of the first London club to invite ethnic minorities as members, and the first to do so from its very foundation. (A handful of other Victorian clubs remained accessible to minority candidates, including the East India Club whose members included the opium trader Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, but the NLC's ethnic minority members tended to be more radical and anti-imperialist than "establishment" figures such as Jejeebhoy.) The first recorded ethnic minority member of the NLC, Dadabhai Naoroji was admitted in 1885, when the club was less than three years old. Spurred on by Club Secretary William Digby (himself a long-standing anti-imperialist campaigner), by the late 1880s, the club had cultivated a large overseas and expatriate membership, particularly concentrated in India and among Indian nationals resident in London. Henry Sylvester Williams, the Trinidadian lawyer, pan-Africanist, and Progressive Party Marylebone councillor, was a member, as were Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a successful barrister who went on to be the founder of modern-day Pakistan; C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, the Diwan (Prime Minister) of Travancore; and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Indian independence leader, who mentored the young Mahatma Gandhi - himself an occasional visitor to the club as Gokhale's guest. Women members since the 1960s Since the club's 1882 foundation, women had always been allowed to use the club as visitors, but remained barred from membership until the 1960s, when it became one of the first "gentlemen's clubs" to admit women members. It offered women an 'associate membership' category from 1967 until 1976. The Lady Associate membership referendum was submitted for adoption by the General Committee in June 1967. The first five applications for Lady Associate Members were approved by the Membership Committee in November 1967. "Number of lady associate members elected, or applying, at 19 January 1968" was 34. One of the early Lady Associate Members was Miss. V.E. Wilcox, approved by the Membership Committee in March 1968. Lady Associate members initially had to be the wife or widow of a member of NLC. In 1969, women who were not related by family relationships to a male member could be nominated as Lady Associate Member, paying a higher membership fee to a Lady Associate member who is a wife or widow of a member. Both types of Lady Associate member fees were still lower than male members' membership fees because of restricted privileges of Lady Associate members. Other early Lady Associate members included Violet Bonham