1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book Coronation Edition

PREFACE TO THE PAGEANT OF PEN AND INK SKETCHES HROUGHOUT this book the reader will find a pageant of history from i860 to the present day. These sketches depict the days when the French emigre met his fellow fugitives from their beloved France, the age of wild night life of the eighties and early nineties, the Edwardian days of splendour, the terrible Great War and the sober age of modern London as it is to-day. The Cafe Royal made a good background for the idiosyncrasies, capers, tricks, jests, practical jokes, wrangles and debates, besides the everyday lively chit-chat and conversation of the little world of poets, painters, journalists who frequented the place, and the solid background of men of affairs, diplomatists and officials who helped to enjoy and support it. So it became, duly, a London institution and took a premier place in the Quadrant end of Regent Street, the corner where Regency liveliness had yet continued. Outside its doors flowed, full-tide, the surges of popular demonstration at times of general excitement, whether about the Boat Race or the Relief of Mafeking; and as the bewhiskered generation went out, the newest devices on wheels, bicycle and motor-car, swung past. At the same time costume changed from crinoline to bustle and from pre-war high-shouldered leg-of-mutton sleeves and train- trailing skirts came, by gradual degrees, the knee-high garments with silk stockings and high-heeled shoes which