Yesterday, we were delighted to make our progress down the hill and to meet up with our Saturday crowd in Waitrose. We have noticed that the lamp standard into which a car crashed and the driver lost his life and we were only about one hundred feet away has now been replaced. In addition, the grass has been mowed and all of the last remnants of the crash cleared away so not a trace remains of a memorial to the driver who sadly lost his life.
One of the jobs that I did at the Old Swan hotel was to act as a porter and specifically a night porter. But we had an 'all hands on deck' hour to deal with the coaches that arrived to disgorge their usually American visitors on two or thee occasions a week. The hotel was on a route which ran from London to Stratford on Day 1, a journey up to Yorkshire and the Old Swan on Day 2 and then a trip up some of the Yorkshire dales and onwards towards Edinburgh. Four coaches with 40 occupants each is evidently 160 bedrooms that are required and not many hotels would have the capacity to accommodate the coaches. But on arrival, the customer's bags had to be marked up with their room number and then it was our job to deliver these to the right rooms as quickly as possible. You might have thought that this was a fairly simple task but the job had its complications as with many ancient hotels there were sections of corridors that went up or down three or four steps and we had to utilise a trolly with those wheels arranged in a triangle to negotiate these. Each room was equipped with a gas fire (in those days) and often the Americans had no knowledge or experience of a gas fire so we often needed to light it for them. Sometimes, they were nervous that the gas fire would consume all of the oxygen in the room. One of the reasons why we liked this job was that we were always tipped and sometimes quite generously. The hotel used to sell books of matches that retailed for about 2d but I use to buy a quantity of them out of my own money and then donate the book to the guest after the gas fire had been ignited. Needless to say, this gesture paid for itself several times over. The other portering job that I remember was as a 'night' porter. I suppose there was a need for some portering staff for guests who arrived late in the evening but I do not remember that much about our duties except that we were probably trundling trestle tables and chairs from one part of the hotel to another. But a nightly job was to use one of those big old Hoover vacuum cleaners to hoover the large function room that was typically in use throughout the day and therefore had to be cleaned at night. This job took about an hour to complete as the room was so large but when the job was completed and there was nothing else to do after about 2am, we were allowed to curl up on one of the sofas and go to sleep for the rest of the night for which we got paid as well. We did put on a rather snazzy green porter's apron to distinguish us from other staff and these duties were quite pleasant compared with the dish washing. There were evidently times in the ebb and flow of the year when the hotel was relatively quiet but there was always quite a brisk Saturday and Sunday lunch time trade. It was one of those hotels where families who wanted to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or other special occasion would forget about the expense and treat themselves to a meal. Indeed, when our son was at boarding school in York, my wife, son and mother would treat ourselves to a meal at the Old Swan and these we generally enjoyed, But we did have a celebratory meal for family members on the occasion of our 40th wedding anniversary and our stay, and that of our son, was generally disappointing and we suspected that we would never stay at the hotel ever again. Harrogate being a conference centre, there were two occasions that I remember when the hotel was full and absolutely buzzing. These were the Toy Fair held in the spring and when manufacturers, wholesalers and other toy retailers would come to some kind of decision as to what toys were going to be the best sellers at Christmas time some months later. The other large conference event was the Antiques Fair and I think this held in the Autumn. After the Harrogate conference centre was built in the 1970's evidently this pattern of conferences would evolve over the years. In a hotel of this size - I think about 375 bedrooms - it was evident that on a statistical basis there would be about one death a year in a hotel bedroom. Nowadays, of course, we would have crash teams, ambulances with wailing sirens and flashing lights and a general hullabaloo. But we had a much more sensible and pragmatic solution as to how dispose of the dead body without attracting undue attention. As porters we often had to transport rolls of carpet from one part of the hotel to another and when a death occurred, we simply rolled the corpse in a length of carpet and brought them downstairs in the utility lift. I never had to do this myself but I was reliably informed it was a not infrequent event and the staff had to learn to ensure that the feet of the dead person did not stick out from the carper roll. In later years, the Old Swan became well known as the hotel with Agatha Christie associations. It was to the Old Swan that Agatha Christie famously disappeared in 1926, resulting in a public furore over the 11 days that she could not be traced. Nowadays this is made into a feature of the hotel and events such as 'Mystery Weekends' have tried to capitalise upon this famous association. But when I worked there, nobody really mentioned it. This hotel became an important part of my life because it was not only a source of income but also one good meal a day. Also, there is something a little 'special' about working in a large hotel like this which becomes a society in miniature and some of the lessons that it taught me I have retained for the rest of my life.
© Mike Hart [2024]