Ritz Isn't Just a Name For Some Famous Hotels

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 31, 13 January 1939, Page 14

Ritz Isn't Just a Name For Some Famous Hotels

Cesar Ritz, A Peasant’s Son, Made Europe Understand Meaning Of Luxury

vintage when I discovered the other day that there really had been a man called Ritz. ... I must confess that I had thought it ju’st a name for anything sophisticated or smart. But he was Cesar Ritz, the thirteenth child of poor peasants living in the Niederwald in Switzerland. Like many men who have achieved fame, young Ritz was probably more of a trial to his parents than all the other twelve children put together. He really didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he did know that he couldn’t tolerate the plainness and ugliness of life in the Niederwald. So, not long before the Fratico-Prussian War he became a waiter in Paris. He began first in a humble restaurant, then gradually worked his way up till he was engaged at Voisin’s, the place in Paris where famous men dined (but not their ladies, of courseit wasn’t done to dine in public in those days!). Hie met many people in those early days, people who stood by him when he ventured into business on his own account-EHdward Prince of Wales, Clemenceau, Boulanger, Blondeau, Gautier, Labouchere, La Paiva, Bernhardt. | FELT very much of a 1939 And it was one night-on a usman’s holiday, as it were-

that he discovered a young chef at the Petit Moulin Rouge who was to become the greatest chef the world has known-Escoffier. Where Paris Met Paris was on the verge of a siege. Metz had fallen to the Germans . , . merchants and their money bags were fleeing from the French capital . .'. fortifications were being thrown up everywhere . .. the lovely trees in the Champs Blysees and the Place de la Concorde were hewn down for fuel... dogs, cats and horses disappeared from the streets to be eaten by the people ... Voisin’s restaurant (with a sadly-curtailed menu) became the meeting-place of Government heads. But the war finished-the great column in the Place Vendome had disappeared, pulled down by the mob; no longer did the crowds line up to see the Imperial beauties riding in the park. Eugenie and Napoleon were living quietly at Chislehurst, remembering lost glories. Qn The Riviera But there were new beauties in Paris-and Worth dressed them. There was the sheen of silks and satins in the Place de l’Opera, and there was a continual coming and. going through the doors of the new

Hotel Splendide. And Cesar Ritz, one of the staff of the new hotel, felt that he was no longer the son of a Swiss cowherd, but part of this new, this exciting Paris life. Now he was not alone. Ritz’s services were in demand. tie went: to the Riviera to manage a hotel there, he moved about from Monte Carlo to Nice, from Mentone to Cannes. He knew the hotels’ clients, who liked this and who liked that. More and more people were asking for Ritz. . Ke Goes To London London was the most backward capital in Europe on the score of hotel accommodation. Wouldn’t Ritz start a hotel there, a hotel worthy of the great capital of a great Empire? But he preferred the gaiety of the continental crowds to the phlegmatic English. But then a specially tempting offer came. Perhaps he would go to London to manage the huge new Savoy Hotel, rising on the banks of the Thames? He

thought about it-and he went. -He made the Savoy the most famous hotel In the world, a position it still occupies to-day. Now his ambitions were mounting higher. He wanted a hotel of his own in Paris-and he got it; the world-famous Hotel Ritz in the Place Vendome in Paris-a hotel that I remember well as the place where I saw the Duke and Duchess of Windsor dining when I was in Paris last year. Building The Ritz Cesar Ritz, a sick man in the early years of this century, now went between London, Paris, Rome and the Riviera like a shuttle-cock, supervising this, attending to that, advising, cajoling, demanding. He opened the well-known Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, London, and then began plans for the building of the London Ritz on an ideal site overlooking St. James’s Park. There’s an atmosphere about a Ritz hotel that can’t be defined. When you walk down that long, carpeted corridor of the Ritz in London, look at the _ liveried jackeys, notice the dignified staircase, you may begin to realise something of the personality of Cesay Ritz, the man who brought fine living into the hotel business of Europe. "Cesar Ritz: Host to the World" is a fascinating book, and doubly fascinating if you’ve travelled in

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"Cesar Ritz: Host to the World." Marie Louise Ritz. Harrap. Our copy from the publishers.