George Gissing, the celebrated author of the novel New Grub Street, which satirizes the literary and journalistic world of 1880s London, attended the 20th April 1900 Dinner as a guest of Friar Edward Clodd.
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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(From Friar Sir John Hammerton’s Other Things than War, London: Macdonald, 1943, pp. 17–22), extracted by Friar Colin Smythe
On the north side of Fleet Street just now there is a gaping space that was not made by German bombs. It is the site of the Anderton’s Hotel, long famous as a resort of journalists. As a newspaper reader in my teens, a year or two before I had the delight of setting foot in London, it was the only hotel there known to me by name, and I had come to picture it with a dapper little white-bearded man standing at the door looking nervously through his monocle at the summons presented to him by officers of the law commanding him to appear at Old Bailey on a charge of forgery.
He was what I was then planning to become – a journalist – and his name was Richard Piggott, usually known as Doctor Piggott. As a witness before the Parnell Commission he had been forced into admissions concerning certain letters that had appeared in The Times on “Parnellism and Crime” that left no doubt he had forged these with a view to damaging Parnell and improving his own finances, which were in constant need of improvement, for he was rather a dandy, and straight journalism did not pay too well in those days.
Piggott made a swift getaway to Madrid, where, substituting a pistol for his pen, he wrote “finis” to an adventurous career. It is the way of youth that such events outstay in memory many of greater importance, and although I was to know Anderton’s Hotel and one particular room therein for many a year afterwards, I am sure that in the thousand times I passed through its front door as a member of the Whitefriars Club during the first twenty years of the century, I seldom did so without this picture of the little white-bearded rascal flashing momentarily into my mind’s eye. The very name of Piggott is enough to light it up.
A history of the Whitefriars Club and its guests would include the names of nearly all the foremost men in journalism and public life of the past seventy years, and it would be well worth writing – a task that I might essay some day should I ever feel like emulating old Tegetmeier in his yearage. The club still exists, but in a state of suspended animation. It stood up no too badly to the shock of World War One, but World War Two was a reeling blow. Wars are highly inimical to the social amenities of clubland. Who knows but it may be revived (there’s still funds in its treasury) when we have disposed for ever of the disturbers of world peace, and what a night for the revived Whitefriars if the new brother of 1900, who was my junior in age by a matter of three years, could be induced to breathe new life into it by presiding over its first post-War reunion.
His name is Winston Spencer Churchill.
R.D. Blumenfeld, Coulson Kernahan, Max Pemberton, Robertson Nicoll were among the eleven admitted with Churchill to the brotherhood at the close on 1900, when “eighteen candidates were awaiting election”. I was one of the eighteen, but a month or so later the company of Anthony Hope and A.E.W. Mason shed some lustre on those of us who were allowed in.
The future leader of the British Commonwealth and Empire (as he prefers to call it) in the Second World War was then at the very outset of his amazing career as a man of affairs. Elected for Oldham on his second offering only a few months before, he was a newcomer to Parliament – a newcomer, however, bearing a name well honoured in British politics. All that was to make his life world-historic, that will engage many a biographer in future years, and may well produce an international Churchill literature rivalling that of Napoleon, was still to be.
Though only in his twenty-sixth year, he had already attained by his own energy of mind and character a great and rising reputation in the dual roles of soldier and man of letters – and had he not enjoyed the dramatic luck of being captured by the Boers and escaping from Pretoria in the best Romantic manner while serving as a lieutenant with the South African Light Horse and also acting as war correspondent of the Morning Post? No fewer than five noteworthy books already stood to his name. The first was The Story of the Malakand Field Force (he served with the 31st Punjab Infantry), which, for a young man of twenty-three, shows bright promise in its literary style as well as being informed with a fine sense of the deeper issues involved: no more “war reporter’s” record of a small frontier expedition this.
But a year later he was busy again combining the professions of arms and letters with Kitchener’s expedition to Khartoum, when the Daily Telegraph had the satisfaction of printing his messages from the field, and in The River War (1899) he gave us a book which for maturity of writing and observation is astonishing.
It is more likely to endure on its literary merits than G.W. Steevens’s With Kitchener to Khartoum, its only real competitor in the literature of that picturesque campaign, and Steevens was five years his senior: a biggish margin in the twenties. […] 1900 was the busiest year of his pen for many a year to come.
