‘London – So Help Me’ by Winifred Ellis

This is an amusing little book, originally published in 1952 and now long out of print. In its day, however, it was terrifically popular and widely read, being reprinted again and again.

It is presented as an accommodation guide for young women who hail from ‘the provinces’ and are moving to London to find work for the first time. There is serious advice included, but the style is very tongue-in-cheek, and the book is enhanced hugely by the inclusion of fourteen splendid Ronald Searle cartoons.

In the main, the book gently satirises the boarding-house industry that catered to the needs of so many hundreds of thousands of people in London during the middle years of the twentieth century. Often called ‘hotels’, these establishments were inhabited largely by long-staying residents rather than transient visitors. Many older, single people lived in boarding houses alongside their younger counterparts, who were generally working, or sometimes studying, in London.

Whole districts of the capital – notably Kensington, Bayswater and Bloomsbury – contained street after street of them. Many occupied the large houses vacated by wealthier families who had moved out to the suburbs during the early twentieth century in search of semis with private gardens and convenient tube connections.

They varied hugely, ranging from conventional boarding houses providing meals to establishments offering little more than a furnished room. Bathroom facilities were generally shared among residents and there might be a communal lounge and dining room on the ground floor. Nor were they necessarily cheap. Winnifred Ellis quotes charges of between three and five guineas a week, which could swallow a very substantial proportion of the income of a typical young 1950s office worker.

The humour is gentle but charming. Much of it springs from the pretensions of proprietors, who were forever seeking to portray their establishments as rather grander and their clientele as rather more socially sophisticated than was actually the case. The surroundings might once have been impressive, but the facilities were often shabby and threadbare. Huge rooms had been subdivided into small, cell-like spaces. Rudimentary gas rings for cooking might be installed below knee-height. Furniture was sparse and beds uncomfortable. House rules governing visitors could be strict. And there were, of course, generally no lifts, so climbing steep staircases to fifth and sixth-floor rooms – invariably the cheaper ones – was a big part of everyday life:

It might be possible to find a landlady who would not object to the erection of a crane on the top floor, so that you could be hoisted in comfort, but it is rather unlikely. Or, should you happen to make friends with the person in the next room, it might be possible to arrange the trips up and down together, and use ropes, Alpine-fashion, sliding down and scrambling up the bannisters.

Usually, however, there is no alternative from climbing up to your nest under your own power, and in time, with much practice, you may become as adept at this as the Londoners themselves. But until then, the best way to avoid disgrace is to wait until there is nobody about before starting your journey, and puff and groan as quietly as possible, so as to avoid bringing any inquisitive folks to the doors of rooms on the intermediate landings.

Curiously, it is much easier to find out about the illustrator than the author. Ronald Searle was already becoming one of the best-known cartoonists of his generation, but Winifred Ellis has left remarkably little trace. ‘London – So Help Me!’ appears to have been her only published book, and even basic biographical details about her are difficult to establish. That is surprising given the book’s initial success - the first edition appeared in 1952 and it had already reached its fourth impression by the following year. Perhaps the obscurity into which Ellis subsequently fell is one reason why this delightful little book has itself become so thoroughly forgotten.

What makes ‘London – So Help Me!’ – at least for me - particularly fascinating to read today, is that it has inadvertently become a work of social history. Winnifred Ellis was writing about a world that her original readers would have recognised instantly and which therefore required very little explanation. Seventy-four years later, much of it has vanished. The boarding houses and residential hotels have largely disappeared, the great houses have been restored to single occupation or converted into hugely expensive flats, and the young people arriving in London today inhabit a very different city.

Yet here, preserved almost by accident, is a glimpse of the peculiar social world they once contained - strangers of different ages and backgrounds living cheek by jowl, negotiating privacy, respectability, loneliness and companionship under the same roof. It was a way of life familiar to millions of Londoners in its day, but one which has now almost entirely faded away. Miss Ellis’s jokes still raise a smile, but they now do something she could never have intended in that they allow us briefly to step inside a now extinct part of London's history and see how an ordinary part of life there once worked.