The Pilgrims Society's functions were extravagant and colourful affairs stereotypical of the excesses of upper-class Edwardian Britain and Gilded Age America. The New York Times in 1907 reported from one such Society dinner, describing the grand ball room of New York's prestigious Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the event was being held, as ‘lavishly decorated with American and British flags’. Then, following an event in 1909, the walls of the same venue were described as bedecked by ‘two clasped hands outlined in electric lights, and over them an arrangement of electric bulbs spelled “Hands Across the Sea”’. The ‘gold epaulets and gold lace’ which adorned the military uniforms of some of the 500 guests ‘glittered in the glare of lights at almost all of the fifty tables’. Sometimes the decorations chosen for Society events had a symbolic significance, for example on one occasion when tables were embellished by ‘sprays of trailing arbutus’, chosen because they were the species of plant that had purportedly been the first flower encountered by the Pilgrim Fathers when they landed at Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth century. While official histories of the Pilgrims Society claim that the club did not take its name from the Pilgrim Fathers, the Society was evidently prepared to evoke the spirit of America's early modern English and European settlers. It is noteworthy, for example, that the London branch utilised what was called the ‘Mayflower Room’ in the Hotel Victoria, a room named after both the Pilgrim Fathers’ ship and the trailing arbutus (the trailing arbutus is also called the mayflower, due to this connection with the seventeenth-century Pilgrims). Such sentiments concerning the Pilgrim Fathers were consistent with what Joseph Conforti has termed a ‘new, politicized meaning’ to the word ‘Pilgrim’, which emerged in the early nineteenth century. Largely distinct from religious connotations, ‘Pilgrim’, and the Pilgrim Fathers, ‘connoted the pioneering status of New England's founders; the old comers were now imagined as the pioneers of civil and religious liberty in America’.