Dull Men’s Club – is it actually… interesting?

In New York City, sometime in the late 1980s, a group of friends sat in a bar near Central Park and flicked through a magazine.

One man, after looking at the stories of boxing, wrestling, and judo, turned to his friends and said, with some regret: “We don’t do any of those things.”

Almost 40 years later, on a coach on the M40 in England, a different man opened a Mars bar.

When he noticed the bar was smooth, rather than rippled, he posted a picture on Facebook. The post was picked up by the media – including the BBC – and the story of the unusually-smooth chocolate was read by millions of people around the world.

The friends in Manhattan, and the man with the Mars bar, do not know each other – but they are linked by a trans-Atlantic thread. Their stories mark the founding, and perhaps the high point, of a growing fellowship: the Dull Men’s Club.

Grover Click, now 85, was one of those friends in the New York bar in the 1980s.

“When my friend said ‘we don’t do any of those things’, someone else said: ‘We’re kind of dull, aren’t we?’ So I said: ‘OK – let’s start a club for us dull men.'”

The club began as a joke. They raced lifts (or elevators) to see which was fastest, and once organised a bus tour that started and finished in Manhattan, without going anywhere in between.

“We walked round the outside and the driver explained tyre pressures,” Grover remembers. “Silliness like that.”

In 1996, after Grover moved to England, his nephew offered to build a website for “that silly Dull Men’s Club”. And from there, says Grover, “it kind of morphed, and has really caught on now”.

Grover’s Dull Men’s Club Facebook group – it’s the one with the copyright symbol in the title, there are copycats – now has 1.5 million members. On it, men and women of all ages celebrate their observations and obsessions, without fear of ridicule (ridicule is against the rules, as is politics, religion, and swearing).

Posts this week include praise for the £2 coin design; before and after pictures of brass instrument repair; and how long it takes to fill a water bottle. One person comments: “Every morning at work I refill my water bottle and it takes 47 seconds… sometimes I close my eyes and count to 47.”

But the Dull Men’s Club is more than just a Facebook page: it also has a newsletter, a calendar, real-life meet-ups, and awards – including the coveted Anorak of the Year, for the truly dedicated dullster (Grover prefers dullster – “The opposite of hipster,” he says – to dullard).

This year’s winner was Tim Webb, 68, from Orpington in south-east London. He takes pictures of potholes with plastic ducks in.

Tim started taking his pictures in January last year, after a pothole in his area wasn’t repaired properly.

“I had a word with a council official, and he recommended that I look at the manifesto of the Monster Raving Loony Party from 2017. In there, it says residents should highlight potholes with plastic ducks – seriously, this is true. And I thought, OK, I’ll put plastic ducks in potholes.”

After taking the pictures (for safety reasons, he works at quiet times and takes a friend to help) he sent them to the council, and posted them on a local Facebook group. Encouraged by the feedback, he progressed from plastic ducks to other visual jokes.

“I put a toad in a pothole – not a real toad – and wrote: ‘This is my favourite Sunday dish.’ And people either get it or they don’t.”

Tim does not know how many potholes he has photographed – he guesses 100 to 150 – but now the pothole art is the “interesting bit” of his campaign. The dull bit, he admits, is his spreadsheet of every road defect in the borough, which allows him to chase up repairs.

“There are about 2,500 entries on there,” he says.

Grover encouraged Tim to join the Dull Men’s Club after seeing the pothole pictures online. Tim did so, and was happy to accept the Anorak of the Year award in the good-natured spirit in which it was offered.

But for Tim, there is a serious side to his hobby, even if it could seem… well, less glamorous than others.

“I don’t do it for money or fame,” he says. “I do it because I want to make a difference to my community.”

It’s an outlook shared by the Dull Men’s Club Anorak of the Year from 2021 – who, it turns out, is neither dull, nor a man.

In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, Rachel Williamson was looking at a socially-distanced queue outside a chemist in her hometown of Rhyl in Denbighshire.

“My twin sister joined the queue. They’re all looking miserable, and I’m in the car waiting for her. And I just wondered – could I put a sparkly hat on the post box to make this queue smile?”

Although Rachel – a 61-year-old retired police detective – had knitted since she was a girl, she couldn’t crochet. With little else to do in lockdown, she tried, and within two days had a sparkly hat for the post box outside the chemist. Another one, for the box outside the Post Office, soon followed.

“My sister went in the Post Office and she said: ‘Nobody’s talking about Covid any more, they’re talking about the post box topper outside the door.'”

She has since topped more than 300 post boxes, and made countless other decorations for the community. She does requests from elsewhere in the UK – “I’ve sent one to Scotland, one to Nantwich [in Cheshire]” – and local people chip in with supplies.

“My living room is full of wool,” she says. “I don’t know where the Christmas tree is going to go.”

During lockdown, Rachel’s toppers featured in a charity book and calendar, which brought her to the attention of the Dull Men’s Club. So how does it feel for a woman to be invited to such a club?

“I’d never heard of it, but I felt very privileged,” she says.

Yet despite being an Anorak of the Year, is Rachel’s hobby even dull? Is it not colourful, life-enhancing, even – dare we say – quite interesting?

“I’ve got three grown-up sons, and when they come round, all I talk about is my knitting,” she says. “I am the dullest person on the planet to them. I’ve gone from a fast-moving detective to fluff and stuff.”

Like Tim, Rachel has found purpose in her (arguably) dull hobby.

“After 18 years in the police, it has restored my faith in people. The people of Rhyl have been absolutely great. And we’ve made lots of people smile.”

She picked up her Anorak of the Year award in a ceremony in a pub near Llangollen.

“The people who haven’t got hobbies are the dull people.” says Rachel.

It’s a realisation that also came to Grover Click – the original Dull Man – while compiling the club’s calendar, decades after that first conversation in the New York bar.

“We started writing about these people and thought it was kind of funny,” he says. “But then you see these guys are onto something. They’ve got their act together.”

To sum it up, Grover points to his foreword to the 2024 Dull Men’s Club calendar.

“What they [the dull men] are doing is referred to in Japan as ikigai,” he writes. “It gives a sense of purpose, a motivating force. A reason to jump out of bed in the morning.”