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| Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwoood |
List of Gargoyle Club members compiled by Michael Law (a friend of Ivan Moffatt) in the late 1950s and found illustrated (as a hand-written list - hence some inaccuracies) in Michael Luke's David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) To quote from Michael Luke's 2005 obituary: 'This rooftop den was founded by David Tennant in 1925, high above the corner of Dean and Meard streets, and reached by a rickety lift whose dimensions were such that strangers entering it left as intimate friends at the top.
The Gargoyle Club was a theatrical arena for London society, high and low. The Moorish interior - its walls narcissistically mirrored with fragments of 18th-century glass and inspired by Henri Matisse (himself a member) - was described by Luke as "Mystery suffused with a tender eroticism". On its dance floor Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Tallulah Bankhead conducted a rite of hedonistic alcoholic abandon while Noël Coward and Francis Bacon looked on, and Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean filled out membership applications...'
Many more names to come (Writers, Poets and Politburo.) The full list pretty much covers London society including boho and haute boho from 1925 -1965. Some of the names are now untraceable...
[Ladies etc.,] Joan Wyndham (Shivarg), Janetta Parlade, Caroline Blackwood, Mamaine Paget, Sally Belfrage, Barbara Skelton, Henrietta Moraes, Caryl Chance, Nora Sayre, Jeanne Campbell, Kitty Epstein, Natalie Newhouse (Newton) Margaret Lygon, Sarah Macmillan, Margaret - Ann Ducaine, Glur Dyson Taylor (Quennell) Josephine Lowry Carry, Suna Portman, Pamela Tellerson, Jennifer Fry, Sonia de Leon (Quennell) Venetia Murray, Jennifer Renwick, Tania Vinogradov (Hobson) Deidre Craig (Levi), Anne Dunn, Antonia Fraser, Anne Paget, Charlotte Starbussman, Patricia Cutts,Mary Keene, Louisa Morriss, Rosamund Fellows, Rita Wheatley, Dinora Mar (Mendelsohn)Vivien Talbot Brady, Ingrid Wyndham (Channon)
[Arts & Music] Freddie Mayor, Edward James, Tilly Losch, Feliks Topolski, Matthew Smith, Francis Bacon, Michael Wishart, Douglas Cooper, Lucian Freud, John Minton, John Craxton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Marion Leigh, Isabel Lambert, George Melly, Rodrigo Moynihan, Elinor Moynihan, John Moynihan, David Sylvester, Erica Bransen, Malcolm Arnold, John Heath Stubbs, Gwynneth John, John Banting, Hellen Lessore, Colquhoun & McBryde, Peter Palham, Mary & Rose Palham, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nina Hamnett, Robin Darwin, Bebé Berard.
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| Two in the morning at the Gargoyle (Virginia Bath) |