Don’t tempt fate!
It’s a mantra I was brought up with and was one often muttered by my dad.
He would mutter it in myriad situations but especially when someone commented on the weather or a streak of good luck.
That said, I wouldn’t describe my father as particularly superstitious but, as with all good Irish families, I realised this morning while pondering the idea of superstitions that I did grow up with a healthy respect for superstitions.
While I may scoff at the very superstitious I suddenly found myself admitting, quietly, that I too have a couple I uphold without exception.
This certainly comes from my Irish grandfather who also had a number of superstitions he adhered to solemnly.
Among those was the belief that driving a green car would most certainly result in a car accident, and you should never sit down to dine at a table with 13 guests.
Thinking about him, I recalled the story he used to tell us grandchildren of Kasper the Savoy Hotel’s resident 14th guest.
Not only is he a permanent resident of The Savoy, ready to dine with anyone who needs his services, he even has a book written about him.
Searching the internet for the facts of the story I came across this article published in The Spectator (written by Mark Mason) which briefly tells Kasper’s story, as well as a few other tales of diners who refused to be part of a party of 13.
I have shortened the text and the original can be found on The Spectator’s page.
Take a read and let me know if you have ever had found yourself in need of an extra guest to balance the numbers, and what your solution was.
In 1898 Woolf Joel, a South African mining magnate, hosted a dinner at the hotel (The Savoy), but a last-minute cancellation brought the group down to 13.
Joel scoffed at talk of the first person to leave the table encountering bad luck, and to prove guests were talking nonsense he left first.
On his return to Johannesburg he was promptly shot dead.
The Savoy decided that from then on they would never allow 13 diners to sit down again.
For a while their solution was to seat a waiter with the party.
But neither side was very happy with this arrangement: the hotel was a member of staff short, while the diners had to put up with a complete stranger in their midst.
Not very relaxing, and useless if you wanted to talk confidentially.
Then in 1927 Basil Ionides came to the rescue.
He was the designer who gave Hounslow West tube station its pink-and-cream ticket hall, but more relevantly he’d been commissioned by the Savoy to redecorate Pinafore, one of its private dining rooms.
As well as completing this task, Ionides provided a solution to the ‘13’ problem: a black cat he’d sculpted out of a block of wood from a London plane tree.
From then on, Kaspar — as the animal was christened — occupied the 14th chair, a napkin tied round his neck.
Winston Churchill became so fond of Kaspar that he had him at his table no matter how many guests were present.
The cat briefly left the hotel during the second world war, courtesy of officers from the RAF’s 609 Squadron, who managed to smuggle him away.
Kaspar lived for a while at their HQ in Lincolnshire, only returning to the Savoy after the intervention of an air commodore.
Parties of 13 can dine with the cat to this day, and he’s become something of a hotel mascot.
Huge topiary versions of him stand outside the entrance, the River Restaurant has been renamed in his honour and even the Savoy’s cappuccinos are topped with his outline in chocolate.
He’s also had a book written about him by the hotel’s erstwhile writer-in-residence Michael Morpurgo.
In this, we learn that Kaspar was the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic. Lucky boy.
