1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book Coronation Edition

characterised the after-war decade's climax. It has been a pageant of contemporary affairs that has never ceased to go on, the multi-coloured, inimitable essence of the time which found its stage on the sophisticated ground of Regent Street. For it was to the Circus and Quadrant that people returned from the ends of the world, seeking there renewed glimpses of the most vivid of life as it was being lived. But in the tale of all the various characters and types who have laughed or yarned or stormed or joked thereabout, the pictorial cavalcade of the Cafe Royal can tell only about the few which have been most obvious and easy to record. They may be enough to show the rich pattern of genius and jest which has gone to make the days of the Cafe Royal memorable. Its enduring glory was consecrated by all the practitioners of all the arts. Was there a prank to play ? The Cafe Royal would be the stage. If Aubrey Beardsley would parade his pet skeleton, who played duets with him at the piano, it must be there; did a young actress just back from Spain want to try a new dance she could essay its steps on the table top at the Cafe. The greatest talkers were habitues, and with them bores were silent or found wit for the nonce. When Wilde, Whistler, Frank Harris and G. B. Shaw crossed verbal swords, when Yeats, Augustus John, Orpen and their crowd sat round the Cafe tables the new century's art shaped itself in the imaginations of the younger men. And all the wit was not necessarily verbal, nor all the talk about painting and poetry. Every genius has its own ways of expression. Like the wronged young lady who turned on the man in the case and showed her skill at fencing with the end of her parasol, to be desperately warded off with a walking cane. Or the two Oriental beauties who arrived with serpents round their necks instead at the conventional feather boas. All was not wild melodrama or