In postwar London, stylish gentleman amateurs could try their hand at being restaurateurs. Nowadays, they’d have to resort to going on TV cookery competitions
In the only photograph I have ever seen of him, Dr Hilary James – definitely not to be confused with Dr Hilary Jones of GMTV fame – is wearing Michael Caine glasses, an open-necked shirt, striped strides and espadrilles. Posing beside a brimming flowerbed at the height of an English summer, he looks quite stylish, albeit in a forbidding late-1960s sort of a way. It’s the kind of image – distant and rather cool, temperature-wise – you used to find on the dust jacket of a certain kind of novel (“The author, pictured at his home in London”), which is why, perhaps, it immediately makes me think of grammar school-induced class war, plentiful extramarital sex, and dirty Le Creuset saucepans.
Alas, I’ve no idea what school James went to. Nor do I know much about his sex life. But I suspect he probably did own a number of Le Creuset pans, for, although by day he was a psychotherapist at the Middlesex Hospital (or possibly a psychiatrist: I’ve seen him described as both), by night he was the cook at his own restaurant, Le Matelot, in Elizabeth Street, Kensington, which opened in 1952. Inspired by Elizabeth David and various places James loved in the south of France, Le Matelot was, by all accounts, a somewhat singular establishment. On eBay, I found one of its plates, on which there pranced three muscled sailors; the seller had confidently labelled it “gay interest”. Among the restaurant’s fans were Fanny Cradock and her husband Johnnie, who would eat there on Christmas Eve, when James apparently liked to wear horns as he prepared the coquilles St Jacques. In a review published in their Bon Viveur guide of 1955, the Cradocks praised the “delightfully uninhibited” staff, one of whom, wearing coral jeans, had bared her midriff as she poured champagne.
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