42 Reconstruction of Crabbet Club [1890 



only, nearly all the members of it were Tories, two or three of them in 

 Parliament, and when in 1882 I took the somewhat violent line I did 

 about Egypt and war ensued, several of the members taking offence 

 ceased their attendance, and the Club as far as the Crabbet meetings 

 were concerned became less popular, and this state of things was 

 aggravated when I stood for Parliament as a Home Ruler in 1885 and 

 1886, and it was all but submerged by my imprisonment at Galway. 

 Hardly any of the old Wilton members would answer the invitations 

 to it, and Pembroke himself, the most tolerant of men, as an Irish 

 landlord with large interests at stake in the county of Dublin, felt it 

 a grievance that I should have identified myself with the Land League 

 and the Plan of Campaign. All this was natural enough, and I could 

 not complain of the defection. The Club as the " Crabbet Club " was 

 still continued, but reconstructed on different lines with a number of 

 young men, Oxford undergraduates, most of them professing Home 

 Rule opinions. The chief of these were the two Peels, Willy and 

 George, sons of the Speaker, Arthur Pollen, Herbert Vivian, Leo 

 Maxse, Percy Wyndham (son of Sir Hugh), Theodore Fry, Theobald 

 Mathew, Artie Brand, and Loulou Harcourt, the only three of the old 

 set being Mark Napier, Eddy Hamilton, and Nigel Kingscote. 



The young men thus got. together, most of them fresh from the Uni- 

 versities, though also bent on amusement, had tastes more intellectual 

 than their predecessors, and besides our lawn tennis handicaps, we had 

 much after-dinner speaking, and a verse competition with the election 

 of a poet laureate for the year. The Club was in this condition when 

 in 1889 George Wyndham, becoming a member, took it in hand, and 

 seeing its intellectual capabilities brought new blood into it by intro- 

 ducing friends of his own, already holding a certain position in the 

 political world, and who have since no few of them climbed to fame. 

 Among these were George Curzon, Harry Cust, Houghton (now Lord 

 Crewe), Frederick Locker, Umphreville Swinburne, cousin of the poet, 

 St. George Lane Fox, Eddy Tennant, Laurence Currie, George Leveson 

 Gower, Esme Howard, Elcho, Dick Grosvenor, Alfred Douglas. Charles 

 Gatty, Morpeth, and his brother Hubert Howard, and on a single oc- 

 casion Oscar Wilde, and it was in the company of these that our meet- 

 ings of the early nineties were held. They were really brilliant meet- 

 ings, with post-prandial oratory of the most amusing kind, and were 

 productive of verse of a quite high order. The number of the members 

 was limited to twenty, and there was much competition when a vacancy 

 occurred. The poetry of the Crabbet Club has been preserved in print, 

 and is one of the curiosities of literature, deserving a place, I venture 

 to think, in company with the best verse of a not serious kind, including 

 even perhaps that of the Mermaid Tavern. My own part in these 

 meetings, which were essentially convivial, was that of Chairman and 



