Beef And Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation

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The club originally met at the Imperial Phiz public house in Old Jewry in the City of London, but finding that venue not private enough, it ceased to meet there, and by 1709 it was not known "whether they have healed the breach and returned into the Kit-Cat community [or] … remove from place to place to prevent discovery." [4] Joseph Addison referred to the club in The Spectator in 1711 as still functioning. The historian Colin J. Horne suggests that the club may have come to an end with the death of Estcourt in 1712. [2] There was also a "Rump-Steak or Liberty Club" (also called "The Patriots Club") of London, which was in existence in 1733–34, whose members were "eager in opposition to Sir Robert Walpole". [5] Sublime Society of Beef Steaks [ edit ] Badge of the Sublime Society: a gridiron and the motto "Beef and Liberty"

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Colman, George; Bonnell Thornton (1754). The Connoisseur, By Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-General. London: R. Baldwin. OCLC 83521763. Thompson, Charles Willis, "Thirty Years of Gridiron Club Dinners", The New York Times, 24 October 1915, p. SM16 The first known beefsteak club (the Beef-Stake Club, Beef-Steak Clubb or Honourable Beef-Steak Club) seems to have been that founded in about 1705 in London. [2] It was started by some seceders from the Whiggish Kit-Cat Club, "desirous of proving substantial beef was as prolific a food for an English wit as pies and custards for a Kit-cat beau." [3] The actor Richard Estcourt was its "providore" or president and its most popular member. William Chetwood in A General History of the Stage is the much quoted source that the "chief Wits and great men of the nation" were members of this club. This was the first beefsteak club known to have used a gridiron as its badge. [3] In 1708, Dr. William King dedicated his poem "Art of Cookery" to "the Honourable Beef Steak Club". His poem includes the couplet: East India Club 1849–present (Incorporating the former Public Schools Club, which now makes up most of its membership)

Many beefsteak clubs of the 18th and 19th centuries have used the traditional grilling gridiron as their symbol and some are even named after it: the Gridiron Club of Oxford was founded in 1884, and the Gridiron Club of Washington D.C. was founded the following year. These two clubs also still exist. [19] [20]

Beef and Liberty : Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation Beef and Liberty : Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation

Other "Beefsteak Clubs" included one in Dublin from 1749, for performers and politicians, and several in London and elsewhere. Many used the gridiron as their symbol, and some are even named after it, including the Gridiron Club of Washington, D.C., US. In 1876, a Beefsteak Club was formed that became an essential after-theatre club for the bohemian theatre set, including W. S. Gilbert, and still meets in Irving Street. Allen, Robert Joseph (1933). The Clubs of Augustan London. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. OCLC 2174749. Timbs (1872) gives no date for this club but cites Memoirs of Charles Lee Lewis, vol ii, p. 196 as his source. Gilbert, who could not bring himself to sit through the opening nights of his own plays, often waited at the club until it was time to go to the theatre for the curtain calls. [36]Report of the fiftieth anniversary dinner, "Beefsteak and Brotherhood", Cairns Post, 6 June 1936, p.13. a b c Horne, Colin J., "Notes on Steele and the Beef-Steak Club", The Review of English Studies, July 1945, pp. 239–44 Weinreb, Ben; Hibbert, Christopher; Keay, Julia; Keay, John (2008). The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4050-4924-5. The oldest dining club in Australia is the Melbourne Beefsteak Club, established in May 1886, [21] when merchant John Deegan, [22] City Councillor William Ievers, [23] solicitor James Maloney and manufacturer Frank Stuart [24] gathered with friends for regular lunches. [25] Their motto was "Beefsteak and Brotherhood", and the membership was made up of gentlemen from business, the professions, and academia. [26] It held its 300th dinner on 14 October 1916 [27] and its 400th on 11 August 1928, in the Hotel Windsor. [28] [29] "Leadership in War", the speech that General Sir John Monash gave to the Club on 30 March 1926, was included in a 2004 collection entitled The Speeches that Made Australia. [30] Successors to the Sublime Society [ edit ] Dining room at the Lyceum, used by the Sublime Society and later by Henry Irving. The kitchen is at the rear, beyond the gridiron-shaped grating. Irving's dinners and the present Sublime Society [ edit ] Thomas Sheridan founded a "Beefsteak Club" in Dublin at the Theatre Royal in 1749, and of this Peg Woffington was president. According to William and Robert Chambers, writing in 1869, "it could hardly be called a club at all, seeing all expenses were defrayed by Manager Sheridan, who likewise invited the guests – generally peers and members of parliament. … Such weekly meetings were common to all theatres, it being a custom for the principal performers to dine together every Saturday and invite 'authors and other geniuses' to partake of their hospitality." [3]