And Bradley explains the way that bills were incremental - and sneaky. To have a bath (with water and a hip-bath carried to your room) commonly cost 2 shillings. There was an "attendance charge" for the maid and the waiter at dinner (a shilling) and six pence to the boot black. Candles were a shillings and six pence, and a fire in the grate (no central heating) also cost extra. This, the writer explains, "contributed to the immediate success of Frederick Gordon's new mid-priced hotels of the 1880s... where all-in bills were the custom from the outset".
Bradley finds that accounts of the life of the large staff are thin on the ground, although PW Smith, who started at age 15 as a page in 1898 wrote a memoir, including a report on the tip he earned by demonstrating the new revolving door to the satisfaction of the local fire officer. And a report from the contemporary 1931 Railway Magazine of the porter at Leeds station identified as speaking seven languages "including Arabic and Hindi", who was "promptly reassigned to the new Continental enquiry bureau at St Pancras". And there's an oral account of the tragedy of 17 February 1918, when 20 people sheltering near the departure arch were killed by a single bomb.
So if you're a regular, or even one-off, visitor to St Pancras station, this really is a must-read - something that will allow you to look at this magnificent structure with new eyes. And please buy it there if can you, not just for the fittingness of it - I want to make sure that the shop stays open, since it's now my local book shop. You can secure there your very own "signed by the author copy" - in fact when I bought it that was all you could buy. (Quite why there's this current fashion I really don't know - I thought Caxton solved the problem of identifying the author of a text with that thing called printing several centuries ago. But they might have unsigned ones by now...)
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