Gentleman's club glass to fetch £15K

A rudely-illustrated drinking glass from one of Scotland’s earliest and most influential private gentlemen’s clubs was expected to fetch up to £15,000 at auction today.

The item, dated circa 1770, is from the Edinburgh branch of the Beggar’s Benison club, established three decades after the first ‘‘Benison’’, was set up in 1732 by around 30 merchants, craftsmen and small lairds in Anstruther, Fife.

Professor David Stevenson, whose newly-published book, Beggar’s Benison, charts the rise and fall of 18th-century sex clubs.

The Fife club - whose membership spread as far as the East Indies - was unique because so many artifacts survived the Victorian age.

Lot 76, featuring a phallic illustration with a castle and anchor either side, is one of only three such glasses known to have survived, and was being sold at Sotheby’s European glass sale in London today.

The Benison took its name from a mythical parody of a beggar woman, said to have carried King James V over Anstruther’s Dreel Burn, who later blessed the purse and sexual prowess of the king after he had repaid her kindness by both means.

According to Prof Stevenson, while Benison members differed over religion and ideology, they shared a dislike of the Union, particularly its high taxation, from which derived a particular notion of free trade - smuggling - ultimately extending to a common fantasy of free sex.

Fuelled by alcohol and a general desire to defy society’s conventions, the men would sing bawdy songs, recite lewd verse, read pornography and perform elaborate sexual rituals while drinking toasts from obscenely marked glasses such as the rare wine glass being sold today.

Prof Stevenson said: ‘‘The Benison wasn’t a secret society since people knew it existed. But there were many peculiar clubs, including a number of pretty bawdy ones, and only a few people knew quite what went on inside.’’