David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years Book

The Gargoyle was founded by the young Cambridge graduate, David Tennant, in 1925. `It will be,' he announced, `a chic nightclub for dancing but also an avant garde place... where people can express themselves freely in whatever manner they please.' And so it became.Situated high above the rooftops of Soho it was to become the favoured meeting place of many of the most gifted and vibrant spirits of the times: Noel Coward and Edwina Mountbatten, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, Matisse, Gladys Cooper, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Tallulah Bankhead, Oswald Mosley, Hermione Baddeley, Randolph Churchill, Graham Greene, George Or-well, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, A. J. Ayer, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Durrell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Antonia Fraser, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Tennant provided a meeting place in which the rich, the famous and the well-connected could mix freely with the not evidently deserving but certainly artistic poor, often to the latter's advantage.The club had three floors and two faces: by day it passed as a sober luncheon club patronized by politicians, distinguished servants of the State, literati and nobility - and by the occasional spy; but at night the Gargoyle became a cosmopolitan arena, a theatre of social, sexual and intellectual challenge - of bravura display and emotional piracy where exceptional minds might meet wayward beauty on even terms.Michael Luke was himself a member of the Gargoyle Club and his first-hand account captures the creative and optimistic fever which the Gargoyle generated for more than a quarter of a century. To many the Gargoyle was more than a club where `Bohemians' mingled with the upper crust. It was the epitome of an epoch and when it closed it signaled the end of an era. It's passing left behind a sustained and agreeable hangover for those who experienced its pleasures.Read More