It is the kind of letter any marketing department would drool over.
On the wall of the Pont Street branch of upmarket dry cleaners Jeeves of Belgravia is a typed missive from the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein:
"I am glad to say I have heard from Mr Wodehouse this morning," Rubinstein writes, "that he is quite happy about your using the name 'Jeeves' as a trading name in your new business adventure. And good luck to it."
The short, but extremely sweet, letter, dated 4 July 1966, is addressed to Sydney Jacob, a twinkly-eyed entrepreneur who had spotted a gap in London's nascent dry cleaning industry — namely a company that would adhere to the lofty whims of London's monied classes; refresh their cigar-saturated smoking jackets and Bolly-blotched bowties. You can hardly imagine, say, JK Rowling being so wantonly generous with her intellectual property, but Jacob was granted the 'Jeeves' name without paying a penny. Three years later, along with co-founder David Sandeluss, Jacob's business was a reality; London's minted would be sweet-smelling forevermore.
"Sydney moved down to London in the early sixties, got into the scene, met lots of celebrities in the 'It' crowd," says Patrick Timpson of the well-known Timpson family, who is now Director at Jeeves of Belgravia. "And it struck him one day that all these amazing ball gowns... there was nowhere reputable that people could send them to. So he set out to make London's finest dry cleaner.
"Sydney always had a saying: 'Everyone can do without Jeeves. The question is for how long?'"
Six decades on and it seems plenty still can't make do without Jeeves; it has outlived many London dry cleaners — not to mention the proto search engine Ask Jeeves — and is still considered the last word in dry cleaning, with four branches studding the well-to-do environs of Belgravia, Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea.
'Pink Hunting Coat from £5.30p'
In the latter branch on a Tuesday afternoon, the door pings at regular intervals as customers come in with Louis Vuitton jackets in need of a touch up, or to collect dazzling white tailored shirts, folded and packaged up as new. Though Jeeves offers a van delivery service (as covered in the BBC's Man Alive documentary from 1981), many customers prefer to come in personally, to talk over the treatment of their prized garments. Bills are settled for hundred — if not thousands — of pounds there and then. Some clients have Jeeves do everything: shirts, bedsheets, pants. The clientele think it's worth it; in that Man Alive documentary, accountant Jean Lloyd claims that she only trusts Jeeves with her £15,000 Harrods furs. Certainly this place brings a whole new meaning to 'money laundering'.
Though comparatively new to some of the storied tailors and cordwainers at which its customers shop, Jeeves' history is an-ever important part of its branding. Each shop is splashed with old advertisements: Vogue features; poetic ads penned by Jacob. A 1974 pricing list reels out: 'Evening Gown from £5.35p', '2 piece Tail Suit from £4.20p', and then, out of the blue, 'Pink Hunting Coat from £5.30p' — a mark of Sydney Jacob's exquisite eye for attention-grabbing. Another of his adverts from the early 1970s is for a miniature Egyptian exhibition at Jeeves' Pont Street branch, replete with film and stage props of Horus, the hawk guarding Tutankhamun's tomb, which featured in the 1972 film Lucifer Rising.
"We try all avenues before we surrender"
The pink hunting coat might be something of a gag, however, Jeeves really does attend to everything: feather boas, racing suits, ceremonial gowns, military uniforms. Wedding dresses are a speciality; after the Big Day, clients want them cleaned and boxed up for posterity; the dresses themselves often arrive filthy: wine stains, cigarette burns, mud flicked up the hem — hallmarks of what was hopefully the best day of someone's life.
The magic of the dry cleaning itself — that chemical wonderland famously swooned over by Monica Geller in Friends — does not take place at the central London stores, but a factory in Barnet, named for Sydney Jacob himself. While KFC has its secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, Jeeves has its five different dry cleaning solvents; most dry cleaners only have one or two, says Patrick Timpson, but having five gives you a gamut of options.
"We try all avenues before we surrender," Cole De Vries, Store Manager of the Chelsea branch, tells me. "Some of the most expensive bits are some of the most difficult to clean — a lot of different exotic leathers, different dyes used... and because they're not mass produced, sometimes they don't have care labels, so there's no advice for us on how to attempt to clean it. And sometimes they don't put a care label in because they know you can't clean it. But where there's a will there's a way."
Indeed, while PG Wodehouse's butler had a knack for cleaning up the most stubborn of messes made by Bertie Wooster and pals, his dry cleaning namesake pride themselves on their ability to clean near-anything.
"A lot of people want their Harrods teddy bears cleaned"
It really is near-anything, too. "A lot of people buy Harrods teddy bears, and they all want them cleaned," says Cole. "So our seamstresses will unstitch them, sometimes take all the filling out, and then put them all back together. Some of them are worth a fortune so it's important that you go to someone who can do it properly." Sometimes the bears are life-sized; Jeeves has dry cleaned football mascots' outfits before now — which gives you an idea of how big some of those machine in Barnet are.
As for the most stubborn stain of all: "Makeup can be quite a tricky one, just because there's so many different chemicals and compounds," explains Cole. "It's not one rule — there's so much different fake tan and foundation, lipstick... nail varnish is a tricky one. You want to be careful that you protect the fabric and protect the colour of the fabric while you're trying to take out the stain."
Dry cleaning is only half the story. The Jeeves service is more of an MOT: garments checked over, and if buttons or stitching are loose, this will be noted down. Alongside the dry cleaning and laundry department, there's an entire restoration department and a tailoring department, working on suits, handbags, shoe repair. The Jeeves team work together like studious elves to get the job done. Some of the handbags takes weeks and weeks. "It's really complex stuff," says Patrick.
"Do mistakes get made? Of course they do. What we do is really complicated."
All of which makes you wonder about getting something wrong. "The clothes we get in... sometimes we can't even think about the price," says Patrick, "because ultimately our clients bring it to us here to do something with it.
"Do mistakes get made? Of course they do. What we do is really complicated. There's lots that can go wrong. But that's why we give ourselves more time. A lot of traditional dry cleaners do a fast, speedy turnaround. We have an expression internally that it only goes wrong if the customer can see it. Ultimately, if the customer's happy, we're happy. And if in the very rare circumstance you do have to make it right for the customer, I see it as a great opportunity to really show what we're good at and that we provide an amazing service in fixing a slight mistake."
That's very much in keeping with Wodehouse's cool and collected Butler, whose talent at fixing problems without batting an eyelid is what makes him such a revered character. Perhaps they should branch out into crisis management.
Jeeves has faced its challenges: "When the smoking ban came in, that was dry cleaning's Wall Street financial crash, because no one needed to get their clothes dry cleaned as much," says Patrick. The company also lost a lot of its Russian clientele due to sanctions in recent years.
But while dry cleaning remains an occasional luxury to some, there will always be a tranche of Londoners all too willing to part with their cash in order to come up smelling of roses. Jeeves dry clean 2,000-3,000 items a week.
"We don't claim to be the cheapest. But if you're coming to us, you will get the same treatment. There are no stars on things in the factory where 'that's an important one'."
"We do have the Royal Warrant... They pay full rates, everything."
The customers themselves are known only to the people who man the stores. Many of the names on the tickets of the items stored downstairs awaiting pick-up are household names, yet this is not the kind of dry cleaners where you find autographed photos on the wall. "A lot of the reason customers use us is because we're quite discreet," says Patrick.
There is, however, a dead giveaway for Jeeves' most famous client of all: emblazoned on the wall of each store are the Prince of Wales' feathers. "We do have the Royal Warrant which implies we do it for certain people, which is a real privilege to have," says Patrick. "They pay full rates, everything."
Yet the only name that really matters around here is that of Jeeves. "Even to this day, the name's brilliant. You know what we do," says Patrick, "It's a cracking name. It's got us a long way."
It's incredible to think that not only did Jacob get use of it gratis, Wodehouse wasn't — as far an anyone knows — even offered free dry cleaning. As for today, there's only one customer who has that privilege. "Sydney is still very much to this day a legend," says Patrick. "Very cool, suave, sophisticated and a bit cheeky. "He gives me a lot. I learn a lot off him.
"He's the only customer I've got that gets 100% off."
