TORONTO DECEMBER : 1919 :

THE LAMPS December
it was decided to let the Committee of Convention meet, connive,
add to their number and convene again. For weeks they met
at luncheon—talking.
They were not a Club; they had no exchequer. Their sole
function as a Committee was to call the next meeting and make
it good enough to be followed by another, until some day somebody
might arise and move that "we have an election."
Two monthly dinners were held, each with some sort of talkfest
to discover a common ground. At one of these, after J.
Humfrey Anger had played historically on a spinet, there was
a debate on "What this club should be called."
One of the earliest suggestions had been "Palms"—from the
initial letters of the five arts. The Chairman argued for "Lamps."
Grier contended for Arts and Letters. Carried with no minute to
record it.
In those days, C. W. Jefferys was Secretary. But the business
was all of getting together; there were no accounts to pass
and no archives to record except those which the Chairman
jotted down on the backs of old envelopes from memory and
afterwards transcribed for the old book of records now in a
state of obsolescence in the Club Library—q.v.
In the fall of 1908 the omnium gatherum happened again in
McConkey's buffet to dine and to hear W. A. Langton talk on
Gothic. John A. Ewan, genial jibist of The Globe, and J. T.
Clark, of The Star, argued on how to get room for a bed in a
builder's bedroom. In November the itinerants held the first
election in the bohemian precincts of McConkey's Palm Room.
W. A. Langton was elected President; E. Wyly Grier vice; the
writer of this Secretary-Treasurer. For executive see the Club
panels now in the office.
At last ,we were a Club, with a name and a set of officials:
as yet no bank account, no membership fees, no treasurer per
se, no official minutes worth a dam, everything Homeric—and
quite obviously no constitution. O tempora, O mores! Above
all we had no—home, not even Langton's prophesied "garret."
In January, 1909, eighty men sat at dinner in Grier's studio.
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