Nathaniel Newnham-Davis

Nathaniel Newnham-Davis (6 November 1854 – 28 May 1917), generally known as Lieutenant Colonel Newnham-Davis, was a British food writer and gourmet. After a military career, he took up journalism, and was chiefly known for his restaurant reports from London establishments of the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. He was also active in the theatre as an occasional playwright and amateur performer.

Life and career

Early years, army and journalism Newnham-Davis was born in London on 6 November 1854, the eldest son of Henry Newnham-Davis and his wife, Mary. He was educated at Harrow School, and joined the Buffs, a leading infantry regiment of the British army. He served in the South African colonial campaigns with the Imperial Mounted Infantry, and was decorated and twice mentioned in dispatches. He later served in the Straits Settlements, China and India. For three years he was attached to the Intelligence Department at Simla. Jadoo (1898) and "Baby" Wilkinson's V.C., and other stories (1899). He published a play, A Charitable Bequest – A comedietta (1900).

Food writer Newnham-Davis was best known for his writings about food and wine. His Dinners and Diners – Where and How to Dine in London was published in 1899, with a second edition in 1901. In 1903 he published The Gourmet's Guide to Europe, written in collaboration with Algernon Bastard. A second edition was published in 1908 and a third in 1911. The New York Times wrote of him: "He is not of a domestic turn. The people of the gay world he affects breakfast at a café, lunch at a club, dine in the palm room, or the ivory room, or the gold room of a 'swell' hotel." The Gourmet's Guide to Europe was published in an American edition in 1908, when The New York Times called it "a veritable masterwork of its own genre".

Newnham-Davis is chiefly remembered as the gastronomic correspondent of The Pall Mall Gazette. A lifelong bachelor, he regularly dined at London's great hotels and restaurants in company with a succession of companions given discreet pseudonyms in his restaurant reviews. Among them were "the Colleen", who "prattled incessantly of horses", "the Little Prima Donna", "the Dean's Daughter," and "Miss Brighteyes", a débutante who distressed her host by drinking lemonade with caviare.

In a 1952 article about Newnham-Davis, entitled "A Gourmet in Edwardian London", Elizabeth David detailed some of the menus presented to the Colonel and his companions in the last years of the Victorian era and the first decade of the 20th century. A fairly typical example was "oysters, soup, sole, a fillet of beef cooked with truffles and accompanied by pommes de terre soufflés, wild duck à la presse, a pudding and an ice-cream (bombe Midland)". David notes that with a bottle of wine, this dinner cost 28 shillings for the two of them. Newnham-Davis was strictly fair in his reports, and seldom expressed a preference for one establishment over others. He rarely condemned a restaurant, instead conveying his disapproval by omission. He said that he did not "think it fair to a restaurant to condemn it upon one trial, or fair to himself to give it another." Despite Newnham-Davis's efforts to remain impartial, Elizabeth David concluded that his personal favourite was the Savoy Hotel. There, in the 1890s, Escoffier's mousse de jambon, "served on a great block of ice and melting like snow in the mouth", was declared a masterpiece, and his bortsch was held by Newnham-Davis to be the best soup in the world.

Last years

In 1915, during the First World War, Newnham-Davis applied for re-engagement by the army and was put in charge of prisoners of war held at Alexandra Palace.