Though the signs outside identified it
as a hotel, the Cavendish was no place for the unsuspecting tourist.
Most strangers who ventured into the dim, cluttered lobby at 82 Jermyn
Street were sternly told to try elsewhere. Others, if they were lucky
enough to remind the proprietress of some long-vanished Victorian buck
or Bostonian pooh-bah, would be clasped to her shapely bosom and
regaled with surrealistic reminiscences about old Lord Droopy Drawers
and Lady You-Know-'Oo, or “the time we went to Ireland on roller
skates.” Rosa Lewis, the cockney genie who conjured up the Cavendish and presided
for half a century over its revels, liked to think it was “not an 'otel
but an 'ome away from 'ome for my friends.” To addicts, “Rosa's'' was
not so much home as a Mad Hatter's champagne party. They called Rosa
the Duchess of Jermyn Street, and rated her and the Cavendish itself as
two of the three most rewarding landmarks in London . The
mid-Mayfair hotel remained for decades one of the last places in all
England where, as Evelyn Waugh wrote of it in Vile Bodies, “one can
still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts of
Edwardian certainty.” Gewgaws & Cherrybums. Last week, ten years after Rosa's death, the
Cavendish was meeting the ignominious end that has overtaken many of
London's best-loved structures in the postwar building boom. In
September it will be torn down to make way for a gleaming new hotel. Through the plain, brick-pointed door opposite
famed Fortnum & Mason, movers wrestled a seemingly inexhaustible
argosy of odd treasures. Over the years, the 100-room Cavendish had become Mayfair's best-stocked
curiosity shop. It was crammed with mauve and red plush sofas, chairs,
beds and chests, mostly of vast age and hideousness, and almost all
associated with the ancient indiscretions of the illustrious that
flowed from Rosa's memory like champagne from “cherrybums,” as she
called the Jeroboams that were consumed by the case. Her walls, lined
with signed pictures, were a 'Oo Was 'Oo of her times. King Edward VII refused to dine at friends' houses unless Rosa was there
to cook the bland, boiled food that, in her words, “would not spill
down is shirt front.” Edward was an ardent patron of the hotel, which
had a private entrance around the corner for merry monarchs and squires
on the spree; as Prince of Wales he reputedly bankrolled his blonde,
blue-eyed friend when she bought the Cavendish in 1902. “One king leads
to another,” she used to say. Soon the Kaiser became one of her best
customers, and grew so fond of her cuisine that he presented her with a
portrait of himself that in World War I was ostentatiously hung behind
the toilet in the men's room. Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill often stayed there with “Copper
Top,” as Rosa called young Winston. Other cherished guests were
Lord Northcliffe, General Kitchener and the Duke of Windsor, upper
bohemians such as Ellen Terry, G. B. Shaw, Isadora Duncan, Artists John
Singer Sargent and Augustus John , and “all
the American aristocrats.”
