From the Archives: 'The dust was as thick as the breakfast tea, the chamber as chilly as our toast' - In the footsteps of Fanny Cradock, the Bon Viveur
Though they are a little hazy, some of my earliest TV memories are of Fanny Cradock. Now, 42 years after her increasingly eccentric 20-year long television career came to an abrupt end (when she was incredibly rude to a cookery competition winner), and 23 years after her death, she’s popping up again for Easter. Fanny Cradock Invites you to... a Cheese and Wine Party (1970) is one of 50 classic cookery shows being served up on BBC iPlayer this weekend. Frankly, with the possible exception of Keith Floyd, she makes her fellow celebrity chefs (of which she was surely the first) look positively mousey.
I will have to steel myself to watch the old bird. To be honest, as a child I was rather frightened of Fanny Cradock. With her imperious manner, heavily painted face, supercilious penciled eyebrows and coiffed hair, she looked like a cross between Danny La Rue and Edna Everage. I was always faintly alarmed that she might turn on her hen-pecked co-star, husband Johnnie, complete with monocle and much needed glass of wine, and do his head in with a rolling pin or a meat cleaver.
fanny cradock quote
We slept in a mausoleum-like bedroom plunged in 25-watt Stygian gloom. The dust was as thick as the breakfast tea, the chamber as chilly as our toast
Fanny Cradock on a trip to Winchester in 1950
Of course it was my mother, not me, who cooked Fanny’s recipes in those days. Like Fanny, she was a product of the post-war era, a housewife who loved entertaining, though she had none of Fanny’s cruel streak (abandoning her sons and marrying four times, twice bigamously). I can see my mother now, just like Fanny on TV, all pearls and rustling silk with her apron on, getting ready for a buffet supper or a wine and cheese party for her neighbours. She was very proud, in later life, that I became a travel writer and hotel critic for the Telegraph. It was her newspaper of choice, read every day at breakfast. What my mother didn’t know – and nor did I till recently – was that my predecessor as Telegraph hotel reviewer in those decades was none other than Fanny Cradock, writing as Bon Viveur. Mum must have read Fanny’s columns and, I do believe, taken note of her recommendations when we went to country hotels and on holidays abroad.
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Fanny described how her Bon Viveur columns, which carried housewives from the dregs of rationing to the brashness of Thatcher’s Britain, came about. Evelyn Garrett, then woman’s editor, asked if she and Johnnie would like a few weekend breaks in the country.
Fanny: (disbelievingly): “Doing what?”
Evelyn: “Now, don’t run away with the idea this is something big. It’s simply a series I think might hold up for six weeks. We’d pay expenses, of course. I want you to find out if there is anything left that is worthwhile in the inns of England.”
Fanny: “What sort of anything?”
Evelyn: “A warm welcome, honest fare, integrity, Fanny, if it still survives.”
Almost 70 years on, that’s exactly what I have been trying to find too.
Trawling the Telegraph’s archives, I can’t get enough of forthright columns. Like me, she loved hotels and inns, including a number of the same ones, and she loved travelling. But she also cut to the chase and had a way with words and a bruising wit to which I can only aspire.
She pulled no punches on a trip to Winchester in 1950: "We slept in a mausoleum-like bedroom plunged in 25-watt Stygian gloom. The bed tapestry peeled, as did the ceiling. The straw bulged from the palliasse under our limp feather overlay. The dust was as thick as the breakfast tea, the chamber as chilly as our toast." She was no less kindly to the town itself: “England should pay more attention to this historic town which draws so many tourists. Its restaurants and hotels should, in their turn, pay more attention to Englishmen and tourists."
On the English Riviera, she resorts to capitals to vent her spleen: "I’VE FOUND SOME SCANDALOUS PLACES with lukewarm bathwater, insufficient toilet arrangements, annexe rooms devoid of bedside lighting…" The list of complaints goes on.
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The directness of her descriptive writing means that it is admirably unpretentious. How can I not love her, long to have met her, when she writes, in 1951, about my own beloved village, Beaulieu, in Hampshire: "The first crisp tang of spring has made last weekend notable. I have seen sunlight glinting on the Solent, stippling the tree-trunks in the New Forest and silvering Beaulieu River."
And when she is satisfied with a hotel, she makes her readers long to go, as every good critic should. Arriving late and unexpected at the Master Builder’s, close to my house, she reports: "'We can’t do much I’m afraid', said Mr Fry, who runs the hotel with his sister, 'but you’re welcome to what there is.' At 8,45, I sat down to hot gravy soup, beef steak and kidney pie, stewed fruit, custard, two vast slabs of cheese, all followed by good coffee, for 6s."
Reading that, and all Bon Viveur’s reviews, subtitled In Quest of Pleasure and illustrated with photographs and useful maps, it’s hard not to feel both deep nostalgia and deep regret for the crazy pace of life today. There’s irony though. Her evident enjoyment of plain English fare comes from the TV chef that espoused food colourings, piping bags and recipes like Jelly a la Zizi (layers of different coloured jelly) and Green Cheese Ice Cream. My mother only went so far with Fanny Cradock – she preferred Constance Spry and Elizabeth David.
The list of hotels that Fanny and I have both enjoyed is by no means short. Most, of course, have changed enormously since her day, though one, Knoll House in Studland Bay, was, when I visited it a few years ago, exactly as she found it, down to the bars of carbolic soap and uniformed nannies on hand to remove guests’ children. (It has since been refurbished.) Other mutual favourites include the George at Yarmouth ("as shipshape as a battleship, as trim and taught as a yacht") and the Isle of Eriska near Oban (‘you may well mistake the hotel for a country mansion’). In London, the Connaught, Goring and Stafford all win her approval at various times, as they do mine. However, we must politely agree to disagree about her adoration of the Dorchester. Her observation, in one of her later columns (1982), that the Berkeley, Athenaeum, Savoy and Dorchester offer "elegant dining at low cost" brings tears of disbelief to my eyes today.
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As it has done for me, the Telegraph gave Fanny and Johnnie the opportunity to travel offshore and her articles are credited with inspiring many readers to take their first tentative steps abroad. They went to Goa, Barbados, Corfu (‘In the Durrell Country’), Ibiza ("of all the Mediterranean coast this rates the highest with us for an unsophisticated holiday"), Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia and many other places. Wherever she reported from, she had a knack of conjuring up the destination in a few well-chosen words, at the same time as giving straightforward practical advice. In 1952 she wrote ‘Two Weeks in Denmark on ￡25’ (￡562.50 in today’s money) and 15 years later ‘Getting a Fortnight on the French Riviera out of ￡50’ (￡830). At Reid’s Palace in Madeira, a hotel I loved when I reviewed it for its 125th anniversary in 2016, she usefully informed her readers in 1953: "Anyone able to spend more than ￡25 on a holiday can do so legally at Reid’s. As it is British owned, a Bank of England concession permits payment from foreign currency allowance for only part of your hotel bill. The balance is paid in sterling in England before departure."
People may scoff, but all the travelling and hotel reviewing is actually hard work. "Bon Viveur", reads a footnote in 1951, "is taking a well-earned holiday after a strenuous but enjoyable year in the quest of pleasure on readers’ behalf." She was soon back in the fray, travelling to Majorca ("the nightlife, which I dutifully probed on your behalf, is in the open air…I danced to a good band for about an hour"), Denmark, Holland, Jersey, Portugal and the Tyrol.
Forty years ago, for our wedding night, my parents gave my husband and I a stay in a fancy hotel called Monkey Island, on the Thames at Bray. Bon Viveur had endorsed it, and maybe, just maybe, that’s why my mother chose it as a special treat for us. This August, we are going back for the first time since then. Closed for several years, the hotel is to be relaunched and when I review it, I will be thinking of the newfound connection between Fanny and Fiona.
Fanny Cradock Invites You to . . . A Cheese and Wine Party is available on bbc.co.uk/iplayer from March 31, 2018.
