place

1920 Club

1920 establishments in the United KingdomGentlemen's clubs in London
1920 Club
1920 Club

The 1920 Club was a short-lived London ladies and gentlemen's club, which existed in the 1920s. The original London club was established for Liberal supporters of the Lloyd George government, after the National Liberal Club began systematically blackballing Lloyd George's supporters. This was symptomatic of a deeper schism at the time, between the 'official' Liberal Party in opposition, led by H.H. Asquith (which retained control of the party machinery), and those led by Lloyd George in a coalition with the Conservatives. The club opened in December 1920, in rooms at 2 Whitehall Court (inside what is now the Royal Horseguards Hotel), neighbouring the National Liberal Club - something the 1920 Club's committee described as 'a coincidence'. It evolved from being just a club for coalition supporting Liberals. It was a relatively unusual club, in that it admitted both men and women as full members. This resulted in a number of prominent Liberal Party women, such as Margery Corbett Ashby joining.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article 1920 Club (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

1920 Club
Whitehall Court, City of Westminster Covent Garden

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: 1920 ClubContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.5055 ° E -0.1244 °
placeShow on map

Address

Whitehall Court

Whitehall Court
SW1A 2EF City of Westminster, Covent Garden
England, United Kingdom
mapOpen on Google Maps

1920 Club
1920 Club
Share experience

Nearby Places

Whitehall Court
Whitehall Court

Whitehall Court in London, England, is one contiguous building but consists of two separate constructions. The south end was designed by Thomas Archer and A. Green and constructed as a block of luxury residential apartments in 1884 while the north end, occupied by the National Liberal Club, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and completed in 1887.The building was developed speculatively by the Liberal MP and property developer Jabez Balfour, through the Liberator Building Society which he controlled. In 1892 the Society collapsed, leaving thousands of investors penniless. Instead of advancing money to home buyers, the Society had advanced money to property companies to buy properties owned by Balfour, at a high price.Well-known residents have included William Gladstone, Lord Kitchener, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia and George Bernard Shaw.The building was used as Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) headquarters until the end of the First World War. A blue plaque in Mansfield Smith-Cumming's name at the SIS headquarters at 2 Whitehall Court was unveiled on 30 March 2015.1 & 2 Whitehall Court are occupied by the Royal Horseguards Hotel. 3 Whitehall Court is occupied by the Farmers Club. 4 Whitehall Court was occupied by the West Indian Club from 1912 until 1971. It is currently split into apartments: in February 2018, Transparency International reported that lawyer and activist Alexei Navalny has claimed that Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov owns two apartments in Whitehall Court worth £11.4 million.

Authors' Club
Authors' Club

The Authors' Club is a British membership organisation established as a place where writers could meet and talk. It was founded by the novelist and critic Walter Besant in 1891. It is headquartered at the National Liberal Club.The Authors' Club was based for many years next door to its present site, on Whitehall Court, first moving into the National Liberal Club in 1966. After ten years there, in 1976 the Authors' Club joined forces with The Arts Club in Dover Street, London W1. In 2011 it moved to Blacks, a Grade 2* listed building by John Meard in Dean Street, Soho - a house that was once home to a club run by Samuel Johnson and Thomas Gainsborough - where it remained for three years. It has now returned to its old home in the National Liberal Club. The Club welcomes both men and women as members, and is open to all those 'professionally engaged with literature'. It was at a dinner at the Authors’ Club that Oscar Wilde denounced the censorship of his play Salome. 'Casting aside all his gifts of humour and irony the angry Irish poet poured out his sense of assault and battery committed upon himself and laid his spirit bare and bruised before us. Having finished he did not sit down again but swept from the company still overwhelmed by the weight of his wrongs.'Three Poets Laureate — Alfred Austin, John Masefield and John Betjeman — have graced its ranks, while guest speakers included Émile Zola, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Winston Churchill, Bram Stoker, TS Eliot and Clement Attlee. Arthur Conan Doyle was for many years chairman, and often used to read his manuscripts to members prior to publication. The first president of the Authors' Club was the novelist George Meredith; he was followed by Thomas Hardy; who was in turn succeeded by JM Barrie. Subsequent presidents included the architectural historian Sir Banister Fletcher, the Anglo-Irish writer, dramatist and poet Lord Dunsany, Compton Mackenzie – author of Whisky Galore – and Laurence Meynell. The current president is the author and The Independent columnist John Walsh.