What’s the origin of the phrase ‘In the club’?
More fully, this expression is ‘in the pudding club’. It is a 20th century British expression. An early example of it in print is in James Curtis’s novel, The Gilt Kid, 1936:
You were put in the pudden club by the squire’s son.
It’s possible that Curtis coined the phrase but, more probably, it emerged as street slang sometime before 1936.