The place of the consumer and the amateur in British pre- and post-war restauration
This is the text of a short talk I gave to the 2018 International Congress of the IEHCA at Tours.
My intention had been to talk about British restauration in the immediate post-war years, as armed forces were demobilised and new entrants to the restaurant scene abounded. It then seemed more sensible to put this moment into a longer perspective because, I believe, the British experience was unlike that of other European countries and had a profound effect on its public eating during the ’60s and ’70s – even until today. The factor I will explore is the contribution of the consumer and of the amateur who turns professional cook or restaurateur to the twentieth-century British scene.
The trades of cook, chef or maître d’hôtel are not genteel – their descriptor is ‘trade’. Gentlemen are not tradesmen. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gentlefolk were educated at public school and university or inns of court, or went directly into the armed forces once their schooldays were over. Their source of income was often inherited wealth, but should they need to earn their own living, their opportunities were limited to the traditional professions of medicine, law or the church, or to military service, or to some form of mercantile activity that allowed them to remain at arm’s length from the actual source of wealth. Already, the nineteenth century had seen a widening of permitted spheres of wealth creation: it was not long since a surgeon or physician had become an acceptable occupation; banking and the stock exchange had also shed any lingering social opprobrium; and the ranks of the professions had widened to include some teachers, architects and even artists. It was now arguable that anyone who was an owner, as opposed to a producer, might call himself a gentleman, particularly if he had the wealth to buttress his cause. I might warn you that the same considerations can apply in conservative districts even today. A landowner of my acquaintance was looked upon with some disfavour by his peers when he started a very small business shipping wine for sale to friends and neighbours: ‘It smacked of trade,’ were the whispers across the teatable. At the turn of the twentieth century and beyond, the divisions of class in Britain were still rigid.
The irruption of the First World War was, however, the occasion of a certain relaxation of these unwritten laws of social hierarchy. The acceleration of technological change meant that new occupations were gaining status; the demobilisation of a vast number of potentially discontented males meant that there were many who did not wish to return to the old ways of living; the gender imbalance caused by the excessive loss of male lives resulted in numbers of women needing to earn their own living. One consequence, therefore, was the entry of the middle class into retail trades. Some of them, for example antique shops and interior design businesses, could gain acceptance through links to art and design – be classified as genteel because they were bohemian, but with proper accents. Others were more problematic, especially the catering trade. While it was possible to own an hotel, or direct a chain of restaurants, it was not conceivable that a gentleman would ever work in one: take off his gloves, not wear a morning suit, address a customer in any way that brought to mind a servant/master relationship.
This brings us to our first amateur in British catering, John Fothergill, who achieved great fame in the 1920s as the owner and chef of the Spread Eagle at Thame, a small country town not far from Oxford. Fothergill was born into a landowning family in northern England with connections to the steel industry in South Wales. Properly educated, although he did not last long at Oxford University, he was a younger son, with limited heritable wealth. A boy and young man of remarkable beauty, he fell in with the aesthetic and homosexual crowd surrounding Oscar Wilde and sought some sort of career as a gallerist and artist. This developed into a firm connection with a group of people, headed by the American collector and connoisseur Edward Perry Warren, known as the Lewes House Brotherhood, who sought and sold antiquities to American museums. This way of life lasted until a disastrous marriage to a fellow-artist in 1910. So disastrous that he entered a nervous decline that unfitted him for military service during the First World War. In the first years of peace, he managed to get divorced and contracted a second, transparently successful, marriage in 1921. At this point, however, he had a problem: no means of income, a wife and soon two children to support. Quite why he decided to become an innkeeper he never explained at any point through the three very popular books of diaries that he subsequently published – ‘I found that I must do something for a living, so I was compelled to take an inn,’ was the best he could do. He described himself in Who’s Who as an ‘amateur pioneer innkeeper’ although we today would call him a chef-proprietor. In 1922, when he started at the Spread Eagle, he was indeed a pioneer, if not unique among his class, but he soon attracted recruits, not least the son of the painter Augustus John, and imitators so that after ten or twenty years in the trade he did not feel himself unique at all.
The Spreadeagle, Thame, in 1925
After nine years in Thame, he found he was losing money and sought to repair his finances by going into partnership with a large brewery who owned an hotel in Ascot, next to the famous racecourse. As is so often the case, this stratagem did not work out happily and the partnership was summarily dissolved. He then sunk his life-savings in another country inn, the Three Swans in Market Harborough in Leicestershire, in the middle of England’s best, and highest-class, foxhunting territory. He stayed there from 1934 until 1954 where, after a short period of retirement, he died in 1957.
Fothergill was a tremendous snob: he recognised early in his career that the normal profit margins of a country hotel in 1920s England would be inadequate and made strenuous efforts to rid himself of the lower-class clientele that were usually the mainstay of such places. Instead, he attracted people of his own sort – artists, academics, undergraduates from Oxford, writers, and high-society intellectuals – and made an impressive reputation in a few short years. His attitudes to food, particularly its sourcing, anticipated many of our attitudes today: ‘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?’
Other people of this class who might have been amateur or, in some cases not so amateur, include Tom Laughton at the Pavilion Hotel in Scarborough, Yorkshire’s finest seaside resort. Laughton’s family were hoteliers and he himself, once finished with public schooling, never descended to the rank of chef or maître d’ – was always the proprietor. Nonetheless, he picked up on the new style of hotel-keeping that was being developed by people such as John Fothergill. His elder brother, Charles Laughton, should have inherited the business but decided in 1924 that he would prefer to be an actor – becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated pre-war film stars – Tom kept to hotels. He indulged in his artistic preferences at every turn, buying fine paintings to hang on the walls of public areas and guest bedrooms, and employing interesting artists and decorators to provide him an up-to-date environment. These wine lists by Britain’s best graphic designer at the time, Edward Bawden, are an example.
Another artist-cum-hotel-proprietor was the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. From 1925, and for the next fifty years, he constructed a fantasy Italianate village at Portmeirion in North Wales, equipped with two hotels. Architecture was more important to him than innkeeping, but he imparted an ethos of hospitality to Portmeirion that caused John Fothergill to recognise him as a spiritual brother.
The Beetle and Wedge, Moulsford
Another man claimed as colleague by Fothergill was the aesthete and fine printer Philip Sainsbury. He was the brother of the artist, dancer and poet Hester Sainsbury, and the nephew of the artist Henry Scott Tuke who specialised in paintings of semi-naked young boys on Cornish beaches. (They now fetch upwards of a quarter of a million pounds.) Sainsbury kept the Beetle & Wedge pub on the banks of the river Thames. It was once visited by Jerome K. Jerome on the excursion described in Three Men in a Boat. Sainsbury himself had difficulties with the British prejudice against homosexuals so went after a few years to Italy to keep a guest house with his partner. He died young in 1936.
The success of these places run by amateurs far distant from large urban centres depended on attracting sufficient people of their own sort as clients. This was only possible thanks to the motor car and its enthusiastic adoption by the middle classes as a leisure activity. This was an identical situation to France and the rise of provincial gastronomy spearheaded by the Michelin Guide and journalists such as Curnonsky. However, in England, there was less emphasis on fine dining and more on residential comfort and variety. Hence the growth of the country-house hotel and the country club in rural districts, just as metropolitan areas saw the appearance of the roadhouse, providing dining, bedrooms, drinking, dancing, and sports such as swimming and tennis, even shooting. Many of these country places were properties where the family had fallen on hard times and a sale was required, or where the family sought to tough it out by converting their home into a business.
The expansion of the customer base, and the sort of establishments that catered for them, both stimulated and was stimulated by the emergence of guide books for consumers. The two large motoring organisations in Britain – the Automobile Association and the Royal Automobile Club – published guidebooks that classified hotels (but not restaurants) according to services provided, but not according to the quality of those services so long as they met certain criteria. The Michelin Tyre Company of France also published a motorist’s guide to Great Britain in the years 1910–1913 and then again in the 1920s, ceasing in 1931. These guides initially ignored restaurants and treated hotels in a manner similar to the AA and RAC. It was only in 1974 that a full simulacrum of the French Guide Michelin was created for Britain.
Although there were some consumer guides for London restaurants in the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was nothing for the provinces. This did not change until the mid-1930s when there emerged two hotel guides, each run by a single individual – without, it appeared, any staff or back-up organisation. Their method of finance was simple: the hotels (almost not one restaurant) paid a fee for their entry, and in some cases paid further fees for PR or commercial assistance, for instance in the matter of bookings and reservations.
The longest-running of these one-man shows was Ashley Courtenay’s. His first guide of 1934 was titled Let’s halt awhile: Being some recommendations from personal experience as to where to eat and sleep in Kent and Sussex, with digressions into Surrey. The area covered expanded to include the British Isles, and in one form or another, it lasted until 2002. Courtenay was an advertising executive, who diversified into offering hotel services. At an early stage in his career, after driving armoured Rolls-Royces in the First World War, he had worked in provincial hotels. Ashley Courtenay himself died at the age of 98 while on a wine-tasting cruise in the Mediterranean and Black Sea in the company of his third wife in 1986.
The second such guide was called Signpost and was the creation of William Gordon McMinnies. It ran from 1935 to 1970. McMinnies appears to have been an intrepid motorist who just loved life on the road. He does not seem to have had any experience in the catering industry. His war service 1914–1918 consisted in flying aeroplanes off battleships. He was a keen motor-racer.
These guides made full mention of food, but concentrated on accommodation and services (e.g. sporting facilities and bathrooms, or telephones by the bed). As the entrants paid a fee, the entry could hardly be critical. But they provided an important service to the new class of tourist as their books were marked out as choices, rather than the motoring organisations’ catalogues.
There is one pre-war consumer initiative that appeared more interested in food. This was a tiny organisation formed in 1935/6 called the Travellers’ Food Club. Little is known about the personnel and prime-movers of the venture, but they appear to have been drawn mainly from the London world of music, journalism and performance. One member of their Advisory Committee, at least, was the actor Laurence Olivier. What marked it out was its close modelling on the earlier French organisation, the Club des Sans-Club which had produced the annual guide Les Auberges de France since 1924. In similar vein, membership of the Travellers’ Food Club was obtained by simply buying the guide, and entries were the result of members’ recommendations. This Club anticipated the much more famous Good Food Guide by some 15 years yet has sunk almost without trace. Its one and only full-scale guide contained only 55 pages of entries, with a few extra telling of a dozen places in London that had caught members’ fancy. The outbreak of the Second World War cut it off before it had truly got going.
Another consumer initiative from the 1930s that should be noted was the formation in 1933 of the International Wine and Food Society by the French wine merchant and gourmet André Simon and a journalist called A.J.A. Symons. This aimed to promote French wine and haute cuisine across the nation, mainly by publication of a journal and the mounting of dinners and banquets in London or hosted by provincial branches. Another intention was to raise the standard of British commercial cookery by means of consumer recommendation. This particular aspect, however, never got off the ground, but the Society was an important pressure group for classical cooking and for the education of the hitherto largely ignorant urban middle classes.
World War II, of course, stopped everything: the development of a broad and informed consumer base, as well as the emergence of a class of professional caterers drawn not from the producing classes but the consuming classes themselves. But as the War drew to a close in 1945 the serving military began to think of their civilian futures. On the one hand, many of them voted for a socialist government to reform the atrophied economic and political make-up of the country. On the other, they dreamt of a life no longer bounded by the drab confines of the office, and submission to unsympathetic employers. Many had tasted for the first time, as serving officers, the delights of self-determination and, within a paradoxical situation, liberty. To many of these men, the idea of owning their own inn, hotel or even restaurant was a glimpse of paradise.
The market for such establishments, from small country hotels to guest houses to public houses, took off in the last six months of warfare. Estate agents advised the greatest haste in concluding a deal, given the many other interested parties that would snatch it from your grasp at the first sign of indecision. The consequence was a plethora of wing-commanders, captains and majors, or naval commanders, in charge of small country pubs and nice middle-class hotels. Fortunately for them, the market for holidays – the first respite in six years – was immense. Save for the fact that there was a limit to what you could charge – imposed by the government in respect of meals, and by the market in respect of accommodation – everyone was kept very happy. The property market remained buoyant, but the domestic holiday market suffered some decline as people began to hanker for a foreign holiday even though there were currency restrictions in force.
There is a small genre of literature that records this particular social episode. ‘I Bought an Hotel’ is often the title, explicit or implied. Alfred Brown was in the Royal Air Force (a wing-commander who had worked in the cloth industry and was something of a poet and fell-walking writer). He bought a small hotel in north Yorkshire. His wife, half-French, was placed in the kitchen, and he smoked his pipe, served drinks and chatted to all the guests. She collapsed after two seasons; they sold after six.
Altogether grander were Mr and Mrs Morton who bought The Elms country house at Abberley in Worcestershire. Country houses at this stage, afflicted by the drop in land values before the war, the onset of death duties to pay for the war, and precipitous decline in condition with the absence of the landowners themselves, were two a penny. Mr Morton, who had rowed for Oxford in his youth, sent Mrs Morton off on a course at the Cordon Bleu and installed her in the kitchen. They made the place a resounding success.
Then there were those who had served in the war but as conscientious objectors. They too dreamed of a rosier future. Often, their duties had encompassed some form of cooking or catering. Thus Francis Coulson had experience of catering for large numbers for the charity TocH. In 1948, he bought a small country house in the Lake District called Sharrow Bay, taught himself the art of fine cookery, and established with his partner Brian Sack one of the most renowned country house hotels in the land, pronounced Restaurant of the Year by the Egon Ronay Guide in 1980.
Another conscientious objector, George Perry-Smith, served with the Friends Ambulance Unit, again learning the skill of catering for numbers, if not for quality. In 1945, he returned to university to finish his degree, then went to France in 1949/50 as an assistant teacher at the Lycée St Louis in Paris. On return to Britain, realising that the teaching profession was not for him, he opened the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath, Somerset in 1951.
These are just a few instances of the beginning of an amateur tendency that stood apart from that of classical haute cuisine and its practitioners. It endorsed the primacy of French cooking, and often slavishly recreated a French atmosphere and ethos (there was a restaurant on the Devon coast at Brixham, run by an amateur, which had a menu expressed entirely in French, right down to the prices). But it also looked further afield for some of its inspiration, developing that magpie cuisine that had been a mark of empire, drawing on Asian, American, Italian and Spanish traditions in parallel to French. This was, it might be said, the mark of the true amateur. Although often clumsily expressed, it was not always so, and paved the way for the cookery with which we are familiar today.