The Glee Club is a traditional event in the Liberal Assembly and UK Liberal Democrat party conference, consisting of a public singing around a piano. It is one of the most popular fringe events in British politics and was a formative event in the lives of many British political leaders, allegedly Michael Foot amongst them. Although the Glee Club has informally existed for many years, in 1967 the first songbook (entitled After the Count was Over) was published by the National League of Young Liberals. Songbooks have been produced since the 1975 by Liberator, and in 2009 the 20th edition of the Liberator Songbook was published - the 27th songbook in its publishing history.
It is often combined with the Liberal Revue, a series of sketches consisting mostly of in-jokes and irreverent takes on political matters.
Famous quotes containing the words glee and/or club:
“Do not forget! For those green times now laugh
In glee with sport and thought and lily dance;
And fate in vanity now leaps to chaff
Me smiling at her winking circumstance.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)