Bed and bored
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Why do they come, these visitors to Britain? London is bursting with them now, posing in front of the mounted guards in Whitehall or taking the billion and first photograph of Big Ben. Pageantry and old stones must be the lure, for they overcome both the weather (which is not our fault but our heritage) and the 'amenities.' These have to be framed in quo- tation marks for they should relate to features of an estate, this realm of England, that are pleasant and agreeable. Stayed in any bad hotels lately?
After even a brief absence from Britain it is possible to view the British scene, so aptly defined in two official words, catering and accommodation, through foreign eyes. The two words are used at random, but I see that the Economic Development Committee for Hotels and Catering opens its report Visitors to Britain with a reference to the 'accommodation and catering requirements' of tourists. Good food, comfort and courtesy are shorter words, but liable to give offence to the sensitive in- dustry that manages to dispense none of them in many of its far-flung establishments.
This report, if that is what it is, should have been published before the visitors began to arrive, long before, and should have been addressed directly to the thousands of lazy, inefficient and incompetent hotel managers whose only contribution to the raising of stan- dards in this unhappy trade is to imitate the obvious and vulgar gimmicks that the un- imaginative proprietor seizes upon in an attempt to boost his diminishing clientele. The Little Neddy's report is predictably defensive. Many hotels, it intones, 'do much better than average.' It would be a curious average if this were not so.
They sought out three hotels to survey for salient facts. One, the 'Hansel and Gretel,' London, which has an overseas clientele of more than half its normal guest intake, hap- pens to be near Victoria Station and attracts an unknown but probably large number of business visitors. The report adds, 'the per- centage of holiday visitors . . . is of course higher in the summer.' And there are other similar discoveries; for instance, that 'Edin- burgh is, of course, a popular tourist centre.' Given more time and a bigger grant the re- search team might have explored Stratford-on- Avon, Widdecombe and Windsor. They picked a hotel in Edinburgh, the 'George,' and found that most of its guests in winter were business- men. Their third revelation was that the North Stafford Hotel in Stoke 'is well situated for business visitors to the Potteries.' After read- ing these profound statements it seemed to me that I should humbly offer my own collection of representative hostelries and eating places.
Take The — Hotel, which has the lumpiest beds in the country and serves the sort of food that works canteens gave up years ago.
Or The , all olde-worlde, with built-in bumps in the night, a home-made pâté that even looks nasty, and a penchant for serving 'butter' that certainly cannot be told from Stork or, indeed, any other marge. The — has a typical cuisine, dear to all British traditionalists. Everything is served in a pool of warm water, then hastily masked, as the jargon has it, in Bisto. Everything, that is, but the ice-cream.
A step up the social ladder from these ordinary inns and you are in the realms of frock-coated waiters and menus as long as your
arm. The Hotel, with its beautiful river- side situation, puts on a stylish international menu which must have foreign visitors wonder- ing why the British don't stick to what they know best how to cook. After all, who wants caneton d la bigarade when the duck is a fro-quacker from Cherry Valley and the oranges are tinned mandarins? Undeniably international, admittedly. The —, a rebuilt coaching inn, now one of a large group, oozes opulence and waits upon the latter-day carriage trade with a large car park where the painted rectangles will accommodate the longest pro- ducts of Detroit. But the Yorkshire pud was singed, the roast beef dry, the boiled potatoes exhausted and the cabbage almost in solution. A glass of water was conjured up only by the most persistent clamour. The presented wine list was an expensive travesty of the full list, which should be one of their prides. This was on a Sunday, when, naturally, as the report would say, many people would like to eat out but nobody wants to serve them.
In all these places I stayed and paid. Their names must be kept from you because of what are sportingly called 'the laws of libel.' In Britain it is permissible to praise but never to blame, at least not in the public prints, no matter how just, how true and how much it may be in the public interest. The British Travel Association and the Mc for Hotels and Cater- ing are not fighting a losing battle, because they are not fighting. The only weapon that will ever frighten the British hotel proprietor into his senses is an annotated guide, somewhat less frivolous and caustic than the above comments, which will distinguish the good from the bad from the tolerable without too much equivo- cation and symbolic illogicality. It should be published by the BTA. Will it ever be?
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