The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels

We are often told that the Second World War was a people’s war. Well, yes and no. While the masses huddled in Anderson shelters and their homes and workplaces were pummelled by the Luftwaffe, the rich in London continued to party like it’s 1939. Readers of the wartime press were appalled by revelations about the luxuries toffs continued to enjoy, including secure, deep shelters and plentiful food that was not covered by the ration. Satirist Michael Barsley dubbed this opulence at a time of sacrifice the Ritzkrieg.

Broadcaster and cultural historian Matthew Sweet offers a different history of the Home Front from the one we are used to. London’s grand hotels such as the Savoy and Claridge’s proclaimed their respectability but also provided settings for activities that were anything but. Sweet assembles a cast of fraudsters, government ministers, sex maniacs, ambassadors, poseurs, spies, abortionists, Nazis, prostitutes, traitors and the inevitable cameo appearance by the Duke of Windsor. The Last Days of Rome had nothing on this lot. The realisation that we were not all in this together led a group of East End socialists to invade the Savoy in protest. Churchill’s government was shamed into opening up the London Underground so that people could sleep in safety.

Armed with an attractive dry wit, Sweet conducts a series of interviews with people who still remember this elegant world that contrasted with the Blitz. Government officials consorted with foreign dignitaries and the numerous deposed European monarchs who fetched up in town (King George of Greece signed in at Claridge’s as ‘Mr Brown’). The Dorchester was home both to leading members of the Zionist movement and a grim collection of aristocratic antisemites. Meanwhile, the lower bar of the Ritz housed a riotous homosexual subculture where cocktails and sex were always on offer.

The real heroes of the book are the waiters, chefs and doormen who made this world possible. Sweet interviews Joe Gilmore, former head barman at the American Bar in the Savoy and friend to the stars. Gilmore remembers a time of deference. It was also a world where the staff were underpaid and often exploited. Fittingly, the book ends with the strike at the Savoy in 1947. Perhaps this was a people’s war after all.

Rohan McWilliam is author of The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (Continuum, 2007) and is writing a history of London's West End.