‘Inferior port, bad salads and hangovers’: newly discovered 1935 diary offers invaluable view of England’s festive past

On 23 December 1935, a woman called “Mouse” set off from her home in Earl’s Court in search of Christmas in England.

“In some remote corner of this island there must be a shining blazing hearth, beams laden with holly and mistletoe, and bustling happiness when the turkey and the plum pudding are cooking away in the big, old fashioned oven,” Mouse writes of her festive road trip in a diary that has been bought at auction by the Dorset History Centre with funding from charitable organisation Dorset Archives Trust – and is an invaluable source for social historians.

The writer – genealogical sleuths speculate that she is Cheshire-born Doris Perry [née Bateman], aged 45 at the time of writing – undertakes the journey with her husband, who appears in the chronicle as “Jumbo” and “the Elephant” (and is presumed to be solicitor and shipping investor Arthur Vivian Perry, then aged 44).

The pair travel through Dorset and Hampshire as Mouse, with her derring-do and between-the-wars style, documents run-ins with “dully lit dining rooms innocent of Christmas decoration”, “inferior port” and “the usual devastating English salads” that feature damp lettuce, beetroot, tomato and “a bottle of mayonnaise”.

Their journey peaks in the happy discovery, on 27 December, of festive cheer at old coaching inn The Antelope in Dorchester. Here, our intrepid gourmands fall upon “fresh hot toast and jam” and wine that “warmed Jumbo’s marrow” in “a simply furnished, beautifully kept lounge” with a “bright fire”. The marbled manuscript is illustrated with picture postcards bought on the journey and a hand-drawn route map.

Diane Purkiss, professor of English literature at Oxford University and author of English Food: A People’s History, says informal sources such as Mouse’s In Search of Christmas in England and the wartime Mass Observation diaries are an “invaluable” trove for social historians.

“There’s something honest about these accounts in that they are not written for a polemical purpose, nor are they part of marketing or advertising,” Purkiss says. “They also sit separately from the food industry.”

In Search of Christmas in England is in the intimate and richly detailed tradition of the diaries of Samuel Pepys or James Woodforde, the Georgian country parson who in his diaries of 1758-1802 documents “gargantuan” meals of roast beef, the fall of the Bastille and the freezing over of chamber pots in East Anglian winter.

Mouse and Jumbo’s “merrie England quest” conveys an image of the then-emergent upper-middle-class motor tourism boom that is as dreary as it is today. In the 1930s, tourist-focused “experiences” began to emerge alongside sometimes misguided notions of regional authenticity.

“This was also the era which invented the Devonshire cream tea as a tourist experience,” says historian Annie Gray, whose new book The Bookshop, the Draper, the Candlestick Maker explores the fate of the British high street through the diaries of centuries of shopkeepers.

Mouse, tellingly, cites the “expert on country food”, Florence White, the folk food historian whose 1932 cookery book Good Things In England was pivotal in a 1930s folk renaissance that also revalued morris dancing. “This era was rather vested in ye olde ways without fully comprehending how hard life was in the past,” she says.

Also striking to the modern eye is Doris Perry’s depiction of the locals. While praise is lavished on pulchritudinous settings – the “green girt street of Milton Abbas, with its pairs of soft cream tinted cottages sheltered beneath the trees”; and Studland village, “a picturesque, much wooded place” – our narrator heaps disdain on Swanage’s “bright young things” who are “large, vulgar and determined to enjoy themselves at all costs”.

A lady-turned innkeeper in West Harnham, meanwhile, is “of the worst type”: “She could not even produce a glass of sherry”, and “kept us standing in the cold while she dilated on all her preparations for a children’s tea party”.

Most jarring, however, is the encounter with an inadequate barmaid at the Bankes Arms hotel in Corfe Castle, a lachrymose and “red-eyed slatternly Irish girl” named Bridget who is homesick for the Christmases of Ireland. Mouse sniffily reports: “They’ll be at the dancin’ in the big farm now’! she gulped. ‘And me not there to see it! – I’d never have come [to England] if I’d known’!”

Purkiss believes our author comes across as “unbelievably entitled” by 21st-century standards in her distaste for restaurants that serve such Christmas standards as “slices of cold ham and turkey”, “mashed potatoes” and “cold mince pies” and don’t offer the cosy version of Dickensian hospitality that is Mouse’s “heart’s desire”.

The manuscript’s purchase is part of Dorset History Centre’s drive to increase public engagement with its archives and includes work to preserve accounts of the lives of Dorset’s long-standing GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) community with local organisation Kushti Bok, and the digitisation of the correspondence of local author Thomas Hardy. The centre plans to stage Hardy’s works in communities across Dorchester for the centenary of the author’s death in 2028.

In the end there’s no holly and mistletoe to be found for Jumbo and Mouse, no rubicund coachman, no plum pudding or hot turkey. We leave a hungover Jumbo, struggling “to raise a very pink bald head from the pillow”, and Mouse as pert as ever.

“Perhaps … I was born too late,” Mouse speculates after the couple’s sentimental festive journey. For all this, Mouse resolves to continue her search for the snow on the sill, the chirping robin and the hot plum pudding of ye olde merrie England.

“After all,” she says, “it’s what makes life worthwhile.”