THE RISE OF THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 69, 18 September 1937, Page 27

THE RISE OF THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

One day in 1910 a young accountant was sent by his firm to look into the affairs of the Cheshire Gheese in Fleet Street, which was then in a bad way (says the "Manchester Guardian").

Now he has retired from the post of manager, which he has held there for twenty-seven years. When he made his report and recommendations after three months' examination the trustees of the house asked him to become manager and carry out his own suggestions. Soon .he had established the prosperity that has flourished there ever since.

It happened that the accountant, Mr. H. J. Wortham, was an utiusual man, specially fitted for his unusual job. He has made his success without injury to the genuine antiquity and picturesqueness of the famous house. The temptation to turn the old into "Ye Olde" and make everything into mock Tudor is too great for a certain type of manager or directorate, who never understand that a genuine piece of antique furniture has always some new parts and adjustments if it has been used through the ages.

Mr. Wortham maintained its appearance and detail as~-a Charles the Second house, where people had eaten and drunk ever since, and he limited the fare to the capacity of the kitchen.

His customers, who included princesses, ex-Presidents of great Republics, Ambassadors, Ministers of the

Crown, and millions of American tourists, appreciated it all. A quiet man with a great manner, a very quick eye, and unfailing tact equal to the exigencies that constantly arose in this unique place with customers, many of whom had never.been in a licensed house before and some of whom had been in one too often, Mr. Wortham guided its fortune through boom and slump and made it definitely a London institution. • . .

When a Fleet Street policeman saw American schoolmarms with red book in hand coming towards him he did not wait for their question, but just pointed out to them the way to the Cheshire Cheese. Strange groups such as the Hawking Club had their banquet there, bringing up the stairs a hawk or two with them on their great gloves, and curious cricket clubs that had their own songs, words, and music, and a longevity society which had a patron who was said to have lived to 180 years, banqueted in the Cheese.

Sir James Barrie at a dinner of a secret Scots society there once said that when his time came to leave this world he hoped that this epitaph might be put over him: "He had many faults, but he never wrote an article about the Cheshire Cheese." He believed that he was the only journalist in Fleet Street of whom that could be said. Mr. Wortham can take that fact away to his retirement as Fleet Street's appreciation.