As Literary Footprints 2019 gathers pace, Jen Pedler tells us the story behind a hotel which features in her Mayfair’s Bright Young Things walk, part of this years Footprints of London Literary Festival. You can find full booking details for the walk on Jen’s walks page.

Shepheard’s Hotel features in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and we are told that “for the purposes of the narrative, [it] may be assumed to stand at the corner of Hay Hill” which means, of course, that it wasn’t actually there at all.

This hotel, Waugh tells us, was a place where you could “…still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts from the well of Edwardian certainty.” In other words, it was old-fashioned.

It was run by the formidable Lottie Crump who is described as “…a fine figure of a woman, singularly unscathed by any sort of misfortune and superbly oblivious of those changes in the social order which agitate the more observant grandes dames of her period.”

Waugh borrowed the name from Cairo’s leading hotel – one of the most celebrated hotels in the world until it burned down in 1952, although not the one he had stayed in when he visited Egypt in 1929.

But the inspiration for the hotel itself was The Cavendish, in nearby Jermyn Street. This hotel was run for 50 years by the formidable Rosa Lewis until her death in 1952.

Rosa had left school aged 12 to go into domestic service and worked her way up to become a cook, claiming to have been taught by the famous chef Auguste Escoffier who named her ‘the queen of cooks’. Her cooking was much admired by Edward VII, with whom she is rumoured to have had an affair and who may have helped her to buy the hotel in 1902. The 1970s tv series The Duchess of Duke Street was loosely based on her life.

The Cavendish was the place to be seen in early twentieth century London and welcomed many distinguished guests, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was a fan of her cooking and presented her with his portrait. At the outbreak of World War 1, she had this hung upside down in the men’s toilet, just as Lottie does in Vile Bodies.

“When the war broke out she took down the signed photograph of the Kaiser and, with some solemnity, hung it in the men servants lavatory; it was her one combative action…”

When the hotel was hit by a bomb during World War 2, Rosa emerged from the rubble defiantly proclaiming that “Whatever else may go in this war, we shall still have Rosa Lewis and the Albert Memorial at the end.”

Evelyn Waugh was a frequent visitor to the hotel until, outraged at being satirised as Lottie Crump, Rosa banned him.

Rosa herself was later banned from the Ritz as she developed the habit of going into the Palm Court and loudly accosting some of the elderly peers who had been her former customers with remarks such as “How’s the old waterworks? Still as unreliable as ever?”; or, “Hullo, droopy drawers, when’re you coming round the Cavendish to bounce a cheque?”

Although Rosa Lewis’s Cavendish was demolished in the 1960s, there’s a plaque commemorating her on the new hotel that was built in its place and she has been immortalised as Lottie Crump.

Follow the link for the full list of our Literary Footprints 2019 walks . If you’re feeling particularly curious (and energetic!) you can go on as many as you want by taking advantage of our great value season ticket which for only £49 allows you one free place on every Literary Footprints walk throughout October 2019!