Little Ship Club
London yacht club
The Little Ship Club is a yacht club in London. It was founded in 1926 by a group of yachtsmen for the purpose of providing training and lectures over the winter months. The club operates from its riverside clubhouse at Bell Wharf on the River Thames, and is the only one operating from within the City of London.
History
The club's inaugural meeting was at The Ship restaurant in London on 5 November 1926. Notable founder members included Claud Worth, Maurice Griffiths, and Higley Halliday. The training function of the club was so successful that, by 1936, they were training members of the Royal Naval Supplementary Volunteer Reserve Force (RNSVR). As a result, the First Sea Lord invited the club to apply for a defaced blue ensign. This is the only known instance of such an invitation being made. The close link with the RNSVR led to Little Ship Club members taking part in the World War II evacuation of Dunkirk in which the military commandeered hundreds of private "little" ships to bring troops from land to larger navy vessels that could not pull in close to shore. The club still includes what is possibly one of the original Dunkirk Little Ships, Sheemaun.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q22098019. Authority coordinates are 51.510, -0.092. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Little Ship Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.