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Saturday, 14 March 2020
In an olde-worlde town of steeples, spires and higgledy-piggledy black-and-white houses on a hill, looped around by a river along which swans glide between an English bridge and a Welsh bridge, there stands a hotel like no other. High up in the town, reached along a cobbled alley called Butcher Row, it is a hotchpotch of timber-framed buildings dating back nine hundred years where a Bohemian prince once lived, and overlooks a square with a twisty tree and the church of St Alkmundâs that was founded long before the Black Death.
âLetâs meet at the Prince Rupertâ has long been a common refrain in Shrewsbury, whether among ladies that lunch, businesspeople wanting to discuss deals, bridal parties planning a wedding or tourists wandering in wonder through the narrow streets of the medieval town centre.
Inside, on this Saturday, a welcoming fire crackled in the lobby and guests sallied back and forth past the portrait of a long-haired man with a romantic air. This was Prince Rupert, the Prague-born grandson of King James I, who stayed here in the seventeenth century trying to marshal Royalist forces during the English Civil War, and gave the hotel its name.
That day the Prince Rupert had sixty-one paying guests and the two restaurants and lounge bar had a steady stream of customers. The Camellias Tea Rooms were so busy that hotel manager Charlie was helping out alongside her daughter Gabriella, serving pots of Earl Grey and tiered cake-stands of scones, fruit slice and cucumber sandwiches while the tinkling digital piano played the theme from Titanic.
Upstairs, the hotelâs sixty-one-year-old owner Mike Matthews was sitting in his wood-panelled office, the princeâs old lounge, head in his hands. The computer screen in front of him revealed a summer full of bookings for the Prince Rupertâs seventy rooms, thanks to the crowds that were going to descend on Shrewsbury for its food festival in June; for Letâs Rock in July, featuring the eighties stars Adam Ant and Tony Hadley; and then in August for the folk festival and the Shrewsbury Flower Show, the worldâs oldest, dating back to 1836 when only carnations and gooseberries had been allowed.
Everything had been shaping up to be a good year. On television, however, as there had been for days, were terrifying images from northern Italy, where hospitals were so overwhelmed by a deadly virus that had come from China that they were running out of ventilators and doctors were having to play God and decide who to save. Some hospitals were so full they were treating people in car parks. Similar scenes were being repeated in Spain. Mikeâs cousin in Malaga was sending daily messages about the fear that was spreading across the country.
Mike called in the two fifty-something women he considered his âright-hand menâ â Charlie Green, the bubbly red-haired manager with a heart-shaped face, and Jacki Law, his watchful pale blond accountant, both as petite as he is tall. âI think they will close us down,â he said. The women were surprised. The day before, almost seventy thousand people had gathered for the races at Cheltenham Festival. Boris Johnson, the mop-headed British prime minister, was playing the virus down, going to a rugby match at Twickenham with his young fiancĂ©e Carrie Symonds, shaking hands with all and sundry, and telling a press conference with his usual bluster, âIâm absolutely confident that we can send coronavirus packing in this country.â
Mike shook his head. Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Greece were already in some form of lockdown, closing restaurants, shops and schools, and telling people to stay at home. âItâs economy versus life,â he said, âand thatâs no contest.â He couldnât understand why the government wasnât shutting the borders, closing airports and seaports, taking advantage of being an island to keep the deadly virus out. It seemed to him as clear as daylight that weddings, banquets, business conferences and holidays would all have to come to a grinding halt.
His mind whirred. How on earth would he pay the staff? Some of them had worked there for decades. Part of the hotel was leased â how would he pay the landlord? Then there was the insurance, the mortgage, the utility bills and what about the suppliers â local farmers, grocers and butchers, as well as Tanners, the townâs old wine merchants. He couldnât just say, âStop now, I wonât pay.â
Centuries-old Grade II listed buildings like the Prince Rupert were not like a modern Holiday Inn you could just shut down. Behind the walls lay a myriad of pipes and wires that, if not used, could seize up. Water had to keep circulating or legionnairesâ disease could take hold. If the boilers were shut down, they might not restart. The pipes were a mix of copper and iron â if hot water didnât flow, they would corrode. If the heating wasnât on and air wasnât flowing, mildew and mould would grow. And what about security: the hotel was a jumble of buildings with multiple entrances and exits, and it was right in the centre of town.
You couldnât just stop everything in its tracks. The Prince Rupert needed care and attention, like a living breathing thing.
Mike was particularly worried about paying Charlie and Jacki, who were so dedicated to the hotel and had no significant other in their lives â how would they survive without their jobs? Heâd read about Nordic countries that were putting in place a furlough scheme whereby the government would pay 80 per cent of peopleâs wages, which in his view was seriously generous. He couldnât imagine the UK doing that.
He called his bank manager to see if he had heard anything. âI know as much as you do,â came the reply.
Back home that evening, a few miles away in the village of Cruckton, Mike paced the lounge. The news on TV was growing more and more alarming. There were now over a thousand cases in the UK, including the junior health minister Nadine Dorries, and twenty-one people had died. Anyone with a high temperature or ânew and persistent coughâ was being urged to stay at home for fourteen days. The stock market was falling. People were starting to panic buy in supermarkets.
âI donât want to close,â he told his wife Diane. âI need to find something to do with the hotel.â
The next day as he walked from the car park along Wyle Cop and up Pride Hill, the main shopping street, people were coming out of Tesco and Marks & Spencer laden with piles of toilet rolls.
In his office Mike began making calls and sending emails, offering the hotel to different organisations. He asked the NHS if it wanted to use the Prince Rupert to put up nurses and doctors from the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital who were worried about taking the infection home. He tried the police and fire service. Nobody responded. By that evening, as he left for home, he had given up hope. âWhat am I going to do with you?â he said, shaking his head at the hotelâs black-and-white timbered frontage in the pink early evening glow.
After supper he sat on his sofa with a cup of tea. Diane went upstairs to her room at 10 p.m., as she always did, but he stayed up, his mind racing.
It was twenty-five years since they had bought the Prince Rupert and the hotel was his life. Dotted around the living room were photos of their three children: the two eldest, James and Camilla, both now hoteliers themselves, and the youngest, Alexander, who was at university studying hospitality. It was because of them that Mike and Diane had moved back from the Caribbean, where heâd spent ten years managing hotels such as the exclusive Sandy Lane resort in Barbados whose guests had included John Cleese and Michael Winner. Heâd been having the time of his life there, but one evening, looking out over the turquoise water and twinkling lights, he thought about the need to find schools for their children and to be nearer his ageing parents back home, and decided he wanted a place of his own.
Mike amassed a bulging file of hotels that were for sale across the UK, but something about the Prince Rupert kept catching his eye. He had never been to Shrewsbury on the EnglishâWelsh border â like many, when he thought of Shropshire, he thought of Ludlow, its ancient market town â so was intrigued to read the description of Shrewsbury in a Frommerâs guide as âthe finest Tudor town in Englandâ. When he went to see it on a trip back from the Caribbean, he had just two hours to walk around, and never did discover if you should pronounce it Shrews-bury, like the long-nosed rodent, or Shrows-bury, to rhyme with âshowâ â no one seemed to know â but it looked to him to have everything you could want in a town.
A view of Shrewsbury, engraved in 1771.
Set on two hills with a dip in the middle and the River Severn encircling it almost like a moat, Shrewsbury has an astonishing 660 listed buildings and had clearly once been very affluent, with all its highly decorated black-and-white Tudor mansions and handsome Georgian townhouses on cobbled streets. Many of these had been the homes of wool merchants and drapers, who were behind the townâs commercial heyday from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Its location across the border from Wales, on the highway to London and on the Severn to the port of Bristol had seen it dominate the trade in Welsh wool, and then in woven cloth, which went thence to Europe and later the Americas. Aside from its fine houses, the town had a Norman castle and abbey, a series of bridges and an ancient school to educate the scions of its wealthy, as well as the worldâs first iron-framed building, the flaxmill, known as the grandfather of skyscrapers. That wasnât Shrewsburyâs only claim to fame (and draw for tourists) â one could also call it the birthplace of evolution, for Charles Darwin grew up there. It also had a couple of old coaching inns â the Lion and the Prince Rupert. Both had seen better days, but to Mike there was something magical about the Prince Rupert.
Buying it had not been easy. Even in its dilapidated state, he could not afford the ÂŁ1.15 million price tag on his own, let alone the money for works, and his first partner in the enterprise proved unreliable. Eventually, in 2002, Mike managed to borrow almost ÂŁ2.5 million to pay over the odds to buy his partner out.
Since then, he had renovated, added bits and created a courtyard terrace; there was always something to do with a hotel. In 2014 he had sold off some car parking spaces and borrowed money for a ÂŁ2 million refurbishment that had taken the Prince Rupert from three stars to four stars. Guests had included Margaret Thatcher, the Liverpool football team and Monica Lewinsky, and rooms went for as much as ÂŁ225 a night. Mikeâs wife and children had all worked there. He knew every nook and cranny, from the stone vaulted cellars with underground tunnels to the Jacobean staircase and the ancient rooms with their heavy wooden beams and ceilings that slanted so low you could easily touch them with your hand. He had even got to know the ghosts.
The first rays of dawn sun were lighting up the tiles when he finally drifted off into an uneasy slumber.
Around 4 p.m. that day, Monday 16 March, Pam, the reservations manager, asked if Mike had got the message from Paul on reception that someone from the council had called about housing. Paul was absent-minded and there was a frantic search to find the scrap of paper with a name, Tim Compton, and number.
Intrigued, Mike dialled. Compton came straight to the point. âI guess this is a long shot and youâll probably say no, but the government is ordering us to bring in all rough sleepers off the streets because of this coronavirus, and I wondered if we might use your hotel.â
Mike was stunned. âI bet weâre the last hotel you tried,â he laughed.
Compton said nothing. âI had included the Prince Rupert on the list of local hotels and B&Bs to try as a formality, never expecting them to agree,â he later admitted.
âHow many are there?â asked Mike. He couldnât remember seeing many homeless people on the streets of Shrewsbury, maybe three or four in doorways. To be honest, he always quickened his step when he saw one, and if he thought about them at all it was to wonder why they didnât get off their backsides and get a job.
âThirty to forty,â said Compton.
âWow,â said Mike. He invited Tim for a cup of tea in the hotel lounge the next afternoon.
That evening Boris Johnson held the first of what would become daily briefings from 10 Downing Street, standing at the centre of three podiums, flanked by the scientists Professor Chris Whitty, the UKâs chief medical adviser, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser. âNow is the time to stop non-essential contact with others,â urged the prime minister, âand all non-essential travel.â He added that people should stop going to pubs, clubs and restaurants to halt the spread of the ânew coronavirusâ.
âI donât think thereâs been anything like it in peacetime,â said Johnson. âWithout drastic action, cases could double every five or six days âŠâ
Although there was some confusion â Johnson wasnât ordering places to close or banning public gatherings â businesses started taking matters into their own hands. Top London theatres announced they were bringing down the curtain on their shows, even The Mousetrap, the worldâs longest-running play. Airlines began cancelling flights and cruise companies said their cruises would be suspended until 11 April. One British ship, the Diamond Princess, had already been quarantined for weeks at a Japanese port after a major outbreak swept through, infecting seven hundred passengers and crew, of whom nine had died. If Mike had any doubt the Prince Rupert would have to close, it soon disappeared. Guests started calling to cancel. Before long only eight rooms remained booked.
After lunch the next day, he sat waiting in the lounge with Charlie and Jacki. Through the glass doors they watched a man with long hair and long beard, dressed all in black, saunter up to reception. âOh crikey, theyâve sent one already!â exclaimed Charlie. Then the man turned and they saw his Shropshire Council lanyard.
It was Tim Compton. He explained that the government had launched an initiative called Everyone In to get all the homeless across the land off the streets by the weekend, âas their immune system was all shotâ, and they were considered particularly vulnerable to the disease and potential spreaders. Councils had been asked to round them up and house them in hotels and B&Bs.
âHow long would it be for?â asked Mike.
âWeâve been told up to four months, but we think it will be just a few weeks,â said Compton. âUntil this is over.â
Jacki asked about funding. Compton said he didnât know the details, but they would obviously be compensated. He was very open. âThis wonât be easy,â he said. âThey are very vulnerable â many are high-level drug addicts or alcoholics; some are convicts. Many have not slept inside for years.â
He did not expect Mike to agree. Heâd spent most of his working life battling the stigma attached to rough sleepers, having spent ten years running the Shrewsbury Ark, the local homeless charity, before joining the councilâs housing department in 2019. When heâd told his colleagues that he was going to the Prince Rupert to see if it would house any homeless, theyâd laughed.
âMaybe you could take one or two,â he suggested.
Mike looked at Charlie and Jacki. They were smiling. âLetâs do it,â they said. âWe can take them all.â
