- Dining club
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A dining club is a social group, usually requiring membership (which may, or may not be available only to certain people), which meets for dinners and discussion on a regular basis. They may also often have guest speakers. Clubs may limit their membership to those who meet highly specific membership requirements, for example the Coningsby Club requires that one was a member of either OUCA or CUCA, the Conservative Associations at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively. whilst others may require applicants to pass an interview, or simply pay a large membership fee.
A dining club differs from a gentlemen's club in that it does not have permanent premises, often changing the location of its meetings and dinners. However, the members of both dining and gentlemen's clubs are often from the same social background.
In the United States, similar clubs that limit membership to students of a particular university are referred to as eating clubs. Replaced largely by the modern fraternity and sorority system in United States, eating clubs are now limited to a few colleges and universities, most notably Princeton University, Davidson College, and Mount Olive College.
List of dining clubs
This list is incomplete. Date of founding in brackets
- Kit-Cat Club
- Beefsteak Club (c.1705)
- October Club (1711-1714)
- Society of Knights of the Round Table (1720)
- Society of Dilettanti (1732)
- Divan Club (1744-1746)
- The Club (1764)
- Lunar Society (1775)
- Bullingdon Club (1780)
- Trinity College Dublin Dining Club, London (c.1810)
- Grillions (1812)
- Geological Society Dining Club (1824)
- Raleigh Club (1827)
- Pitt Club (1835)
- Blue Boar Club (1851)
- X-club (1864–1893)
- Myrmidon Club (1865)
- The 16' Club (c.1875)
- Ye Cherubs (Queens' College, Cambridge) (1895)
- Stock Exchange Luncheon Club (1898-2006)
- Coefficients (1902)
- Square Club (1908)
- The Other Club (1911)
- Cercle de l'Union interalliée (1917)
- Ratio Club (1949-1958)
- Piers Gaveston Society (1977)
- The Strafford Club (1995)
Fictional
The Twelve True Fishermen is the name of a fictional club, the title of a short story by G. K. Chesterton in which his detective Father Brown solves the riddle of the disappearance of the club's silver.
See also
Categories:- Dining clubs
- Lists of organizations
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