This is faithful transcription of the original handwritten memoir. The original punctuation has been maintained, with additions only when necessary to aid understanding. Mispellings have also been corrected.

A memoir of working at Smedley's Hydro in Matlock, Derbyshire, in 1945 and 1946

by Amy 'Joyce' Knifton (née Pennington) (1930-2017)

Transcribed by Kevin Knifton, 29th December 2023

I had my own experience of working at Smedley's. I was almost sixteen when I was taken on as a [illegible] waitress.

It was a fantastic place having all been re-furbished after the War Department had left after occupying the building all through the war.

I had never seen anything like it: big high ceilings, cornices, chandeliers everywhere; big wide corridors. There were two living rooms, the main one the future dining room could hold two hundred people - it was massive; big mahogany tables that could seat 20 people; all the waiters and waitresses in black & white. We would all be standing to attention at our various stations in readiness for the guests to come in.

On arrival the guests would be shown to their seats by the head waiter, and that was their place for the remainder of their stay.

I was very much a rookie. I only knew one knife, fork & spoon when I first started. All new recruits were put with a tried and tested waiter. Normally you worked with someone for a fortnight before having four own stations. 'Station' was the word for four the tables you were looking after.

I was one of the few girls who didn’t live in, and had to report for duty, signing in at 7:30 a.m. every morning. You were only late once - after that you got the push.

The other girls & young men lived in the staff wing which overlooked the main road going up the hill. They was completely segregated from the men - they were on another floor. There was certainly no hanky-panky, that was strictly forbidden.

We would all start at 7:30. Fortunately the tables were already laid from the night before. The only job was to see each place had a napkin after which you’d be off to the still-room to check on tea & coffee pots, toast, etc.

10 minutes before service the whistle would go, and everybody would line up at in the dining room for inspection by Mr Douglas. You held your hands out to show your clean nails; were then turned them over after which he would look you up and down and hopefully he would move on down the line.

They thought I was competent to have my own station after a fortnight having been trained by one of the old school waitresses, who knew everything there was to know about waiting on as she started there after the First World War at the very same age that I was.

Obviously you start off with a small number of people till you are more particular at serving. It was all silver service, which is very tricky picking food up with just a fork and spoon between two fingers. At the beginning you are so nervous about not dropping the food in the guests lap.

I was fascinated by the whole set-up. It was very hard work, for you were on your feet all the time you were there except for the quarter of an hour for breakfast and the half-hour for lunch. I loved it and all for £1-10s a week (£1.50 in today's money).

The thing that killed me was the carpets! My feet were not used to such luxury, at home we only walked on lino, with just a rug in front of the fire. My feet swelled up, I used to soak them in a bottle of warm salt water each evening. My shoes were tight on me - I’d be limping like an old lady. It was four weeks before my feet got finally back to normal.

What was nice, once you had your own station, was any tips you received you could keep them - no sharing with anyone else! I started in the summer; I was looking forward to Christmas at the posh, first class hotel.

There Christmas was fantastic. I had twenty people to look after over the four day holiday. I didn’t realise at the beginning but in that number I had a family of four and they belonged to the Colgate toothpaste family and they gave me a one pound note for my tip. It sounds very little now, but it was a fortune to us waitresses, for our actual wage was £1 10 shilling for a 60 hour week. You can tell how much there was left for me after giving my mother ten shillings for my board & lodging and paying my cart fares twice a day, except one day a week when you had a half day off.

That was wonderful, you didn’t have the same afternoons every week. It worked in rotations, you’d went off with Monday one week, the following week Tuesday, and so on. After lunch was over you would carry on with all the usual stuff tidying the dining room up and leaving your station immediately laid in readiness for dinner that evening when your table was between two girls on either side of you.

Another tradition that happened whilst I was there was, the management gave the staff a ball on the day after Boxing Day. The thing that was great was the guests waited on us! Not that there was much waiting on. There was a wonderful buffet which the chefs had prepared a few hours before while seeing to their normal duties, and they tended the bar under the watchful eye of Mr Douglas. Dinner was brought forward that evening to enable us to finish at eight p.m. in readiness for the start at 8:30 in the winter gardens. A great big conservatory an extension added on to the end of the building a beautiful sun trap where the guests sat and relaxed during the day.

Our bash started at 8:30 till midnight. It was a wonderful evening with the same house band that the visitors had. A very happy evening. I stayed there for just over a year, it taught me a lot.

I’m afraid the writing was on the wall for an establishment of that size, for it lasted a bare six years after [illegible] was finished. With over three hundred and fifty bedrooms to fill, you can’t make a profit when it was only full three or four times a year.

Sadly Smedley closed its doors as a hotel in 1956. The wonderful old building was going to be more of asset then could have been envisaged when Derbyshire County Council bought it for their headquarters.

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