For a club that neglected to keep minutes of its meetings for the first three years of its existence, it is amazing that the formation of the United Arts Club in Dublin can be firmly traced to 1907, writes Wesley Boyd
Perhaps the correspondence and recorded observations of the celebrated people associated with its opening help to place it at that particular moment of the calendar a hundred years ago. The poet W.B. Yeats, his brother Jack, the painter, Lady Gregory of the Abbey Theatre, William Orpen, the painter, Hugh Lane, art collector and dealer, the Count and Countess Markievicz were among the first to join.
The prime mover in establishing a non-sectarian, non-political social club for the cultivation and study of the arts was a Dubliner, Mrs Ellie Duncan, the curator of the Municipal Gallery. She and her husband, James, a civil servant in the British administration, piloted the club through a hazardous infancy in rented rooms in Lincoln Place, beside Trinity College. Yeats was a frequent attender and entertained members with his flowing eloquence. He would lose himself in speech.
In a letter of 1909 to Lady Gregory he wrote: "Last night, at the Arts Club, I found Orpen and some others sitting down to dinner and joined them and we talked. Presently they got up to go and I was startled to see a clean knife and fork and no plate before me. I appealed to the attendants to know whether I had eaten or not. One said yes and one no. Presently they came to say that they had both come to the conclusion that I had not. I then ate my dinner and was rather late at rehearsal."
Mainly to meet a demand for overnight accommodation, the club moved to larger premises at 44, St Stephen's Green in 1910. New members included Tom Kettle, the poet who was to die at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, his brother-in-law, Cruise O'Brien, a talented journalist (father of the renowned Conor Cruise O'Brien), Oliver St John Gogarty and Joseph Mary Plunkett, poet and rebel, executed in 1916. He denounced the actions of the employers during the great lock-out of 1913 as did Yeats, Padraic Colum, James Stephens and Seamus O'Sullivan, all members of the club.
As in all social clubs, members did not always act in harmony. St John Gogarty threatened to resign when another member blamed him for the drunken behaviour of two guests who had given his name as their host. Gogarty protested he was not in the club at the time and the committee passed a resolution regretting the misunderstanding. In spite of the tensions and conflicting loyalties of the 1916 Rising, the first World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War, members of the club continued to meet without rancour in keeping with its non-sectarian and non-political principles.
Many of them, by upbringing and religion, would have been unionist. Others, such as Constance Markievicz, Erskine Childers, Robert Barton and Darrell Figgis were active participants on the nationalist side. When the first World War ended in November 1918 there were half-hearted attempts in the club to celebrate the Allied victory. Dermot O'Brien, president of the Royal Hibernian Academy, noted that members "gathered hurriedly together for dinner and jubilation, lit candles in all the windows and Cruise O'Brien and Jim Duncan tried to get up a festive feeling and sing-song with rather poor success."
When the lease of the St Stephen's Green premises expired the club, with great financial difficulty, bought a house at 3, Upper Fitzwilliam Street - where it remains to this day. In the restless years of the early 1920s the house, to quote from Patricia Boylan's detailed history of the club, All Cultivated People (1988), became "a neutral zone, an oasis of peace, a cultural island". As the Civil War raged a dinner was given for Lennox Robinson to mark the opening of his play The Round Table at the Abbey. The mischievous Cruise O'Brien is reputed to have recited a long ode on the play, including the lines: "Some people who should have been there/ Have asked me to tell them the plot/ But so far as myself is aware/ That's just what the thing hasn't got".
Another club dinner was given in 1924 to honour the award of the Nobel Prize to W.B. Yeats. The poet first learned he had won the award in a telephone call from another member, Bertie Smyllie, the editor of The Irish Times. Smyllie recalled that Yeats's first words to him were: "How much?" Such was the demand for tickets that the dinner had to be moved to Clery's Dining Hall. The treasurer reported the event was a great success and that "most people had paid their subscriptions".
The club survived the shortages imposed by the second World War, restricting lunch and dinner to one hour to save gas. The painter Arthur Power, friend of James Joyce, left in 1942 to join the British army and in the same year the Blueshirt General Eoin O'Duffy became a member. Down the years the club has enjoyed an all-embracing membership, representative not only of the arts but of commerce, the professions and the public service.
In my own 40-odd years of membership I have witnessed the caprices and vagaries of the members of an unique institution. Like the night that two senior civil servants had an argument which ended on the steps of the High Court when one agreed to compensate the other for slander by way of a substantial payment to the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Society. Like the night a banker threw a pint of stout over me when I dared to suggest the Provos had to accept some responsibility for the violence in the North. Like the night an ambassador's wife divested herself of her skirt and danced the Can-Can, splits and all. . .
I could go on and on. Just like the Arts Club.