Tuesday, April 28, 2020

A 1939 cigarette card of the Three Swans, Market Harborough

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In 1939 the Three Swans was kept by the writer and eccentric John Fothergill.

Bryan Magee, who was evacuated to Market Harborough during war, wrote of him:
What impressed me about him more than I can express was that he had written one of the books we had at home, An Innkeeper's Diary. He must have been the first author I met. Needless to say, I had not read the book, but I was familiar with it as an object, and knew that it was about the job I was seeing him doing, namely running a hotel. 
He must have been the best-known hotelier in Britain at that time, because his book had been a best-seller in the thirties and was currently in Penguin Books at a time when Penguins were the only mass-circulation paperbacks. 
I saw him as an outlandish figure. He wore his hair to his shoulders, and buckle shoes, and went out of doors in a cape, none of which I had seen a man do before. Yet he was not effeminate. He had a wife and two sons, and was very much the boss, both of his family and of the hotel. 
He spoke to everyone in a direct way that I found disconcerting. He was simply saying what he thought and felt, but I had never heard anyone do that. If he thought you had an ugly face he told you so. Sometimes you could scarcely believe your ears. ...  
But some of the most interesting things about him were things I did not know, and would not have understood. He had been a close friend of Robert Ross, who in turn was the closest and most loyal friend of Oscar Wilde. After Wilde's imprisonment, Fothergill visited him in France and stayed with him there. 
A mere eight of nine years after I knew Fothergill, the opportunity of asking him about all this would have been valuable beyond price, but it was wasted on me when I was ten.

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