HISTORY: The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand HotelsBy Matthew Sweet Faber and Faber, 352pp. £20
I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT my husband was a spy. Everything told me so except himself – and of course real spies take their secrets to the grave. He matched perfectly. His family were distinguished soldiers, and he was an old Etonian, infinitely discreet and with a business that even during the cold war operated all over Europe. He had access to the nuclear-power industry in France and he was nearly killed in Jakarta during the rising there, and shortly afterwards I found him in King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, in London, completely paralysed and unable to speak – I’ve always believed he was tortured. There were meetings, with gentlemanly goons I didn’t like, but when I told him I knew what he was he smiled and said that I always was inclined to fantasy and that all I wanted was for him to be more glamorous.
On the evidence of this book the last thing one would look for in a spy would be glamour. The spies who frequented the grand hotels of London during the war were the seediest lot you could imagine: con men with moustaches, men with fake legs and false titles, women no better than whores, double dealers and double agents, sleaze bags and villains, all of them garrulous, and you’d wonder how anyone could be taken in by them until you read on and find that the people in charge were borderline bovine.
There were good-time girls, gigolos and a lot of low life behind luxury facades. Literally low, as a great deal of the action took place under the hotels, in air-raid shelters, subterranean dining rooms and nightclubs. But there was high life, too, and Matthew Sweet breezily covers almost the gamut of the extraordinary world in the turbulent years of the war and after. (In fact the title is somewhat misleading, as the book ranges over half of Europe and Cairo and touches down in New York, and the time span it covers reaches into the present.)
He doesn’t say much about the famous society hostesses who moved in for the duration, including Emerald (Lady) Cunard, one of London’s most ambitious and ruthless hostesses, and Lady Colefax, of the decorating firm, who held small lunch parties known as Ordinaries, much sought after even though each guest received a small bill afterwards. (They liked to think of preserving their prewar social lives as a form of war work.)
Cecil Beaton described life there as “reminiscent of a transatlantic crossing in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor”. What Sweet uncovers is more like shifting a large stone and seeing unsavory creatures scuttling away towards new burrows.
Each glitzy London hotel had its own specialities, and we’re not talking food: ex-royals, would-be royals, potentates and ministers of state (even if the state no longer existed) stayed at Claridge’s (suite 212 was declared part of Yugoslav territory for one night for the birth of Crown Prince Alexander); the Savoy attracted show business; the Dorchester had the rich or the ex-rich or the would-be rich; and the Ritz seemed to have the strangest mix of all, presided over by one Victor Legg, the beady head hall porter who worked there for 50 years and knew everyone, including little me.
The Dorchester was the most popular, as it had the reputation of being the safest hotel in London, built as it was of reinforced concrete on a raft of concrete a metre thick, to support eight floors of bedrooms. But they all had their share of chancers, and conditions and circumstance made for strange bedfellows: Chaim Weizmann and other leaders of the Zionist movement lived at the Dorchester in proximity to a vicious claque of anti-Semitic, upper-class English unrestrained in their enthusiasm for Hitler.
Matthew Sweet interviewed as many survivors of this period as he could find, and he has been just in time, as the term of the second World War edges closer to the limits of living memory. Often he treats their memories as though he is writing a tawdry novel, although one of his most memorable discoveries is a nonagenarian homosexual who spent a great deal of time in the Pink Sink, the gay hub of wartime London, deep under the Ritz, who delivers lewdly compelling photo-sharp memories.
In every chapter, Sweet describes in astonishing and sometimes overworked detail a capering cast of characters who could have come prancing and flouncing straight – although straight is the wrong word here as no one was straight in any sense of the word – out of a Ruritanian opera: King Zog of Albania paying his Ritz bills with bullion filched from his country; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands trailing around in a flannel dressing gown flanked by formally clad ladies-in-waiting; Douglas Fairbanks jnr remembering that the name of the head waiter at Claridge’s was King and calling out to him, at which a bald-headed gent in khaki turned around and said, “Yes?” It was King George of Greece.
Once clear of Ruritania, we find ourselves in Biggles or Buchan country or on Agatha Christie territory. Sweet has a salty ear for humour and for anecdotes wherein laughter takes over from disbelief, and these are scattered like shrapnel between tales of tragedy and heroism, but most of the book is an account of mendacity, opportunism and double-dealing. Sweet is not a felicitous writer, but certain details are fascinating: the barman at the Savoy for decades, Joe Gilmore, born in Belfast, was the original Joe in the Frank Sinatra song One for My Baby; the verb to plug something comes from the goings-on of a conservative MP, Capt Leonard Plugge, notorious for his brazen commercialism; Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, spent a fortune employing a dodgy princess to advance his ambition to have his son Esmond Harmsworth ascend the Hungarian throne. Every page is filled with such rambunctiousness, and occasionally the author displays an ironic attitude towards the calamities taking place in the theatre of war that is unforgivable: he describes a concentration camp as being "open for business", for example.
There is also one recurrent solecism that is minor in the scale of things but, considering that the English class system and its nonsensical titles play such a role in this raffish book, you might expect him to get this right. Women who have married knights are here wrongly given the honorific Lady prefixed to their Christian names (as in Lady Pauline Rumbold). One can never be called Lady Christian Name So-and-So (and they often are) unless born the daughter of a duke or marquis or earl – then you are indeed Lady Pauline or Lady Mairi Bury (as he inadvertently gets it right once). If you marry a knight or a baronet you are called by his surname: Lady Mitford, Lady Rumbold. And he seems to think that if you marry a life peer or have been knighted for services or inherited a newish baronetcy that you become an aristocrat. Fâcheuse illusion.
The only characters that come out of this high-velocity narrative with any hint of glory are the workers who kept the hotels running; their tolerance was remarkable. The sad fact was that many of the professionals – chefs, maitre d’s, waiters – were foreigners who had helped give the great hotels their reputations but were summarily shipped off to internment camps without notice or appeal or good reason. As Matthew Sweet himself says, “It may be that social historians of the future will cast a not very friendly eye on this peculiarly wasteful and decadent activity of society.”
It may be? Give us a break.
Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster. She is currently teaching at Barnard College, in New York
