England’s postwar gastronomy: a case-study of the first menu of the Hole in the Wall restaurant, Bath, 1951/2

This is the text of a talk I gave to the 2019 International Congress of the IEHCA at Tours, France.

It is well known, or certainly widely accepted, that after the Second World War, England was no place to eat out. Exceptions to this rule might have been discovered in London, where wealth and privilege saw a continuation in minor key of a restaurant culture staffed by European immigrants and fuelled by a concentration of rich clients, but beyond the capital, things had gone from bad to worse after five years of food rationing and the existence of a statutory limit on the charges a restaurant might impose.

This situation continued at the War’s end. Rationing was not over completely until 1954, although it was diminuendo by 1951; and the problems of the catering industry in this period were compounded, at least from the employers’ standpoint, by the imposition of the Catering Wages Act in 1943 which added an extra layer of bureaucracy to employment, as well as imposing an hours regime that inhibited long opening. It was this Act that lay behind the rigid hours of many restaurants and, particularly, provincial hotels. ‘Kitchen’s closed’ was a cry long feared by countless travellers.

As the War drew to a close, however, the imminence of demobilisation provoked an astonishing surge in the market for catering properties as soldiers dreamt of a life of independence and cheerful hospitality on their return home. Many embraced the vision of no longer working in a smoke-filled office for an unsympathetic employer. Far better to be your own boss and, as everyone knows, the life of a publican or hotel-keeper is easy: plenty of staff, cheap food and drink, pleasing surroundings, lovely customers. In the event, as the many memoirs of these first-time businessmen and women reveal, reality never matched the fond ambition. The practical consequence, however, was the transformation of British catering with the entry of a large cohort of amateurs with quite different priorities to the grizzled professional survivors of the 1930s and 1940s. Matters did not improve overnight, but the seeds of change were sown.

The long-term consequences of this shift in ownership and personnel can be gauged by two lists, both compiled long after the end of the War in 1945. Each was the work of the Good Food Guide, a restaurant guide that operated in Britain from 1951. Its principles were founded on those of the French Club des Sans Club founded in the 1920s. Its recommendations were based on reports from members, themselves pure amateurs who had no other qualification than purchase of the guidebook itself. It was an early expression of consumerism, indeed nigh on the earliest, in Britain. The Good Food Guide reflected middle-class values: its staff were not part of the professional nexus of the catering industry, as were, for example, the Michelin Guide’s in France or, later, the Egon Ronay Guide’s in Britain, the creation of a former chef and restaurateur. The mindset of the Good Food Guide was to applaud good cooking, but also to prioritize creativity and enterprise over the tenets of classical haute cuisine.

The first such list, of the twelve best places to dine outside London, was written by the Guide’s editor and founder Raymond Postgate, in an issue of the Spectator magazine in 1955. The second, twelve years later in 1967, formed part of the Guide itself. It was the first year in which it gave formal awards to its favoured establishments. Outside London, there were 10 places so distinguished. In 1955, 25 per cent of the establishments were run by chef-patrons (1 French, 2 British). In 1967, the percentage was 33 (2 British, 2 French). In 1955, 25 per cent of the places were conventionally run, in other words by an owner with an employed chef; in 1967 either the owner or his wife undertook the cooking in every instance. In 1955, one-third of the selected places were run by amateurs, i.e. people with no prior experience of the catering trade before buying the business in question, and in each case either the man or his wife did the cooking. In 1967, 60 per cent, or nearly two thirds, of the ten restaurants were run by complete amateurs who had had no experience of the trade before buying their properties. Two more significant facts from these lists: in 1955, a certain majority of the male chefs identified sported beards and, more significantly, half of the chefs in this list of a dozen exceptional restaurants were female. Furthermore, two of the twelve were owned and run by women. This profile of successful eating houses is quite at odds with any that might be encountered in other European countries at the time.

I wish here to concentrate on a single restaurant that figured in both of these lists, the Hole in the Wall restaurant in the spa town of Bath in Somerset. It was founded in 1951 by George Perry-Smith, my step-father. He ran it, and cooked at its stoves until 1972 when he moved to a smaller business in Cornwall, not far from Lands End, where he continued cooking until 1987. As a young man, George had been in the War, not as a combatant but a conscientious objector, serving in the Friends Ambulance Unit, a Quaker organisation. He had done one year of university before being called up. The War over, he finished his degree in modern languages and then obtained a post as assistant in the Lycée St Louis in Paris for a year before taking a teaching qualification, expecting a career as schoolmaster. He had by this time married a girl with domestic science training. He soon realised that education was not for him and so impressed had he been with the French way of life, especially Parisian restaurants and cafés, that the couple decided to open a restaurant in this very bourgeois spa resort (where he had, incidentally, been educated, and had taken his first faltering steps as a teacher). His own words were: ‘The Lycée St Louis on the Boulevard St Michel was undemanding, my own studying intermittent. Although I had no money to speak of, I did have a car, a rare asset at that time, which took me round and about France as well as Paris itself, then fizzing with Claudel, Anouilh, Sartre, Cocteau, the climbing of Annapurna, and Brigitte Bardot; also, I began to realise, Paris offered extremely pleasant places where one could sit down unhurried, unfussed, with a glass of wine, un sandwich jambon, on rare occasions a real meal, prix fixe, a cup of coffee and a wide variety of strangely coloured drinks in small glasses. When, scared by the prospect of the Masters' Common Room, I wondered what else I could possibly do, it struck me that no such pleasant relaxation seemed to be available there. How could life go on without it? No wonder most people seemed unhappy, or at any rate unsmiling. An alert estate agent told me about the lease of The Hole in the Wall, then badly run down, and there we suddenly were, for the next twenty-one years.’

George Perry-Smith

The restaurant he bought consisted of two cellars beneath tall Georgian terraced houses on a busy thoroughfare in Bath. There was no pavement – it was out of the door and into the oncoming traffic (a problem for those who had drunk too much). Given that he had limited knowledge of cooking (and his wife had two young children to look after), he hired a chef as part of his small staff. The chef was of mature years, an amateur himself, whose chief claim to fame was to have served in the Canadian Mounted Police. But he was a bon viveur, with firm ideas about materials – such as they were in postwar Britain. Other than chef, he had the help of a French student waiter, an Estonian waitress who had fetched up in Bath as a displaced person after the War, and an Austrian waiter in the same boat.

The first menu that was produced for this enterprise showed many of the hallmarks of enthusiastic amateurism that were shared by similar start-ups. For one, it boasted a manifesto, setting out their particular approach to the restaurant industry. This by no means matched the presumed attitude of industry professionals, hated in large part for their surly refusal to oblige their customers. Such manifestos or mission-statements can be found in memoirs of restaurant and hotel start-ups from this period. They were sometimes public, for example left in lounges of hotels where guests might read them, or were arrived at during family conclaves as the aspirant businessmen tried to work out why they were doing what they were doing. In every case I have encountered, the underlying message was, ‘The industry is not meeting the needs of the consumer, we can do it better.’ George Perry Smith’s was quite counter-cultural – ‘We may be in business, but we are not there to make money, but to make you happy.’

‘We have tried to include in this à la carte and in our table d’hôte menus a fair selection of the dishes which you will know and enjoy. These dishes which the chef definitely has available today have, marked against them, the price which we shall always try to keep as low as we can; oddly enough, we are interested at least as much in doing our job well, that is in giving you pleasure, as in making money out of it. But it is impossible to fit in everything on a folder of reasonable size, and if there’s any other dish which you have enjoyed, perhaps on a special occasion abroad, and which you would like to eat again, we hope you will ask for it. The proprietor or the chef, or any of the staff, will be glad to discuss it with you, and if we are able to produce it for you on this or on your next visit, it will give us sincere pleasure. We are not yet able to obtain a licence to serve wines from our own cellars, but we shall be very pleased to serve you own wine free of charge, or to assist in obtaining suitable wines for you. The waiter will be glad to show you a list of wines and other drinks which should be readily available [from a neighbouring wine shop].’

By way of explanation: a licence to serve alcohol was not forthcoming for several years. Such permissions were not easily obtained at that time, and the magistrates distrusted George’s beard and sandals and largely bohemian dress sense. It was to counter this that he headed his first menu and his writing paper ‘George Perry-Smith, M.A.’ – he was respectable underneath it all.

The menu was astonishingly large, so large indeed that the chef was unable to stay the course and left after 6 months defeated by the strain of it all. This was the moment that George taught himself to cook. The menu that confounded our Mounty seemed infinite in extent (though each day but a tithe of the foods proposed would actually be available on the market or cooked). Was it French? Of course it was in the sense that we British and French had been for centuries dipping our ladles into a common culinary pot. But in other respects, not at all, I would say. On the menu, ‘Continental and American specialities’ were printed in red type: the soups were Minestrone with Parmesan Cheese; Bouillabaisse (‘as nearly as possible’); Bisques; Fish Chowder; Bortsch (‘as nearly as possible’). For fish there was Coulibiac and Lobster Newburg. And for entrées there were ravioli; risotto; Hungarian goulash; Chicken Maryland; Hamburger Steaks; Spaghetti and Macaroni dishes; Pork Chops and Country Gravy; Baked Beans Boston style; Chili con carne; Quiche lorraine; and Vienna Schnitzel. Note the ever-presence of food shortages and rationing in the annotation ‘Omelettes and eggs whenever we are allowed to serve them.’

One thing this first menu does demonstrate is the importance of America to postwar British cooking, enhanced in this particular instance by the chef’s Canadian experience (evidenced by the Pork Chops and Country Gravy). America was increasingly the source of our consumer goods, new foodstuffs, new ways of cooking them. It was also the public model of the good life. So we encountered for the first time sweet corn, Philadelphia cream cheese and avocado pears, and we delighted in mixing sweet and savoury in a far more thoroughgoing manner than our familiar roast lamb and mint sauce. Abiding favourites of customers were Maryland chicken, baked Virginia ham with peaches, a salad of avocado pear with a ceviche of Dover sole, filets mignons à l’americaine with fried bananas, a creamy gelatine-set Philadelphia-based cheesecake with a Graham cracker crust, and a dessert that was called Jane’s Banana Cheese which must have been thought up round the supper table one day: it was no more than sliced banana, sweetened Philadelphia cheese and a chocolate flake crumbled over the top.

The somewhat inchoate nature of the first menu was reminiscent of an à la carte of some provincial hotel with an Austrian chef which might throw everything into the mix on the grounds that most people would be ordering from his much, much shorter table d’hôte. When an à la carte order suddenly erupted from the dining-room, it would be the source of frenzied hunts in fridges for the ingredients to cook it. Out of this arose the possibility of the many substitutions for which postwar catering was rightly condemned: pork for veal, lemon sole for Dover sole, or, most shameful of all, monkfish for lobster.

The broad eclecticism of the 1951/2 menu was soon replaced by a more single-minded French and Mediterranean tilt, inspired by the early books of the English food writer Elizabeth David, which were to be an abiding influence on my step-father’s cooking. Thus a menu from five years later looks like this; and ten years later looks more like this.

Transcript of the Hole in the Wall's menu for 28 April, 1955

The menu from some years later, approximately 1965, was by this time printed on a Formica sheet (previous menus had been handwritten each day, reproduced via a wet-copy technique involving a large flat jellied surface which received the master copy, written with special ink). The 1960s menu looked like this (the calligraphy was by the picture restorer David Bull, who had worked at the restaurant when a student at the West of England College of Art during the 1950s).

Hole in the Wall menu from the second half of the 1960s