LIKE DEEPING NOVEL

Evening Star, Issue 19774, 26 January 1928, Page 11

LIKE DEEPING NOVEL

WAITER'S SON A MAYOR RISING YOUNG LAWYER. Robert is head waiter in the chief hotel of the country town of Guildford. After November 0 Robert took on a new dignity. He not only continued to be a head waiter, but he is the father of the mayor of the town in which he does his waiting. Thus has ‘ Sorrell and Son ’—the famous novel by Mr Warwick Deeping —come to life, with the modification that “Sorrell,” in this instance, is a waiter instead of an hotel porter, and the son is a solicitor instead of a surgeon. Guildford is the place where this happened. Mr William R.aclcliffe Philpot, a rising young lawyer, partner in a firm with a practice in London as well as Surrey, was nominated by his colleagues on the town council as the Mayor of Guildford for the coming year, and was elected on November 9 without opposition. His father, Mr Robert Philpot, is head waiter at the Lion Hotel, at the bottom of Guildford’s hump-hacked high street, and has been there in that, position for forty-nine years. It is difficult to say at the moment whether the head waiter father is prouder of his son’s success or the solicitor son of the father’s splendid record and reputation as the best waiter in the southern shires. Hundreds and thousands of motorists who drive along the Portsmouth road know Robert Philpot, with his fin© presence and urbanity of manner. He is a head waiter out of another age, when “carriage folk” were the patrons of the coffee room and coaches pulled into the yard of the Lion instead of sports cars with throaty exhausts. “I am getting near to my half-cen-tury ns a head waiter,” said Robert —he is always Robert to his favorite customers—to a newspaper representative, “and I am still as hale and hearty as ever. The changes I have seen have been great, but the new times are just as interesting to me as the old. The world passes before you as a head waiter. You see all sides of people, and you learn to judge them by their manners. I. find now that,the men, as a rule, have better manners than the women.”