NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB

The National Sporting Club (NSC) was a private members' sporting club founded in London on 5 March 1891 by John Fleming and Arthur Frederick Bettinson. Operating from premises at 43 King Street, Covent Garden, it staged professional boxing and acted as a de facto national supervisory body for the sport during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The NSC occupied 43 King Street, Covent Garden, a building now Grade II* listed, constructed in 1716–1717 for Edward Russell, 1st Earl of Orford. The design is attributed on stylistic grounds to the Baroque architect Thomas Archer. Before the NSC's tenancy, the building housed Evans's Supper Rooms, a well-known song-and-supper venue which closed in 1880. Two short-lived proprietary clubs followed: the Falstaff Club (1882) and the New Club (1884), linking the venue with aristocratic entertainment. The NSC acquired the lease and reopened the building on 5 March 1891, the premises having stood vacant since the closure of the New Club. The opening night was attended by members of what historian Guy Deghy termed "Corinthian London", the fashionable sporting and aristocratic set whose name derived from an early nineteenth-century slang term for wealthy young men about town.