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Authors' Club

1891 establishments in the United KingdomArts organizations established in 1891British artist groups and collectivesBritish writers' organisationsGentlemen's clubs in London
Soho, LondonUse British English from July 2015
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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.

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

Authors' Club
Whitehall Place, City of Westminster Covent Garden

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N 51.5061 ° E -0.1238 °
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National Liberal Club

Whitehall Place 1
SW1A 2HD City of Westminster, Covent Garden
England, United Kingdom
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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.