John Fothergill: Mad, Bad or Wonderful?

John Fothergill self-portrait.

This is the text of an essay I wrote for Petits Propos Culinaires 111 in 2018. Those of you wishing to subscribe to PPC should look at its website at https://prospectbooks.co.uk

The length of winter evenings has afforded me time to revisit the works of John Rowland Fothergill the celebrated innkeeper at the Spread Eagle in Thame, the Royal Hotel, Ascot and the Three Swans, Market Harborough. He wrote three books combining diary, reminiscence and thoughts for the day, all published by Chatto & Windus: An Innkeeper’s Diary (1931, henceforth ID); Confessions of an Innkeeper (1938, henceforth CI); and My Three Inns (1949, henceforth MTI). The last contains extracts from the two first as well as continuing his account up to the end of the Second World War or thereabouts. He also published a cookery book: John Fothergill’s Cookery Book (a slim volume, from Chatto too, 1943). Readers avid for more Fothergill might seek out his excellently expressed article on drawing for the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (volume 8, 1910); or his short The Gardener’s Colour Book (1927) published by Knopf. Then there is a strange book called The Fothergill Omnibus which was subtitled For which seventeen eminent authors have written short stories upon one and the same plot. The plot was created by Fothergill and there were introductions by Fothergill himself, the philosopher and fellow-native of the Lake District R.G. Collingwood, and the Labour suffragist, essayist and poet Gerald Gould. The writers gathered under this unlikely umbrella were Martin Armstrong, H.P. Barbour, Elizabeth Bowen, Gerald Bullett, Thomas Burke, G.K. Chesterton, A.E. Coppard, E.M. Delafield, L.P. Hartley, Storm Jameson, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Margaret Kennedy, Edward Shanks, Helen Simpson, J.C. Squire, L.A.G. Strong, Frank Swinnerton and Rebecca West. Pretty impressive for an innkeeper. It came out here with Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1931 and in America, under the title Mr Fothergill’s Plot with the OUP, New York. Fothergill also wrote the introduction to a gathering of the works of his very close friend, the remarkable Welsh painter James Dickson (Dick) Innes who died young of TB in 1914. Innes was at the Slade with Fothergill and together they paid an extensive visit to Collioure, south of Perpignan, in 1908. It was ever a favoured subject of Innes’s landscapes. Otherwise, the British Library catalogue lists various opuscula on the subject of drawing, mostly in relation to his involvement with the Slade school of art, and a translation from the German of Emanuel Löwy’s Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (‘The Rendering of Nature in Greek Art’, Duckworth, 1907).

The late Hilary Rubinstein contributed an elegant entry on Fothergill to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He drew largely on his nice foreword to a new edition of An Innkeeper’s Diary which he prepared for Faber & Faber in 1988 (there was a further reissue by the Folio Society and Faber in 2000, with a foreword by Craig Brown). I take advantage of the ODNB’s complaisance to reproduce the bulk of it here:

Fothergill, John Rowland (1876–1957), innkeeper and author, was born on 27 February 1876 at Kennington, Ashford, Kent, the only son of George Fothergill and his wife, Isabel Eliza (née Crawshay). He had two sisters. His mother died when he was two days old, and George Fothergill subsequently remarried; there was a son by this second marriage. The Fothergills were a long-established Lakeland gentry family, claiming descent from a Norman baron, and his father was both remote and stern. At the age of eleven Fothergill was sent to Old College in Windermere and endured much humiliation and beating. A year later he entered Bath College and in 1895 went up to St John’s College, Oxford, where he stayed only one term, as he failed the preliminary examinations.

It would be fair to describe Fothergill during the next twenty-six years of his life as a dilettante. At Bath College, already a romantically handsome youth, he had some early initiation into homosexuality. As an undergraduate he met Oscar Wilde, and he was to become an intimate of Wilde both before his trial and later in France after Wilde had served his sentence. Fothergill was also closely associated with Robert Ross for a number of years.

After leaving Oxford Fothergill drifted for a number of years without a real vocation though, with the assistance of William Rothenstein, he opened the Carfax Gallery in Oxford in 1898. During a tour of European museums he was impressed by Greek antiquities and ‘decided to learn about Greek art and to live it’. At about this time Fothergill had an affair with a rich young American, Beatrice Romaine Goddard. Torn between homosexual and heterosexual attachments, Fothergill joined Edward Perry Warren’s unusual group of bachelor aesthetes known as the Lewes House Brotherhood. He helped collect antiquities for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and continued his studies in classical archaeology. Eventually leaving this milieu, Fothergill studied at Leipzig, and then at the Slade School (1905–6), and was drawn into the circle surrounding Augustus John. During this time he was briefly married to Doris Elsa Henning.

In 1922 Fothergill abandoned the life of a dilettante and scholar. Much to the astonishment of those close to him, and at the age of forty-six, he acquired The Spreadeagle in Thame, Oxfordshire, and found his vocation. Also in 1922 he embarked on a lasting and transparently happy marriage to Kate Headley Kirby, who contributed enormously to the running of The Spreadeagle; they had two sons. In his most successful book, An Innkeeper’s Diary, Fothergill wrote cryptically that his background and previous work disqualified him from any of the usual jobs: ‘I found that I must do something for a living, so I was compelled to take an inn’.

Fothergill described himself in Who’s Who as an ‘amateur pioneer innkeeper’. Before the Second World War innkeeping was an outré occupation for someone of his background, yet, virtually single-handedly, he made the profession of innkeeping smart as well as respectable. In its heyday during the latter part of the twenties, The Spreadeagle became a haunt for the literary and artistic world, as well as for Oxford dons and well-connected undergraduates. Its patrons included writers such as G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, and G.K. Chesterton, artists such as Augustus John and Paul Nash, and actors and actresses. Even heads of state such as Field Marshal Smuts were numbered among the guests.

Fothergill possessed many (though by no means all) of the essential attributes of an outstanding innkeeper: he was an excellent chef, a connoisseur of wine (though he drank very little himself), an early campaigner for ‘real food’, and cared passionately about the quality of the furnishings. Foodstuffs were regularly ordered from Athens, France, Norway, Jaffa, and Italy, and he also sought out the best local produce. Three local bakers produced ‘three different kinds of bread made from flours that I have forced upon them, besides the breads we make ourselves’, and there was ‘cheese from East Harptree, salt from Malden, mustard from Leighton Buzzard’.

Yet the success of Fothergill’s enterprise depended first and foremost on his intriguing, volatile, and provocative personality. He had a clear idea of the kind of clientele he wished to attract, and those whom he cherished felt honoured to be sharing his company. He had little compunction in showing the door to the wrong sort. ‘I’ve determined’, Fothergill wrote in his diary, ‘not only to have proper and properly cooked food but to have only either intelligent, beautiful or well-bred people to eat it’ (The Times, 29 Aug 1957). H.G. Wells described Fothergill as ‘a fantastic innkeeper … dressed in the suit of bottle-green cloth, with brass buttons and buckled shoes’. Harold Acton concurred that: ‘for a quiet dinner there was no alternative but to drive to Thame. At John Fothergill’s … one could be sure of good food and better wine in congenial surroundings with a host whose affability and erudition revived a more liberal age.’

Fothergill was an irresistible raconteur, but if he had lacked the art of telling stories in print it is unlikely that he would still be remembered today. Fortunately, he was persuaded to write An Innkeeper’s Diary, which was an instant best-seller when it was first published in 1931 and has been reprinted many times since as well as being dramatized for both television and radio. Like Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford it recalls with uncommon vividness the feel of Oxfordshire life in a former era; both writers convey the moral values that prevailed at their time and in their own social class.

The Diary presents an image of its author as irascible, gratuitously offensive, and an outrageous snob. He would refuse to accept guests because he disliked their notepaper or their letter-writing style. On one occasion, he recounts having charged a party who had come in for tea an extra 6d. per head because they were ill-shaped, ugly or ill-dressed – ‘surely this was a more praiseworthy action than the usual one of charging people extra because they are beautiful, well-bred and dressed’. He particularly detested those who came in off the streets and tried to use his lavatories without asking. He would accost these interlopers and demand their addresses – ‘in case I need a pumpship when I’m passing your home’.

Ten years at The Spreadeagle brought Fothergill fame but scarcely fortune. He was a poor businessman, and book royalties could not compensate for hotel losses. He was forced to sell, spent an unsuccessful year at a hotel in Ascot, and in 1934 acquired the Three Swans in Market Harborough, where he stayed until 1952. Fothergill died at St Luke’s Hospital, Rugby, on 26 August 1957. While at Market Harborough he had published two more volumes of reminiscences, Confessions of an Innkeeper in 1938 and My Three Inns in 1949, but neither had the bite and raciness of An Innkeeper’s Diary. It surpassed them as his best book, a minor classic in the annals of innkeeping.

Although we know a great deal about Fothergill’s years as an innkeeper, his earlier career is full of lacunae and mysteries, often chronological. I can elucidate little myself, and in any case the focus here is on catering and cooking, but there are some points that have popped up during my searches that are worth mentioning. Firstly, as to sources. Having not yet located Fothergill’s two sons, John and Anthony, who are perhaps themselves deceased, I know not of other descendants. More intrepid researchers than I am did meet the younger Fothergills when they still lived, notably David Sox, the author of Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood (Fourth Estate, 1991), and Meryle Secrest, the biographer of the American artist Romaine Brooks, Between Me and Life (MacDonald & Jane’s, 1976). Secrest tells of her encounter with Anthony Fothergill when searching for an original portrait of his father by Brooks (née Goddard) in Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (Knopf, 2007). The sons held certain manuscript memoirs and notes by their father, as well as correspondence. These were described by the Reverend Sox as being an account of his early life and career as well as notes towards a more finished memoir that he contemplated writing at the end of his life once retired from his inn at Market Harborough. At the moment of writing, these materials are at a site unknown. However, the Leicestershire Record Office does hold some MSS that formed part of a deposit from the Market Harborough Archaeological & Historical Society. The reference number is DE 2101/92/1–15 and consists of 15 volumes of manuscript diaries, 1922–1943. The details of size and pagination are missing from the short catalogue entry, but it would appear the first volume contains a journal running from 1922–27 and subsequent volumes are for much shorter periods, often six months or a year, although there are perhaps four or five that cover a couple of years or even a bit more. Whether these are the originals of the published diaries, only inspection will tell. The Market Harborough Museum also has a few Fothergill items. They kindly sent me a short list. The principal items are Fothergill’s books, but there are also a dozen miscellaneous MS notes, drafts or letters, all relating to the minutiae of day-to-day business. Mr William Cross (<http://williecross.tripod.com/>) of Newport in south Wales is the biographer of Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar and his family. Lord Tredegar was a noted eccentric, occultist and homosexual. His sisters were also notorious. Mr Cross has written several books on them (as well as on the Caernarvon family and Highclere), the latest of which is Not Behind Lace Curtains : The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar (2013, the author). Mr Cross has become interested in Fothergill as a result of his links through his mother (a Crawshay: he remarks in the Diary, ‘I might have told him of our grandfather Crawshay who is said to have had 300 children in South Wales.’) and his ironmaster ancestors with the south Wales tinplate and steel industry, of which Tredegar’s family were mainstays. Marks of Mr Cross’s interest are a short note on Fothergill in Wikisource and a Twitter account in Fothergill’s name (<https://twitter.com/johnrfothergill>). Mr Cross has also made contact with the step-grandson of Fothergill’s half-brother who appears to hold material relating to our innkeeper. His researches are ongoing.

Fothergill’s own manuscript memoir apparently concerns the time before he was an innkeeper, beginning with his schooldays. He suffered much, it seems, both from corporal punishment and bullying. This left him with deep feelings regarding the proper treatment both of children and animals. His books are full of invective against any form of physical assault and he campaigned, inasmuch as he was able, against corporal punishment at schools and in the home. This aversion to violence leads him in one instance into a discussion of a proposition that homosexuality in schoolmasters might be beneficial for the boys and spare them at least caning and other physical assaults. He is surprised by the idea even entering public discourse, but does not entirely dismiss it as stupid (ID pp. 266–7). In another moment he noted, ‘I have since thought what tremendous scope there would be for a “Kindness First” or “Cruelty Last” movement, not only for schools and homes where they dare to touch the skin of a child because they are too stupid or bad-tempered to teach his mind, but in so many other directions not covered by legislation’ (ID p. 175). A few years later, in about 1932, he wrote ‘to the Parents’ Association to which I subscribe and asked for their action or policy regarding cruelty and injustice. They replied that they valued their happy relationship with head masters too much to jeopardize them with a frontal attack that would suggest that all schools were offenders! So, being a parent and not a head master, I resigned my membership’ (CI p. 91).

At about the same time, ‘A man of about my own age arrived – I don’t like calling myself a man, there’s something child offending, corrupt, hairy about a man, even as the reverse is true of a woman, whereas a girl is parboiled, unholy – and gave his name as S—. I then recognized him as the fellow that I, Noel Stephen and another at school 40 years ago had sworn an oath together to hate for all time. I’d never seen him since. Was I to hate him now? Stephen was dead and the other boy I didn’t remember, so I thought in the circumstances I might betray them and decide in the negative on their behalf. And so we talked and he talked and talked and I got to dislike him more and more and he told me cruel things he’d done and others had done to natives and I loathed him. … Afterwards I thought what foresight we little boys had’ (CI p. 87). His dislike of bullying and mistreatment of animals got him into some embarrassing scrapes, whether in Berlin or Rome, or in the back streets of Market Harborough where he tackled the horrid behaviour of a boy towards his younger companion.

Fothergill was sent to infant and preparatory schools near his family home in Westmorland but spent his teenage years at Bath College in Bath. The school, which boasted a high reputation for classical studies, was founded in 1878 by T.W. Dunn, formerly a master at Clifton College. It lasted no longer than 1909. It occupied the former mansion of an Indian nabob called Augustus Andrew who had it built in 1835. A previous inhabitant was Charles Kemble, of the acting family, but who was rector of Bath as well as the compiler of a popular hymnal. The house was but a hundred yards down the hill from where I myself attended preparatory school. In my time it was a nurses’ home (they were safely tucked up behind very high walls), but in latter days it has resurfaced as the luxurious Bath Spa Hotel. I admit that what follows is a febrile connection, but Fothergill was proud of the mature Cheddar cheese he served at the Spread Eagle – ‘It is an eighteen-months-old Cheddar, I get 900 pounds of it every August’ (ID p. 92). This he bought from the village of East Harptree in Somerset. The largest property in the village was Eastwood Manor, a gothic-style house built by the son of the Rev. Charles Kemble (and its agricultural buildings are listed Grade I). Was there a school contact?

Fothergill was spectacularly beautiful in his youth. His many portraits attest this fact. Doubtless this made him the subject of attentions from masters and fellow-pupils at his school and later a magnet to similarly inclined persons when he was an undergraduate and in London and Italy. It appears to have taken him until he was in his forties to have worked out his sexual preferences and settle to connubial bliss and fatherhood. Even so, his preoccupation with tall young men, evinced in An Innkeeper’s Diary (the quotations are too many and various to include here), perhaps harks back to his earlier propensities.

And here, I regret, a diversion. At the Spread Eagle, Fothergill would measure long and lanky youths and mark their heights on a wall (he would also enter into rhapsodies about their gentle natures and beauty). There is a fold-out plate of this measuring-spot at the end of the book. It is quite a bizarre procedure, especially carried to such lengths (there are so many names in a small space that the bulk of them are illegible). In his younger years, as Rubinstein records, he was one of the coterie surrounding Edward Penn Warren in Lewes, Sussex. Warren, a rich American, first bought Lewes House for his own occupation, but later added other properties in the town to his portfolio. One of these was The Shelleys, once home of John Hodgkin, the Quaker barrister and father of Thomas Hodgkin the historian (it ultimately became an hotel, mentioned indeed by Fothergill, see below). There survives to this day a door in The Shelleys against which a century’s worth of Hodgkins measured themselves and left their mark. Was this Fothergill’s template?

Rubinstein sketches in for us the varied nature of Fothergill’s dilettantism and career after school and university. Although a bloc of several years was occupied by his association with Warren and the discovery, purchase and exportation of antique works of art from Europe to museums in Boston and other cities, he also occupied himself with a brief attachment to the architectural office of Sir Arthur Blomfield, the founding of the Carfax art gallery in Ryder Street, St James’s (not Oxford as Rubinstein has it), study in Leipzig, travel in Germany, Italy and Greece, and enrolment at the Slade school of art. His attachments and acquaintance were manifold: from Oscar Wilde and his circle, through the great names of English art at the time (Tonks, Steer, Rothenstein, John, Epstein, etc., etc.), to the worlds of journalism and letters. Many were to visit him at his hotels, their names dropped like well-aimed grenades into his narrative.

There was an early affair with a woman. In 1898, in Rome, he met Romaine Goddard, as she then was, not marrying John Brooks until 1903. Their relationship was intense, but brief, he continuing to Greece, she to addressing her work as a painter. And a fine painter she turned out to be, indeed fantastic. She was also a lesbian, but it was later claimed that Fothergill was the only man she ever loved, although there was also her long friendship or relationship with the Italian poet d’Annunzio.

Fothergill’s taste in art seems high grade. His friend Dick Innes was a wonderful painter, as was Romaine Brooks. When he started the Carfax gallery his idea was to boost the profiles of many fine artists whose reputations were yet to be burnished by widespread acclaim: Augustus John, Walter Sickert, Max Beerbohm, Charles Conder, and William Orpen. He himself was no slouch – his revealing self-portrait is the frontispiece to his cookery book and in later life he was approached by the Sheffield Art Gallery to see if they could include some of his drawings in an exhibition of present-day artists. He was flattered, ‘I who worked for only 18 months and stopped short … I’ve always hated my reputation as an Innkeeper because of its shortcomings and its finality and this made me purr to have that work of 30 years ago recognized, which I know to have been so full of promise’ (MTI, p. 158). His artistic sensibility, once an innkeeper, was diverted to decoration and cookery. The polychromy of his dishes will be mentioned later but immediate note should be made of his decorative schemes, especially outdoors, such as the variegated doors to the range of loose boxes at the Royal Hotel, Ascot, or the painting of outbuildings in hotel yards to give accent or a sense of perspective (he also painted the woodwork of each storey at the Spread Eagle in an ever-lightening shade). In large part, his interior decoration was ‘English antique’, but this did not inhibit his occasional contemporary gesture.

We hear no more of women and John Fothergill until his first marriage. The brotherhood gathered in Lewes by E.P. Warren was collegiate and male. Its purpose was the purchase of all sorts of ancient artefacts (jewellery, coins, sculptures) with a view to owning them, giving them to some museum, or selling them to the same. The house was run by a largely female staff, but all the chaps would dine together, go on rides together, and indulge in various tasteful high-jinks. In the interims, people would be sent off to Europe to look out another treasure, or they would retreat to their rooms or the library to undertaking cataloguing or research. Friendships ebbed and flowed, but the critical relationship was between Warren and his chief collaborator John Marshall. This was irredeemably altered by Marshall’s marriage to Warren’s cousin Mary Bliss in 1907. It has been suggested that Fothergill’s own marriage was somehow provoked by Marshall’s. Who knows? The incontrovertible fact is that the registers of St George’s Hanover Square record the wedding on 30 March 1910 of Fothergill, then residing at Lewes House, Lewes and Elsa Doris Herring (not Henning as Rubinstein would have it), aged 21 years, the daughter of Alfred Herbert Herring, gentleman, then residing in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset (the birthplace of Jeffrey Archer and John Cleese; I have to thank Mr Cross for a copy of this certificate). Mr Cross informs me that the Herring family were in the brewery business in Newport. Possibly, therefore, the connection with Fothergill is due to his family background in the south Wales iron and steel industry rather than the Slade school of art. But she was definitely an artist, and David Sox reports that she finished up in Rome, where she died in 1951 (according to William Cross). Mr Cross has discovered on an Internet auction site a watercolour by this lady which can be seen on the Twitter page referred to earlier. Fothergill himself never mentioned her again. The marriage was evidently a disaster. It is presumed that his psychological decline set in shortly afterwards. Mr Cross also claims that they were not divorced until 1921, shortly before his second and remarkably successful marriage to Kate Headley Kirby.

Fothergill’s nervous collapse occurred sometime between his first marriage and the early months of the First World War. He makes a few references to it in his more introspective book Confessions of an Innkeeper: ‘When I had to retire to Church Stretton, to a sort of Farm House in the hills where they took mainly ex-idiots, I who for 38 years had hoped to have deceived the world into thinking I was an exceptional person, and had felt, almost said to myself on one occasion, that the world would not go round without me … after five months of solitary humiliation there, if only I could have written of my joy and pride when the fat farmer’s wife, an ex-prison nurse, who ran the place, thought me good enough to stand and hold for her some branches of prunus prunella as she cut them off the tree for the house!’ (CI p. 11). If he was indeed 38 years old, then he was there in 1914. Church Stretton, although small, boasted at one time two lunatic asylums. Presumably the farmhouse was used as a place of recuperation. Later in the same book he muses on his intemperate disciplining of Roman cab drivers who whipped their horses too much. But, he observed, ‘at Church Stretton I realized I couldn’t reform others till I’d re-formed myself’ (CI p. 162). His illness excused him from serving in the forces. He recalled, ‘I go downstairs and eat bread and cheese in the RAC baths where I used to go during the War at another distressing period of my life, when I had my own war and envied those around me down there who had the War’ (CI p. 172). He reverts to his First War experiences towards the end of My Three Inns: ‘Late in the first war, when I was broken down … [and] … when I was still a recluse, frightened to go even into the street, a delightful clairvoyant girl, G.P., told me … [I would be] doing some very interesting work, with lots of people and paper. … [This prophecy came true when talking to a man called Musgrave Dyne at a party. He] told me of [a] job and about his own doings. “Well … how do I get it?” — “Through Humbert Wolfe,” he said, whom I also knew in the Ministry of Labour. And so I did, and from that moment began to recover but in agony’ (MTI p. 208).

He was evidently drafted into the civil service: ‘When I was in Government service at the end of the last war I was impelled to short-circuit the official printers by getting some printing done privately, and sent the Ministry a bill for £3. After they had filled a dossier with minutes discussing whether I should be reimbursed or not, Walter Payne, theatre magnate, also a temporary, settled the thing in the affirmative, excusing my crime as “an act of temporary enthusiasm”.’ (MTI pp. 198–9. Walter Payne was licensee of the London Pavilion and later chairman of Variety Theatres Consolidated.)

He was at the Three Swans in Market Harborough during the Second World War. His sons enlisted in the Home Guard until called to higher things, but Fothergill himself was unwilling to join them until finally, ‘[I] put into the background my fear of death which has kept me back so long. I got a pair of army boots made from my own lasts, in fact I think that the certain agony of going in issue boots was my chief reason for having held back till now, and enrolled’ (MTI pp. 188–9). The dandy will always out. He did not last long in the ranks, recognizing the futility of many of the exercises, but his apprehension of mortality was evidently constant and palpable. Partly it was a function of his age, partly it was, as he admitted, that anxiety was his chief motivator. ‘Enthusiasm is all very well when young, but as age advances, so fear becomes the real goad to action’ (MTI p. 199).

The dandyism revealed by his army boots was continuously on show in his working clothes. He always wore buckle shoes – rock-crystal, not paste, as he explained to an incredulous young woman who had already exclaimed at his cooking in a sleeved jacket (‘but I wear an apron’) and could barely comprehend why he sported a monocle – ‘I couldn’t read a kitchen order or wine label without it’ (MTI p. 148). At the outset, he sported a white jacket over black trousers, as illustrated by this anecdote from Ascot days: ‘Ascot, Cyril Heber-Percy, malapert lad [he was later to write Hym, the life of a fox, and While Others Sleep: the Story of a Poacher; his brother was ‘Mad Boy’ Robert Heber-Percy, the companion and heir of Lord Berners] asked in a shrill voice, “Are you the head waiter, or do you merely provide the music?” A white jacket he knew, but buckled shoes were confusing. … As for my buckles and white coat, every tradesman ought to wear a uniform’ (CI p. 69). At Market Harborough, he had a black outfit. He observed that ‘dining out is not much done in the Midlands. … Feeling reassured [by his first genteel clients] I wore for the first time here my little black coat which I designed from a combination of chauffeur’s, cook’s and French labourer’s coats and got the lot made up by a military tailor, my friend Farrell of Camberley.’ The Yorkshire Post accused him of wearing breeches and stockings, but these he denied. The talismanic value of his buckle shoes is revealed in an aside when at his lowest ebb during the troubled months after his dismissal from the Ascot hotel. His ambitions had waned from proper hotels and public houses to tea-rooms and even shops. In that last extremity, he said, ‘I had worked myself up into a state fit to work to-morrow 18 hours a day, I had decided to discard my buckles and get some laced shoes made’ (CI p. 173).

Having navigated the waters of a bad marriage, nervous collapse and conscripted service (albeit office-bound), Fothergill must have felt somewhat adrift in the first years of peace. He had no obvious occupation. His second marriage in 1922 landed him with added responsibilities, soon emphasized by children. As he remarks, ‘I found I must do something for a living, so I was compelled to take an Inn’ (ID p. 1). Quite why an inn, at the age of 46, he never really explains.

I leave it to writers more mellifluous than I to descant on his views on the ideal guest and the policies and imbroglios that flowed from them. Here, I want to concentrate on questions of class and economics. He was, and still is, accused of snobbery. He cites various abusive letters received after people had read his Diary. ‘Thoroughly disgusted – horrible snob – deliberately offensive to everyone you consider below your level’ (MTI p. 153), said one. Others were even ruder. The intrepid gatherer of ephemera on the internet, a blog called ‘jot101’, has a couple of juicy Fothergill items. The second is a pair of letters described on a later page, but the first is a squib on the Spread Eagle that was published in A Bunch of Blue Ribbons. A Volume of Cambridge Essays, collected by [Alfred] Innes Rose (Chapman & Hall, 1933). This puts into verse everything that might be objected to about Fothergill’s regime:

BALLAD AGAINST BLATHERGALL
Buying a box of matches once by stealth,
I saw an inn-kepper who fame pursued,
Welcoming those who boasted height and wealth,
To the short and shabby he was merely rude.
And while obscure and costly dishes stewed,
He snubbed an Oriental from Shoreditch,
And cracked a jest with Lady May Fitzprude –
He kept a pub entirely for the rich.

And yet in every fairness let us state
He had created something very new,
A pseudo-Soho restaurant for the great,
A hot-house for the fashionable few. 
The thought of beer or other vulgar brew
Would anger him to so intense a pitch
That very soon the local farmers knew
He kept a pub entirely for the rich.

The lavatory was most strictly guarded
From sudden travellers in their distress
(Though free to aesthetes prettily pomaded
Who wishes to rouge or to adjust their dress.)
Ladies were often turned away for less,
Except, of course, they claimed some social niche,
Or knew the gossip man on the Express –
He kept a pub entirely for the rich.

ENVOI
Prince, let it be remembered for all time,
When Blathergall lies rotting in death’s ditch,
His was the one unpardonable crime –
He kept a pub entirely for the rich.

(<http://jot101.com/2014/08/innkeeper-john-fothergill-lampooned>)

He called himself an innkeeper but, of course, he was really a publican, though a freeholder not a tenant. One day in Ascot he applied to the magistrates for an extension to his licence so as to hold a dance. He found himself among a group of other publicans in search of a similar waiver: ‘Then five publicans were called up, not in their own names but in the names of their pubs. “The Lord Nelson,” bawled the policeman, “The Jolly Gardener” and so on. Then the tenants, pathetic sight, top-coated and washed up, humble and grey-headed, each holding his hat behind him, stepped up and stood in a row. … After these pubs my case came. I was not called “The Royal Ascot,” but why not? I tried to go up gracefully but firmly. I didn’t touch, much less hang on to, the greasy rails of the little box, I didn’t wear my greatcoat or hold my hat.’ The genteel might be able to own a hotel (one step up from an inn) or be a super-publican by sitting on a brewery board, but innkeeping smacked too firmly of trade. When his son John was sent to Leighton Park School in Reading (a Quaker foundation), he was taunted by his classmates for being the son of a publican – this summons up the memory of the episode in Sorrell and Son (the novel by Warwick Deeping about the hotel business, published in 1925) where Sorrell is asked to take his boy away from a school run by an intensely snobbish headmaster for fear his father’s humble avocation infects his fellow-pupils. If you were in trade, or so it seems to me from reading both Fothergill and Warwick Deeping, it meant your motive was only sordid profit and survival. It invited insult and exploitation from all classes of citizen, unless you were strong-minded. Assaults on Fothergill, for example complaints and ruses that might provoke a reduction in the bill, are recorded from all social groups, high and low – the distinction Fothergill drew was between nice and nasty, though his presumption was that the nasty were more commonly encountered among the low than the high. As one so emotionally insecure, at least at the outset, Fothergill had long and sensitive antennae to detect social affront. His account of visiting a county couple with a delivery of cyder (his spelling) and lager loaded in his dog-cart (I don’t think Fothergill was able to drive, despite his loving description of all sorts of motor cars at his inns) is intriguing on how servants addressed him (and, although not quoted here, how the county failed to offer him a cup of tea): ‘To be addressed by butlers without a “sir” is distressing; there is only one now in the district who gives it me, and I feel like thanking him for it. One footman always gives me a rain of “Mr Fotherjills,” so last time I delivered the goods I told him that if he must call me affectionately by my surname it was Fothergill but that “sir” would be shorter’ (ID p. 275).

Fothergill’s exclusion, particularly from the Spread Eagle, of farmers, local tradesmen and commercial travellers was in part because he desired to be surrounded with people like himself, who treated him as he wished to be treated, and because he realised his economic survival depended on catering to a better sort of trade. His axiom, and this a reflection of the deep-seated class divisions of the era, was that people of different backgrounds and upbringing could never co-exist. He discovered, very late in the day, perhaps as England itself realized, that a degree of promiscuous fraternization in the dining-room was possible and even desirable, but society had to go through a depression and a world war to welcome it. He has a nice observation on this à propos his tenure of the Three Swans, Market Harborough, which also displays a self-awareness of his emotional progress (to which we will come later): ‘I want to keep an Inn for the good of the public, not for myself and yet however I may determine not to carry on the individualistic tyranny of Thame somehow or other I still find myself guiding, selecting, deciding and controlling the client. I can’t help it, but I think I’m only driving away the broadest impossibilities, because now when manufacturing gentlemen, commercial travellers, highbrows and county are in the dining-room together I haven’t the slightest feeling of the incongruous, whereas at Thame I felt responsible and guilty’ (CI p. 243).

If Fothergill had to plump, then, the upper class and the intelligensia would be for whom he plumped. The trouble with commercial classes (save nice ones, magnates in any form) was that they didn’t like paying and he needed to charge more than his predecessors in Thame – a town which had barely registered the rise in cost of living since the First World War. Even so, Fothergill encountered the first dilemma of middle-class people entering the retail trades: the prices that were acceptable to the clientele produced an inadequate level of profit if your expectations (for holidays, say, or the private education of your two sons) exceeded those of most high-street businessmen. It has taken much of a century to bring these two figures into line. A five-and-sixpenny dinner in 1939, for which you might be served four courses and cheese, would be worth £14.99 today, after inflation. In the middle of World War II, it would be worth not more than £11.09 today. The Thame farmers of 1924 who expected to pay 2s. 6d. for their market-day luncheon (for which they might get more than a pound of roast meat) would be paying, adjusted for inflation, £7.43 in 2017. A bedroom for which Fothergill charged 8s. 6d. (including breakfast) in 1943 would now be worth £18.01. This is not a recipe for wealth, nor for the education of expensive young boys (Eton’s annual fees in 1938 were £245). Small wonder too that hotels and restaurants paid low wages. One thing, therefore, that John Fothergill achieved by throwing out his lower-class custom in 1924 was to raise the price that he might set for his meals from a niggardly 2s. 6d.

Here too, I must be indulged a slight excursion from the main thread of argument. Mr William Cross kindly sent me a copy of a letter from Fothergill to the editor of The Times, dated 26 April 1949. He wrote it in response to an earlier letter to the editor from Hugh Wontner, chairman of the Savoy Hotel in London, who had advocated the lifting of the five-shilling limit on restaurant charges (for the food alone, not the drink or extra-curriculars) which had been in force since early in the War. Our innkeeper wrote: ‘Sir,— When Mr. Hugh Wontner pleads that our five shilling dinner limits the spending of our foreign visitors I would like to add that it also limits, or should limit, the quality of food that small hotel keepers are able to give them. I find that my five shilling dinner, with no surcharge, costs about two and ninepence which, with small custom and the increased cost of all overheads, amounts, my accountant tells me, to a small gift to the purchaser. Yours truly, JOHN FOTHERGILL.’ This only serves to show at what small margins of profit the hotel industry used to operate. Albeit the circumstances were exceptional, but in the limits set by government you can see dim shadows of the urge of the customer class to underpay for their pleasures.

One remarkable change that has come in the public conduct of British people over this period is that we no longer haggle about prices. At the kernel of a large proportion of Fothergill’s tales of insult, argument and discord is a refusal to pay the price asked by the supplier. Such refusals come from the most unlikely sources and in circumstances where you might expect the customer to feel in some way obligated to the establishment. For example: ‘Three middle-class governesses dined and slept in the yard cottage because we were full up. Next morning they complained of the charge. I explained sympathetically how they had been charged less for dinner than everyone else and less than ordinary even for the cottage. They were a little truculent and cheeky. I kept in good temper and said, “I’m sorry about this unpleasantness.” – “It’s you who are the cause of it,” said one, and another said something vulgar which the subsequent happening caused me to forget but in reply to which I said, “Now, none of your schoolgirl nonsense.” – Like a flash of lightning the young female near me raised her sharp elbow, caught me a smash across the head with her hand and simultaneously jumped out into the street … I felt a martyr in the cause of keeping an Inn for decent people’ (ID p. 111).

An even more egregious example (I leave to one side the flash Harrys and chancers) comes here (this, by the way, is in the middle of the War): ‘I was in bed for a change and at 11 o’clock Kate let in a little female, en route, she said, for a confinement. She told her we had only a very small but quite adequate room. When she got there she exclaimed, “Oh, haven’t you anything better than this?” Kate, who thought her lucky to get a room at all in this sleepworthy town, … ignored her, but gave her tea and cake, and a friend with us did her an H.W.B. [hot water bottle]. She came down at an unearthly hour and Di Bulloch’s kind old nurse made her more tea and knocked us up to ask how much she was to pay. We said 8s. 6d. She wouldn’t pay more than 5s. and so she left. But finding her early train didn’t go she came back, had a good breakfast told the waiter that she’d already paid for it in the bill and hooked it’ (MTI p. 183).

It is not easy to excuse Fothergill’s more outrageous statements about his fellow-humans, and one has to appreciate that some of his attitudes were ingrained prejudice common to those of his upbringing, whatever his ambitions to make a place inhabited by only beautiful people. Phrases dropped in the course of a narrative can be revealing: ‘a scrubby undergrad’; ‘the few disgruntled ones who treat us like coolies’; ‘what touched me most in Lucas’ article was that he was not afraid to call me a gentleman and insist upon it. It isn’t easy to be one, especially in an Inn’; ‘two rather stodgy underbred folks came and asked for a room’; ‘the first [Agricultural] Show we had here at the Inn was inundated with peasants and ham teas’; ‘an old man with a whore told Katie to tell me that 3s. 6d. for a four-course meal was a swindle’. What is perhaps more interesting is to watch his ideas changing over the course of his three principal books.

An Innkeeper’s Diary certainly set the cat among the pigeons when it dealt with the ‘patients’. (As an aside, is he the first to refer to his customers by that word? I recall Patrick Stevenson of the Horn of Plenty restaurant near Tavistock delighting in the usage in the early 1970s. Maybe it was a common currency that I had simply never before encountered.) One is bound to suspect that Fothergill indulged in a certain amount of teasing, pour épater les bourgeois. In his Confessions he called the Diary ‘that nasty little book showing a high moral and aesthetic purpose’ (CI p. 1). Later in the same volume, he mused on the various types of hotel to be found in Britain: ‘The second [type is] … the amateur or self-conscious place in which the proprietor’s personal tastes, trivialities or petty tyrannies prevail and the client becomes a timid and often poorly fed guest. This was the atmosphere of my own misguided first efforts and it’s now to be found fairly often’ (CI pp. 273–4). But this is not to dispute that he did quite self-consciously set about creating an inn in his own image, it is rather to indicate the weakening of his resolve to be an impossible tyrant. The critical juncture was his dismissal from the management of the Royal Hotel, Ascot in 1933. When he found that he was losing too much money at Thame, he had determined on a new and reasonable course, to go into a larger enterprise, with adequate capital provided by partners. This is the standard dilemma of the small business proprietor, the one-man show. The turnover does not supply sufficient for your ambitions, nor does it allow for hiring of proper staff so you can have a moment to yourself. The only solution is expansion: and how many small businesses have foundered on this chimera? He was, of course, sadly disappointed at Ascot. Not only did he have to work every hour of the day, but his partners proved penny-pinching and unsympathetic. They cut their losses, he looked for some other berth. The twelve months he spent in furnished accommodation driving round the country to inspect one white elephant after another were dispiriting. Each month wasted was so much more capital expended and less to invest once they did find something. There were, however, compensations. The most important was the time of enforced idleness he spent with his children. He discovered that they might love him and he love them in return. There was also a certain spiritual transformation which he describes in terms of their slight involvement with Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group, later Moral Re-Armament (MRA). In the event, Fothergill rejected their blandishments, but the episode emphasized the extent of their own individual turmoil – ultimately, they seem to have preferred the thrills of palmistry and fortune-telling to evangelical Christianity. But there is no doubt that Fothergill was converted from someone motivated by dislike and exclusion to one driven by love and inclusion (though this never quite curbed his atavistic tendencies). He recognized this change in attitude in a remark he made about the probable reception of his second volume of diaries: ‘[Critics will say,] “We preferred Mr. Fothergill as a neurotic than a kindly Boniface,” or “Whilst he was the first self-conscious Innkeeper there are hundreds now and we begin to wonder if the traditional non-egoist sort isn’t preferable”‘ (CI p. 297).

While seeking a third business, he wrote: ‘If I ever get another Hotel I shall now devote myself to Hosthood as if it were religion. Having done Circe, Cerberus and Syren in turns, been spiteful, irritable, unsympathetic and tyrant, sometimes with a sound purpose, sometimes out of pride or lack of grace, and having begun at Ascot to feel still more clearly that there was such a thing as an Innkeeper’s love, now is the time to put it into practice … But there are obstacles – say you did set about letting your heart go out towards an ill-educated, ill-behaved, ill-dressed party (and how often haven’t I been tempted to do so) they’d be embarrassed and suspect your every smile or soft word or attention and never come again, still more the bright young person, who would suspect you of being a missionary or half-wit’ (CI p. 160). This is quite a turnaround from an earlier remark: ‘Isa Fletcher … told me that someone had said that I was getting on so well that I could afford to be rude to people. … I was ruder still at the beginning and it is just because I have been rude to people whom I don’t like here that we are “getting on”’ (ID p. 93).

At this point, if you will accept it, a digression. In PPC 93 I printed a letter from John Fothergill to one Mrs Cardew. The manuscript had come into the hands of my friend Richard Storey when he bought a small lot of ephemera. It had no context at all. The letter was written from Market Harborough in reply to one of appreciation for his second volume of diaries Confessions of an Innkeeper, published in 1938. It is entirely without punctuation, which I have here supplied. The text reads in part:

Dear Mrs Cardew,

… It is very jolly to have yr letter – so many thanks. I remember your names so well from Ascot tho’ Beastlywise I’ve forgotten your faces – and for your comfortable words about my last Diary. [T]o be sure I don’t mind the p-g [paying guest(s)] now so much, but practice more objective attitudes upon them & don’t get subjective. … It’s a desert, this Midlands – but this is a delightful little place of great parts. Thanks, it’s going quite well.

Meantime please have my best wishes & Memories,

Yrs sincerely,

John Fothergill

The reference to paying guests must be to the extensive diatribes against permanent boarders at the Ascot hotel contained in his Confessions. They were his bête noire, in the main because they just sat around complaining, contributing very little to his profit margin. ‘There is no good boarder. I don’t believe there is any good and decent reason for anyone to be an Hotel Boarder for long. Either they are unhappy or impossible to live with or incapable of keeping a servant, or of doing a job or too idle – they are by nature cast-offs, throw-ups or downs and outs’ (CI p. 73). But by the time this letter was written, we can observe the effect of his spiritual conversion from hate to love (from subjective to objective).

While most readers have concentrated on Fothergill’s prejudices against guests who ask to see the room, ask if the beds have been aired, ask for ‘accommodation’ rather than a ‘room’, or against those who think a little promiscuous coupling will be ignored by the proprietor, or even promiscuous lap-sitting – ‘It’s a horrible thing to be a fanatic. I saw a girl, rather a nice girl, on a nice undergrad’s knee in the Common Room, so I attacked the four of them like a fury, telling them to go out, never to come again and to tell their friends not to’ (ID p. 164) – his views of his staff are also worth exploring.

‘When I came to look over this place in 1922 … I was passing down the yard trying to make up my mind, when I saw Katie standing at the kitchen door and I decided then and there to take it’ (ID p. 283). This was Katie Lomas (to distinguish her from John Fothergill’s wife Kate), the eldest of five sisters, all born to the local gas works manager. She, and they, were the rocks on which the Spread Eagle was founded. Katie was in charge of much front of house: ‘For all these years, five or six nights a week, she has read out of her counterfoil books every item received – would it be fifty thousand or sixty thousand pounds or more? – mainly in shillings, with Kate transcribing and analysing them. Many … will miss her … were it not that we have still three of her sisters! … and now Phyllis has left us on the same errand … and Bessie remains, equally wonderful’ (ID p. 284). This was written as she declared her intention to get married, after more than seven years’ service.

Contrast this encomium to his usual term of reference to the workers: ‘Hearing a crash in the kitchen I looked inside and asked what was broken; a kitchen boy on his first day with us from a pauper home replied wearily, “Only a jug, sir”’ (ID p. 5). But he could do better. In the very early ’30s: ‘Alan Bicknell … asks me if I would lend my name and advice to a new venture in London. But the fact is, having had here a kitchen staff for seven years composed mainly of half-wits, degenerates, dishonests, drunkards and hystericals, and having done it daily ourselves, I can’t conceive of lending my name to any establishment where I don’t also do it all myself. It’s this kitchen business that has knocked the initiative and courage out of me. … But now, 1931, Ronald Walker who was a kitchen boy when the last cook “put on her hat” has done more for me in a year than all those “cooks” together did in seven years and Ted Surman and Jack Johnson, boys, have done in two years between them more than seven years of other kitchen staff (ID p. 264–5).

Often his relations with his staff, especially in the kitchen, were those of hectoring teacher and wayward pupil: ‘For 14 years I’ve taught boys, men and women to cook things in my way but now I thought I could teach no more’ (CI p. 220); or, ‘having just had a slang at a kitchen boy for disgusting, culpable negligence, a sly, sulky, evasive, plausible, shamming, slippery type’ (ID p. 180). However, soon after taking the Three Swans he noted, ‘But what really gave me pleasure was that after 3 months’ teaching of our incredulous staff, tactfully, firmly, persistently, repetitively, delicately the elements of method and some of my own tricks (the means and methods of almost all hotels and private houses are indescribably stupid), we can now serve and wash up for 50 people in the same time as we did for twelve when we first came, and I believe the staff is convinced and pleased’ (CI p. 232). He had a penchant for home-made gadgets to accelerate kitchen work, both elaborate, such as his kitchen table, and simple, like his dirty-pot holder to speed washing up (all these illustrated in his cookery book). His efforts to make everyone adopt his own methods provoked this comment: ‘Mrs. X preferred her own way of cleaning pans to using my gadget, for the same reason, namely, habit, that she preferred to take 40 minutes peeling and washing potatoes to using the machine for 2 minutes and wasting nothing. … Over the same sink I used to tell Z daily the quickest and cleanest way to wash plates. But no, she wouldn’t do it. So one day I got ratty and said, “Z, I believe you are obstinate.” — “I believe we are much of a muchness,” she replied smilingly’ (CI p. 253).

Fothergill’s staff came from all walks of life. When he put up the great sign of the Spread Eagle he was lucky to employ at the time a former naval lieutenant whose training as a shipwright eased some knotty problems; he had a waiter who married a princess, albeit of exotic origin; he had nice middle-class boys learning the innkeeper’s ropes, such as Romilly John, the son of the painter – and a second is referred to much later on, at Market Harborough: ‘Roger Beck, tall, good-looking youth, told me he wanted to leave the stage and learn Innkeeping. As Johnny [JF’s son] was now leaving the Inn to learn acting, I thought it fitting that he should come and ornament this place for us on our holiday’ (MTI p. 165); he had a cook who boasted the name Janet de la Cour, although her Channel Island background may have implied more noble an ancestry than indeed it was; at least one of his waiters at Ascot seems to have been trained at the Dorchester in London. Not everyone, in other words, came from the proletariat. Nor, by the finish, did he think his staff unworthy of his employ. He called the Lomas sisters, ‘our blessed maids’; sometime later, ‘Chetwynd was telling me how admirable our staff was, even better than private house staff. May Stratford and Gladys Lindars have all the charm and goodness of the Lomas family, and I here and now bless them all for being what they are, and leaving us free to trouble about the twopenny difficulties and problems of every little matter’ (ID p. 177). Even at Ascot, which was never an easy place to run, he was moved to report, ‘For the first time all our staff are splendid. I don’t suppose there was ever a mixed staff of 14 so decent and so happy, so sworn at periodically and so trying to think – for until they teach thinking at schools you can’t expect it of them when they come out’ (CI p. 92). He dedicated Innkeeper’s Diary ‘to our generous staff’.

The sign at the Three Swans, Market Harborough.

He was able to observe that different talents had equal worth. Once he had settled at Market Harborough, with an inherited staff, he delighted in the salt-of-the-earth charms of his waitress Beatrice, never cowed into submission by an upper-crust clientele: ‘Beatrice, the elderly parlourmaid whom we took over, bids fair to be the catch of the place’ (CI p. 221). Part of it was that he was touched by her support of his regime (just as he was touched by the apparent goodwill of the Midland town in contrast to the stand-offishness of Thame). A thought expressed by Beatrice gave rise to this: ‘Beatrice … started talking about “personality” in running an Hotel. I asked her what it was. She said that she didn’t know but that it not only brought the people and made them happy when they came but made the staff agreeable to one another. I hope I have personality then, and that my quiet efforts to make them agree and treat one another peacefully will succeed’ (CI p. 226). Note once more the effects of his spiritual transformation.

With the declaration of war, trade in Market Harborough came to an abrupt standstill. Fothergill felt constrained to take precipitate action: ‘No one comes here. In a fortnight the war has taken them all. We are going deeper and deeper into the dark … I’ve written a letter to my staff of ten, telling them that an expected badly reduced trade would not pay the same wages. Therefore those that couldn’t take less must, of course, find work elsewhere. … To those who should prefer to stay on at a reduced rate, I would raise it again as and when trade allowed it. … Lois Blackmore, of the bar, came streaming with an awful cold and volunteered to take half. Janet the cook, Mrs. Bowman, Henry Collins, all elderly, bravely offered to go out – on the dole’ (MTI p. 166). For a moment, the house was run by the Fothergill parents and their sons and a few friends from the town. A new normality resumed, however, and wartime trade became brisker, allowing Fothergill to take back some of his faithful retainers, although the staff remained ‘elderly’ for the duration.

Two long paragraphs in Confessions point to occasional issues. The first relates to tipping, a vexed question then as now, although Fothergill may have been grateful that the owner’s stake in the matter was nil, apart from ensuring the happiness of all with the regime in force. ‘Fairness in the division of tips which I should think are a survival of the time when you brought your own servants to the hotel and paid bribes to the few hotel servants for extra jobs, was not on my mind at Thame for 8 years because there was always a Lomas girl to take and divide them, but here I saw a difficulty. So many good servants leave because they are treated unfairly by the head waiter, who, short-sighted enough not to see that it is all to his advantage to keep them, bags the cash and robs his employer and himself of good staff, tho’ many stay and suffer unfairness because they can’t be sure of anything better elsewhere. I could never think that the money-box into which all tips were put for open partition at the end of the day would be fair for plainly some would keep a percentage back. At Littlehampton Beach Hotel [this was a large successful hotel, rebuilt in the 1880s and lasting until the 1980s] the head waiter, an agile and remarkably hostlike young man (since, I believe, gone into a publishing firm), told me of his system, viz. each waiter made out his own bills and gave him a certain percentage of his tips. For this the head waiter not only ran the show and talked to the guests, saw to fairness in placing the people amongst the waiters, helped them when they were pressed and in every way pushed business for them. He divided when, and as he thought fit, tips that were given to him personally or for division. He said he had a pretty shrewd idea as to whether his seven waiters were giving him the proper percentage or not. But this system I cannot put into practice here where one waiter or waitress must make out all the bills. I used to ask the bill maker about the tips, “Oh, I gave Ella 7s. 6d. last week,” or, “Oh, I gave Nancy 5s.” This I told him was indeed very kind of him, but a proper proportion of the tips was in fact their due. I arranged what this proper proportion should be, but how to get to know that the girls were being given it? So I added up the dining-room turnover from casuals, single nights and solid boarders. From the casuals’ takings I reckoned 9 per cent., the single nights or short stagers 5 per cent. and from the solid boarders nil. Thus I should have the minimum tips received by the head waiter or waitress. Now, as one wouldn’t want to ask them how much they had had, I can, and indeed do, in passing say to a girl, “I’m glad, Mary, that you will have had 20s. this week,” and pass on. If I am far out, she tells me. Very soon after I started the plan the bill maker gave notice (CI pp. 102–4).

A second long entry in his diary marks Fothergill’s interior political debate which appears as a new angle on life in the course of his Confessions, i.e. in the 1930s. Hitherto, his world-view was irreduceably founded on personality and individualism with little acknowledgement of wider influences on human action, but in this episode, he came up against altogether different forces (though the personal was never far distant): ‘Today being Bank Holiday, the kitchen porter-that-was, whom I made into cook and for whom I’ve cooked every dinner since, intimated that it was his afternoon off – their afternoons begin at one o’clock. I argued with him that if all cooks went off when the world was on holiday the world wouldn’t get any food nor indeed would the cooks themselves… and I think I convinced him that if he wanted to have his holiday on Bank Holidays, he shouldn’t be in the Catering Trade. At that moment James, who always makes fine and large pronouncements backed by terrifying references to his experience elsewhere, came into the kitchen. I turned to him as arbitrator … “Of course the chef can choose his day and time for going off duty.”— “Then who,” I asked, “does the cooking?”— “The learners who are coming along.” With this vision of a Dorchester kitchen staff in my eye I looked at our own staff, George, the Welsh boy whom I had recently brought from starvation on the mines and who was quite incapable of helping me. “And when the learners are proficient,” continued James, tho’ surely he had done me enough harm already, “they too can choose their own time and day to go off.” … “Who, then, does the cooking for the Holiday crowd?”— “The beginners of course.” … The Irish cook soaked up this eloquence and I, out of decency, couldn’t argue further with my elected arbitrator. The cook went off and I had to do his work as well as my own. I mused a little about it with Welsh George that evening. He is supposed to be a red-hot Bolshevist, and he has always shown himself very fair and loyal to the cook. Next day was an additional Bank Holiday and George, it being his day off, slipped quietly away, and that was the Irish and Welsh of it. Next day I told George the Bolshevist that he was too anti-social for me, an advanced socialist, believing not in having my own way and suiting myself but in working together for a cause. … I feel a common little bourgeois capitalist giving weekly of my overdraft. … Next day came David Ogilvy who 18 months ago at Oxford was a boisterous, handsome and almost idiotic great lad and now is a very quiet, thoughtful fellow. He has been working in French kitchens in order to become an expert on kitchen requirements for the Aga stove. Someone told me once that all the kitchen staffs in France were the noblest of the race and that in England they were mainly lazy and perpetually complaining men. Ogilvy told me that in a kitchen in Paris, when he was standing thinking (for after all he was not there to learn cookery but to sum up other things), the others once called out to him, “Quoi donc, rien a faire? rien a faire?” He said that the silver-plate cleaner, … earning £3 a week, was a fanatic Bolshevist, who went to Moscow as Paris delegate at the Third International and returned with his pride in his work intact; so that’s the French of it – in the kitchen at least. (The Welsh went a week later.)’ (CI p. 82).

Here, I apologise, is another small diversion. The man David Ogilvy mentioned here is David Ogilvy (1911–99) of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. Fothergill must have first met him when he was up at Christ Church, Oxford in 1929–31 (he didn’t finish his degree). After he came down, he went to Paris and signed on as a commis chef at the Hotel Majestic. After a year, he returned to Scotland (he had been at school at Fettes) and began to sell Aga cookers from door to door. His success in this field marked him out to his employer and he was commissioned to write a manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker, issued in 1935, to coincide with the launch of the New Standard Aga cooker. (The most complete text of this manual can be found at <http://www.lannigan.org/the_theory%20and_practice_of_selling_the_aga_cooker_training_manual.htm>. It was described by Fortune magazine as the finest sales instruction manual ever written.) Thus far, Wikipedia, but Fothergill’s description of Ogilvy’s Paris visit may modify this to a degree. Fothergill was very keen on Agas. He certainly had them installed in his kitchen in Market Harborough: there were two two-oven stoves, placed at right-angles to each other. Does this reference, dating from 1932 at Ascot, imply that he had put them in at the Royal too? It makes him quite an early adopter. Agas were first produced in Great Britain at their Smethwick factory in 1929. Their sales in the year 1931 amounted to 322.

Some closing thoughts, perhaps, on staff, revealing Fothergill’s more philosophic, and unselfish, side. The first was prompted by a girl at Ascot filling a hot water bottle from a jug of coffee rather than the water boiler, leaving a party without their coffee after dinner. Shortly afterwards, ‘When I passed the staff room to-day and heard them loudly laughing, my first feeling was of resentment, then I asked myself, “Do you think they ought to ask your leave to laugh when in this house?” I felt selfish and ashamed, then I thought, would I have minded their loud laughing had I not felt in their voices this hot-coffee bottle, and an absolute carelessness of anything but themselves. But, again, do the silly sheep turn round and thank the shepherd for leading them into pastures new? No, and why should they? He doesn’t lead them for their own good. And so if your job involves staff, and I should think there was no job more involved with staff than an Hotel where they are with you day and night, in and out, not slaves, not part of your family, but independent, irresponsible, carnal, half-baked beings living their own lives for themselves under your roof; if you must use them it’s best not to let them be enemies to your peace of mind, but to praise God if you have two or three as reliable as yourself, and of such we have, and more than two or three’ (CI pp. 86–7).

It was when he had settled into Market Harborough that he was moved to this paean: ‘Whatever other country Innkeepers’ experiences with barmaids, mine were generally pretty awful till two years ago when Josephine (Jo) Graham, an amateur, came to us here and has shown us what the ideal barmaid for the best Inn in a country town should be. What should be a barmaid’s make up? and why is she so difficult to get? She doesn’t sweep her bars or make the fires. She eats apart, and dresses better and at least wears show-clothes whilst working. She gets “Miss —” from the staff and the proprietor. She not only makes the custom, but controls and keeps it. … She must be a lover of men; in a philosophic sense, i.e. all women to all men, whether or not she cares, in closing hours, to be one woman to one man. With this equipment and in an atmosphere of her own creation she may turn over from £30 to £200 per week at a gross profit of from £10 to £80, and gets, well, 25s. for it! (tips she seldom gets and generally declines them). … Good barmaids therefore are rare because no one constituted as above would do the job for this money. … It is a University graduate’s job at a proper wage and when both these essentials are appreciated the bar and many a born hostess will come into their own. (After three years Jo gets married.)’ (CI p. 238) That this satisfaction was not confined to the barmaid is underlined by his report that, ‘Beatrice has left for a lighter job. She gave us our standard of kindness in the dining-room. … Lily and Ethel Calow are wonderful, and especially valuable in a part of the world where nice girls prefer even short time in a factory with partial “freedom” to do nothing in to an interesting life in an Inn where “service is perfect freedom”’ (CI p. 253).

Fothergill always described himself as an innkeeper (‘an amateur pioneer innkeeper’ in his Who’s Who entry) while today we would most likely say he was a chef-proprietor. But was he always the chef? Did he do all the cooking? One cannot imagine that he was especially trained for kitchen work. The closest he may have come to it was in supervising household matters at some periods during his residence at Lewes House, but there the staff was highly competent. It is difficult to establish exactly his function at either the Spread Eagle or the Royal Hotel, although he gives more details about life at the Three Swans.

There were definitely cooks at Thame: ‘To-day the cook let us down nicely at lunch, having made half the proper amount of soup and vegetables and secretly economized on seven chauffeurs who went on strike’ (ID p. 113). (One needs to recall that in pre-war days the servants needed feeding and watering as well as the clients: the chauffeurs’ fare was sometimes a vexed question.) It may have been the same cook when he reports, ‘No one came to dinner to eat what would have been no food because the cook had spoilt it all when I had to be out of the kitchen for an hour’ (ID p. 156). Here the implication is that he has a hands-on role alongside the cook. A possible trio of mishaps, pouring as the metaphorical rain falls, occurs later at Oxford, where Fothergill contracted to cater an OUDS dinner for 100 people: ‘The cook spoilt the black soup completely… brownish salt lemonade’ (ID p. 157). This sort of hopelessness is recalled in the reflection quoted earlier, ‘Ronald Walker who was a kitchen boy when the last cook “put on her hat” has done more for me in a year than all those “cooks” together did in seven years’ (ID p. 265). The sense of much of the text is that Fothergill supervised the kitchen closely throughout his early years – laying down the law, crafting the menus and specifying the way dishes should be cooked and presented. It seems also clear that he was often in charge of the selection and carving of the roast meats (‘“Because you’re not married and I discourage indiscriminate coupling here,”’ he thundered at some hapless couple who had misbehaved in the dining-room, ‘[t]hen I went back to the kitchen to carve meat…’ might well cover his in-and-out function during meals). There were evidently some main course dishes that were not simple roasts, but not many – jugged hare, some pies – especially if plain grilled meats and beefsteaks are included in the larger category. But for the production of the rest of the menu, perhaps he allowed the staff free rein (once the recipe and presentation had been agreed). His wife Kate had a hand in, perhaps control of, the dessert course – she made all the mavrodaphne trifles for instance (as well as 900 pounds of jam in one season). At the end of Thame he wrote, ‘I simply wish … I could stay in the kitchen and make the food perfect and see no human beings’ (CI p. 38). That half-in, half-out condition persisted at Ascot. The long anecdote above about kitchen days-off confirms this.

When he got to Market Harborough, he found a cook already in post: ‘We’ve taken over our predecessor’s cook Janet de la Cour from Jersey and Mrs. Bowman as helper. For 14 years I’ve taught boys, men and women to cook things in my way but now I thought I could teach no more. Why shouldn’t I do the cooking, for dinner at least, myself? I don’t know where it’s done in England but in France it would be the ordinary thing in an Inn of this size. So with the prospect of being tied from 6 o’clock till ten every evening after a hard day’s work, I took off my coat and started this evening straight away. … Kate arranges luncheon, cook does it beautifully, on my menu I call it “Eatable” – which is all that a daily luncheon should be and more than it generally is – and dinner, “Somewhat of an event for the curious palate,” when cook helps me … (Instead of being a tie, these last four hours of the day, they’re the happiest I’ve ever known – The two women are so loyal, careful and enthusiastic.)’ (CI p. 220). Later, he purred, ‘Janet de la Cour is the best all-round cook I’ve had for 14 years. Character is 9/10ths of being a cook (CI p. 253).

What sort of cooking went on at Fothergill’s inns? He made various broad statements in the course of his writing, the most famous of which is: ‘The place with its specialité gastronomique is at least one better than the place with none, but you can’t make a meal of ecrévisses alone, or Grasmere gingerbread, Rouen duck, Edinburgh rock or Westminster school pancake, or Pâté de canard d’Amiens, especially as, in these speciality places, the rest of the food is extra meaningless. But where is it, besides here, that you get intention in everything? When I took this shop, I thought round for all the things I had found best wherever I’d been and sent for them. So Kate pays regular bills for food stuff in Athens, France, Norway, Jaffa and Italy. And of English things we have daily from three bakers three different kinds of bread made from flours I have forced upon them, besides the breads we make ourselves, cheese from East Harptree, salt from Malden, mustard from Leighton Buzzard, sausages, after a romantic search all over England, from Glenthorn in Thame, books from the Book Society, bacon, found by accident, from the International Stores … and despite the trouble, the net result upon the patient is that he is alive to something very different in the food. Real food is a surprise, and simply because the gastric juices fly out to it, whilst they hold back aching at the aromalessness of synthetic, poor or adulterated products. Surely this is better than buying all your stuff from an ‘Hotel Purveyor,’ making out your quantities required on a big list – butter, coffee, coal, caviare, paraffin, all tasting the same and all wrapped up in Marie Stopes paper, even the coal. Surely this is better and more difficult than having one specialité gastronomique? (ID pp. 169–70)

Another was: ‘I define three kinds of kitchen: (i) The French, where the food doesn’t taste of what it is, or ought to be, but tastes good: (ii) English hotel, where the food, when even it is food, doesn’t taste of anything, or tastes badly: (iii) Our kitchen, and the true American, where the food is food, tastes of it, and tastes good’ (ID p. 186).

In his Cookery Book he lists suppliers some of which, thanks to the War, must have been a memory. His chief source, particularly for tasty tidbids for hors d’oeuvre was De Danske Vin & Konserves Fabrik, J.D. Beauvais & Rasmussen, Copenhagen, to whom he went for bayleaf anchovies, pickled cucumber, frankfurter sausages, tinned mussels, purée de foies, and canned tunnyfish. Otherwise, he got toheroa soup from Segal Frères in London (or try the New Zealand Consulate, or Fortnum’s) – toheroa is a large bivalve, Paphies ventricosa, found in New Zealand, which makes a bright green soup. Its population has crashed in recent years thanks to overfishing. His mustard he got from Taylor’s of Newport Pagnell (this English mustard had been manufactured in the town since 1830 – the family originally produced mineral waters – although today the works have migrated northwards). Gjetost cheese came from Jansen in Oslo. And he counselled consulting the Greek consul for supplies of mavrodaphne wine from Patras, first developed by a Bavarian Gustav Clauss in the nineteenth century. He meant to tell us whence came his roseleaf jam but in the end he omitted all mention of it. Roseleaf jam was one of Fothergill’s linchpin ingredients. He brought it out at every turn, most surprisingly as the sweet condiment for mutton or lamb. In his early days at Market Harborough, ‘Having determined to have no rows here I had my first one to-day with a little business man who, tho’ perfectly sober, in order to swagger said harmful things to me about my food and menu in a crowded smoke-room and then carried on in the same lead-swinging way up-stairs at lunch before his two friends, each of whom tactfully tried to smother him’ (CI p. 228). The main cause of dispute was that the customer would have preferred redcurrant jelly with his mutton.

There was invariably a table d’hôte at luncheon. At dinner, the choice was greater, although the meal seems often to have been prix fixe. He does make some remarks about his menus, although I myself have never yet seen one. From Thame comes this observation: ‘A complaint from two people at a very crowded prix fixe luncheon objected to paying 3s. 6d. for only fish, curiously cooked, proper cheese and the rest. The arguments for discouraging these little à la carte meals are (i) in a country place you don’t get people eating at all hours as in the town, and since turnover has to be made in a limited time and space, snacks have to be discouraged, especially as the snackers sit as long at the table as the prix fixers; (ii) being near Oxford one has to be careful not to establish this precedent or we could fill up every night by people drinking a tankard and cheese whilst perhaps others, at busy times, are waiting outside for a full ceremonial meal; (iii) it is not what you eat that costs so much as the upkeep, the atmosphere and the time you spend on it. Here these last are especially costly. In short, cheese and beer, in the dining-room at least, doesn’t pay. One has to risk being thought mean and grasping’ (ID pp. 185–6).

When wartime restrictions were in force, there was little choice: ‘Sometimes people will come and, generally out of affectation, send for the waitress and ask to see the menu for dinner, and, even when assured by her that the menu, tho’ unknown, will be “all very nice,” will send her back for a definitive answer, but in vain. Rather futile, because here in the wilds it’s either what I have or nothing’ (MTI p. 145).

John Fothergill’s formative years were spent in the world of art – sometimes tending towards antiquities, others towards art pure and simple. His approach to life in general, to gardening and to cooking seems often to be that of a colourist (although his artistic specialism was drawing, not painting). Do not forget that he wrote The Gardener’s Colour Book in 1927. Two years later, this was translated for American varieties, times of flowering and so forth, by the US garden writer Mrs Francis (Louisa Yeomans) King. Fothergill himself always hoped for a reissue in England. There survives a letter from him to Guy Chapman (Storm Jameson’s husband and a publisher’s editor and evidently working in the ’20s with Knopf who published the gardening book) that he wrote right at the end of his time in Market Harborough. The relevant parts run:

3 Swans. Market Harboro’ 12.4.52

My dear Guy.

It seems like calling down into to the tomb to write to you after all these years … If you get this and have time to answer I would like your opinion. I’m wondering whether a small 2/6 paper edition or so of that ill-fated Knopf Gardener’s Colour Book which you so nobly did for me and so beautifully, would appeal to some publisher. It’s very doubtful of course, but perhaps an agent could find a job for it. Author’s Society tell me they can’t advise without seeing the contract – which of course I’ve lost years ago. Would you know?

We are selling this place by auction at the end of the month and I’m living in anguish as to its results … they say it will be OK. Going to live in Rugby with a son Anthony…

This letter was acquired by a blogger and can be seen here: <http://jot101.com/2016/06/two-john-fothergill-letters>. The other letter dates from 1927, also to Guy Chapman, and concerns buying wine. There is also a Christmas card, dated 1952, from the address in Rugby where Fothergill spent his last years.

The Colour Book consisted of a schematic chart of plant colours and times. As Fothergill explained in his introduction, ‘In a garden one patch of colour, beautifully or strikingly composed, avails more than an acre of beautiful flowers thrown into it without intention. The patch would have all the attraction of a picture, the acre of flowers would be merely like a palette after a day’s work, a waste of colour. Nature, it is true, jumbles her colours together, but a garden is not a field or mountain side, it is an artificial thing, or rather a work of art. (The US version of the book can be viewed at <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924002823056;view=1up;seq=1>.)

It is well to think of some of Fothergill’s plates in his dining room answering to the same requirements. His Cookery Book shows him obsessed with colour: ‘Five colour vegetables: Playing with red cabbage has led to the following. Boil together red and green cabbage, savoys for preference, when the red goes a beautiful blue and the green gets more brilliant. Separate them as soon as cool, chop, salt and pepper them. Chop and season also boiled carrots, turnips and beetroot, and warm them separately. Lay them in a pattern on a dish, blue, green orange, magenta and white, and spray melted butter over them, or have them cold with salad mixture’ (CB pp. 60–1).

He would adorn a plate of roast meat or roast chicken with various blobs of many hues. He describes one instance: ‘Three very broad Yorkshire people with a funny little child came and asked for a beef “stairk”. We hadn’t any, so they reluctantly agreed to chicken. I sent them up plates heavily ornamented with pleasant oddments. Feeling a bit nervous about it I followed it up and asked them how they were doing. They hadn’t started yet but the big fellow, looking down at his polychrome plate said, “Well, ar dorn’t know ’ow we’ll get on with this mix oop,” so I tried to excuse it all and then told them to eat the potatoes and how they were made—“scrape them on the grater—put in casserole, etc. etc.” and then I ran. (CI p. 276).

Another time, he disposed just one blob: ‘At lunch to-day, Sunday, two savoury omelettes were ordered. There was not much doing so I made them specially beautiful with almost more cream than they could bear and at the side I put a blob of creamed spinach. Later I saw the eaters of my omelettes, … two tough-faced women with shaggy hair, thick brown tweed suits, and a bit of colour round the neck. I went up to them, the delicious omelettes had gone but the spinach dollops remained intact’ (MTI p. 145).

The ornaments he might include were not merely dollops: ‘Perhaps the plates of chicken were more than usually crowded with ornaments tonight, pale green, black, orange and more, so that as I was passing I heard the girl of the party call out, “Yes, mother, and I’ve found a piece of sausage (the black) and such a nice sausage too!” (MTI p. 165) Colour permeated everything: his favourite vegetables are red cabbage and beetroot; he listed black soup and mauve soup on his menus – the black from black beans, the mauve from red cabbage water (which he could also convert into a violet sauce for fish).

As if to reinforce the notion that meals under Fothergill usually revolved around a roast or grilled meat, his Cookery Book contains barely a handful of main dishes but consists of side dishes, soups, fish concoctions, fish sauces, omelettes, pancakes, desserts and cakes. His ingenuity lay in dressing up the plain viands.

Allusions to cookery books or other literary inspiration are minimal in the diaries, although slightly more frequent in the Cookery Book. For the diaries, Lady Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays is the exception: ‘I owe more to Lady Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays than anything else’ (ID p. 84). He also acknowledged the advice and ideas of Oriana Haynes, the wife of the lawyer and author E.S.P. Haynes and grand-daughter of T.H. Huxley: ‘Mrs E.S.P. Haynes, who has given me some fine things; one, a jelly which I called “Huxley”, thinking it came from that part of her antecedents’ (ID, ibid.). Mrs Haynes eventually published her own collection of recipes, Cooking and Curing (Duckworth, 1937) which the Spectator described as having been ‘collected by Mrs. Haynes’s forebears since the eighteenth century, and in many excellent cases by herself and her daughter. The great majority are English in origin (Miss Florence White and the English Folk Cookery Association must look to their cullenders), with a few stragglers from Finland and the remoter parts of Europe.’ That Fothergill himself enjoyed flirting with history is evinced in his cooking enthusiastically a meal based on the seventeenth-century receipt book of Anne Blencowe. This was put into print by his friend Guy Chapman, husband of Storm Jameson (see above) in 1925. The original manuscript had come to rest in Weston Hall in Northamptonshire, the home of Sacheverell and Georgia Sitwell. They had shown it to their friend George Saintsbury who had persuaded Chapman to issue it. In the Cookery Book, we see acknowledgement of Ambrose Heath, M. Clouet, the eighteenth-century chef memorialized by William Verrall (and, of course, a resident of Lewes), as well as to some American friends, and even a Harborough housewife (mint jelly).

When introducing his Cookery Book, Fothergill observed that it was, ‘a collection of known recipes with my own modifications and ways of preparing them and a number of original dishes and sauces that I have produced during twenty years of middle-pocket Innkeeping. … [I]t is a repertory with one character throughout, manifest in a preference for strong flavour and colour, practicality and economy (which in business and in private too, if often best expressed in generosity); and in its little regard for the conventional use and treatment of materials and guest.’ He opened with, ‘This is not a book of recipes for sumptuous dishes to be read in bed as an escape from our food at home; nor of curious recipes, that, if we have the materials to make them with, are neither likeable nor makeable; nor of foreign ones with intriguing names when the results are, after all, just like our cottage pie or pancake.’

His recipes deploy a great deal of cheese and, when appropriate, cream. The cheese is particularly for a seasoning. White sauce, or some other starch thickening, is another trusty standby, apt to surface at the slightest provocation. High flavour is always a goal: anchovies, Oxo, curry powder and cayenne pepper being handed out with gusto, unless cheese has already done the job. Quite a few of his concoctions seem gloopy – but then again, savoury in the extreme. His kipper rarebit, he claimed to be a ‘delicate yet stimulating dish best of all my kipper treatments’: ‘Put the kipper in milk and warm up gradually. It shouldn’t boil or even get near it. In five minutes or so the skins and bones can easily be taken off. Put these remains back into the milk and boil with thin slices of garlic, strain and thicken with flour and as much butter as you like. Throw in grated cheese and the squashed up meat of the kipper and melt gradually. Colour with paprika. Chopped hard-boiled egg is a good addition. Pour on to fried bread, very hot.’

His approach to mussels may be thought to typify much of his cooking. He bought them tinned from Denmark – ‘great fat mussels as big as native oysters. I don’t know what they do with them in Denmark.’ After stripping them of string and cartilege, he chops them up, thickens their liquid with cornflour, adding fish stock or milk, garlic or onion, butter and cream and a touch of vinegar, puts the mussels back in this ‘and you have a lovely rich green thing’ to put in scallop shells or pastry cases or on fried bread. He sometimes gave it more body with rice, and he might use it to stuff an omelette, or as a sauce for a piece of fish. He noted his satisfaction after one conversation with a customer early in his time in Market Harborough. The client was wont to eat classical haute cuisine in Birmingham where he enjoyed the food but found the taste or flavour predictable. With Fothergill, however, his meals are ‘always a surprise and have different and unrecognizable flavours’ (CI p. 281).

As well as his business of feeding and putting up his clients, at Thame Fothergill was a wine merchant. He was always trotting off with a load of beers or seltzer water to his county supporters, and there are signs of big purchases. One was a happy bonus: at the beginning of the War, he was contacted by the shippers Lebegue who had been forced to make alterations to their cellars because of the air raids. They had uncovered a bin of 93 dozen Château Malescot-St-Exupéry 1928 which he had paid for and left to mature. This is quite a lot of claret. He was also taking wine in cask and bottling it, or getting it bottled, himself. In that other letter to Guy Chapman referred to earlier, he writes in 1927: ‘Kate tells me you wanted wine – you didn’t tell me. …If anything would mollify your hardships at present please tell me. I have a Château (?Celau) ’22 which I bottled here in ’24 at 40 shillings, which I like very much and the Dupin at 31 shillings and all the other and better things.’ He noted he had spent £1,100 on wine in 1927 (which apparently equated to 9,000 bottles of burgundy and claret). He thought he should buy a little champagne too. So he ordered 60 dozen.

It is possible that his sideshow in wine taught him the rudiments of sound trading: ‘I told T—, anticapitalist, that when I first started business I thought the other wine merchants were charging too much and now that I knew the risks and costs of things I was getting less certain about it. For instance, I found the other day 24 bottles of good wine in a broken heap on a collapsed shelf and “the worst of it was that the customer had to pay for those bottles!” “Then,” said T—, with his little eyes bright, “I don’t think much of your ‘risks’ if the customer has to pay for them.” “But,” I explained, “if he didn’t pay for the risks as well as the costs, and overhead charges, license [sic] and everything else, I couldn’t afford to be a wine merchant, nor could anyone else … the fact that the public has to pay £1 for a thing everywhere else when I think I can sell it for 15s. is beginning to make me feel that I may be giving my capital and services too cheap”’ (ID p. 47).

In 1928, he tried to increase his off-sales: ‘Day after day passes, and it seems a waste of cellar and desire to put it in order when not a dozen bottles go out. I am hoping that this time next year will see a change when my new “stunt” of selling by post to people who live in flats with flat purses even one bottle at a time, though I would profit only 2d. on the single bottle, has had its chance. I realize that a cash trade is hard to make … In a little notice I have printed about selling wine in detail, with a mahogany coloured cover so that you don’t see them tho’ lying about on every table, I give a list of wines ending with “each of which is either drinkable or remarkable”’ (ID p. 152). At Market Harborough he seems not to have pursued this line of business and subsided happily into the arms of Ronald Avery, the Bristol wine merchant, who henceforth would maintain his wine list.

Although Fothergill’s pages are heavy with names of the rich, famous and ambitious, he leaves us in the dark as to the wider context of catering and hotel-keeping. The motoring organisations, the AA and the RAC, are mentioned for their guides, or they are appealed to by disconcerted clients anxious to trump Fothergill’s prejudices and practices – be it charges levied or lavatories denied to passing strangers – but the only other guides referred to are James R. White’s Traveller’s Food Club, and William Gordon MacMinnies’ Signpost, quite similar to Ashley Courtenay’s hotel guide. Courtenay’s book does not figure. (For these, see my earlier essay.) Of course, such guides were not yet thick on the ground, motorized tourism was nascent. Similarly, ‘amateur pioneer innkeepers’ were rare birds, though Fothergill recognized that the species was increasing as the ’twenties passed into the ’thirties: viz. the quotation already alluded to, ‘[w]hilst he was the first self-conscious Innkeeper there are hundreds now.’ He mentioned very few himself. One day at Ascot when feeling somewhat down, he wrote, ‘Feeling alone, awfully alone in this job of improved Innkeeping, (tho’ I read the other day Clough Williams-Ellis’s clever pronouncement upon the requirements of good Innkeeping which shows that at least this happy idealist has got more than the hang of the thing), I wrote to Will Darling who I read in the Edinburgh Daily Record had started a delightful eating house up there, and congratulated him upon his courage. I felt I wanted someone to look up to, a leader in fact, at least a colleague, since I get none in my co-directors’ (CI p. 106). This Will Darling was in fact (Sir) William Young Darling (1885–1962), soon to be Lord Provost of Edinburgh and MP for Edinburgh South. At this stage he had written Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller (1931) and other things. He was the great uncle of the Labour minister Alistair Darling, now Lord Darling. Fothergill had earlier adverted to Clough Williams-Ellis and his rococo creation at Portmeirion while accepting as another peer or colleague Philip Sainsbury, the proprietor of the Beetle and Wedge at Moulsford on the Thames. This is the younger brother of the woodcut artist and dancer Hester Sainsbury, the wife of Frederick Etchells. He was also the nephew of Henry Tuke, the Newlyn artist famed for his many pictures of naked young men in boats and on beaches. Sainsbury had been involved in the small presses, the Favil Press and Cayme Press, and is later encountered at Cascais in Portugal running a guest house with his partner George Eley (mentioned by Hilary Spurling in her life of Anthony Powell). In 1933/4 Fothergill noted, ‘Kate and I went to see Philip Sainsbury at the Beetle & Wedge. He wants to sell. He feels what I did at Thame, the awfulness of being unoccupied all the week and not being free to get down to any hobby or other occupation’ (CI p. 160). In 1923, the Cayme Press printed Fothergill’s wine list, presumably for off- as well as on-sales. It was 12 pages long. Two other places earn his approbation, Shelleys in Lewes (remember the E.P. Warren connection) and the Broadway Hotel in the Cotswolds. Shelleys Hotel (sometimes spelled with an apostrophe) had been in the hands of the Heriot family since 1932. Martin Heriot was evidently something of a card. The relevant entry in the Travellers’ Food Club for 1938 reads: ‘Your host, Mr. Heriot, has been good enough to send us particulars of his charming Hotel although he does not wish “to encourage or be encouraged by” the T.F.C. We are including this hotel in our Reports as we are assured that the Cuisine is so Good that the book would not be complete without it. However Mr. Heriot issues a warning that if a member of the Club ever makes a complaint to him which he does not consider justified, he will put the following notice in a prominent position: Do not confess that you are a member of the Traveller’s Food Club as you will be charged a shilling extra for your meal!’ Luck would have it that a blog written by Emma Chaplin features an interview with the 90-year-old widow of Martin Heriot (who himself died in 1973), Peggy, who was the daughter of the victorious rider of the 1921 Grand National, F.B. Rees, himself a Lewes man (by the end of that race, his was the only horse that was still upright). Martin Heriot was a stockbroker from Henley who fancied running a hotel. It opened in 1934. Mrs Heriot recalls visits from Queen Mary the Queen Mother (eyeing the furniture), Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell and many other stars. They sold the place in 1970 (<https://emmachaplinwrites.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/interview-peggy-heriot-marilyn-monroe-in-lewes/>).

When casting about for something to do after Ascot, Fothergill thought of applying to an acquaintance: ‘I saw too Mrs. Elspeth Fox Pitt on the chance of my helping at her Old Mill at Salisbury, she, white-haired, big, smiling, and with a cocky little manner and unreserved with her praise of me and of her own flair for making things go’ (CI p. 151). The lady was in her own right a celebrated dressmaker, designing both for the stage and film business and for debutantes being presented at court. There was a fairly notorious lawsuit in the mid-’20s when she fell out with her business partner Paquin. As well as crafting fancy dresses, she ran a pub and hotel in the village of West Harnham near Salisbury. Here, in 1936, Augustus John and four others were arraigned for drinking after hours, and Mrs Fox-Pitt was fined for allowing them to do so. Her licence was taken away. Her clientele marks the place out as a suitable berth for Fothergill although one can hardly think of him lasting there – probably too much promiscuous coupling. There is a fine photograph of John, Bertrand Russell, the lady herself and various others at the club in the National Portrait Gallery. Jonathan Meades’s father was also present on that evening, but not fined. The episode is recounted with relish in Meades’s matchless record Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014). In the Travellers’ Food Club guide of 1938, there is a fulsome report on this Old Mill, a former paper mill, the fabric dating back to ca. 1250. ‘At this XIIIth century “Monk’s Hostle” you may refresh yourself in summer or doze before the fire in winter. You may dine by candlelight off Very Well Cooked traditional Wiltshire dishes. “Warm welcome at 9 p.m. Excellent squab pie and fresh strawberries well served by unobtrusively attentive waiters. Mrs Fox-Pitt most friendly and welcoming.” Lunch 3s. 6d. Dinner: 5s. 6d., 7s. 6d. Rm. etc. 7s. 6d.’

Missing from much of the record is great involvement on the part of Fothergill with the circle that made up the Wine & Food Society, founded by André Simon and A.J.A. Symons in 1933. John and Kate attended what was probably the inaugural banquet at the Savoy as well as the Carême bicentenary dinner at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton in the following year where, ‘It was cheering to meet so many old hands from Thame and Ascot.’ But otherwise there is little mention of this coterie nor, for instance, of its favourite innkeeper Barry Neame of the Hinds Head in Bray. Nor, and perhaps unexpectedly given his penchant for English cookery, is there any allusion to Florence White and her revivalist labours.

For all his apparent posturing, his delight in the rebarbative, Fothergill was sensitive to the role played by one giving professional hospitality: ‘The relationship between Innkeeper and his guests is a peculiar one. You don’t get or need to know the scandals or virtues of their lives, nor their politics or bank balances, yet along with a good deal of small talk, as between barber and barbed, there comes also a giving and taking of certain personal, even intimate feelings and an understanding that is made easy by each party knowing he isn’t condemned to bother about the other again’ (ID p. 123). His failure at Thame was his inability to embrace any customer that did not qualify in his eyes as desirable. A surefire remedy for misanthropy in those working in restaurants and hotels is the thought that the client wishes to be there, has chosen you over myriad others. No matter his or her personal defects, therefore, the very act of desire, of choice, makes them endearing. This simple emotional trick seems to have escaped Fothergill, or not have been acquired until late in his career. In his biography of Augustus John, Michael Holroyd described Fothergill as masochist. Perhaps he was rude to people he disdained so as to goad them to unacceptable behaviour thus leaving him sorry and belaboured. Alternatively, the realities of public conduct in England in the 1920s may have indeed been exactly as he portrays in his first diary, forcing him to exclude the unwashed for fear their demeanour would scare off the fragrant. In a dining-room today there may be a great variety of people, but by and large they conform to a single code of manners. Were we to introduce a group who did not conform, indeed were antithetic, we too would be faced with Fothergill’s dilemma. This brings to mind the genteel East Anglian resort of Cromer which was in ‘lockdown’ in August 2017 after an invasion of discontented Irish travellers.

In the circles in which he attained maturity, everybody was expected to have a ‘character’. In the art world of the early twentieth century, in London’s bohemia, one might be wild, another surly, one tight-fisted, a fourth filthy of habit; each could be singularized. Fothergill delighted in his character of ‘London’s rudest man,’ bestowed by Robbie Ross. He came to Thame with something of that still ringing in his ears: and he acted upon it. Age, perhaps, as well as humbling experience, mellowed him. But some days’ acquaintance with his written works has convinced me that his heart was, eventually, in the right place; his urge to hospitality was strong; his mission urgently felt. When David Sox interviewed Fothergill’s sons in the course of writing his study of the Lewes brotherhood, they impressed upon him their memory of their father as a loving, generous and warm-hearted man, not the manic curmudgeon, crazed bully, occasional sycophant of the Innkeeper’s Diary. Plain facts assert his determination to pursue the art of innkeeping, even if they cannot be used as evidence of his love of it. He didn’t open his innings until the age of 46, but he carried his bat all the way through until he was 77. That is impressive.

In closing, a short entry from Market Harborough days – new realities obtain, he accepts them, but with a rising gorge: ‘Two English girls of about seventeen came for two nights, one rather dirty and one rather pretty. I made discreet inquiries of them to be sure that they weren’t going out late to bring in soldiers. Nor have they. When filling in their forms one said to the other, “Nationality? What’s that?” “Your job,” replied the other, so she put down “waitress,” and the other put down, “munitions.” And these girls will soon have the vote. Margery said that their underclothes were only dirty rags, so their “nationality” hasn’t done them very well … But these pitiful people haven’t got all their rights yet. There are two “rights” still missing from the country’s care for them from their pre-natal state to their state burial with Beveridge namely the free washing of their smalls, and the supply and maintenance of flowers on their graves for a period not exceeding six months. Oh, let me not be bitter!’ (MTI p. 226).