'Regret no coloured': bedsit ads reveal true feelings – archive

An outstanding anthology of landladies’ prose is on view in a shop display case near Clapham Common. It is well worth a visit even for regular students of landladies’ prose as used in their advertisements, for this anthology contains some remarkable examples of their style at its most revealing.

All the standard lyrical passages are there – such as “Quiet house in select road recently decorated throughout with clean surroundings and pleasant atmosphere” ­– and it includes some admirably terse exercises in the art of persuasion – “Rent reasonable Frige use of bath.” But where the anthology really scores is in the subtlety with which so many of the writer-landladies reveal themselves in what is on the surface merely an offer of a bedsitter.

“Too girls sharing good bus serves everything supplied white people only” is how one message ends in what is presumably a stream-of-consciousness style. Was the writer aware of what lay beneath the surface of the “stream”? Obviously something lay behind “Europeans only – Chinise people welcome,” but what it was only the writer must know. The landladies’ – or landlords’ – spelling is often erratic but they are usually quick to plunge straight to the point, when they are being patriotic in a shop-window sense. “English people only” is a favourite, though several of them prefer a subtler twist. “Sorry no coloured” or “Regret no coloured.” Were any literary conceits ever more meaningless than those “regrets” and “sorrys”?

Some of the writers extend their range at the expense of the Irish – “No coloured or Irish,” writes one without “Regret” – and a few even go farther with “No married sorry no coloured.” And the author of “Mother and daughter or might accept couple with no children” is likely to be a little too obscure for most readers. Does that mean the “mother and daughter” could be coloured or Irish? This style is obviously florid at the expense of precision. The plainer, more precise of the landlady-writers simply states “Students or business people only,” leaving the reader to assume they mean only what they say.

But as with most anthologies, there are one or two writers whose style is the opposite of the one currently in fashion. “West Indians only,” writes one of the landladies (or is it a defiant landlord?). Another adds “Indian or Pakistan gentleman preferred.” And between these colourful extremes are the more colourless writers who merely offer their accommodation to all comers.

This variety makes a good anthology, but one wonders what might happen to the style of so many of the landladies if the market for bedsitters in such exclusive places as Clapham ever swings in favour of the outsider.