Chronicle No. 26 · Incidents

Kaspar, the Wooden Cat the Savoy Keeps for Tables of Thirteen

A superstitious dinner in 1898 left the Savoy with a problem, and a designer solved it with three feet of London plane.

In 1898 a South African financier named Woolf Joel gave a private dinner at the Savoy in London. A late cancellation left thirteen at the table. Someone mentioned the old superstition that the first of thirteen diners to rise will be the first to die. Joel laughed, stood up first, and finished his evening.

He was shot dead in Johannesburg not long afterwards.

The Savoy is a hotel, not a seance, but it had a practical problem. Guests now noticed when a table came out at thirteen, and a superstitious host at a private dinner is an unhappy host. The first remedy was to seat a member of staff as a fourteenth, which solved the arithmetic and ruined the privacy.

Around 1927 the designer Basil Ionides, who had just remodelled the hotel's restaurant, carved a better answer: a black cat, three feet tall, cut from a single piece of London plane and lacquered black. They named him Kaspar.

The protocol has not changed since:

Winston Churchill dined with him more than once, at meetings of The Other Club.

It is an absurd object treated with complete seriousness, which is precisely why it works. Someone at the Savoy understood that a guest's unease is a real service defect, and built a permanent fix that makes the table laugh instead of shifting in its seat.

Lesson: Solve a guest's discomfort once, properly, and you never have to solve it again; the fix itself becomes part of the welcome.

The Savoy entrance on the Strand, where Kaspar has been on call since the 1920s.
The Savoy entrance on the Strand, where Kaspar has been on call since the 1920s. — Wikimedia Commons · Photo by CVB, edited and cropped by Cart · CC BY-SA 4.0
The Savoy Hotel, London, seen from the river side.
The Savoy Hotel, London, seen from the river side. — Wikimedia Commons · Colin Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0