Early History
Ted Ware (1898–1979) took over the club in 1943 after allegedly winning it in a poker game. Ted was a well travelled man who, unusually for the time, had raised his son from his second marriage on his own. He allowed the club to become a meeting place for the Chelsea Arts Club and was welcoming to the wide variety of people who lived in the area. The club had many gay and lesbian regulars, and was also frequented by black Caribbean people and members of other minority groups that were discriminated against elsewhere.
Ted married Gina Cerrato (1922–2001), a glamorous actress, in July 1953 when he was 55 and she was 31 years old. Gina had been born in Italy in 1922, but had grown up in Cardiff. She came to London to pursue her acting career and had appeared in several films, before meeting Ted in The Gateways in 1947. She and Ted had one daughter together, before Gina gradually took over running the club during the late 1950s.
Smithy (1933–1993) first arrived at the Gateways in 1959 and eventually went on to co-manage the club with Gina. She was originally from California and as a member of the American Air Force, was posted to a base in Ruislip, London. She decided that she wanted to stay in London with Gina and Ted and had an arranged marriage in 1962, which enabled her to stay in the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: Gateways Club
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)