Postscript . . .
Tun Sunday Times's London diarist has described Eric AMbler, the novelist, as 'always beautifully turned out in suits, shirts and shoes from Savile Row.' Social climbers would do well not to take this too literally, for they would be hard put to it to lind shoes or shirts in Savile Row, unless they are prepared to settle for off- the-peg Van Heusen shirts from the wholesale showroom between the carpet shop and the copper shop, at one end, and ready-made shoes from the place at the other which, although its address is `Savile Row,' displays its wares in a row of windows in Vigo Street, full of price- tags, sprigs of holly and little show-tickets saying `Happy Christmas!' and even (I assure you: I checked it again yesterday) !Cheery Greetings!' And I don't think that either .of these establish- ments is what any columnist means by `Savile Row.'
Not that I've ever understood why it is Savile Row rather than any of a number of other nearby streets that is always the synonym for the best English tailo- ng. There must be more nobby tailors to the square yard in Sackville Street (where the Queen gets her Guards uni- forms made), and there are tailors in Dover Street (where Prince Philip, Lord Snowdon and Lord Mountbatten all go), Jermyn Street (where the young Anthony Eden acquired his European reputation as a dandy) and Hanover Street (where the Duke of Windsor used to be tailored and perhaps still is), as eminent as any in Savile Row. Especially now that Pooles have left there to go to Cork Street, and Scholte—perhaps the most famous of them all, in his time—is no longer with us.
This column can have a bash at the name- dropping lark, too.
* Talking pf columnists, I see that the Daily Herald's Henry Fielding, who writes the most accurate, least snobbish and only consistently readable of the popular-newspaper columns, ob- served the other day that the proof that 'port wasn't always the preserve of high Tories' is that working men used to drink it before the war. But port was never a Tory, always a Whig tipple: Tories used to drink to the king over the water in claret, and from Dutch William's time onwards the Whigs drank port, to show what they thought of such treasonable, Frenchified goings-on. Which is why we drink the sovereign's health in port to this day, to show our loyalty to the Glorious Revolution and the Protestant Succession.
Personally, I am broadminded in these matters, and a claret is my wine of the week. There is always some good wine made in bad years, and Chateau Palmer made a good one in 1956, which not many people in this country were shrewd enough to buy. Among the wiseacres were British Railways, and travellers on the Torbay Express the other day—and I suppose on the other restaurant cars, too—had the chance of drinking this unusual good light claret of an off year. What I don't congratulate British Railways on is that their price in the restaurant cars is 22s. 6d., whereas the pub in Tottenham Court Road where the Spectator sometimes takes its luncheons can sell it at 13s. 6d. (clever early buy- ing—it's now 14s. 9d. retail), which makes non- sense of the claim made on every restaurant-car wine list that prices are 'as reasonable as any you will lind in this country.'
*
When I was composing this paragraph, by the way, it occurred to me to quote, as a good example to British Railways, the reasonable prices asked on the wine lists of Trust House hotels. So I telephoned Trust Houses to ask them to send me a typical list. I telephoned the inquiry office in Piccadilly and told my story, and was made to telephone head office in Drury Lane, where I told the same story twice more. The second man I spoke to went away for a long time- —I could hear much consultation going on —and then came back and said I would have to ring up again, when yet another official was avail- able: he himself was 'not in a position to say,' he explained, whether he could send to the press a copy of a document which is on public view in no fewer than 214 establishments up and down the country.
IL ItAY (
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