In July 1890, Oscar Wilde called at the Whitefriars Club’s rooms at Anderton’s Hotel and had a long talk about Dorian Gray with Friar Sidney Low, then editor of the St James’s Gazette.
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On 16th June 1899, more than twenty-five years from his first visit, the celebrated humorist Mark Twain returned to the Whitefriars Club.
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W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, as well as a dramatist, critic and essayist. Closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats attended as a guest on 23rd November 1900, when he spoke on ‘The Depredation Which We Call Progress’. He returned to the club four years later, on 11th November 1904, as a guest of the Prior of the Day, Friar Osman Edwards. On that occasion he is reported to have made “an impressively mystical speech” as he discussed the points touched by the opener.
