History
Founded in the year of the Constitution of 1782, the club's first home was a house in Kildare Street built by Sir Henry Cavendish on land bought from James FitzGerald, 20th Earl of Kildare, later first Duke of Leinster. In 1786 the club acquired an adjoining house also built by Cavendish, thus completing its original clubhouse. [1]
There is a tradition that what prompted the foundation of the club was the blackballing of William Burton Conyngham at Daly's Club in Dame Street. [1] This led to an exodus of members from Daly's, who formed a new club which soon rivalled their old one as a fashionable haunt and which in the end eclipsed it. Although by the later 19th century the club was closely associated with the Protestant Ascendancy and Irish Unionism, nevertheless its earliest members included men strongly opposed to the British connection, such as Sir Jonah Barrington, who argued against the creation in 1801 of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. [2]
In a famous incident at the Kildare Street Club in 1806, Earl Landaff, a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, denounced the "eighty-five scoundrels" who had blackballed his brother Montague James Mathew, and stalked out of the club, never to return. [1]
By 1840, the club had some six hundred and fifty members, "a large and elegant card-room, coffee, reading, and billiard-rooms". There was a committee of fifteen members, elected annually. Admission to membership was by ballot, with an entrance fee of £26, 10s., and an annual subscription of £5. [3] [4]
In 1858, it was decided to build a new clubhouse, as the original premises at 6, Kildare Street, were now too small for the club's needs. In 1859, the club was described in The Building News as "an institution famous for aristocracy, claret and whist..." Between 1859 and 1860, the new clubhouse was built, designed by Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward, at a cost of some £21,000. This replaced three existing houses on Kildare Street and one on Leinster Street, which were demolished, giving an L-shaped new building, with an internal plan similar to that of the Reform Club in Pall Mall, London. The club committee had altered Deane and Woodward's original Italian Gothic design, insisting on large arched windows divided by thin columns, and the outcome was described as Byzantine. [5] The new building is adorned by "whimsical beasts". [6]
The club had planned to move from the old to the new building in 1861, but on 11 November 1860, there was a disastrous fire at the old clubhouse. Three maids died, and a fourth was saved by being at the time in the bedroom of the club accountant, from which she was rescued. All of the club's pictures and furniture and a library of fifteen thousand books were destroyed, and the club moved into its new building before completion. [5]
In Parnell and his Island (1887), George Moore wrote scathingly of the club:
The Kildare Street Club is one of the most important institutions in Dublin. It represents in the most complete acceptation of the word the rent party in Ireland; better still, it represents all that is respectable, that is to say, those who are gifted with an oyster-like capacity for understanding this one thing: that they should continue to get fat in the bed in which they were born. This club is a sort of oyster bed into which all the eldest sons of the landed gentry fall as a matter of course. There they remain spending their days, drinking sherry and cursing Gladstone in a sort of dialect, a dead language which the larva-like stupidity of the club has preserved. The green banners of the League are passing, the cries of a new Ireland awaken the dormant air, the oysters rush to their window – they stand there open-mouthed, real pantomime oysters, and from the corner of Frederick Street, a group of young girls watch them in silent admiration. [7]
Overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo-Irish, in 1900 the club was called by a member "the only place in Ireland where one can enjoy decent caviar". [8] It has been estimated that at about this time only between two and six per cent of the club's members were supporters of Irish Home Rule. The most popular Dublin club for the Irish Parliamentary Party was the St Stephen's Green Club, while the Kildare Street Club was closely associated with the Irish Conservative Party and later the Irish Unionist Alliance. [9]
Redevelopment and reuse
After the partition of Ireland of 1921, and again after the Second World War, the Kildare Street Club found itself in decline. In 1976 it merged with the Dublin University Club, thereafter sharing the premises of the latter at 17, St Stephen's Green, under the name "Kildare Street and University Club". [6] [10] In 1967 the owner of the Kildare Street premises, Phoenix Assurance, sought permission to demolish half the building and replace it with an office block, having printed the notice in the newspapers in Irish. Dublin Corporation refused permission in June 1967. The next owners, Rampart Holdings, sought permission to redevelop the interior of the building in March 1971, and as only the exterior of the building was protected by a preservation order, this work was allowed to go ahead. The interior of the building was gutted, with the vaulted arcades, stone fireplaces, carved columns, staircase and flying buttresses removed. The work began in 1971, and was finished by 1973, having converted the interior to accommodate 15,500 square feet of office space. [11]
As of 2002, the building was leased to the State Heraldic Museum and Genealogical Office and the Alliance française. [6] [10]
Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford,, known to his family as Frank Longford and styled Lord Pakenham from 1945 to 1961, was a British politician and social reformer. A member of the Labour Party, he was one of its longest-serving politicians. He held cabinet positions on several occasions between 1947 and 1968. Longford was politically active until his death in 2001. A member of an old, landed Anglo-Irish family, the Pakenhams, he was one of the few aristocratic hereditary peers ever to serve in a senior capacity within a Labour government.
Anglo-Irish people denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until 1871, or to a lesser extent one of the English dissenting churches, such as the Methodist church, though some were Roman Catholics. They often defined themselves as simply "British", and less frequently "Anglo-Irish", "Irish" or "English". Many became eminent as administrators in the British Empire and as senior army and naval officers since the Kingdom of England and Great Britain were in a real union with the Kingdom of Ireland for over a century, before politically uniting into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.
Earl of Longford is a title that has been created twice in the Peerage of Ireland.
Brigadier-General Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford, KP, MVO, known as Lord Silchester until 1887, was an Irish peer and soldier.
Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford, known simply as Thomas Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of African history, Victorian and post-Victorian British history, and trees.
General William Lygon Pakenham, 4th Earl of Longford, styled The Honourable William Pakenham before 1860, was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Conservative politician.
Kildare Street is a street in Dublin, Ireland.
Molesworth Street is a street in Dublin, Ireland named after Richard Molesworth, 3rd Viscount Molesworth and links the more notable Dawson Street with Kildare Street and lies just over 200 m to the north of St. Stephens Green in Dublin's central business district.
Benjamin Woodward was an Irish architect who, in partnership with Sir Thomas Newenham Deane, designed a number of buildings in Dublin, Cork and Oxford.
Sir Thomas Newenham Deane was an Irish architect, the son of Sir Thomas Deane and Eliza Newenham, and the father of Sir Thomas Manly Deane. His father and son were also architects.
Edward Arthur Henry Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford was an Irish peer, politician, and littérateur. Also known as Eamon de Longphort, he was a member of the fifth Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Parliament, in the 1940s.
Catherine Sarah Dorothea Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington, known before her marriage as Kitty Pakenham, was the wife of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.
Events from the year 1806 in Ireland.
Thomas Pakenham, 1st Baron Longford was an Irish peer and politician.
Sackville Hamilton PC (Ire) was an Anglo-Irish politician.
St. Peter's Church was a former Church of Ireland parish church located in Aungier Street in Dublin, Ireland, where the Dublin YMCA building now stands. It was built on land that formerly belonged to the Whitefriars in Dublin. It served the largest Church of Ireland parish in Dublin.
Edward Michael Pakenham, 2nd Baron Longford was an Anglo-Irish naval officer, peer and landowner.
Daly's Club, with premises known as Daly's Club House, was a gentlemen's club in Dublin, Ireland, a centre of social and political life between its origins in about 1750 and its end in 1823.
Elizabeth Pakenham, 1st Countess of Longford, formerly Elizabeth Cuffe, was an Irish noblewoman. She was the wife of Thomas Pakenham, 1st Baron Longford, the mother of Edward Michael Pakenham, 2nd Baron Longford, and the grandmother of Thomas Pakenham, 2nd Earl of Longford.
Hercules Langford Rowley PC was an Irish politician and landowner.
