Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.
Today however we are not in Lettice’s flat. Instead, we are in central London, near the palace of Westminster and the Thames embankment at the very stylish Metropole Hotel*, where Lettice is finally having her first assignation with the eldest son of the Duke of Walmsford, Selwyn Spencely after he telephoned her last week. After she hung up the receiver on the cradle, Lettice was beside herself with joy, causing somewhat of a kerfuffle with her downstairs neighbour, Mrs. Clifford after her jumping up and down caused the lady’s pendant lamps to rattle and sway from the ceiling above. Since then, Lettice has spent hours of her life over the ensuing days going through her wardrobes, trying on outfit after outfit, much to the irritation of her maid, Edith, who has to pick up after her. In a whirl of excitement and nerves, Lettice has gone from deciding to wear pale pink organdie, to navy serge, then to peach and rose carmine satin, to black velvet with white brocade trim. Yet now, as she shrugs her coat from her shoulders into the waiting arms of the liveried cloak room attendant of the Metropole, Lettice knows that her choice of a soft pale blue summery calf length dress with lace inserts accessories by a blue satin sash and her simple double strand of perfectly matched pearls is the perfect choice. The colour suits her creamy skin and blonde chignon, and the outfit is understated elegance, so she appears fashionable and presentable, yet doesn’t appear to be trying to hard to impress. Breathing deeply to keep the butterflies in her stomach at bay she immediately sees her companion for luncheon lounging nonchalantly against a white painted pillar.
“Darling Lettice!” Selwyn exclaims as he strides purposefully across the busy lobby of the Metropole. “You look positively ravishing.”
Lettice smiles as she sees the glint of delight in his blue eyes as he raises her cream glove clad right hand to his lips and chivalrously kisses it. “Thank you, Selwyn.” she replies, lowering her lids as she feels a slight flush fill her cheeks at the sensation of his lips pressing through the thin, soft kid of her glove. “That’s very kind of you to say so.”
“I’ve secured us a discreet table for two, just as you requested, my angel.” He proffers a crooked arm to her. “Shall we?”
Lettice smiles at his words, enjoying the sound of his cultured voice call her by a pet name. She carefully winds her own arm though his and the two stroll blithely across the foyer, unaware of the mild interest that she and Selwyn create as a handsome couple.
“Good afternoon Miss Chetwynd,” the maître d of the Metropole restaurant says as he looks down the list of reservations for luncheon. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” Ticking the entry off the reservation list he takes up two menus. “Right this way, Your Grace.”
He leads the couple through the busy dining room of the hotel where the gentle burble of voices fills the lofty space and mixes with the sound of silver cutlery against the blue banded gilt hotel crockery, the clink of glasses raised and the strains of popular Edwardian music from the small palm court quartet playing discreetly by a white painted pillar.
“Your Grace.” Lettice says in a lofty fashion, giggling as she makes a joking bob curtsey to Selwyn as they follow the maître d.
Selwyn scoffs and rolls his eyes up to the ornately plastered ceiling above. “You know it’s only because of Daddy**.”
“I know,” Lettice giggles again. “But isn’t it a scream: ‘Your Grace’.”
“I’m not ‘Your Grace’ to you, my angel,” he smiles in return. “Just Selwyn will be fine.”
“As you wish, Just Selwyn.”
The crisply uniformed maître d stops before a small table for two surrounded by tables of suited politicians and a smattering of older, rather tweedy women. He withdraws a dainty Chippendale style chair from the table and Lettice takes a seat. The older man expertly pushes the chair in with her as she settles before the crisp white linen covered table.
“Does this table suit you, Lettice darling?” Selwyn asks a little nervously. “Discreet enough for you?”
“Oh yes, thank you Selwyn.” Lettice replies as she observes all the diners around them, busily involved in their own discussions with never a thought for the two of them, although she does notice an older couple at a table a short distance away observing them discreetly. The woman turns to her husband, indicating something about Lettice’s wide brimmed pale blue hat, judging by her gesticulation and his withering glance in response.
“Could that be one of your mother’s spies?” Selwyn asks, breaking into her quiet thoughts.
“What?” Lettice gasps. “Where?”
“There.” Selwyn gestures towards a potted palm, the fronds trembling with the movement of a passing waiter carrying two plates of roast beef to a nearby table scurrying past.
“Oh Selwyn!” Lettice slaps his hand kittenishly. “You are awful! Don’t be a tease and startle me like that.” She smiles as she returns to perusing her menu. “You know my mother’s spies are everywhere.”
“As are Lady Zinnia’s.” he replies.
Selwyn looks around the room taking in the Georgian revival furnishings, the restrained Regency stripe wallpaper, the watercolours of stately British homes in gilt frames as much as his architect’s eye pays close attention to the restrained fluted columns, ornately plastered ceilings and general layout of the room. “It’s so thoroughly English, don’t you think?” he concludes as he picks up the menu to peruse it.
“Oh,” Lettice says a little deflated as she lowers her menu. “You’d prefer something a little more, European? Should we have dined at a French restaurant?”
“Oh no Lettice darling,” he assures her with a defending hand. “I was just remarking. As I think I told you on the telephone, I haven’t been here since before the war, and I think the décor is much improved. It’s so much lighter and free of that ghastly old Victorian look.”
“I was saying the same thing to Miss Wanetta Ward the last time I came here.” Lettice remarks.
“Wanetta Ward? Isn’t she the moving picture star?” Selwyn looks over the top of his menu at his luncheon companion.
“The very one!” Lettice elucidates. “Do you ever go?”
“To the kinema***? No.” He shakes his head vehemently. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t either, but Miss Ward insists that I must experience it some day. Not that Mater or Pater would approve if I ever worked up the gumption to go.”
“Surely you don’t need to tell them if you do go.”
“Are you encouraging me to be devious, Selwyn?”
“No,” Selwyn laughs, his eyebrows lifting over his sparking blue eyes. “I’m simply suggesting that you are of age, and your own person with your own life in London, whilst they live their lives in far away Wiltshire. You can go to kinema if you wish. No-one need see you. In saying that, my parents feel the same about it, especially Mummy. She is very much against what she calls ‘painted women who are a poor and cheap copy of great art, moving about overdramatically on screen’.”
“I’ll be sure not to tell Miss Ward your mother’s opinion of her the next time I see her.”
“My mother’s opinion is entirely uneducated, Lettice, I assure you. After all, like both you and I, she has never actually seen a moving picture before.”
“Well, considering that both my maid and my charwoman*** go to the pictures, I very much doubt that I ever will.” Lettice concludes. “How would it be if I sat next to them? Besides, I have heard picture theatres called fleapits***** before, which sounds none too promising when compared with a lovely evening at Covent Garden.”
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Selwyn announces, changing the subject. “But I rather like the look of the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding for luncheon. What will you have?”
Lettice looks disappointedly at her menu. “When I came here with Miss Ward, we shared a rather magnificent selection of savories and little deadlies******, but I suppose they must reserve them for afternoon tea, here.”
“Fear not!” Selwyn says, giving Lettice a beaming smile. He carefully catches the eye of the maître d and summons him with an almost imperceptible nod of his head.
“How may I serve Your Grace?” the maître d asks with a respectful bow as he approaches the table.
“Look here, my companion Miss Chetwynd had some sweet and savoury petit fours when she last came here and speaks very highly of them. I’d taken a fancy to trying them for myself, so might we have a selection for two, please?”
“Well Your Grace,” the maître d begins apologetically. “They are from our afternoon tea menu.”
“Oh, I’m sure you could have word to your chefs, especially to please such a charming guest.” He gestures with an open hand to Lettice as she sits rather awkwardly holding her menu, her eyes wide as she listens to Selwyn direct the manager of the restaurant. “It would please her,” He then plays his trump card with a polite, yet firm and businesslike smile that forms across his lips like a darkened crease. “Both of us really, if you could perhaps see about furnishing us with a selection from your afternoon tea menu.”
“Well I…” stammers the maître d, but catching the slight shift in Selwyn’s eyes and the twitch at the corner of his mouth he swallows what he was going to say. “Certainly, Your Grace.”
“Good man!” Selwyn replies, his eyes and his smile brightening. “And some tea I think, wouldn’t you agree, Lettice my dear?”
“Oh, oh… yes.” Lettice agrees with an awkward smile of her own.
As the uniformed manager scuttles away, shoulders hunched, with Selwyn’s request, Lettice says, “Oh you shouldn’t have done that, Selwyn. Poor man.”
“What? Are you telling me that you are displeased that you are getting what you desire for luncheon, even though it doesn’t appear on the menu?”
“Well, no.” Lettice admits sheepishly.
“See, there are advantages to having luncheon with a ‘Your Grace’.” He gives her a conspiratorial smile.
“You do enjoy getting your way, don’t you Selwyn?”
He doesn’t reply but continues to smile enigmatically back at her.
Soon a splendid selection of sweet petit fours and large and fluffy fruit scones with butter, jam and cream has been presented to them on a fluted glass cake stand by a the maître d along with a pot of piping hot tea in a blue and gilt edged banded teapot.
“So,” Selwyn says as he drops a large dollop of thick white cream onto half a fruit scone. “At the Hunt Ball we spent a lot of time talking about our childhoods and what has happened to me over the ensuing years,” He shakes a last drop off the silver spoon. “Yet I feel that you are at an unfair advantage, as you shared barely anything about yourself al evening.”
“Aahh,” Lettice replies as she spreads some raspberry jam on her two halves of fruit scones with her knife. “My mother taught me the finer points about being a gracious hostess. She told me that I must never bore my guests with trifling talk about myself. What I have to say or what I do is of little or no consequence. The best way to keep a gentleman happy is to occupy him with talk about himself.”
“You don’t believe that do, my angel?”
“Not at all, but I found it to be a very useful tactic at the Hunt Ball when I was paraded before and forced to dance with a seemingly endless array of eligible young men. It saved me having to do most of the talking.”
“I hope you didn’t feel forced to dance with me, Lettice darling.” Selwyn picks up his teacup and takes a sip of tea. “After all you did dance quite a bit with me.”
“You know I didn’t mind, Selwyn.” She pauses, her knife in mid-air. “Or I hope you didn’t think that.”
“I suppose a healthy level of scepticism helps when you are an eligible bachelor who happens to be the heir to a duchy and a sizeable private income. Such things can make a man attractive to many a woman.”
“Not me, Selwyn. I am after all a woman of independent means, and I have my own successful interior design business.”
“Ah, now that is interesting.” he remarks. “How is it that the daughter of a viscount with her own private income, a girl from a good family, can have her own business? It surely isn’t the done thing.”
“Well, I think if circumstances were different, I shouldn’t be able to.”
“Circumstances?”
“Well for a start, I am the youngest daughter. My elder sister, Lallage, is married and has thankfully done her bit for her husband’s family by producing an heir, and given our parents the welcome distraction of grandchildren, thus alleviating me of such a burden.”
“She and Lanchenbury just had another child recently didn’t they?”
“My, you are well informed. Yes, Lally and Charles had another son in February, so now my sister has provided not only an heir, but a spare as well.” She pauses for a moment before continuing. “Secondly, and perhaps what works most in my favour is that I am my father’s favourite child. If it were up to my mother, I should have been married and dispatched off by the end of the first Season after the war. But Pater enjoys indulging his little girl, and I know just how to keep him continuing to do so, and keeping Mater and her ideas at bay just enough.”
“And how do you achieve this miracle, my angel?”
“I decorate mostly for the great and the good of this fair isle,”
“I don’t think I’d call a moving picture star a member of the great and good!” laughs Selwyn heartily.
“Yes, well…” Lettice blushes and casts her eyes down into her lap sheepishly. “I did rather get in trouble for that, but only because my mother’s awful cousin Gwendolyn, the Duchess of Whitby, told tales behind my back. Anyway, I design and decorate mostly for people my parents approve of, and I play my part socially and pretend to be interested in the things my mother wants for me.”
“Like marriage?”
“Like marriage.”
“So, if you aren’t interested in marriage, why are we having luncheon then, my angel?”
“I never said I wouldn’t get married someday, Selwyn,” Lettice defends with a coy smile. “I just want to do it in my own fashion, and I believe that marriage should begin with love. If I am to get married to a man I love, I need to know him first.” She pauses again and stares firmly into her companion’s sparkling blue eyes. “I’m sure you agree.”
“I’m quite sure my mother, Lady Zinnia, wouldn’t agree with you and your modern ideas about marriage.”
“Any more than my own mother does. When I told her that I wanted to do this my own way, by arranging to meet you myself she told me ‘marriages are made by mothers, you silly girl’.”
“And you don’t agree with that?” he asks almost unsurely.
“Would I be here if I did, Selwyn?” Lettice takes up the bowl of cream and begins to drop some on her scones.
Selwyn starts chuckling in a relieved fashion, consciously trying to smother his smile with his left hand, a hold and ruby signet ring glinting in the diffused light cast from the chandeliers above. He settles back more comfortably in his seat, observing his female companion as she stops what she is doing and puts down both the spoon and bowl of cream self-consciously.
“What? What is it Selwyn? What have I done?”
“You haven’t done anything other than be you, my angel, and that is a great blessed relief.”
“Relief?” Lettice’s left hand clutches at the two warm strands of creamy pearls at her throat.
“Yes,” Selwyn elucidates, sitting forward again and reaching out his hand, encapsulating Lettice’s smaller right hand as it rests on the white linen tablecloth. “You see, I was worried that it was a mixture of champagne and the romance of the Hunt Ball that made you so attractive. You were so naturally charming.”
Lettice bursts out laughing, the joyous peal mixing with the vociferous noise around them. “I was dressed as Cinderella in an Eighteenth Century gown and wig. I’d hardly call that natural, Selwyn.”
“Aahh, but you were my darling, beneath all that. I must confess that when I suggested luncheon today it was with a little of that healthy scepticism that I came here.”
“But I don’t need your income, Selwyn, I have my own.”
“But you do have a scheming mother, and many a mother like Lady Sadie want their daughters to marry a fine title, especially one that they may have desired for themselves. A Duchess is a step up from a Countess, I’m sure you agree.”
“Oh I don’t care…”
“Shh, my angel,” Selwyn squeezes her hand beneath his. “I know. However, that also makes you a rather exceptional girl, so I’m glad that my misgivings were misplaced. I’m pleased to hear that you’re in no rush to get married, and that you have set yourself some expectations and rules as to how you wish to live. Perhaps you were born at just the right time to manage as a woman in this new post-war era.”
“Please don’t tell Mater that,” Lettice says, lowering her spare hand from worrying her pearls. “She’ll be fit to be tied.”
“I promise I shan’t say a word to Lady Sadie, or my own mother. Both are cut from the same cloth in that respect.” He releases her hand and settles back in his chair. Picking up a scone he takes a bite. After swallowing his mouthful and wiping his mouth with his serviette he continues, “Now, do tell me about your latest piece of interior design. I should like to know more about it.”
Lettice sighs as she feels the nervous tickles in her stomach finally start to dissipate as she settles back in her own seat and starts to tell him about ‘Chi an Treth’ the Regency house in Penzance that belongs to her friends, the newly married Dickie and Margot Channon.
*Now known as the Corinthia Hotel, the Metropole Hotel is located at the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall Place in central London on a triangular site between the Thames Embankment and Trafalgar Square. Built in 1883 it functioned as an hotel between 1885 until World War I when, located so close to the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall, it was requisitioned by the government. It reopened after the war with a luxurious new interior and continued to operate until 1936 when the government requisitioned it again whilst they redeveloped buildings at Whitehall Gardens. They kept using it in the lead up to the Second World War. After the war it continued to be used by government departments until 2004. In 2007 it reopened as the luxurious Corinthia Hotel.
**The title of Duke sits at the top of the British peerage. A Duke is called “Duke” or “Your Grace” by his social equals, and is called only “Your Grace” by commoners. A Duke’s eldest son bears his courtesy title, whilst any younger children are known as Lords and Ladies.
***In the early days of moving pictures, films were known by many names. The word “cinema” derives from “kinema” which was an early Twentieth Century shortened version of “kinematograph”, which was an early apparatus for showing films.
****A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.
*****Early cinemas were often derisively referred to as “fleapits”, however the name given them was for very good reason. As cheap entertainment for the masses, with entry costing a paltry amount, early moving picture theatres often had problems with fleas infesting themselves on patrons who were free of them from those who had them. This was especially common in poorer areas where scruffier cinemas did not employ cleanliness as a high priority. Even as late as the 1960s, some filthy picture houses employed the spraying of children with DDT when they came en masse to watch the Saturday Morning Westerns!
******Little deadlies is an old fashioned term for little sweet cakes like petit fours.
An afternoon tea like this would be enough to please anyone, but I suspect that even if you ate each sweet petit four or scone on the cake plate, you would still come away hungry. This is because they, like everything in this scene are 1:12 size miniatures from my miniatures collection.
Fun things to look for in this tableau:
The sweet petite fours on the lower tier of the cake stand and the scones on the upper tier and on Lettice and Selwyn’s plates have been made in England by hand from clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. Each petit four is only five millimetres in diameter and between five and eight millimetres in height!
The blue banded hotel crockery has been made exclusively for Doll House Suppliers in England. Each piece is fashioned by hand and painted by hand. Made to the highest quality standards each piece of porcelain is very thin and fine. If you look closely, you might even notice the facets cut into the milk jug and the steam hole in the teapot.
The fluted glass cake stand, the glass vase on Lettice and Selwyn’s table and the red roses in it were all made by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. The cake stand and the vase have been hand blown and in the case of the stand, hand tinted. The red roses in the vase are also made by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures.
The Chippendale dining room chairs are very special pieces. They came from the Petite Elite Miniature Museum, later rededicated as the Carol and Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures, which ran between 1992 and 2012 on Los Angeles’ bustling Wiltshire Boulevard. One of the chairs still has a sticker under its cushion identifying which room of which dollhouse it came. The Petite Elite Miniature Museum specialised in exquisite and high end 1:12 miniatures. The furnishings are taken from a real Chippendale design.
The vases of flowers on the stands in the background are beautifully made by hand by the Doll House Emporium. The three plant stands are made by the high-end miniature furniture maker, Bespaq, whilst the sideboard is made by high-end miniature furniture maker JBM. The paintings come from an online stockist on E-Bay.
