greatly to her delight, with a First) with some equally diligent event planning. The young girl who had been hosting parties at home for her friends since her mid-teens was now bringing people together in various social settings on a far grander scale.

“The events that I threw at Edinburgh started to become an expression of my own character,”

Tamsin recalls. “Connecting people had always been a passion but university started to come closer to combining the personal with the professional. My birthday became a three-day dinner party, always with a theme, and I remember with particular fondness a Lord of the Rings event. There were also two regular club nights that I used to organise, one a monthly trance party and the other an 80s-themed event, called Glitterati, which was held bi-weekly. A lot of the fun was in decorating the clubs and serving food and drink to guests at the end of the night – I began to realise that food and music were my art form.”

The road to transforming Tamsin’s gifts for organising parties and bringing together the most eclectic range of guests imaginable from a sideline into a business that would become pre-eminent in its field took Tamsin little more than six years after leaving university. “I considered management consultancy post-Edinburgh, rejected that idea and then went into a dull corporate events job, which I quickly decided wasn’t for me,” she explains. “I moved to Cape Town for a year, did a few different things, returned to London and eventually met Edward Enninful, the great British Vogue editor. That led to a spell working as a stylist for Italian Vogue but I think I already knew that I didn’t see my future in the fashion industry.”

The foundation of The Supper Club was initially a way for Tamsin to regain the thread of the dinner party scene that she had enjoyed so much at university.

“It was a hobby at first,” she agrees. “I missed the big dinner parties, meeting new friends around a table and actually being able to hear what they were saying. Night-clubs are fine but they don’t do much for the art of conversation and nothing at all if you want to meet a prospective partner! I decided to revive dinner parties in London and held my first at my father’s flat for about 20 people. For about a year, I carried on with the idea and by the end of it I understood that there was a serious gap in the market here. No-one else was doing this and people were prepared to pay a premium for the service I was providing.”

The Supper Club was such a runaway hit in London that after just two years Tamsin was able to turn attention to an even bigger metropolitan market for her business – America. The New York branch was established in 2007 and was soon followed by another in Los Angeles. Today there are chapters all over the States, including Miami, the city that Tamsin now calls home. The premise is simple enough – a members-only club devoted to the art of the dinner party and relationship-building via events that take place at a number of fabulous places all over the world. The workload required to sustain such a far-reaching business for The Supper Club’s founder is anything but simple.

“I’m a good host, I think, but I am always careful to balance the social me with the commercial version,” Tamsin says.

“When you’re the one in charge, you can’t rely on anyone else and that means I have to be disciplined, which comes naturally to me at least partly because I’ve always hated the idea of failure. In London, it was new and exciting; now it’s so well established and I’m enjoying all the different aspects of running a successful business. Fifteen years in the States have gone in a flash and although I’m married now (I met my husband at a dinner party, you might not be surprised to know!) and have two children of six and three, I still seem to spend almost as much time with my Supper Club family as I do with my real one. It’s hard to let control go sometimes but the truth is that I don’t want to build an empire and I do want to find a little more space for my loved ones and myself. So I shall start next week by taking a break for a week or two, going back to re-connect with the UK, having a holiday in Majorca and then re-charging my batteries for the next stage in the development of the business.”

On the face of it, we seem to have lost Tamsin to America for good but she is not so sure. “Miami is a beautiful place to be but there’s nowhere quite like England, which I do miss a lot at times,” she says. “I’m not convinced there is any one ideal place to live but I wouldn’t rule out a return home one day.”

At heart, there is a lot of Tamsin that is still the Bedales girl she was for so long.

“The school had a huge impact on me,” she says. “All those years have an effect. I learned about independence and the importance of friendships at Bedales, along with self-expression and the conviction that you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it. The memories of school are still warm and they’re still happy ones.”