| Biography | The Three Arts Club was founded on the Marylebone Road in 1911 by the actress Lena Ashwell. Its purpose was to address 'the discomfort of the woman artist, wandering the streets [and] getting makeshift meals' by providing a residential and rest space for artists, musicians, and performers to use between classes, rehearsals and performances.
The club's design was influenced by the earlier model of the Rehearsal Club the charity asked for a 'maximum of utility and comfort at a minimum cost.' Along with bedrooms, the club offered large reception rooms, lounges, reading, writing, and music rooms, and a spacious restaurant. Charges were subsidised: a small cubicle with full board was available for seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, with a larger bed-sitting-room for a slightly increased cost. In spite of the influence of the Rehearsal Club, the Three Arts Club was a distinct operation because it was a charity started and run from within the theatrical profession.
The notable high number of actresses on its board of management and advisory board demonstrates a clear set of links between the club and the Theatrical Ladies' Guild and the club and the Actresses' Franchise League. Other actresses were involved who did not contribute to either of these organisations or who did not engage with the campaign for suffrage. While Margaret Leask has stated that the club did not position itself as a charity, as its users paid through a subscription system, it nonetheless relied on high-profile fundraisers - primarily balls and matinees - to raise the money needed to maintain the building. Actresses' published comments about the Three Arts Club were closely aligned to those they made about the charitable activity they undertook for the benefit of the profession. In practice the club was treated as a charity, and its costume balls were the organisation's major annual fundraiser.
In line with the extratheatrical costume balls actresses frequently contributed to, the Three Arts Club's fundraising balls centralised spectacle and stage personalities. The first ball took place at the Royal Albert Hall on December 20, 1911. less than a fortnight after the club had opened. An estimated four thousand dancers attended, taking part in a evening composed of twenty six dances and supper. The ball's organisation demanded the time and energies of a body of London's best-known West End actresses. Maud Beerbohm Tree, Madge Kendal, Lena Ashwell, Lilian Braithwaite, Lily Brayton, Winifred Emery, Rosina Flipp, Eva Moore, Marie Tempest, Irene Vanbrugh, and Violet Vanbrugh all served on the event's organising committee. The majority of these actresses also served on the club's advisory committee, and Ashwell and Moore were members of the management board.
Tickets were issued on application. While this admissions policy had led to critiques of the Savage Club Ball, there was no public debate surround admissions to this event. Dancers were intrinstic to the event's spectacle. The ball's visual aesthetics were rigorously policed. Fancy dress was compulsory. Admission was refused to those who arrived and were not in costume. The costumed participants created the scene, the denouement of which came at one o'clock in the morning wjem Arthur Bourchier arrived on a sledge. Dressed as Santa Claus, he was pulled by a band of faries composed of Unity Moore, Phyllis Bedells, Florrie Lewis, June Tripp, Miss Evans-Freke, Flora de Fleming, and Elsie Craven. Gifts were distributed to the dancers, and as Bourchier left, snow bega nto fall in the hall. The auditorium was transformed into a winder landscape. A carefully managed blend of dance, costume, celebrities and theatrical spectacle came together to secure the success of 1911's Three Arts Club event. The event celebrated theatre and theatricality and recognised their usefulness as a tool for creating fundraising spectacles. The Three Arts Club was rooted in the personailities and visual culture of the West End.
In the following years, the club hired the Royal Botantic Society's gardens (1912) and the Queen's Hall (1913). |