My First Job

A Memory of Hunstanton.

I worked and lived at the Golden Lion Hotel, beginning when I was 19, fresh out of Westminster Hotel School, when I was a trainee/assistant manager there from 1959-63 or 64, with the exception of the winter of 1962/63 when I worked in a luxury hotel in Munich, for the experience. My German friend, Reinhardt Willner, a waiter in Munich, came back with me (a mistake) and worked in the restaurant at the Golden Lion. He married one of the English waitresses and never made the effort to treat my position with respect. It was a very busy hotel with a lot of function dinners (especially Masonic as we had a temple built into the hotel), crazy bank holiday weekends where, when serving in either cocktail or back public bar, all you could see were three rows of outstreched arms clutching empty pint mugs requiring refills.

Mr and Mrs Hinchliffe were the managers (ex Todmorden, Yorks). One day while relieving the barman, Scottie, for his lunch break in the public bar, the news came over the television that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I'll always remember that moment. You've never seen a bar empty so fast!

Somehow we acquired two Chinese cocktail barmen from Hong Kong who used to get the run of the kitchen after the bars closed and cooked us marvellous food. God, that food was so good! The head cook at the time was a very, very rotund lady called Dorothy (right out of a Dickens novel) who used to tipple the Scotch in the pantry when she got stressed out, resulting in chopping off half her thumb once when she got distracted on the downstroke while sectioning a duck! She was so pie-eyed I don't think she missed a beat and simply wrapped it in a cloth and carried on! Periodically I would relieve her on her day off as Chef! I don't think I poisoned anyone although I do recall getting hell from Mr H for melting icecream to make a mousse once! The crazy things one does! Another time I was trying to rewire an electric bellpush hanging over one of the guest room's beds and had to thread it through the cap. Well, you all know what you have to do when you have to thread anything resembling string through a hole...you wet it, right? Oh, except when there's electricity running through it! I was lucky to escape with a shock and a sore tongue.

I was a naive, innocent, lonely and insecure kid at the time, ripe for being made a fool of, and I stepped right up and obliged one time. The hall porter had a particularly mean-spirited son who was employed there one time when he got out of gaol. He managed to convince me that some lovely girl, a ballet dancer, liked me (he accompanied this lie with a conveniently clipped magazine photo to help add credence to his story). So a couple of days later I got all dressed up to supposedly have a date at the King's Lynn picture house with this admiring lovely. Fifteen minutes after the movie had begun it dawned on me that I'd fallen for this gag. Now I'd missed the last train and had a 16 mile walk home. I tried to save face by telling the jerk I'd never have  taken him seriously and had not tried to meet the girl. "What kind of fool do you think I am!". Exactly!

Years later (around the early 1970s) I ran into one of the Hong Kong guys, Kelvin (they took English names), in the basement of the old Eaton's Discount Annex in Toronto, Ontario, Canada! I don't know who was more shocked, him or I, being that I had the long-haired hippie look and we'd never really clicked anyway.

The owner of the Golden Lion Hotel (who ran The Le Strange Arms in Old Hunstanton) once mistakenly hired an American 'banquet/events' manager for the hotel, a position that we did not require. He had, for then, typically adventurous 'American' ideas and organized pop concerts at the pier which lost the owner enough money that he soon relinquished his services.

I made my first American friend while at the hotel. His last name was Gerald Knapp and he was a fighter jet pilot in the US Airforce stationed at Lakenheath. He was billeted, with his wife, at our hotel and would leave for work at 8.30am and return in the early evening having done a mission over most of Europe and North Africa. This always amazed me. They were a very nice couple.

I used to take the train up to King's Lynn (this was before Beecham got his axe out) on one of my very few days off. In those days it was common for 'trainees' like me to work 7 day weeks, especially in the summers.

I'd grown up in a military officer's family and wasn't allowed TV so when I got to the Golden Lion I got one for my room and would lock myself in this tiny 6' x 8' room and watch wall to wall TV (make note, future parents ... don't totally deny anything to your kids or they'll make up for it in spades later!). I taught myself to dance the twist in that room watching the Victor Sylvester's Dance Hour ... I can hear him now telling us to imagine stubbing out a ciggy butt on the ground with our right foot while gyrating the other in unison! "Let's twist again..like we did last summer!" This 'experience', fortified with numerous pints, gave me the courage to go to a dance on the pier once where I think I probably made an ass of myself.

I really don't recall much outside of work as I never had/took any time off except to go to King's Lynn for a haircut and a picture show. What a life!