National Liberal Club
The National Liberal Club is a London private members' club, open to both men and women. It was established by William Ewart Gladstone in 1882 to provide club facilities for Liberal Party campaigners among the newly enlarged electorate following the Third Reform Act in 1884, and was envisioned as a more accessible version of a traditional London club. Since 1947, it has also been the home of Liberal International.
The club's Italianate building on the Embankment of the river Thames is the second-largest club-house built in London. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, it was completed in 1887. Its facilities include a dining room, a bar, function rooms, a billiards room, a smoking room, a library and an outdoor riverside terrace. It is located at Whitehall Place, close to the Houses of Parliament, the Thames Embankment and Trafalgar Square.
History
Early years
The genesis of the club lay with Welsh Liberal party activist Arthur John Williams, who proposed the creation of such a club at a Special General Meeting of the short-lived Century Club on 14 May 1882, so as to provide "a home for democracy, void of the class distinction associated with the Devonshire and Reform Clubs". The first full meeting of the new club was held on 16 November 1882, at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Victoria Street. The Century Club itself then merged into the NLC at the end of the year. In its early years, the club declared its objects to be:An initial circular for subscribers meant that by the end of 1882, 2,500 members from over 500 towns and districts had already signed up for the new club, and membership would reach 6,500 by the time the clubhouse opened in 1887.
An initial temporary clubhouse opened on Trafalgar Square in May 1883, on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall. The club would be based here for the next four years. The opening of the first clubhouse was marked by an inaugural banquet for 1,900 people at the Royal Aquarium off Parliament Square, which Punch reported saw the consumption of 200 dozen bottles of Pommery champagne. During the club's time on Trafalgar Square, a parliamentary question was asked in the House of Commons about the White Ensign being raised on the club's flagpole as part of a prank.
The club's foundation stone on the modern clubhouse was laid by Gladstone on 9 November 1884, when he declared "Speaking generally, I should say there could not be a less interesting occasion than the laying of the foundation-stone of a Club in London. For, after all, what are the Clubs of London? I am afraid little else than temples of luxury and ease. This, however, is a club of a very different character", and envisioned the club as a popular institution for the mass electorate. However, another of the club's founders, G. W. E. Russell, noted "We certainly never foresaw the palatial pile of terra-cotta and glazed tiles which now bears that name. Our modest object was to provide a central meeting-place for Metropolitan and provincial Liberals, where all the comforts of life should be attainable at what are called 'popular prices'", but added "at the least, we meant our Club to be a place of "ease" to the Radical toiler. But Gladstone insisted that it was to be a workshop dedicated to strenuous labour." Funds for the clubhouse were raised by selling 40,000 shares of £5 each, in a Limited Liability Company, with the unusual stipulation that "No shareholder should have more than ten votes", so as to prevent a few wealthy men from dominating the club. However, this only raised £70,000, and so an additional £52,400 was raised for the construction of the clubhouse by the Liberal Central Association. The remaining £30,000 necessary was raised by mortgage debentures.
The clubhouse was still unfinished when it opened its doors in 1887, but it was opened early on 20 June to allow members to watch that year's Jubilee processions from the club terrace. It was when the club had only recently moved to its present address that "Bloody Sunday" ensued on its doorstep during the Trafalgar Square riot of 13 November 1887. NLC members flocked to the windows to watch George Bernard Shaw address the demonstration, and later in the day, witnessed the bloodshed which ensued.
In its late-19th-century heyday, its membership was primarily political, but had a strong journalistic and even bohemian character. Members were known to finish an evening's dining by diving into the Thames. Of the club's political character, George Bernard Shaw remarked at a debate in the club, "I have never yet met a member of the National Liberal Club who did not intend to get into Parliament at some time, except those who, like our chairman Lord Carrington, are there already."
On the club's launch, it represented all factions of liberalism from whiggery to radicalism, but within four years it was rocked by the Home Rule Crisis of 1886, which saw the Liberal Unionists led by Joseph Chamberlain and the Marquess of Hartington secede from the party and eventually go into alliance with the Conservatives. Indeed, Chamberlain had been one of the NLC's most enthusiastic promoters upon its launch. At the 1884 ceremony of Gladstone's foundation-stone-laying for the club, Hartington had argued that the club would be the future home of Chamberlain's Radical Birmingham Caucus, and Chamberlain, standing next to him, pointedly refused to contradict him. Chamberlain himself resigned in 1886, shortly after the Home Rule split, Hartington and other prominent Liberal Unionists followed early in 1887, and when a further 130 Unionists simultaneously seceded from the club in 1889, the Scots Observer called it "one of the most important events that has recently occurred in home politics", due to its ramifications for the Liberal Party breaking in two.
File:National Liberal Club Wikimedia UK foyer illustrations.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Three founding vice-presidents of the club: the Marquess of Hartington, Earl Granville, and William Vernon Harcourt. Within five years, Hartington would resign over the club's pro-Home Rule direction.
The club enjoyed a reputation for radicalism, and H. V. Emy records that Radicals secured
This reputation for radicalism was underlined when former Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery resigned from the club in September 1909, denouncing it as "a hotbed of socialism."
Several discussion groups met at the club, including the Rainbow Circle in the 1890s, an influential group of Liberal, Fabian and socialist thinkers who came to be identified with the Bloomsbury Group.
It was also the site of much intrigue in the Liberal Party over the years, rivalling the Reform Club as a social centre for Liberals by the advent of the First World War, although its membership was largely based on Liberal activists in the country at large; it was built on such a large scale to provide London club facilities for Liberal activists from around the country, justifying its use of the description 'national'.
On 22 March 1893, during the Second Reading of the Clubs Registration Bill, the Conservative MP Thomas Gibson Bowles told the House of Commons "I am informed there is an establishment not far from the House frequented by Radical millionaires and released prisoners, the National Liberal Club, where an enormous quantity of whisky is consumed." Despite this remark, it seems that the club accounted for relatively little alcohol consumption by the standards of the day – Herbert Samuel commented in 1909 that the average annual consumption of alcoholic liquor per NLC member was 31s. 4d. per annum, which compared very favourably with equivalent Conservative clubs, including 33s. 5d. for the nearby Constitutional Club, 48s. for the City Carlton Club, and 77s. for the Junior Carlton Club. One possible explanation was the strength of the Temperance movement in the Liberal party at the time.
On 3 December 1909, Liberal Chancellor David Lloyd George used the club to make a speech fiercely denouncing the House of Lords, in what was seen as a de facto launch of the "People's Budget" general election of January 1910.
On 21 November 1911, the club was one of a number of buildings to have their windows smashed in by the suffragette Women's Social and Political Union, in protest at the Liberal government's inaction over votes for women.
During the Marconi scandal of 1912, Winston Churchill used a speech to the club to mount an impassioned defence of embattled ministers David Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs, asserting that there was "no stain of any kind" upon their characters.
First World War
The club's cosmopolitan and internationalist make-up drew outside criticism as nationalist feelings rose in the First World War - the fervently anti-German and anti-semitic campaigner Arnold White wrote in his 1917 tract The Hidden Hand that:From late 1916 to December 1919, the clubhouse was requisitioned by the British government for use as a billet for Canadian troops, the club relocating in the meantime to several rooms in the Westminster Palace Hotel - the venue of its original meetings in 1882–3. Many of the Canadian troops billeted in the clubhouse were offered heavily discounted temporary club membership during their stay, although it appears that some overstayed their welcome – a "farewell dinner" by the club on 19 March 1919 attempted to hint that their departure was imminently expected. At the end of the First World War, the Canadian soldiers who had stayed there presented the club with a moose head as a gift of thanks, which was hung in the billiards room for many years. After the troops finally left in December 1919, the club was closed for a year for renovations, and did not re-open until 19 December 1920.
As H. H. Asquith was deposed as prime minister by David Lloyd George, he spent his last full evening as prime minister on 8 December 1916 reporting to a full meeting of the Liberal Party at the club. It provided an overwhelming vote of confidence in his leadership.