Kit-Cat Club [ Association / Associational culture / Politics & Society ]
… national identity. The dates of the Kit-Cat’s foundation and dissolution are uncertain, as no official records of its meetings or membership survive. A semi-reliable contemporary recorded that it was first convened at the Cat and Fiddle Tavern on Gray’s Inn Lane, owned by a pastry-maker named Christopher (Kit) Cat (or Catling) and that the meetings dined on mutton pies known as ‘Kit-Cats’. 1 It is also certain that one of its founders and its first chairman … aloud, and toast absent ladies with short complimentary verses. The only female known to have been invited to join a meeting, on one unique occasion in 1695, was the seven-year-old daughter of a member who was proposed as a toast (later …
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