Kernoozer's Club
From 1897 to 1899 Joseph Grego was secretary of the Kernoozer's Club; (motto: Nostrum de armis quaerere,) a close and select little body of connoisseurs in Arms and Armour (“the armour-club par excellence in the world”) formed to promote ‘friendly intercourse between Gentlemen to study, collect and exhibit Ancient Armour and Arms.’ The words kernoozer or kernoozling are late C19th humorous travesties on connoisseur. Its sense now extended to form a verb; I kernooze, he kernoozes, I/he should kernoozle.
The Kernoozers Club was founded in 1881 by its first president; Charles Alexander, Baron de Cosson, (from a family of French Revolution emigrees) born in Durham 28 August 1846. Vice President was Robert Alexander Hillingford, (1825–1904) with Joseph Grego as its Secretary. It was limited to 20 members, whose meetings were held at members’ homes. Members are known to include Sir Richard Burton; Egerton Castle; Sir Walter Pollock; John Camden Hotten; Arthur Charles Fox-Davies; John Forster; and Edward McDermott.
A Kernoozers Club meeting was featured in the Magazine of Art (1889; Cassell & Co,) also referred to as “a club of armour virtuosi,” by The New York Times; Identical arm and armor societies were supposedly forming in Madrid and Paris about that time emulating the Kernoozers, which folded in 1922 (Sirelmann, p. 363). In 1890 the Junior Kernoozers Club was founded, this club, later becoming the Meyrick Society, whose collections of armour now form the bulk of the Wallace Collection in London.
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