Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

a cup of tea. He opened the first of the teashops. Others followed in various major cities, all allied to exhibition catering. They proved popular and successful. The brothers opened their first London teashop, the Popular Café, an expensively built place, at 213 Piccadilly, near the Circus. The chain developed. They had a great reputation for their cup of tea only – the two top leaves of the Darjeeling crop were used. The shops were painted white and gold and served all manner of refreshments, but no alcohol. The fare was clean and cheap, any mother could take her children there and the waitresses were as pristine as their surroundings.

None of the brothers wanted the family name above a teashop. Nor did they want this new enterprise confused with their tobacco business. They needed another name. Joe Lyons was the extrovert cousin of Gluck’s Uncle Isidore’s wife, Rose. He painted, he gave Gluck, when she was little, a miniature silver gilt paint-box of watercolours, hung on a silver chain, gave demonstrations at scientific exhibitions on the workings of the microscope, and was something of an entrepreneur and rolling stone. The brothers – with his approval – took his name to go above their shops.

Expansion followed fast and J. Lyons & Co. opened a chain of teashops; there was one in every urban district. They always bought freehold shops, or very long leases and so had a farsighted hedge against inflation and an investment in property that itself proved lucrative. The Trocadero, adapted from a music hall, opened as a restaurant with a floorshow in 1896. The first of the Corner Houses, renowned for their good food and live orchestras, opened on the corner of Coventry Street, in 1908. Oliver P. Bernard, who worked for Covent Garden and the Boston Opera House, designed the interior. The walls had views of mountain scenery with pine forests and waterfalls carved in different coloured marbles. That same year the brothers built their first hotel, the Strand Palace, on the site of the Exeter Hall. The entrance staircase with its illuminated glass balustrades glittered like a set for the Folies Bergère or the Casino de Paris. There was running water in every room instead of a jug and basin and the rooms cost five shillings and sixpence a night – and no tips. Then followed the Regent Palace Hotel, the biggest hotel in London, and, in about 1930, the Cumberland, the first moderately priced London hotel, with a bathroom in every room. It cost eleven shillings and sixpence a night with full breakfast.

This was the business and family ethos into which Gluck was born. Her father, Joseph, with his two elder brothers Isidore and Montague, were the backbone of the business, The Family and The Fund. ‘We pride ourselves on being the most united family in the whole world’, Joseph wrote to his prospective in-laws in August 1894, when asking permission to marry their daughter. He conformed entirely to the values of hard work, family unity, loyalty and correct social behaviour. He was a good-looking fellow with dark, bright eyes and a dimple in his chin. He was serious-minded, mild-tempered for the most part, and conservative in dress, politics and outlook. He allowed himself a number of fanciful flights: when eighteen, he wrote a drama in four acts called Leila, an extravagant Old Testament saga of filial piety, privately printed. (A copy is lodged in the British Library.) As director of the firm’s advertising campaigns, he indulged in a few theatrical flings: he once hired four horse buses, had them painted silver, filled them with actors dressed in different national costumes, all smoking cigars or pipes, or chewing tobacco; they went round and round Piccadilly Circus puffing smoke and holding up the traffic until the police intervened. And, as his perhaps most impulsive move, he married Gluck’s mother, Francesca Hallé, who was not of the Gluckstein mould.

She was his second wife. His first, Kate Joseph, was, predictably, his cousin, his mother’s brother’s child. (Five of the seven Joseph children married their Gluckstein cousins.) She was nearly thirty when she married him, perilously close in the mores of the day to old-maid status. She died, childless, after seven years of marriage.

During my married life I was the happiest man in the world and thought I was a favoured mortal in having been blessed with such a treasure. I decided never to marry again, thinking I could not settle down, but my dear Family have for years urged me to remarry as they pointed out that my life was not a correct one, being the only unmarried one of the elder members. I believed them, but could not afford to risk being badly mated.2

The Family rather expected him to settle for another cousin. However, when nearly forty, at a ball given by Joe Lyons in March 1894, he met Francesca Hallé. Though an indifferent dancer, and consigned to being a spectator, it seems he suffered the coup de foudre when he saw her and said to himself, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’3 According to Francesca’s account of events she took little notice of him. She was nineteen, tall, extrovert, with copper-red hair and blue eyes and thought to be beautiful, vivacious and talented. She was American. Her family lived first in St Louis, then moved to Chicago. Her father was a whisky salesman with a strong sense of moral rectitude, a love of travel and adventure, six daughters, a frail son and no particular wealth. Francesca had a fine soprano voice and was training to be a professional singer. She was in Europe principally to study music in Berlin and had gone to London to visit cousins.

In August 1894 she and Joseph met again. Both were holidaying with their respective relatives in Margate:

Joseph was with us a lot, but I did not think very much about it. One day he asked me to walk with him on the cliffs. I suggested that the others came