The Savoy Hotel

“ In the supper-room of the Savoy Hotel there was, as anticipated, food and light and music. It was still early, and the theatres had not yet emptied themselves, so that the big room was as yet but half full. Wally Mason had found a table in the corner, and proceeded to order with the concentration of a hungry man.
"Forgive my dwelling so tensely on the bill-of-fare," he said, when the waiter had gone. "You don't know what it means to one in my condition to have to choose between poulet en casserole and kidneys à la mâitre d'hôtel. A man's cross-roads!" ”

“ Temporary offices were opened; men looking for contracts frequented the place and the Savoy quickly became the Canadian headquarters in London.
Special rates for rooms were given Canadian officers and it was possible to obtain a magnificently furnished, steam-heated room for no more than was paid at other hotels for much inferior accommodation. The Savoy Hotel, warm, comfortable and American like, located at the heart of things, close to the theatre district and the War Office, had a "homey" appeal to us, and it speedily became the centre of all things Canadian in London ”

“ They had fortunately lingered some time before the palace of the Savoy, to allow the Black monks to land at steps near it. Afterwards there was a long wait while the waterman who rowed the boat, followed them up a narrow lane over-arched with white hawthorn, and was seen to enter a little house with tiny latticed-paned windows and a swinging sign-board above its porch.
“That’s a tavern, and he’s gone to drink what he no doubt calls ‘a stoup of wine,’” said Godmother. “The muddy lane there, all overhung with trees, is now one of the narrow streets near the Savoy Hotel, leading into the Strand. ”

“ The grill-room was tucked away in the middle of a block of buildings. There was below the restaurant a table d'hôte dining-room, and on the garden level was a ballroom and its ante-rooms. The balcony was but half its present width. No block of buildings has been more greatly improved from time to time than the Savoy has been. There has hardly been a year without some adornment being added, and in 1904 the largest additions during the history of the hotel were completed, and the hotel and restaurant gained their Strand outlet. ”

“ The "Pinafore" private room at the Savoy Hotel.
At the back is a wide arch, beyond which is a glazed balcony, with a view over the tops of the Embankment trees of the river and the Surrey bank, with the Shot Towers, &c., and the ends of Waterloo Bridge on the extreme left, and of Charing Cross Railway Bridge on the extreme right.
At the rising of the curtain this view is seen in a warm sunset glow.
Above the arch there is a door on the right, leading to the corridor and restaurant; another on the left, by which the waiters come in and go out.
Below the arch, down on the right, is a fireplace ”

“ All these hotels with Savoy names are in a state of ferocious rivalry; they spy upon each other, watch each other across the copses, and there is a merry war as to which shall put on the most style with its bells, its pianos, the whip-cracking of its postilions, its expenditure of fireworks; or which one shall throw its windows widest open in order that the animation there, the laughter, songs and dances shall appeal to the visitors lodged in the opposite hotel and make them say:
“‘How they do amuse themselves down there! ”

“ As I entered the hotel, my eyes dazzled by the sudden brilliant light, I could hardly for an instant believe that it was not an optical illusion when I saw in the flesh the face which had been haunting me.
But it was indeed she; there was no doubting that. People were coming into the Savoy for dinner, now so fashionable a way of passing the deadly dull London Sunday evening, and in a moment I had guessed that she and her party were of the number. ”

“ And where the old palaces stood in Tudor days, stand now enormous hotels—the palaces of our own day—each newer hotel in its turn eclipsing the other in size, magnificence, expense. The picturesque "Savoy," with its (p. 33) river balconies, the stately "Cecil," with its wonderful banqueting halls, and, further from the river, the spacious "Métropole," the "Grand," the "Victoria." All these hotels are so recent as to impress one fact upon us—the fact that London has really only lately become a tourist haunt. ”

“ Strand to the Savoy, where all Americans eventually arrive. It is the only hotel in England with real steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will discover a radiator, warm, real, life-size! Eureka! It is the only modern-comfort temperature in London. I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of Shetland wool accumulated at Selfridge’s Department Store in Oxford Street. And for the first time since my arrival on these shores I am sitting in my hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down bed-quilt or a steamer-rug. ”

“ There was no doubt as to the tangible luxury of her daily life, and the deep respect shown by the Hotel Savoy management spoke of that regular payment of bills which endears “the guest” to the Boniface.
“A certain number of women friends are a sine qua non, however, to a ‘professed beauty,’” mused Vreeland.
“Their absence is as remarkable as a bedizened general riding out all alone into the enemy’s land with no following. I presume that ‘prominent Westerners’ will in due time furnish her with a golden woman bodyguard. Garston being a widower, too, is another awkward thing.” ”

“ But I cannot believe that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible. The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and treated as a public square. ”

“ Others, too, Americans, who are happier in those big hotels than any of the English, because hotel-life is, in many of them, an acquired characteristic. They are interesting, those Savoy Americans, abundant women, exquisite girls made of beautifully tinted steel-plate, those men with the square shoulders, square chins, square heads, cubic cheeks; you know, without being told, that they are connected with the cinema trade, or that they are producing a play by Mr Montague Glass or Mr Bayard Veiller, or that they are selling many motor-cars, or something like that. ”

“ At the Hotel Savoy, where rooms had been reserved for us, it was necessary, in pre-war days, to wire for accommodations a fortnight in advance of your arrival, and even then you were not always able to get rooms. Yet we were the only visitors, barring a handful of Italian commercial travelers and the Italian governor-general and his staff. The proprietor, an Austrian, told me that in the four years of war he had lost $300,000, and that he, like his colleagues, was running his hotel on borrowedPg 25 money. Of the pre-war visitors to Meran, eighty per cent. ”

“ I'm staying in this hotel. I've just arrived in England from Boston, the first visit in my life. I haven't been in London much more than two hours now! I've got a little suite upstairs."
If she'd got a "little suite" at the Savoy, the woman must have money. She couldn't be a common or garden medium cadging for mere fees. Besides, no common or garden person, an absolute stranger to Robert Lorillard, met by sheer accident, could have described June Dana and that gray dress of four years ago; her jewels, too! Robert's name she might have picked up if Joyce or I had let it drop by accident ”

“ To lunch at the Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober; its luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, too, is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment ”

“ There is no more sensuous dining room in the world than the Savoy. There is no more impressive vision of human beings in the primitive act of eating than can be gained from the top of the stairway which leads into that great double room. ”

“ Guests’ servants are boarded at six shillings per day; price of room according to location. If you want to live in style and enjoy, at its best, life in London, engage a suite at the Savoy, including parlor and bath-room, with private lobby and private balcony overlooking the Thames. It makes no difference what floor you select: there are “lifts” in the house, so large and luxurious as to be justly called “ascending rooms:” they run day and night. ”

“ When one visits the theatrical abbey across the lake and inspects the too picturesque tombs of Savoy’s sovereigns, or walks in the wonderful old garden, with its intermittent spring, the suspicion occurs, in spite of one’s self, that the whole scene will be folded up at sunset and the bare-footed “brother” who is showing us around with so much unction will, after our departure, hurry into another costume, and appear later as one of the happy peasants who are singing and drinking in front of that absurdly operatic little inn you pass on the drive home. ”

“ I have frequently been asked, in reference to the long runs at the Savoy Theatre, if I have not derived some interest from the change of audiences. It appears to me that the audiences at the Savoy are always the same, except in numbers. The house may not be so full, and the enthusiasm may vary; but in all other respects they are the same. When I give my entertainments at the Savoy, the same points tell, and the laughter and applause come in exactly the same places. ”

“ Gaudens' beautiful Shaw Monument, and beyond it the graceful dip of upper Beacon-street. My room is as spacious and luxurious as heart can desire, lighted by half a dozen electric lamps, and with a private bath-room attached, which is itself nearly as large as the bedroom assigned me in the "swagger" hotel of New York—an establishment, by the way, of which it has been wittily said that its purpose is "to provide exclusiveness for the masses." All the comforts of the club are at my command; the rooms are delightful, the food and service excellent. ”

“ And the company in the restaurant, the great room with mahogany panels, golden frieze and gold and red ceiling, of the Savoy on a Sunday night is as fine a society salad as any capital in the world can show. ”

“ In 1866, with its dark passages and crooked stairs, its candles, its carpets and stuffs which had outlived their patterns, its narrow dining-room where a thousand busy flies ate together at one long table, its acrid stagnant atmosphere, and its disturbing sensation of dirt everywhere concealing itself, it stood forth in rectitude as a good average modern hotel. The patched and senile drabness of the bedroom made an environment that emphasized Sophia’s flashing youth. ”

“ You can hire a room for two persons for two dollars a day, or you may engage a suite at twenty dollars a day.
As to table, you may live economically at the Savoy, or you may live like a prince—a rich prince. Here are the definite and fixed rates at the Savoy:—bedrooms for one person, from seven and sixpence (nearly two dollars) per day; for two persons, ten-and-six; suites of apartments containing sitting-room, bed-room, dressing-room and private bath-room, from thirty shillings per day. ”

“ The old must ever give place to the new. But what lovely peeps there are from this hotel, from the balcony and from the bedrooms. It is a river house now in every sense of the word, though not old as a hotel of the kind, and all day long, and far into the night, the bar and passages and the coffee-rooms are crowded in summer with men in snowy flannels, and with some in sailor garb and with artificial sailor swagger. ”

“ Judging by the fat bottles all down the dinner table of this hotel, that reviver of mankind is cheaper here than water.
We have descended at the Hôtel du Jura, which holds out a special inducement of "baths on every [209] floor," an inducement I must confess, for aside from the greatest hotels in the largest cities, one finds no bathrooms in beautiful France,—and on arriving at an inn after a long auto ride, a bath is an absolute necessity, unless you are so utterly tired out, which I have never been, that nothing save bed is of the slightest importance. ”

“ It is one of the strangest features of French hotels that dressing-tables are not included in any suite of bedroom furniture; there are looking-glasses by the score, there are handsome marble slabs bearing ornate clocks that do not go, there are gorgeous armoires à glace, but never a good, commonplace, useful dressing-table. French people seem to do without them in the same simple, uncomplaining way that they do without baths.
We cannot pretend to say we slept well in our opera-box. Everything in the hotel seemed to stay up{23} ”

“ Further west we come again to a building of historic fame, which took a large part in the activities of mediæval London. This was the palace of the Savoy, built in 1245 on the spot which still bears its name, now occupied by Wellington Street at the approach to Waterloo Bridge. Peter de Savoy, its founder, was the brother of Boniface, archbishop of Canterbury, and uncle to Eleanor, the queen of Henry III. On coming to England, he was created Earl of Savoy and Richmond, and [Pg 71] was knighted in Westminster Abbey. ”