This book is about the Pilgrims Society, an elite organisation known to most scholars of twentieth-century Anglo-American relations. References to the Pilgrims may be found in a variety of historical works; none, however, have given the Society more than passing mention. The present monograph, therefore, is the first detailed scholarly examination of this important transatlantic association and demonstrates the ways in which the Pilgrims Society has played a noteworthy role in both the history of Anglo- American relations and the history of public diplomacy. The Pilgrims was founded in 1902 as an elite dining club with the aim of improving cultural, diplomatic, and political relations between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The Society had been formed during the period of Bradford Perkins’ so-called ‘great rapprochement’ between Britain and the US, and was a part of the Anglo-Saxon impulse that helped bring the countries closer together at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pilgrims Society still exists today and has branches in London and New York. It was founded principally as an exclusive dining club for British and American elites, in particular for those men it regarded as ‘prominent in public or social life, science, art or literature’. In both cities, it was entwined with the other brandy-fuelled upper-class clubs and societies that met amidst the cigar smoke of fashionable venues like Delmonico’s, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Claridge’s. The Pilgrims was originally supported by the likes of the famous British field marshal, Lord Frederick Roberts and the academic, Liberal politician, and British ambassador to the US from 1907 until 1913, James Bryce. Other notable British members included Lord Charles Beresford and the author Arthur Conan Doyle. Important members of the New York branch in its early years included Joseph Choate, who was the US ambassador to Britain between 1899 and 1905, bankers Jacob H. Schiff and J. P. Morgan, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times. In more recent years, prominent figures associated with the Society have included top British civil servant Gus O’Donnell and the former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins.