AT THE TROCADERO
The Commissionaire at the centre entrance to the Trocadero greets me with "Regimental dinner, sir? First floor, leave your coat and hat to the right." A very intelligent man this commissionaire, an old soldier who knows another old soldier when he sees him. I leave my coat and hat as directed, ascend in the lift, and am disgorged into a corridor, the walls of which are covered with an inlay of gold Venetian glass tesseræ, pay the very small sum that subscribers to the Regimental Dinner Club are mulcted, and go into a screened-off space of the large banqueting-room in which the feast is to be held. Here two score gentlemen, old and young, most of them with a bar of miniature medals on the lapels of their evening coats, are talking, laughing, moving to and fro, and shaking hands with great heartiness. It is by no means a mauvais quart d'heure these minutes of assembling before a regimental dinner, for old friends who see each other only once a year meet then, and the inquiries as to each other's health and prosperity and happiness are no formal compliments, but a real desire to know how the world wags with old comrades in arms.
The screens that divide the room in two are withdrawn and the company take their places at the table in no set order, though the veterans all try to sit next to some old friend of their soldiering days and the subalterns cling together in little swarms at the far ends of the table. The room in which we are dining, the Alexandra, is panelled to a man's height with dark marbles, with central squares of light marble, and there are at one end pillars of black wood fluted with gold. It is a room with a dignity of its own. Through the lace-curtained windows can be seen the electric advertisements on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue, advertisements which set forth in a blaze of alternating red and green and white light the virtues of somebody's whisky and somebody else's cigarettes, and through the open windows come the roar of the traffic and the hoots of the motor horns. We are dining on the very hub of London. The table for the dinner is of horseshoe shape, with another length of table running up the centre. There are candles with pink shades, and pink flowers in vases and strewn on the table in garlands. The Major-General, who is the full Colonel of the regiment, who served in it for many long years, and was at one time the Adjutant of one of the battalions, sits at the top of the bend of the horseshoe, and chance, not precedence, has put me on one side of him. The two Brigadier-Generals who are amongst the diners, each of whom wears, as our chairman does, his C.B. cross at one end of his long bars of miniature medals and decorations, are somewhere farther down the curve of the horseshoe, and brevet colonels and subalterns and captains and lieutenant-colonels and majors all sit where fancy leads them, some of the seniors to talk to the son of an old friend, a boy who has just joined, some to talk polo, or fishing, or gardening, or shooting, or the iniquities of the Land Tax with friends of like tastes.
A Regimental Dinner ought to be described by some lady novelist who has never been to one and is in no way hampered by any unromantic facts. Grizzled men bearing the scars of old wounds should talk to each other of midnight marches and fierce charges and hand-to-hand combats, and tell the tale over their port of how Billy Bright Eyes, the curly-headed drummer of Company B, won the Victoria Cross on some day of awful slaughter. Unfortunately for picturesqueness' sake the grizzled men talk about nothing of the kind. The man who could narrate as moving stories as ever Othello dropped into Desdemona's willing ear tells his next-door neighbour of the fishing in Norway he has taken this year and of the advantages of travelling to it from the port in a motor car instead of going on the old country conveyances. The man who really earned a V.C. in South Africa, though there were no lookers-on to write glowing accounts to headquarters, is discussing with another man of many battles the advantages of Waterloo over other late-bearing strawberry plants, and laments that there are no pears this year on any of his trees. Tales of a big night at mess in "The Shiny," when a Highland regiment, passing through, was entertained at a dinner which only ended when the pipes were playing "Hey Johnnie Cope" in the grey before sunrise, may stray casually into the conversation, and a regretful word or two may be said that the regimental polo fund in India had not enough ready money to buy a certain pony which would just have won a match for the regiment in an important tournament. Cricket, polo, grouse moors, the coming hunting season, the present play at the Gaiety, the merits of the various revues are the things talked about, and "shop" is almost as rigidly excluded from the conversation as though the dinner was taking place in the regimental mess.
The length of a regimental dinner is as difficult to curtail as is that of a City feast or a Masonic banquet, for any manager of a restaurant or any maître d'hôtel considers it to be an "important" meal, and believes that the guests will not think they have dined satisfactorily unless they have eaten prodigiously. But the three officers who manage our Regimental Dinner Club are happily men of the world as well as old soldiers, and they insist that the dinner shall be ordered to please the tastes of those who dine, and not of those who serve the dinner. This is the menu of the Trocadero dinner. The little circle of beef offered to each man is the only heavy dish in it, and the chicken with its tempting stuffing is the only rich dish that it contains:
Melon Glacé.
Hors d'œuvre de Choix.
Tortue Claire.
Truite de Rivière au bleu, Beurre fondu.
Pommes nature.
Poularde du Mans Favorite.
Médaillon de Bœuf Rossini.
Spoom au Kummel.
Caille de Vigne sur Croustade.
Salade Romaine.
Asperges nouvelles, Sauce Maltaise.
Fraises à la Zouave.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Pailles au Parmesan.
Dessert.
Café.
Vins.
Punch.
Johannisberger, 1900.
Chas. Heidsieck, 1904.
Moët et Chandon, 1904.
Château Branaire Ducru, 1900.
Dow's 1890 Port.
Courvoisier's 1831 Brandy.
The menu, according to custom immemorial, is decorated with the crests of the regiment, with the date of its raising, 1572, and with a little picture of the uniform of the regiment in the year 1684, when the full privates wore black boy-scout hats, bands such as barristers still wear, and coats with very long skirts.
Twenty years ago no regimental dinner could have been held without interminable speeches, which were sometimes listened to with scant patience by the subalterns, who wanted to get to the Empire or the Alhambra before the performance ended. Nowadays there are no speeches, at all events at our dinner, and the only toast proposed is that of "The King." After this loyal toast has been drunk and the cigars lighted, all formality vanishes, every man moves from his place and goes to talk to those of his old friends who have been out of earshot during dinner; the subalterns make inquiries as to whether the Cabaret Club or the Four Hundred Club is the most amusing place in which to keep awake after all the restaurants are shut, and as eleven o'clock comes some of the guests go off to the Service clubs, some have to catch last trains, and the commissionaire downstairs has a busy time whistling for taxis.
There is not much ancient history to delve into with regard to the Trocadero Restaurant. Part of it stands on the ground which, when Great Windmill Street was a cul-de-sac, before Shaftesbury Avenue was made, was occupied by the Argyle Dancing Rooms, familiarly known as "The Duke's." "The Duke's" played its part in the night life of London in the sixties and seventies, when Kate Hamilton's and the other night houses still existed in the Haymarket, and though there were occasional rows there, some of the officers of one of the Household cavalry regiments being on one occasion marched off to the police station, it was on the whole a well-conducted establishment, with an admirable orchestra to play dance music. But the spasm of morality which passed over London towards the end of the last century swept the Argyle Rooms out of existence, and their proprietor, Mr "Bob" Bignell, converted the vacant rooms into the Trocadero Music Hall. Mr "Sam" Adams was the next proprietor of the music-hall, and then Mr Joseph Lyons, who was not yet a knight, saw the possibilities of the site for a restaurant, and gave a very large price for the old hall. The Trocadero Restaurant, when it first was built, was only half as large as it is now, for that red-brick portion of it which faces Shaftesbury Avenue was a nest of flats and chambers, and the conversion of this building when Lyons & Company bought it, into restaurant premises, was an architectural feat. Where the old building ends and the additions begin can be clearly seen by the difference in the architecture.
It is a curious fact that Sir Joseph Lyons, the head and mainspring of the great organisation which controls the scores of restaurants and hundreds of tea-shops belonging to Lyons & Company, wished in his youthful days to be an artist, and that his amusement now, whenever he has any leisure, which he rarely has, is to paint sunsets.