Quentin Letts is a prolific journalist; he’s been at it for more than thirty years. These days his mainstays are as a theatre critic for The Sunday Times and parliamentary sketch writer for The Times. Both jobs require much the same skills.
This month he contributed an article for The Oldie averring that he has lived at the Savile Club for two decades. Only up to a point as he is a Tuesday to Thursday lodger and the rest of the week lives with his wife in Herefordshire. In his article he mentions my cousin, Monsignor Gilbey, who lived at the Travellers’ full time for at least half a century. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, a quintessential young fogey who became famous as the obituaries editor at The Daily Telegraph, used to take his annual holiday at the Travellers’ – although he lived in London already – and go to matinees to fill up the afternoons. He describes this most amusingly in his 2001 autobiography: Daydream Believer.
I was sorry that Quentin Letts overlooked my great-uncle, Edward 5th Lord Bellew, who lived in the same room at the Hyde Park Hotel from 1935 until his death in 1975. I visited him as a schoolboy and was astonished at how cluttered it was but it wasn’t a very big bedroom and things do accumulate after such a long time. He was a Captain in the Royal Air Force in the First World War so it was appropriate in the Second World War to allow my father to take his friends to the hotel bar and have drinks on his tab. My father was serving as a pilot in the RAF, seconded from the Irish Guards.
During Uncle Eddy’s tenure the hotel was modernised. The improvements did not suit an elderly gent. The bells in bedroom and bathroom were replaced by a bedside telephone – hopeless if you have a fall in the bathroom. In the early hours one morning the hotel was evacuated because of an IRA bomb threat. My great-uncle said he was much too old to go out on the pavement in the middle of the night so could someone, please, send up a bottle of whisky to keep him going until normal service was resumed.
In 1984 I was Best Man at a wedding at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. The Reception was at the Hyde Park Hotel and I found myself at the bar with the bride’s father when the festivities were running down. He looked at me a bit squiffily and asked me who I was. The barman had a better memory and remembered my great-uncle’s predilection for Green Chartreuse so we had a few in his memory. I have no doubt living in a club would be more agreeable than in an hotel but few clubs allow residency. Of course it drains the piggy bank.
In a different part of the forest, there has been a small improvement in Marks and Spencer’s share price. Their tie-up with Ocado next month may give them the online traction they need and may offset their bricks and mortar millstone. It’s only a small improvement – the shares are still about 50% below my purchase price last year.