Laugh? I Nearly Tipped My Landlady!

Rookery Nook by Ben Travers

Salisbury Playhouse, 1994

Seaside landladies, in the traditional sense, are now mainly a thing of the past, but they dominated the summer holidays of our forebears for several generations. As a breed they seem to have acquired a mythology all of their own – indeed, the whole wealth of gags, misinformation and sheer libel that has grown up around the figure of the landlady is akin to that which has accrued to the image of the mother-in-law, and probably for similar reasons. Both are traditionally seen as self-appointed guardians of morals, dampeners of the spirits and all-round bad sports. Of course there have always been just as many amiable and tolerant mothers-in-law in the world as there are splendid and indulgent landladies, it’s just that the harridan of the species has always had so much more comic potential.

Holidaymaking on a large scale in Britain first began to take off around the turn of the century, when the Edwardian middle classes started to discover the full range of healthy pursuits available to them in the burgeoning seaside resorts. Up until then, the only accommodation regularly used by visitors had been large hotels based on the continental idea of the chic spa, and geared towards the gentry who had always had both the means and the leisure to make full use of their rejuvenating qualities. Inland centres like Bath and Harrogate had built their fortunes on this traditional trade, but now coastal towns like Scarborough and Brighton followed their lead, having conveniently discovered the life-enhancing effects of their own local waters. It was in order to provide a home away from home for these latest excursionists that the seaside landladies first threw open their doors.

An average middle-class family required the same standards and facilities that they were used to in their town house, and expected nothing more of the landlady than that she should run the household as smoothly as it was run by their housekeeper at home. But it was this very fact that made the relationship between householder and temporary tenant so delicate. While the holidaymakers brought their own standards and expectations with them, the landlady had standards and expectations of her own, and sometimes the two came into conflict.

For a start, landladies were traditionally difficult about so many things. They did not like noise after ten o’clock at night or before seven o’clock in the morning, and any conversation at mealtimes would for preference be conducted in sign language. They didn’t like having young children about the place as these invariably meant more noise and mess than was strictly necessary, so for the same reason pets of any description were always strictly taboo. Certainly landladies never liked guests staying in if it rained – a perennial problem in England – while if you went out, woe betide you on your return if your shoes were wet, your turn-ups full of sand or your bucket full of seaweed. To be late for breakfast, early for lunch, or on time but wearing a disgusting pair of sandals for tea, all these would earn a ferocious glare of disapproval, while coming in or going out before or after an acceptable hour, eating too much or too little at mealtimes and not leaving the bathroom in the state in which you would wish to find it – all these were judged as heinous sins in the eyes of the landlady, which the thoughtless vacationer would commit at his peril.

But if these splendid women are so frequently portrayed in fable and memory as dragons lurking in the back parlour itching to breathe fire and brimstone over the first person to step out of line, the reasons are not hard to find. We may be enjoying our holiday, but we are enjoying it under her roof, and what she says, goes. Besides the poor woman knows she will have no opportunity to get away herself until the season is well and truly over, and she has only a limited period of a few months each year to make the business pay. Add to this the fact that in many cases she might only be letting strangers into her house under sufferance: many landladies were widows, untrained in the social arts and with little relish for their task, having to take on an unwelcome and onerous duty merely to make ends meet. Overworked, understaffed and probably cutting her own throat so as to keep up with the annually increasing and encroaching competition, it was little wonder that she appeared a trifle crabby on occasion.

From the tenants’ point of view, of course, holidays are an opportunity for relaxation, and a happy-go-lucky mood can lead the best of us astray. Lapses in taste and manners and, in certain cases, behaviour that we would not normally be allowed to get away with, these are food and drink to the average landlady. On top of this, for many single people the annual break was (and of course still is) nothing more nor less than a heaven-sent opportunity to get up to any and every kind of hanky-panky there was going, given half a chance, and this above all was what the owners of the seaside houses particularly dreaded. There were plenty of seedy places around, and the owner of a ‘respectable’ house had to ensure that hers could not be counted amongst them. Hence all the rules about coming in late at night, the clampdowns on rowdiness and the seemingly pathological insistence on neatness and cleanliness at all times. The overwhelming atmosphere in most holiday homes was of uncongenial fussiness and repression.

But if the rules were strict, the landlady had every right to make them so. Her guests were only passing through, but she had to be able to face her neighbours fifty-two weeks a year. Scandal, rumour and notoriety could seriously damage her business as surely as a month of hurricanes, so who could blame her if she occasionally took delight in malicious tittle-tattle about her neighbours and competitors? Or, come to that, anyone else she could think of. Because that is another part of the seasonal landlady myth: they have irredeemably filthy minds In Rookery Nook, Mrs Leverett has an opinion about Rhoda based on nothing more than “what she got from Mrs Twine’s cook”, and if the story’s good enough for her, it should be good enough for her lodgers.

Not that Mrs Leverett in the play is exactly a landlady – the word would have scandalised her. She is a housekeeper, an important distinction to make in an age when 19th-century values had been so violently blasted by the war and what social distinctions were left had to be carefully nurtured to prevent them going the same way.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of flannelled ease that the rented house represented was due to change. In the twenties, with more and more women able to find work other than that of domestic, the availability of servants began to diminish, and that which had an impact on middle-class homes similarly affected middle-class leisure. In these straitened circumstances, the traditional landlady-housekeeper was faced with a choice of three options: she could close down, cut her losses and leave the business altogether, which would inevitably involve a disastrous drop in social standing; she could take on the full burden of running the household herself, which would have borne the same social stigma and increased her personal workload; or she could offer a reduced service. Many chose this latter course, which is why between the wars the concept of bed and breakfast came to be so popular. Holidaymakers now had the opportunity to enjoy other entertainments during the day anyway, while evening could be spent at any one of the numerous cinemas or reasonably priced restaurants which were enjoying a boom of their own at the same time. With pleasure gardens, concert parties, boating lakes and tennis courts adding to the range of available ways to beguile one’s time, the attractions of the B&B were obvious to all concerned – vacationers could indulge themselves to the full, leaving their landlady to clear up after them and tut to her heart’s content over their shabby baggage and unruly brood.

Just before the Second World War, prices for seaside accommodation began to rise in response to a new social trend. It wasn’t so much that basic commodities were becoming noticeably more expensive, just that increasing demand inevitably led to higher tariffs. There were more cars on the roads ferrying more people than ever before to the coasts, and the tentacles of the railway system were slowly but surely finding their way into every last nook and cranny, making travel for all cheaper, faster and easier. With the democratisation of travel throughout the country, holidays on the coast were to remain the most popular form of recreation until the sixties when holidays abroad, the next chic thing, began to come in. Before this was to happen, however, the sheer numbers of people making for the beaches were bound to have their own inevitable consequence. The holiday industry became just that: a lucrative business ripe for mass production. Holiday camps scooped up vast shoals of the potential customers with their cheap and accessible on-hand amusements, and it was these more than anything that were to send the seaside landlady as a breed into a steady decline. Her hundred-year reign as Queen of the Resorts was over.

Still, deposed she may be, dead she is not. Her image – or, at least, the affectionately slanderous perception we like to have of her – is too ingrained in the British consciousness to be got rid of quite so easily. Like tar on a towel, she’s there for good, and so long as there is one weary traveller with a shoe full of sand to empty carelessly over the carpet, and a head full of ozone to rest on a weary pillow, there will be a seaside landlady willing to cater for his needs and clean up after him, trouser press extra. Long may she continue to do so.

PS

Judging by the date, this must have been a very early one, exposing my inexperience with the form. That first paragraph can go for a start. What does it tell you that you don’t already know? The title (which I stole from I no longer know whence) probably promised a treat that the piece as a whole could not live up to. It would have been foolish and inappropriate, anyway, to try and crack too wise in a programme accompanying a classic farce by that British master of the genre Ben Travers, so maybe my sheer ignorance saved me from looking even more foolish than I felt. But on the other hand, how many laughs would the audience have expected to glean from the programme, of all paltry things? If anything, I suppose the best this piece could claim was that it delineated the norm from which the absurdities of the character on stage could depart. (I say this as if I knew what the hell the play was all about, but as per, we just got the instructions from the theatre – in this case, something about women’s underwear of the twenties – the ingénue turns up in pajamas – and a bit about landladies, keep it light – so it was blinkers on, shoulders to the wheel, noses to the grindstone, and off we went.)

Having now found the leisure and the facilities to read up on the work, I find that there are in fact no landladies to be found anywhere in the cast, which goes some way towards explaining the phrase “Not that Mrs Leverett in the play is exactly a landlady…” If you look closely you can actually still see the marks the crowbar left as that little gem was crudely jemmied into place. Does this perhaps suggest the article as a whole was merely drafted in from another source and roughly hacked into some kind of relevance? The credit given at the end is one ‘Julien Robbins’, which certainly sounds like the kind of abomination I might have come up with so as not to become too closely identified with a piece I was dubious about. Might have been the first time I drew a veil, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last…