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The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry Derek Taylor
Department of Hotel, Catering and Tourism Management, U.K.
University of Surrey, Guildford,
The contribution of migrants to the British hotel industry is elucidated and discussed. Different cultural backgrounds amongst migrants encourage new approaches to the solution of hotel operating problems. The determination and innovative drive of migrants has had a number of beneficial effects. Key words:
migrant
contribution
British
hotel
industry
To understand the migrant contribution to the British hotel industry, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the immigrant cultures and that of the British host community. It isn’t easy to do so; on the whole minorities like to keep a very low profile indeed; one Italian hotel restaurant manager in London was asked whether he felt that some remote corner of his extremely continental operation might owe something to the British hotel industry, speaking technically, of course, of his organisation, serving methods, administration, sales promotion or an aspect of that sort. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said disarmingly, ‘we serve very good, plain roast beef’. The idea that the British could add anything to a classic Italian restaurant regime was unlikely to have crossed his mind.
rant communities settled into the hotel industry. Or we can observe the migrant contribution in terms of its relevance to the hotel industry today; are the traditions they established economically intelligent in the Eighties, or are they simply a throwback to another age and worth changing. The British hotel industry today is a winning team, and one doesn’t like to change a winning team. Or should we simply be encouraged in our own efforts by the example of the impact that a small group of migrants, even single individuals, could have on the development of a major British industry, as British hotels are today. As Brinley Thomas says, ‘Pioneers are always very small in number, but the range of their influence is incalculable’ (Thomas, 1954).
So one mustn’t expect migrants to boast of their contribution. Father Umberto Marin put it so tactfully when he said ‘Not being made to feel “foreign”, the immigrant does not have to shed his culture’. Most migrant groups do not shed their culture because they consider layer after layer of it to be superior to that of the host community. Brown, whose work on migrant communities in Bedford is one of the best studies to have been undertaken, remarks for instance that the migrants’ ‘reactions to the permissive society are those of shock and repudiation’ (Brown, 1970) and quotes as typical the remark of a Pole who said ‘I like very much Great Britain. I love Poland’ (Brown, 1970).
In considering the migrant contribution, we have to keep in mind that we are indeed talking about a small percentage of the hotel working population at any one time in the development of the hotel industry, but a percentage normally employed in the heart of the industry and the most influential hotel centre - London, and over the years in many key status positions. It is intended that parts of this paper will illuminate all of those ideas, but nothing illustrates the sensitive nature of the subject more than the fact that this appears to be the first time that anybody has tried to present any form of study of the contribution itself, and I hope that others, better qualified than myself, will continue and expand on the subject in the years to come.
So if you want to understand the migrant contribution to the British hotel industry, you must not expect to find it flying from the flagpoles or illuminated in neon lights. The importance of that contribution can be discussed on many levels. We have problems with the absorption of new migrant communities today, and perhaps we can learn something from the way in which past migInt.J. Hospitahty
Management Printed in Great Britain
Vol. 2 No. 2 pp. 61-68
1983
To begin with, we all take it for granted that there are a large number of first generation migrants in senior positions in the hotel industry, and that this situation has existed for many, many years. It is true, but it does make hotels rather exceptional. For example, you won’t find a variety 61
0278-4319/83 53.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd
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of migrants in similarly senior positions in European national airlines - a much more chauvinistic industry, even though it, too, is international in scope and heavily involved in tourism as a service industry. So in understanding why the migrants are in the hotels in the first place, and what brought them to Britain, we can understand more about their contribution. Carlo Levi summed it up. ‘Mass emigration’, he wrote, ‘is not a free choice, but a necessity, an obligatory and violent solution caused by general economic policy, unemployment or insufficient employment’ (Levi, 1969). The migrants had to come. Cheap food from America made it more difficult to make a living out of farming in Europe from 1870 onwards. For over 30 years there was deflation - yes, there really is such a thing. The slump coincided with the growth of the British hotel industry to serve a growing middle class and to house visitors to the heart of the Empire. Staff became a problem. Palmer tells us the supply of ‘the demand . . . far exceeded indigenous workers willing to tolerate long hours under bad conditions for low salaries’ (Palmer, 1977). It says much for how bad life was for the poor peasantry in much of Europe that such conditions were preferable to remaining at home. But then, as Mario Gellati, the great Mayfair restaurateur of the Fifties, wrote when he recalled life in Italy in 1898, ‘In those days there was no question of hours, for the workers had no rights at all. So I worked in the patisserie all day and most of the night’ (Gellati, 1960). He was 9 years old in 1908 and as he was an apprentice to the patissier, he didn’t get paid at all. We have had two main waves of migrants in the British hotel industry; the migrants were needed in late Victorian times and further waves were needed as the industry expanded massively again in the 2.5 years after the Second World War. There was little migration between the Aliens Acts of 1906 and 1945, but the original migrants and their children stayed unless they were repatriated to Austria, Germany or Turkey at the outbreak of the First World War. So the migrants were a substantial force of craftsman, but each wave of migrants was also a force for management to use to keep wages low, because the migrants were invariably prepared to accept the conditions offered. Kiernan (1978) refers to a Victorian economy ‘which demanded a “reserve army” of unemployment and misery’ to remain competitive, and remarks on the effect of the arrival of the Italians when he says ‘Later in the century, a new type of immigrant was making his appearance, drawn more from Northern Italy, with a flair for baking, catering, domestic service and restaurant work.
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This made him useful to the country, but also stiffened competition in casual employment. English waiters did indeed find their jobs more precarious’. What was the mental attitude towards life of those early migrants? Most of them did not intend to remain low grade hotel fodder for ever. Otherwise they would have been far more likely to stay in their own lands and bemoan their wretched fate. The migrants preferred to take positive action to improve matters. As Brown reported the consensus belief of a number of later migrant communities, ‘The best thing, for any people, for any community, they said flatly, was to learn to help themselves’ (Brown, 1970). Those early migrant communities were mostly young adults, tough and determined, disciplined and hard working. They had no dole to fall back on, no welfare state. When Mario Gellati was dismissed in October 1905 for refusing to admit that he had taken 17%~ worth of meat, he nearly starved before he found work after Christmas. As managers, the migrants were paternalistic but they were very strong disciplinarians. In many instances, for ‘strong’ you could equally use the word ‘harsh’. The migrants came from many countries and a considerable proportion of both waves had never worked in an industrial society. They had been brought up in farming communities where there was a ‘centuries old tradition of seasonal migration’ (Palmer, 1977) when the land could not support the population during the winter. The Victorian hotel industry needed a mobile labour force - the British had no tradition of seasonal migration and the migrant, the archetypal mobile labour force, led the way. It wasn’t easy to get on. It wasn’t that easy to survive but, significantly, this probably was not the worst problem for many migrants. As Brown reports about the later generation of migrants, ‘Loneliness was then the killer’ (Brown, 1970). The British, the host community, did not give the migrants a welcome akin to the participants in the Royal Wedding. The migrants were certainly allowed to live in peace for the most part but, to quote Levi again, ‘It is the peace of apartheid rather than that of integration’ (Levi, 1969). It is usually a accepted in the they settle, and eventually become the much larger rejection is likely.
long time before migrants are British neighbourhoods where even if these neighbourhoods little ghettoes, there is always neighbourhood outside, where
There is a plus side to this as well for some migrants. The British do have a love and respect for privacy which makes them leave people alone.
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The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
It is one of the great attractions for the really famous that, if they come to live in Britain, they will not be pestered by gawping throngs. But the minus side is that newcomers - and a newcomer can just as easily be a Scot in East Anglia as a Latvian in the highlands or valleys - newcomers are also left alone, and can easily feel that the host community is basically hostile. Which parts of it might well be. Sociologists talk of a ‘World View’ - an attitude towards life - and they describe two worlds in which the individual wants acceptance: the one is in his own neighbourhood, and the other is in his place of work. Where the first is cold and unfriendly, the need to be accepted in the place of work becomes even more pressing. This might well account for the generally acknowledged fact that continentals make much more courteous and friendly hotel staff than the native born. As the Globe reported in 1880, like so many comments before and after, ‘The comfort was enhanced by the service in public rooms being performed in great measure by foreigners. The English staff are not as good’ (Globe, 1880). Yet continentals are not invariably courteous and polite in their own countries. That isn’t the reputation of drivers in Rome, or French shop assistants, Spanish police, Greek passport authorities or Belgian taxi drivers. In their own countries the local hotel staff, themselves, seem to display the same generalised shortcomings that can be attributed to British cashiers, waiters or any other group. It is the migrant seeking acceptance rather than the innate courtesy of one nationality over another which probably accounts for the difference in attitude to the customer.
which provide most of the services of a reasonable hotel, including luke-warm coffee. Certainly, tipping was, in the past, a method by which hotel management were able to get the guests to pay a substantial proportion of the wage bill, particularly in the restaurant area. For instance, after the Second World War, a good waiter in the West End of London would be paid &2 a week by his employer and would receive, on average, an additional reward of about f20 a week in tips. On that basis of course, survival looks rather easier. Many waiters did not get paid at all until the Catering Wages Act was introduced by Ernest Bevin in 1943, and West End commissionaires in the Thirties would actually pay management for the privilege of having the job at certain luxury hotels; tips were so high that it was worthwhile doing so. This last example is, in fact, the best illustration of what hotel jobs had often become over the years; a franchise from the management to run your own small business within the business. Small businesses; running porters’ desks and cloakrooms, housekeeping departments, cleaning bedrooms, bars and restaurants and banqueting. The wages were a secondary consideration.
How did the migrants manage to survive on low wages?; for the accusation which probably hurts the British hotel industry most to this day is that we remain a low pay industry, as we were in years gone by. One cannot look at the migrant performance in this area, however, without also taking into account the implications of tipping.
The small businesses worked very much on the classic economic principles of supply and demand. At peak periods any half-trained Reception Manager could find an empty bedroom in a full hotel in return for a suitable tip. To obtain a popular date in a Park Lane hotel for a banquet in the 1940s could easily cost you a f2.5 tip to the Banqueting Manager - 22.50 in today’s money! Hall porters with access to Cup Final or Wimbledon tickets still do well, and Clement Freud MP speaks for more junior staff with a lovely story of his days as a Commis Waiter in the Thirties. One of his tasks in the restaurant was to move a chair with arms. He moved it daily to the table of a regular luncheon customer who liked a chair with arms, and requested one when he arrived. Clement Freud then moved it away again after the guest had left, so that it could be produced once more the next day in return for yet another tip.
In 1943 the Reunion des Gastronomes, one of the most prestigious British hotel industry societies, voted unanimously to support the abolition of tipping, and tipping - as we will see -was often more important to the staff than wages; nothing happened. This was not surprising as guests had complained about staff soliciting tips for 100 years and more, and still nothing had happened. Why has tipping always had such an immensely strong hold on the hotel industry? After all, there are a number of other areas where it has been abolished; London clubs for example,
Tips could lead to financial independence, and it was the migrants who were in the forefront of this move to independence. They didn’t want to have to rely on others. They wanted these concessions within the hotels, as they wanted to own their own homes and eventually to run their own businesses. Most Italians, for example, came from the area in Italy, east of Genoa, which is called Emma Romagna, where, as Palmer had shown, there was an ‘intense demand for economic independence’ (Palmer, 1977). It applied to other migrant groups as well. The Ukrainian Voluntary
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Workers who were sent to the brickworks in Bedford in 1948 were destitute; by 1970 60% of them owned private property (Brown, 1970). Those migrants who had left their countries because of economic problems or political ones, had taken arms against a sea of troubles and intended to end those problems by opposing them, rather than becoming resigned to some inevitable and miserable destiny. As they were effectively running their own businesses, the hours they spent at work they considered their own hours. They didn’t object to unpaid overtime because the longer they worked for tips, the more money they could send home to their family, the sooner they might be able to bring their sweetheart to Britain, the quicker they might be able to start their own cafe or buy their own home. The sooner, eventually, they could retire and go back to their native land. That was the attraction of tips, more than the income undeclared for taxation, because for so many years the tax which would have been demanded from most of the migrants would have been little enough. Unions forcing management in other industries to pay for overtime or eliminate it, were viewed with deep concern. Until around 1970 when the practice of including tips within tariffs became more prevalent, the tipping system was a real incentive for the migrant, and to some extent it remains so today. There is, of course, a strong body of opinion which holds that a good worker deserves a decent wage and should not be beholden to the clientele for alms and charity in the form of tips. The approved organisation to validate such a viewpoint is expected to be a trade union, and many have been the explanations why the unions have had such difficulty in organising the staff in the Management opposition is one hotel industry. explanation, but in view of the volume of complaints in earlier years about wages and conditions, it is not a very strong one. If we introduce the element of the migrant attitude, however, the problem might be easier to solve. To the migrants, the trade unions were not their automatic friends and supporters. The trade union movement recognised the migrant workers as a source of cheap labour from the earliest days, and objected to them for precisely that reason; nothing to do with any chauvinistic doubts about their future ability to keep wicket, or master the finer points of campanology. Castles and Kosack who by no stretch of the imagination could be classed as right wing apologists - state categorof institutionalised ically that ‘the system discrimination against foreign workers in Britain has operated with the explicit or implicit support
of the Trade Union Kosack, 1973).
movement’
(Castles
and
Perhaps the most obvious post-war example was the absorption of the 100,000 European Voluntary Workers in 1948 from the Displaced Persons Camps of Europe; refugees who were directed to industries where British workers could not be found in sufficient numbers, but only after many industries had reached agreement with their unions that no foreign labour at all would be introduced. Equally, the Hungarians who entered the hotel industry after the 1956 uprising, would not be likely to forget that the National Union of Mineworkers, in similar vein as black as the coal they dug, refused to accept any Hungarian miners whatsoever. EVWs had to be found jobs where there was no possible danger of them affecting the standards of living of union members. Now this may be totally understandable if you are already a union member, but it is difficult to swallow if you have narrowly avoided death in a concentration camp or escaped by the skin of your teeth from a Communist putsch. Management, which often emerged from the ranks of the migrants, would remember this somewhat less than fraternal welcome in the future, and their compatriots could be reminded of it if this were necessary. Other migrants would simply be afraid of joining organisations which might be unpopular with management. Brown (1970) comments, ‘The fear of authority and bureaucracy was bred in them’ and this particularly applied to the Spanish migrant as well as those nationalities Brown covers. In a number of European countries the unions - to their credit - had been in the forefront of the fight against fascism, and had consequently been classified in those countries as revolutionary, radical and subversive. This was unfair, but again it frightened the migrant who could not distinguish between British unions and continental unions, and who just wanted to stay in the country and earn a living. Did the migrants see themselves as permanent members of the British hotel industry? It has already been pointed out that many migrants saved for the day when they could retire and go home. Most migrant groups had this in mind, no matter the obstacles which stood in their way. The Poles of General Sanders’ army looked forward to the day when their country would no longer be under Russian domination. Even the Ukrainians, when offered the status of Russians by the Home Office, preferred for the most part to remain Stateless. And the Italians remained Venetians, Neapolitans, Romans, Milanese etc; the United Kingdom is not the only state with marked subdivisions.
The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
Of the 100,000 Italian-born who were living in this country according to the 1971 census, over 60,000 had not been naturalised; this was before the United Kingdom entered the Common Market when work permits for member state nationals became unnecessary. The Italians, for the most part, preferred the uncertainty of possible expulsion to giving up their original nationality. Exactly the same attitude had applied before the Second World War and that experience had been traumatic and often tragic. As Firth has pointed out, ‘Although Italians were interned in all Allied countries, in no other place were so many Italians affected so heavily by the experience for so long’ (Firth, 1956). Most survived internment with only mental scars, but the older generation remember the Arnadora Star, a liner torpedoed in the North Atlantic on 10 June 1940 on its way to Canada. Its passengers included the cream of Italian West End hoteliers and restaurateurs on their way to internment, and of the 717 Italians aboard, no less than 470 lost their lives. Men who had lived in Britain for up to 30 years and more, but who had never become naturalised. The link to the original culture is that strong, and it is not to be lightly broken. If the migrants remained deeply attached to their original homeland, wouldn’t they remain equally attached to its hotel and catering traditions? Yes, indeed. The cultures from which so many of the migrants sprang - from Italy, from France and from Switzerland, Alsace and Belgium -were very strongly catering-oriented. Now even a casual glance at the balance sheet of a reasonably sized hotel would show you that the major profits are to be made from bedroom sales. After all, what is a hotel? We are indebted to Shelly Berman for explaining that ‘A hotel is a place where you’re paying about 30 bucks a day and they’re calling you a guest’ (Berman, 1972). This was as much the case when the British hotel industry was young in Victorian times as it is today. Talking to his shareholders in 1902, Frederick Gordon, the founder of the first British hotel chain and a man who, in his time, was called the Hotel Napoleon, said, ‘We do not go in, as some of the other large hotels in London do, for making - I will not say the chief business, but at any rate a very considerable proportion of it, restaurant business. We prefer if we can to let our apartments, and you may rely upon it that the backbone of hotel business is the letting of apartments’ (Gordon Hotel Co., 1898) - self-evident in 1902 and absolutely vital to the successful running of a hotel. Admittedly it was true that a Victorian or early 20th century hotel needed a decent restaurant, because there were very few restaurants outside hotels which were worth patronising, but when the
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restaurant became the focus of management attention rather than the bedrooms, the tail wagged the dog, and the industry was sidetracked into a cul de sac which stunted its development. How did this overwhelming catering tradition emerge? Why did such a large proportion of hotel management emerge from the ranks of the restaurant managers and chefs rather than the reception managers throughout the period? If we go back to the 18th century we find the British aristocracy looking abroad for good chefs and looking primarily to France. The introduction of haute cuisine to that country is attributed to Catherine de Medici who brought her own Italian chefs with her to Paris when she came to marry Henry II in the 16th century. She might therefore be said to have brought culinary enlightenment from Renaissance Italy to the underdeveloped French. By the 18th century the chefs in French aristocratic households, steeped in culinary knowledge and vin rouge, had become a European status symbol, and they became easier for the British aristocracy to acquire when, during the French Revolution, employment prospects in France went down along with the guillotine. George IV effectively gave the Royal Assent to this practice of seeking French chefs, when he employed Marie-Antoine Careme soon after Waterloo. Thereafter it was a French chef, Alexis Soyer, who was chosen to feed the troops in the Crimea, and August Escoffier who produced, at the turn of the century, the Guide Culinaire, which remains the bible of the kitchen to this day. The fact that French is the international language of the kitchen is not only a reflection of the fact that these and other great chefs were French and couldn’t speak English. After all, Italian isn’t the language of the restaurant. It is also a relic of the days when French and not English was the international language, par excellence; hotel management was happy to be associated with the language of diplomacy, the language of 17th and 18th century culture. The continental hotel departmental head continued to be a status symbol, and it was not unusual for management to adopt working names which fitted the picture. As Alice Marks became the prima ballerina, Alicia Markova, so did the hotel staff change their names. Probably the best known example of this occurred as late as the 1960s when the Welshman, Bryan Evans, agreed, on taking the position of Banqueting Manager at the Savoy, to be known henceforth as Evangel0 Brioni. How oddly this contrasted with Firth’s (1956) study which concluded that, ‘Most Italianates are convinced that having an Italian name may be basis enough for some discrimination to be
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directed against them’. Mr Evans, positive discrimination.
Presumably, in the case of rather than negative
For the Italians, who you will recall came primarily from Emilia Romagna in the first wave, food and drink were equally important. It is an area famous for food and drink production; Bologna is the accepted capital of Italian haute cuisine, the region manufactures such excellent products as Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, as well as good brandy and wine. Food and drink are to Emilia Romagna as rugby and singing are to Wales. One wonders in passing whether and Italian rugby player singing for Llanelli would change his name from Mario Gennaro to Mervyn Jones. So that is how the Victorians found themselves with migrant communities who were culturally attuned to a love of fine food and wine, and who, far from home, were sustained by the culinary umbilical cord which joined them to the motherland. That does not explain, however, how their wishes - the wishes of the staff after all is said and done - should have triumphed over the economic realities of bedroom versus restaurant profits observed by the owners. The explanation for this is that too many owners had become a form of absentee landlord. The Gordon Hotel Company which had been created by great hoteliers like Frederick Gordon and William Holland, passed on the Chairmanship to that disastrous amateur, the Earl of Bessborough. By 1920 there were seven barristers on the Gordon Hotels Board of Directors, and their lack of knowledge of the hotel business was certainly a case in point. of amateur hoteliers had Large numbers emerged as mansions were turned into hotels after the first World War, and another group of rank amateurs charitably created Trust Houses in order to restore a number of old coaching inns to some semblance of their former 18th and 19th century mediocrity. Too often the managers were left in charge of running the business, the managers took their cue from the great London hotels and the great London hotels were primarily managed by Where British managers were continentals. employed, they were expected to have continental experience and they were chosen more for their Oxford accents than for their ability to pass examinations. The overwhelming importance of food and drink, the fatal mirage which distracted management from the major source of profits, continued to hold sway. Until the arrival of a man called Fred Kobler, to whom we will return.
It was for exactly the same reason - delegating an authority the Directors should have borne that the hotel industry’s sales and marketing expertise declined so drastically between Victorian times and the 1960s. It was widely believed in the British hotel industry until about 1970 that sales promotion was an inappropriate element as it lowered the tone. A Grosvenor House banqueting head waiter who was able to remember when A. H. Jones, the hotel e~~a~~ testable of his day, ran the hotel in the Thirties, and when A. H. Jones had employed men to sell banquets, explained with some distaste, ‘Banquet touts we used to call them’. Selling, advertising, direct mail; all were in decline in technique and status from around 1910 to 1970. While the American Hotel Sales Managers Association has been in existence for over 60 years, the British Hotel Sales Managers Association was started by six men in 1964, and two of them weren’t really eligible for membership. Yet we now know that the Victorians had been in the vanguard of sales promotion. They had employed advertising managers on occasions, ahead of many other industries. Many an advertising manager today would recognise the problem of the tourists who stop coming when their country goes to war. During the Boer War in 1900, the French hotels belonging to the Gordon Hotel Company could have suffered from the British staying at home but, as Frederick Gordon told his shareholders, ‘When we found that the English people were not coming to the Riviera, our energetic publicity department, who saw at once how matters were drifting, advertised for Germans and Frenchmen, and we had a very large number from Germany and from France who came to the hotels in response to those advertisements’ (Gordon Hotel Co.. 1898-1912). The Victorians had created short break holidays in conjunction with railways. which was presumed to be a totally novel idea when the same concept was introduced in 1964. They were responsible for Special Events, one of the latest so-called modern hotel sales promotion concepts, the most famous of which was an event to fill the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, by running a rally for the new fangled automobile from London which would finish at the hotel. Today we call that event the Veteran Car Run. It still helps the Metropole. The Victorians realised very clearly that they had to encourage people to use hotels, rather than spend their disposable income on other frills and furbelows. Even so, as marketing developed in other parts of British industry, it effectively stopped in hotels. Why was this? The explanation given that it lowered the tone was quite insupport-
The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
able; it certainly didn’t lower the tone of Rolls Royce or Harrods. Such an idea only becomes understandable if we again introduce the effect of migrant management into the equation. As we know, the original Victorian entrepreneurs, who created the British hotels, were normally English, and they hoped to rely on continental key staff for expertise in the standards of cooking and restaurant service; if they could find them. Their successors, however - the absentee landlords - retired more and more into nonoperational roles, concerned with financial or but unwilling to get development matters, involved in running the hotels to any extent because they realised their limitations. The amateurs took the helm, but left it to the professionals to see that the engines actually turned over. And the continental professionals were quite capable of running the ship, and keeping it Boulogne, Brindisi, Bremen or Bristol fashion. Capable in every area that is, except that of sales promotion. Sales promotion demanded that one attribute that their years in the kitchens or restaurants, their enthusiasm and efficiency could not provide; it demanded a very thorough command of the English language, and that the continentals lacked. They could often speak three or four languages well enough to get by with the customers, but they couldn’t speak the one that mattered well enough to undertake technically proficient sales promotion. They didn’t have the mastery of the nuances of the language, they were uncertain about the finer points. They couldn’t judge whether advertising copy would be effective and they couldn’t spell very well. There was no time to go back to school to correct these shortcomings, to improve on the ‘assuring you of my best attention at all times’ approach. Lacking the skill, they had to pursuade the Directors that the skill, itself, was worthless. So they seized gratefully upon the concept that active selling of the product would lower the tone of the company. A. H. Jones was a lone voice - not for the first time. The Savoy used public relations brilliantly but they were also influenced by the argument about tone. Which brings us again to Fred Kobler, the man who decided that if American hotels needed sales promotion, then British hotels must need it as well. Fred Kobler has been given credit for pioneering two concepts in Britain in modern times: the need to concentrate on selling bedrooms rather than spend the management time on catering operations; and the importance of sales promotion. Why was Fred Kobler, a Czech who had lived for years in Vienna and Paris before the war - at which point he came to Britain to join the Czech army - why wasn’t he just as imbued with the
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continental outlook as anybody else? What native culture could influence him, that was sufficiently disinterested in food and drink to make it possible to see clearly the vital importance of filling bedrooms? The answer was Jewish culture. As a religion, Jews are just as fond as anybody else of eating and drinking. Grants of St James, the renowned wine shippers, once explained the attractions of Israeli wines by saying they they were ‘drunk for sentimental rather than oenological reasons’ (Grants of St James, 1964) but hundreds of thousands do find them palatable for all that. Certainly those who have not had the opportunity to enjoy gefilte fish, blintzes or latkas are to be counted amongst the deprived of this world. Nevertheless, there are two serious objections amongst religious Jews - and the upbringing of most Eastern European Jews at the turn of the century was orthodox - to both haute cuisine and alcohol. Haute cuisine is not Kosher, not just because it uses forbidden foods, but also because the rules do insist on cooking meat in a variety of milk products, such as butter and cheese, which is equally forbidden. Most Jews ignore the prohibitions today, but the important point is that their upbringing gave no support to the cause of haute cuisine. The problem with alcohol for the Jews was slightly different. It was certainly Kosher, but too much of it did seem to be regularly imbibed by mobs just before they started pogroms and the massacre of their Jewish compatriots. This, not altogether unnaturally, led to a Jewish loathing of drunkenness which, again, meant that the running of bars or a learned and enquiring mind about wine was, for them, nothing of which to be proud. Being, therefore, quite able to judge on its merits the case between food and beverages on the one hand and bedroom revenue on the other, Fred Kobler could see without any rose-coloured glasses which was the preferred sector. After the rest of the industry had given his company about 15 years’ start, they saw the logic as well. Fred Kobler was not the first to have admired American hotel expertise. Richard D’Oyly Carte came back from America in the 1880s determined to build a hotel similar to those he had gazed at in wonder, and the result was the Savoy. Fred Kobler came back with a raft of ideas, one of which was sales promotion. But why was Fred Kobler looking to America in the first place when everybody else had been continuing to look to Europe for its hotel traditions - including for much of the time the Americans themselves. The answer, sadly, was that in 1945 Europe was not an area to
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which Jews would look for anything. It was a vast cemetary and if there was to be any hope for the future, they believed that it would have to come from the United States. Very few Jews who were born in Europe failed to become British citizens at the first available opportunity. Much has changed in the last 20 years. Third generation migrants have joined other industries and professions, the hotel schools in this country have produced a very large number of skilled British young people capable of running hotels. The flood of poor migrants has stopped as work permits have been withheld, although sizeable numbers of EEC members still come to Britain to learn English, and some marry and settle here. There are also considerable numbers of migrants from Commonwealth countries - West Indians and Asians -who have entered the industry, and a few entrepreneurs are appearing from that source as well. As we face the difficult decade ahead, what lessons should we learn then from the migrants who contributed so greatly to our attitudes towards hotelkeeping over the years? Six seem most important. First, we need to retain their courage and determination; faced with obstacles which would have crippled those with weaker spirits, they fought for a better life for themselves and their families, and most of them won. Every deprived community, everybody who wants to make their way in the world, needs to learn that lesson. Second, we need their love and affection for the hotel industry. Their pride in belonging to it, their pleasure when their children selected hotelkeeping as their future careers. I said much has changed in the last 20 years, but there are still a lot of British parents who would be disappointed if their children selected the hotel industry, believing it to be a low status occupation and the last resort for those who fail their professional exams. Third, we need to retain the high standards so many migrants brought to the profession they loved. They saw hotelkeeping as an art form, from the way a bed was turned down and the folding of a serviette, to the presentation of food on a plate and the piquancy of a sauce. That is what the adjective Ritzy ought to mean. We need that attention to detail as much today as ever. Fourth,
we must
reject
the business
within
a
business concept. Owners, management and staff should all work for the good of the hotel, prosper when the hotel prospers and not simply till their individual furrows. The franchise system leaves the staff basically disinterested in the success of the hotel as such, and leads them to regard both the company and the guests as equally outsiders. If the success of the franchise involves the exploitation of the company or the guests, the temptation to exploit is very real, and many is the youngster who is corrupted by the system. Fifth, we must remember what Fred Gordon and Fred Kobler taught us, that the hotel business is about filling bedrooms. It is not about maintaining the traditions of Emilia Romagna or sustaining the status symbols of Regency England. Last, and surely by far the most important, we must maintain, cherish and value the greatest of all the migrant contributions to our industry-the proof they gave us year after year that men and women of all nationalities, colours and creeds, can work together in general harmony. For hotels are a genuine example of the theory of the United Nations working out in practice.
Acknowledgement This paper was first given as the inaugural at the University of Surrey in February,
visiting professorial 1982.
lecture
References Brown, J. (1970) The Unmelting Pot. Macmillan, London. Berman, S. (1972) A Hotel is a Place. Price, Stern. Sloan, Los Angeles. Castles, S. and Kosack, G. (1973) Immigrant Workers and Class Structures in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Firth, R. (ed.) (1956) Two Studies in Kinship in London, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, No. 1.5, University of London, Athlone Press, U.K. Gellati, M. (1960) Mario of the Caprice. Hutchinson, London. Globe (1880) London. Gordon Hotel Company (1896-1912) Minutes of Annual General Meetings, Primary source. Grants of St James (1964) A Gateway to Wine. London. Kiernan, V. G. (1978) Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, Homes, Colin (ed.). Allen & Unwin, London. Levi, C. (1969) Supplement on Southern Italy. The Times, 5 February. Palmer, R. (1977) Between Two Cultures. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Thomas, B. (1954) Migration and Economic Growth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
About the Author Derek Taylor is a business consultant and visiting professor at the University of Surrey’s Department of Hotel, Catering and Tourism Management. He was formerly a director of Grand Metropolitan Hotels Ltd. He has written a number of books on the and Institutional Management selling and marketing of hotel services. He is currently President of the Hotel, Catering Association.
Department of Hotel, Catering and Tourism Management, U.K.
University of Surrey, Guildford,
The contribution of migrants to the British hotel industry is elucidated and discussed. Different cultural backgrounds amongst migrants encourage new approaches to the solution of hotel operating problems. The determination and innovative drive of migrants has had a number of beneficial effects. Key words:
migrant
contribution
British
hotel
industry
To understand the migrant contribution to the British hotel industry, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the immigrant cultures and that of the British host community. It isn’t easy to do so; on the whole minorities like to keep a very low profile indeed; one Italian hotel restaurant manager in London was asked whether he felt that some remote corner of his extremely continental operation might owe something to the British hotel industry, speaking technically, of course, of his organisation, serving methods, administration, sales promotion or an aspect of that sort. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said disarmingly, ‘we serve very good, plain roast beef’. The idea that the British could add anything to a classic Italian restaurant regime was unlikely to have crossed his mind.
rant communities settled into the hotel industry. Or we can observe the migrant contribution in terms of its relevance to the hotel industry today; are the traditions they established economically intelligent in the Eighties, or are they simply a throwback to another age and worth changing. The British hotel industry today is a winning team, and one doesn’t like to change a winning team. Or should we simply be encouraged in our own efforts by the example of the impact that a small group of migrants, even single individuals, could have on the development of a major British industry, as British hotels are today. As Brinley Thomas says, ‘Pioneers are always very small in number, but the range of their influence is incalculable’ (Thomas, 1954).
So one mustn’t expect migrants to boast of their contribution. Father Umberto Marin put it so tactfully when he said ‘Not being made to feel “foreign”, the immigrant does not have to shed his culture’. Most migrant groups do not shed their culture because they consider layer after layer of it to be superior to that of the host community. Brown, whose work on migrant communities in Bedford is one of the best studies to have been undertaken, remarks for instance that the migrants’ ‘reactions to the permissive society are those of shock and repudiation’ (Brown, 1970) and quotes as typical the remark of a Pole who said ‘I like very much Great Britain. I love Poland’ (Brown, 1970).
In considering the migrant contribution, we have to keep in mind that we are indeed talking about a small percentage of the hotel working population at any one time in the development of the hotel industry, but a percentage normally employed in the heart of the industry and the most influential hotel centre - London, and over the years in many key status positions. It is intended that parts of this paper will illuminate all of those ideas, but nothing illustrates the sensitive nature of the subject more than the fact that this appears to be the first time that anybody has tried to present any form of study of the contribution itself, and I hope that others, better qualified than myself, will continue and expand on the subject in the years to come.
So if you want to understand the migrant contribution to the British hotel industry, you must not expect to find it flying from the flagpoles or illuminated in neon lights. The importance of that contribution can be discussed on many levels. We have problems with the absorption of new migrant communities today, and perhaps we can learn something from the way in which past migInt.J. Hospitahty
Management Printed in Great Britain
Vol. 2 No. 2 pp. 61-68
1983
To begin with, we all take it for granted that there are a large number of first generation migrants in senior positions in the hotel industry, and that this situation has existed for many, many years. It is true, but it does make hotels rather exceptional. For example, you won’t find a variety 61
0278-4319/83 53.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd
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of migrants in similarly senior positions in European national airlines - a much more chauvinistic industry, even though it, too, is international in scope and heavily involved in tourism as a service industry. So in understanding why the migrants are in the hotels in the first place, and what brought them to Britain, we can understand more about their contribution. Carlo Levi summed it up. ‘Mass emigration’, he wrote, ‘is not a free choice, but a necessity, an obligatory and violent solution caused by general economic policy, unemployment or insufficient employment’ (Levi, 1969). The migrants had to come. Cheap food from America made it more difficult to make a living out of farming in Europe from 1870 onwards. For over 30 years there was deflation - yes, there really is such a thing. The slump coincided with the growth of the British hotel industry to serve a growing middle class and to house visitors to the heart of the Empire. Staff became a problem. Palmer tells us the supply of ‘the demand . . . far exceeded indigenous workers willing to tolerate long hours under bad conditions for low salaries’ (Palmer, 1977). It says much for how bad life was for the poor peasantry in much of Europe that such conditions were preferable to remaining at home. But then, as Mario Gellati, the great Mayfair restaurateur of the Fifties, wrote when he recalled life in Italy in 1898, ‘In those days there was no question of hours, for the workers had no rights at all. So I worked in the patisserie all day and most of the night’ (Gellati, 1960). He was 9 years old in 1908 and as he was an apprentice to the patissier, he didn’t get paid at all. We have had two main waves of migrants in the British hotel industry; the migrants were needed in late Victorian times and further waves were needed as the industry expanded massively again in the 2.5 years after the Second World War. There was little migration between the Aliens Acts of 1906 and 1945, but the original migrants and their children stayed unless they were repatriated to Austria, Germany or Turkey at the outbreak of the First World War. So the migrants were a substantial force of craftsman, but each wave of migrants was also a force for management to use to keep wages low, because the migrants were invariably prepared to accept the conditions offered. Kiernan (1978) refers to a Victorian economy ‘which demanded a “reserve army” of unemployment and misery’ to remain competitive, and remarks on the effect of the arrival of the Italians when he says ‘Later in the century, a new type of immigrant was making his appearance, drawn more from Northern Italy, with a flair for baking, catering, domestic service and restaurant work.
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This made him useful to the country, but also stiffened competition in casual employment. English waiters did indeed find their jobs more precarious’. What was the mental attitude towards life of those early migrants? Most of them did not intend to remain low grade hotel fodder for ever. Otherwise they would have been far more likely to stay in their own lands and bemoan their wretched fate. The migrants preferred to take positive action to improve matters. As Brown reported the consensus belief of a number of later migrant communities, ‘The best thing, for any people, for any community, they said flatly, was to learn to help themselves’ (Brown, 1970). Those early migrant communities were mostly young adults, tough and determined, disciplined and hard working. They had no dole to fall back on, no welfare state. When Mario Gellati was dismissed in October 1905 for refusing to admit that he had taken 17%~ worth of meat, he nearly starved before he found work after Christmas. As managers, the migrants were paternalistic but they were very strong disciplinarians. In many instances, for ‘strong’ you could equally use the word ‘harsh’. The migrants came from many countries and a considerable proportion of both waves had never worked in an industrial society. They had been brought up in farming communities where there was a ‘centuries old tradition of seasonal migration’ (Palmer, 1977) when the land could not support the population during the winter. The Victorian hotel industry needed a mobile labour force - the British had no tradition of seasonal migration and the migrant, the archetypal mobile labour force, led the way. It wasn’t easy to get on. It wasn’t that easy to survive but, significantly, this probably was not the worst problem for many migrants. As Brown reports about the later generation of migrants, ‘Loneliness was then the killer’ (Brown, 1970). The British, the host community, did not give the migrants a welcome akin to the participants in the Royal Wedding. The migrants were certainly allowed to live in peace for the most part but, to quote Levi again, ‘It is the peace of apartheid rather than that of integration’ (Levi, 1969). It is usually a accepted in the they settle, and eventually become the much larger rejection is likely.
long time before migrants are British neighbourhoods where even if these neighbourhoods little ghettoes, there is always neighbourhood outside, where
There is a plus side to this as well for some migrants. The British do have a love and respect for privacy which makes them leave people alone.
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The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
It is one of the great attractions for the really famous that, if they come to live in Britain, they will not be pestered by gawping throngs. But the minus side is that newcomers - and a newcomer can just as easily be a Scot in East Anglia as a Latvian in the highlands or valleys - newcomers are also left alone, and can easily feel that the host community is basically hostile. Which parts of it might well be. Sociologists talk of a ‘World View’ - an attitude towards life - and they describe two worlds in which the individual wants acceptance: the one is in his own neighbourhood, and the other is in his place of work. Where the first is cold and unfriendly, the need to be accepted in the place of work becomes even more pressing. This might well account for the generally acknowledged fact that continentals make much more courteous and friendly hotel staff than the native born. As the Globe reported in 1880, like so many comments before and after, ‘The comfort was enhanced by the service in public rooms being performed in great measure by foreigners. The English staff are not as good’ (Globe, 1880). Yet continentals are not invariably courteous and polite in their own countries. That isn’t the reputation of drivers in Rome, or French shop assistants, Spanish police, Greek passport authorities or Belgian taxi drivers. In their own countries the local hotel staff, themselves, seem to display the same generalised shortcomings that can be attributed to British cashiers, waiters or any other group. It is the migrant seeking acceptance rather than the innate courtesy of one nationality over another which probably accounts for the difference in attitude to the customer.
which provide most of the services of a reasonable hotel, including luke-warm coffee. Certainly, tipping was, in the past, a method by which hotel management were able to get the guests to pay a substantial proportion of the wage bill, particularly in the restaurant area. For instance, after the Second World War, a good waiter in the West End of London would be paid &2 a week by his employer and would receive, on average, an additional reward of about f20 a week in tips. On that basis of course, survival looks rather easier. Many waiters did not get paid at all until the Catering Wages Act was introduced by Ernest Bevin in 1943, and West End commissionaires in the Thirties would actually pay management for the privilege of having the job at certain luxury hotels; tips were so high that it was worthwhile doing so. This last example is, in fact, the best illustration of what hotel jobs had often become over the years; a franchise from the management to run your own small business within the business. Small businesses; running porters’ desks and cloakrooms, housekeeping departments, cleaning bedrooms, bars and restaurants and banqueting. The wages were a secondary consideration.
How did the migrants manage to survive on low wages?; for the accusation which probably hurts the British hotel industry most to this day is that we remain a low pay industry, as we were in years gone by. One cannot look at the migrant performance in this area, however, without also taking into account the implications of tipping.
The small businesses worked very much on the classic economic principles of supply and demand. At peak periods any half-trained Reception Manager could find an empty bedroom in a full hotel in return for a suitable tip. To obtain a popular date in a Park Lane hotel for a banquet in the 1940s could easily cost you a f2.5 tip to the Banqueting Manager - 22.50 in today’s money! Hall porters with access to Cup Final or Wimbledon tickets still do well, and Clement Freud MP speaks for more junior staff with a lovely story of his days as a Commis Waiter in the Thirties. One of his tasks in the restaurant was to move a chair with arms. He moved it daily to the table of a regular luncheon customer who liked a chair with arms, and requested one when he arrived. Clement Freud then moved it away again after the guest had left, so that it could be produced once more the next day in return for yet another tip.
In 1943 the Reunion des Gastronomes, one of the most prestigious British hotel industry societies, voted unanimously to support the abolition of tipping, and tipping - as we will see -was often more important to the staff than wages; nothing happened. This was not surprising as guests had complained about staff soliciting tips for 100 years and more, and still nothing had happened. Why has tipping always had such an immensely strong hold on the hotel industry? After all, there are a number of other areas where it has been abolished; London clubs for example,
Tips could lead to financial independence, and it was the migrants who were in the forefront of this move to independence. They didn’t want to have to rely on others. They wanted these concessions within the hotels, as they wanted to own their own homes and eventually to run their own businesses. Most Italians, for example, came from the area in Italy, east of Genoa, which is called Emma Romagna, where, as Palmer had shown, there was an ‘intense demand for economic independence’ (Palmer, 1977). It applied to other migrant groups as well. The Ukrainian Voluntary
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Workers who were sent to the brickworks in Bedford in 1948 were destitute; by 1970 60% of them owned private property (Brown, 1970). Those migrants who had left their countries because of economic problems or political ones, had taken arms against a sea of troubles and intended to end those problems by opposing them, rather than becoming resigned to some inevitable and miserable destiny. As they were effectively running their own businesses, the hours they spent at work they considered their own hours. They didn’t object to unpaid overtime because the longer they worked for tips, the more money they could send home to their family, the sooner they might be able to bring their sweetheart to Britain, the quicker they might be able to start their own cafe or buy their own home. The sooner, eventually, they could retire and go back to their native land. That was the attraction of tips, more than the income undeclared for taxation, because for so many years the tax which would have been demanded from most of the migrants would have been little enough. Unions forcing management in other industries to pay for overtime or eliminate it, were viewed with deep concern. Until around 1970 when the practice of including tips within tariffs became more prevalent, the tipping system was a real incentive for the migrant, and to some extent it remains so today. There is, of course, a strong body of opinion which holds that a good worker deserves a decent wage and should not be beholden to the clientele for alms and charity in the form of tips. The approved organisation to validate such a viewpoint is expected to be a trade union, and many have been the explanations why the unions have had such difficulty in organising the staff in the Management opposition is one hotel industry. explanation, but in view of the volume of complaints in earlier years about wages and conditions, it is not a very strong one. If we introduce the element of the migrant attitude, however, the problem might be easier to solve. To the migrants, the trade unions were not their automatic friends and supporters. The trade union movement recognised the migrant workers as a source of cheap labour from the earliest days, and objected to them for precisely that reason; nothing to do with any chauvinistic doubts about their future ability to keep wicket, or master the finer points of campanology. Castles and Kosack who by no stretch of the imagination could be classed as right wing apologists - state categorof institutionalised ically that ‘the system discrimination against foreign workers in Britain has operated with the explicit or implicit support
of the Trade Union Kosack, 1973).
movement’
(Castles
and
Perhaps the most obvious post-war example was the absorption of the 100,000 European Voluntary Workers in 1948 from the Displaced Persons Camps of Europe; refugees who were directed to industries where British workers could not be found in sufficient numbers, but only after many industries had reached agreement with their unions that no foreign labour at all would be introduced. Equally, the Hungarians who entered the hotel industry after the 1956 uprising, would not be likely to forget that the National Union of Mineworkers, in similar vein as black as the coal they dug, refused to accept any Hungarian miners whatsoever. EVWs had to be found jobs where there was no possible danger of them affecting the standards of living of union members. Now this may be totally understandable if you are already a union member, but it is difficult to swallow if you have narrowly avoided death in a concentration camp or escaped by the skin of your teeth from a Communist putsch. Management, which often emerged from the ranks of the migrants, would remember this somewhat less than fraternal welcome in the future, and their compatriots could be reminded of it if this were necessary. Other migrants would simply be afraid of joining organisations which might be unpopular with management. Brown (1970) comments, ‘The fear of authority and bureaucracy was bred in them’ and this particularly applied to the Spanish migrant as well as those nationalities Brown covers. In a number of European countries the unions - to their credit - had been in the forefront of the fight against fascism, and had consequently been classified in those countries as revolutionary, radical and subversive. This was unfair, but again it frightened the migrant who could not distinguish between British unions and continental unions, and who just wanted to stay in the country and earn a living. Did the migrants see themselves as permanent members of the British hotel industry? It has already been pointed out that many migrants saved for the day when they could retire and go home. Most migrant groups had this in mind, no matter the obstacles which stood in their way. The Poles of General Sanders’ army looked forward to the day when their country would no longer be under Russian domination. Even the Ukrainians, when offered the status of Russians by the Home Office, preferred for the most part to remain Stateless. And the Italians remained Venetians, Neapolitans, Romans, Milanese etc; the United Kingdom is not the only state with marked subdivisions.
The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
Of the 100,000 Italian-born who were living in this country according to the 1971 census, over 60,000 had not been naturalised; this was before the United Kingdom entered the Common Market when work permits for member state nationals became unnecessary. The Italians, for the most part, preferred the uncertainty of possible expulsion to giving up their original nationality. Exactly the same attitude had applied before the Second World War and that experience had been traumatic and often tragic. As Firth has pointed out, ‘Although Italians were interned in all Allied countries, in no other place were so many Italians affected so heavily by the experience for so long’ (Firth, 1956). Most survived internment with only mental scars, but the older generation remember the Arnadora Star, a liner torpedoed in the North Atlantic on 10 June 1940 on its way to Canada. Its passengers included the cream of Italian West End hoteliers and restaurateurs on their way to internment, and of the 717 Italians aboard, no less than 470 lost their lives. Men who had lived in Britain for up to 30 years and more, but who had never become naturalised. The link to the original culture is that strong, and it is not to be lightly broken. If the migrants remained deeply attached to their original homeland, wouldn’t they remain equally attached to its hotel and catering traditions? Yes, indeed. The cultures from which so many of the migrants sprang - from Italy, from France and from Switzerland, Alsace and Belgium -were very strongly catering-oriented. Now even a casual glance at the balance sheet of a reasonably sized hotel would show you that the major profits are to be made from bedroom sales. After all, what is a hotel? We are indebted to Shelly Berman for explaining that ‘A hotel is a place where you’re paying about 30 bucks a day and they’re calling you a guest’ (Berman, 1972). This was as much the case when the British hotel industry was young in Victorian times as it is today. Talking to his shareholders in 1902, Frederick Gordon, the founder of the first British hotel chain and a man who, in his time, was called the Hotel Napoleon, said, ‘We do not go in, as some of the other large hotels in London do, for making - I will not say the chief business, but at any rate a very considerable proportion of it, restaurant business. We prefer if we can to let our apartments, and you may rely upon it that the backbone of hotel business is the letting of apartments’ (Gordon Hotel Co., 1898) - self-evident in 1902 and absolutely vital to the successful running of a hotel. Admittedly it was true that a Victorian or early 20th century hotel needed a decent restaurant, because there were very few restaurants outside hotels which were worth patronising, but when the
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restaurant became the focus of management attention rather than the bedrooms, the tail wagged the dog, and the industry was sidetracked into a cul de sac which stunted its development. How did this overwhelming catering tradition emerge? Why did such a large proportion of hotel management emerge from the ranks of the restaurant managers and chefs rather than the reception managers throughout the period? If we go back to the 18th century we find the British aristocracy looking abroad for good chefs and looking primarily to France. The introduction of haute cuisine to that country is attributed to Catherine de Medici who brought her own Italian chefs with her to Paris when she came to marry Henry II in the 16th century. She might therefore be said to have brought culinary enlightenment from Renaissance Italy to the underdeveloped French. By the 18th century the chefs in French aristocratic households, steeped in culinary knowledge and vin rouge, had become a European status symbol, and they became easier for the British aristocracy to acquire when, during the French Revolution, employment prospects in France went down along with the guillotine. George IV effectively gave the Royal Assent to this practice of seeking French chefs, when he employed Marie-Antoine Careme soon after Waterloo. Thereafter it was a French chef, Alexis Soyer, who was chosen to feed the troops in the Crimea, and August Escoffier who produced, at the turn of the century, the Guide Culinaire, which remains the bible of the kitchen to this day. The fact that French is the international language of the kitchen is not only a reflection of the fact that these and other great chefs were French and couldn’t speak English. After all, Italian isn’t the language of the restaurant. It is also a relic of the days when French and not English was the international language, par excellence; hotel management was happy to be associated with the language of diplomacy, the language of 17th and 18th century culture. The continental hotel departmental head continued to be a status symbol, and it was not unusual for management to adopt working names which fitted the picture. As Alice Marks became the prima ballerina, Alicia Markova, so did the hotel staff change their names. Probably the best known example of this occurred as late as the 1960s when the Welshman, Bryan Evans, agreed, on taking the position of Banqueting Manager at the Savoy, to be known henceforth as Evangel0 Brioni. How oddly this contrasted with Firth’s (1956) study which concluded that, ‘Most Italianates are convinced that having an Italian name may be basis enough for some discrimination to be
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directed against them’. Mr Evans, positive discrimination.
Presumably, in the case of rather than negative
For the Italians, who you will recall came primarily from Emilia Romagna in the first wave, food and drink were equally important. It is an area famous for food and drink production; Bologna is the accepted capital of Italian haute cuisine, the region manufactures such excellent products as Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, as well as good brandy and wine. Food and drink are to Emilia Romagna as rugby and singing are to Wales. One wonders in passing whether and Italian rugby player singing for Llanelli would change his name from Mario Gennaro to Mervyn Jones. So that is how the Victorians found themselves with migrant communities who were culturally attuned to a love of fine food and wine, and who, far from home, were sustained by the culinary umbilical cord which joined them to the motherland. That does not explain, however, how their wishes - the wishes of the staff after all is said and done - should have triumphed over the economic realities of bedroom versus restaurant profits observed by the owners. The explanation for this is that too many owners had become a form of absentee landlord. The Gordon Hotel Company which had been created by great hoteliers like Frederick Gordon and William Holland, passed on the Chairmanship to that disastrous amateur, the Earl of Bessborough. By 1920 there were seven barristers on the Gordon Hotels Board of Directors, and their lack of knowledge of the hotel business was certainly a case in point. of amateur hoteliers had Large numbers emerged as mansions were turned into hotels after the first World War, and another group of rank amateurs charitably created Trust Houses in order to restore a number of old coaching inns to some semblance of their former 18th and 19th century mediocrity. Too often the managers were left in charge of running the business, the managers took their cue from the great London hotels and the great London hotels were primarily managed by Where British managers were continentals. employed, they were expected to have continental experience and they were chosen more for their Oxford accents than for their ability to pass examinations. The overwhelming importance of food and drink, the fatal mirage which distracted management from the major source of profits, continued to hold sway. Until the arrival of a man called Fred Kobler, to whom we will return.
It was for exactly the same reason - delegating an authority the Directors should have borne that the hotel industry’s sales and marketing expertise declined so drastically between Victorian times and the 1960s. It was widely believed in the British hotel industry until about 1970 that sales promotion was an inappropriate element as it lowered the tone. A Grosvenor House banqueting head waiter who was able to remember when A. H. Jones, the hotel e~~a~~ testable of his day, ran the hotel in the Thirties, and when A. H. Jones had employed men to sell banquets, explained with some distaste, ‘Banquet touts we used to call them’. Selling, advertising, direct mail; all were in decline in technique and status from around 1910 to 1970. While the American Hotel Sales Managers Association has been in existence for over 60 years, the British Hotel Sales Managers Association was started by six men in 1964, and two of them weren’t really eligible for membership. Yet we now know that the Victorians had been in the vanguard of sales promotion. They had employed advertising managers on occasions, ahead of many other industries. Many an advertising manager today would recognise the problem of the tourists who stop coming when their country goes to war. During the Boer War in 1900, the French hotels belonging to the Gordon Hotel Company could have suffered from the British staying at home but, as Frederick Gordon told his shareholders, ‘When we found that the English people were not coming to the Riviera, our energetic publicity department, who saw at once how matters were drifting, advertised for Germans and Frenchmen, and we had a very large number from Germany and from France who came to the hotels in response to those advertisements’ (Gordon Hotel Co.. 1898-1912). The Victorians had created short break holidays in conjunction with railways. which was presumed to be a totally novel idea when the same concept was introduced in 1964. They were responsible for Special Events, one of the latest so-called modern hotel sales promotion concepts, the most famous of which was an event to fill the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, by running a rally for the new fangled automobile from London which would finish at the hotel. Today we call that event the Veteran Car Run. It still helps the Metropole. The Victorians realised very clearly that they had to encourage people to use hotels, rather than spend their disposable income on other frills and furbelows. Even so, as marketing developed in other parts of British industry, it effectively stopped in hotels. Why was this? The explanation given that it lowered the tone was quite insupport-
The migrant contribution to the British hotel industry
able; it certainly didn’t lower the tone of Rolls Royce or Harrods. Such an idea only becomes understandable if we again introduce the effect of migrant management into the equation. As we know, the original Victorian entrepreneurs, who created the British hotels, were normally English, and they hoped to rely on continental key staff for expertise in the standards of cooking and restaurant service; if they could find them. Their successors, however - the absentee landlords - retired more and more into nonoperational roles, concerned with financial or but unwilling to get development matters, involved in running the hotels to any extent because they realised their limitations. The amateurs took the helm, but left it to the professionals to see that the engines actually turned over. And the continental professionals were quite capable of running the ship, and keeping it Boulogne, Brindisi, Bremen or Bristol fashion. Capable in every area that is, except that of sales promotion. Sales promotion demanded that one attribute that their years in the kitchens or restaurants, their enthusiasm and efficiency could not provide; it demanded a very thorough command of the English language, and that the continentals lacked. They could often speak three or four languages well enough to get by with the customers, but they couldn’t speak the one that mattered well enough to undertake technically proficient sales promotion. They didn’t have the mastery of the nuances of the language, they were uncertain about the finer points. They couldn’t judge whether advertising copy would be effective and they couldn’t spell very well. There was no time to go back to school to correct these shortcomings, to improve on the ‘assuring you of my best attention at all times’ approach. Lacking the skill, they had to pursuade the Directors that the skill, itself, was worthless. So they seized gratefully upon the concept that active selling of the product would lower the tone of the company. A. H. Jones was a lone voice - not for the first time. The Savoy used public relations brilliantly but they were also influenced by the argument about tone. Which brings us again to Fred Kobler, the man who decided that if American hotels needed sales promotion, then British hotels must need it as well. Fred Kobler has been given credit for pioneering two concepts in Britain in modern times: the need to concentrate on selling bedrooms rather than spend the management time on catering operations; and the importance of sales promotion. Why was Fred Kobler, a Czech who had lived for years in Vienna and Paris before the war - at which point he came to Britain to join the Czech army - why wasn’t he just as imbued with the
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continental outlook as anybody else? What native culture could influence him, that was sufficiently disinterested in food and drink to make it possible to see clearly the vital importance of filling bedrooms? The answer was Jewish culture. As a religion, Jews are just as fond as anybody else of eating and drinking. Grants of St James, the renowned wine shippers, once explained the attractions of Israeli wines by saying they they were ‘drunk for sentimental rather than oenological reasons’ (Grants of St James, 1964) but hundreds of thousands do find them palatable for all that. Certainly those who have not had the opportunity to enjoy gefilte fish, blintzes or latkas are to be counted amongst the deprived of this world. Nevertheless, there are two serious objections amongst religious Jews - and the upbringing of most Eastern European Jews at the turn of the century was orthodox - to both haute cuisine and alcohol. Haute cuisine is not Kosher, not just because it uses forbidden foods, but also because the rules do insist on cooking meat in a variety of milk products, such as butter and cheese, which is equally forbidden. Most Jews ignore the prohibitions today, but the important point is that their upbringing gave no support to the cause of haute cuisine. The problem with alcohol for the Jews was slightly different. It was certainly Kosher, but too much of it did seem to be regularly imbibed by mobs just before they started pogroms and the massacre of their Jewish compatriots. This, not altogether unnaturally, led to a Jewish loathing of drunkenness which, again, meant that the running of bars or a learned and enquiring mind about wine was, for them, nothing of which to be proud. Being, therefore, quite able to judge on its merits the case between food and beverages on the one hand and bedroom revenue on the other, Fred Kobler could see without any rose-coloured glasses which was the preferred sector. After the rest of the industry had given his company about 15 years’ start, they saw the logic as well. Fred Kobler was not the first to have admired American hotel expertise. Richard D’Oyly Carte came back from America in the 1880s determined to build a hotel similar to those he had gazed at in wonder, and the result was the Savoy. Fred Kobler came back with a raft of ideas, one of which was sales promotion. But why was Fred Kobler looking to America in the first place when everybody else had been continuing to look to Europe for its hotel traditions - including for much of the time the Americans themselves. The answer, sadly, was that in 1945 Europe was not an area to
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Derek Taylor
which Jews would look for anything. It was a vast cemetary and if there was to be any hope for the future, they believed that it would have to come from the United States. Very few Jews who were born in Europe failed to become British citizens at the first available opportunity. Much has changed in the last 20 years. Third generation migrants have joined other industries and professions, the hotel schools in this country have produced a very large number of skilled British young people capable of running hotels. The flood of poor migrants has stopped as work permits have been withheld, although sizeable numbers of EEC members still come to Britain to learn English, and some marry and settle here. There are also considerable numbers of migrants from Commonwealth countries - West Indians and Asians -who have entered the industry, and a few entrepreneurs are appearing from that source as well. As we face the difficult decade ahead, what lessons should we learn then from the migrants who contributed so greatly to our attitudes towards hotelkeeping over the years? Six seem most important. First, we need to retain their courage and determination; faced with obstacles which would have crippled those with weaker spirits, they fought for a better life for themselves and their families, and most of them won. Every deprived community, everybody who wants to make their way in the world, needs to learn that lesson. Second, we need their love and affection for the hotel industry. Their pride in belonging to it, their pleasure when their children selected hotelkeeping as their future careers. I said much has changed in the last 20 years, but there are still a lot of British parents who would be disappointed if their children selected the hotel industry, believing it to be a low status occupation and the last resort for those who fail their professional exams. Third, we need to retain the high standards so many migrants brought to the profession they loved. They saw hotelkeeping as an art form, from the way a bed was turned down and the folding of a serviette, to the presentation of food on a plate and the piquancy of a sauce. That is what the adjective Ritzy ought to mean. We need that attention to detail as much today as ever. Fourth,
we must
reject
the business
within
a
business concept. Owners, management and staff should all work for the good of the hotel, prosper when the hotel prospers and not simply till their individual furrows. The franchise system leaves the staff basically disinterested in the success of the hotel as such, and leads them to regard both the company and the guests as equally outsiders. If the success of the franchise involves the exploitation of the company or the guests, the temptation to exploit is very real, and many is the youngster who is corrupted by the system. Fifth, we must remember what Fred Gordon and Fred Kobler taught us, that the hotel business is about filling bedrooms. It is not about maintaining the traditions of Emilia Romagna or sustaining the status symbols of Regency England. Last, and surely by far the most important, we must maintain, cherish and value the greatest of all the migrant contributions to our industry-the proof they gave us year after year that men and women of all nationalities, colours and creeds, can work together in general harmony. For hotels are a genuine example of the theory of the United Nations working out in practice.
Acknowledgement This paper was first given as the inaugural at the University of Surrey in February,
visiting professorial 1982.
lecture
References Brown, J. (1970) The Unmelting Pot. Macmillan, London. Berman, S. (1972) A Hotel is a Place. Price, Stern. Sloan, Los Angeles. Castles, S. and Kosack, G. (1973) Immigrant Workers and Class Structures in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Firth, R. (ed.) (1956) Two Studies in Kinship in London, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, No. 1.5, University of London, Athlone Press, U.K. Gellati, M. (1960) Mario of the Caprice. Hutchinson, London. Globe (1880) London. Gordon Hotel Company (1896-1912) Minutes of Annual General Meetings, Primary source. Grants of St James (1964) A Gateway to Wine. London. Kiernan, V. G. (1978) Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, Homes, Colin (ed.). Allen & Unwin, London. Levi, C. (1969) Supplement on Southern Italy. The Times, 5 February. Palmer, R. (1977) Between Two Cultures. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Thomas, B. (1954) Migration and Economic Growth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
About the Author Derek Taylor is a business consultant and visiting professor at the University of Surrey’s Department of Hotel, Catering and Tourism Management. He was formerly a director of Grand Metropolitan Hotels Ltd. He has written a number of books on the and Institutional Management selling and marketing of hotel services. He is currently President of the Hotel, Catering Association.