Produce yourself, Alice
Sir: Great Cumberland Place must be one of the most cosmopolitan stretches in our splendidly international capital city. At one end, next door to us at the Industrial Soci- ety in Bryanston Square, stands Malaysia Hall, where attractively dressed young Malaysians come and go. Within a few hun- dred yards of each other stand synagogues serving both the Reform and Orthodox branches of Judaism.
Only a minute or two further away runs the Edgware Road, with its myriad Lebanese and other middle-Eastern influ- ences. And at the Marble Arch end of Great Cumberland Place one finds the Cumberland Hotel, a favourite with tourists of all nations alighting from the Heathrow bus. I have had the pleasure of walking up and down Great Cumberland Place every day now for nearly two years. Not once in that time have I sighted any aristocratic ladies of apparently Prussian extraction in The masses accept Camilla. the vicinity of number 57.
In this veritable United Nations of an avenue all nationalities ought to be repre- sented. But I am sufficiently well travelled to know when a German aristocrat is a neighbour of mine or not. Sir, enough is enough. Concerned Spectator readers must surely now demand of the alleged 'Alice von Schlieffen': produce yourself!
Stefan Stem
The Industrial Society, Robert Hyde House, 48 Bryanston Square, London W1
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