Eloise Moss, "The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Eloise Moss on "The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Professor Eloise Moss
Date: May 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into Professor Eloise Moss’s new book, "The Secret Life of the Hotel," which uncovers the social, political, and criminal histories embedded in British hotels and guesthouses since 1918. Moving far beyond sensational anecdotes, Moss explores how hotels are sites where questions of class, gender, sexuality, race, and power play out—both publicly and behind the scenes. The discussion examines hotels not as neutral backdrops but as pivotal, often contested, microcosms of British society, exploring themes of fraud, divorce, discrimination, activism, and the ongoing shaping of national identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Book’s Rationale and Aims

• Interest in Crime and Domestic Spaces
  • Moss’s background is in the history of crime, with earlier work on burglary.
  • Hotels attracted her attention while studying burglaries that occurred in these spaces.
  • “Who is responsible when someone commits a theft in a hotel? … What is the cast of characters that enable strangers to move in and out of different rooms in hotels, sometimes for quite nefarious purposes?” — Prof. Moss [03:10]
• Hotels as Microcosms of Broader Societal Mechanisms
  • Hotels reveal social inequalities, systems of inclusion/exclusion, and expose prejudice.
  • The hotel as a liminal space reflects shifting attitudes about class, gender, and race.
  • “Hotels have been one of the most powerful places to determine systems of exclusion in the past.” — Prof. Moss [05:39]

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2. Interwar Years: Hotel Fraud and Social Upheaval

• Societal Change and Status Anxiety [06:45]
  • Post-WWI shifts: changes in gender roles, a wider franchise, economic downturn.
  • Growing democratization heightens anxiety about status and legitimacy.
• Hotel Fraud Emerges
  • People impersonate higher-status individuals, often using military uniforms.
  • Fraudsters exploit hotels’ reliance on outward appearances for exclusivity.
  • “Hotel frauds bring the con artist, the fraudster, sometimes even the murderer into close proximity with your average guest.” — Prof. Moss [09:41]

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3. Hotel Divorces: Changing Laws and Social Norms

• Divorce Act 1923 Facilitates ‘Hotel Divorces’ [10:32]
  • Adultery can be staged in hotels for legal proceedings.
  • A “cottage industry” develops around fabricating evidence of adultery.
  • Hotel staff are often called to testify, harming hotel reputations.
  • “It even becomes a little bit of a pocket industry to help someone get a divorce in a hotel by being the...lady involved.” — Prof. Moss [11:32]

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4. American Tourists and the Marketing of ‘Britishness’

• Rise of U.S. Tourists after WWI [13:39]
  • British hotels actively court American tourists with staged ‘olde England’ aesthetics.
• Entrenching Social Hierarchies and Whiteness
  • Hotels reinforce service hierarchies and present a nostalgic, Anglo-centric Britain.
  • People of color relegated to marginalized staff positions.
  • “Hotels…try to imitate a stately home version of Britain…this actually entrenches some of the inequalities I talk about within these institutions.” — Prof. Moss [15:14]

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5. The Hilton Arrives: National Identity and Controversy

• The Hilton’s Entry into London (1960s) [16:59]
  • Seen as an American invasion—overshadows St. Paul’s, threatens privacy of the monarchy.
  • Newspapers decry its impact on the skyline and British identity.
  • The chain receives strict instructions to avoid mocking British institutions or highlighting America’s superiority.
  • “The presence of a new Hilton hotel chain in Britain actually is quite an affront to British national values and Britain’s idea of its own wealth and success…” — Prof. Moss [18:56]

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6. Hotels as Stages for News and Political Drama

• IRA Bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton (1984) [20:06]
  • Assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher during the Conservative Party conference.
  • Victorian hotel architecture mitigates the bomb’s impact.
  • Rebuilding the hotel folds into Thatcher’s persona—the “Iron Hotel” to her “Iron Lady.”
  • Incident humanizes Thatcher, as public sees her personal effects in the bombed hotel room.
  • “The Grand Hotel becomes the Iron Hotel...it also gives her a little bit more vulnerability. It humanizes her for the watching public, too.” — Prof. Moss [22:41]

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7. Gender Politics in Hotels

• Persistent Gender Discrimination in Hotel Work [23:57]

  • Women excluded from management and senior roles until late 20th century.
  • Training schools lack facilities for women; women relegated to domestic roles.
  • Women at risk in their jobs—particularly chambermaids.
  • Sexualization and vulnerability of female staff is a recurring problem.
  • “Women are taught the different types of wine, taught to speak many languages...It’s really not until the 1980s and 1990s that you get some high profile women running hotels.” — Prof. Moss [25:07]

• Risks for Female Guests

  • Female guests face privacy invasions, safety threats, and press vilification (e.g., Agatha Christie’s disappearance).
  • “You are a guest…But for women particularly that’s often not true…you’re often at a great deal of danger.” — Prof. Moss [29:04]

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8. Queer Guests and Activism

• Hotels as Sites of Both Exclusion and Liberation [30:36]
  • Risks: LGBTQ gatherings raided, guests exposed.
  • Opportunities: Hotels market to same-sex couples, host events, sometimes pioneer inclusive services.
  • Hotels are crucial to the formation of queer community and activism.
  • “A great deal of important activism happens within hotels, which is where the protest part of the title comes in.” — Prof. Moss [30:41]

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9. Color Bar and Anti-Racist Activism

• Persistent Racial Exclusion through Late 20th Century [32:39]
  • Incidents as late as the 1980s; legal action begins after Race Relations Acts.
  • Hotel discrimination prompts national conversations.
  • Notable figures, including Jomo Kenyatta, speak out in hotel periodicals about racist treatment.
  • “Hotels play a really critical role in helping to eliminate racism, although obviously that goal has yet to be achieved, very sadly.” — Prof. Moss [35:13]

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10. Disability Activism and Accessible Design

• Disabled Activists Push for Inclusive Hotels [35:37]
  • Lobby for physical adaptations (ramps, hearing loops, etc.).
  • Raise funds to create purpose-built accessible hotels.
  • Success in advocacy pressures mainstream hotels toward greater accessibility—ultimately transforms the sector.
  • “It’s hotels that really are the space in which all of these debates are had.” — Prof. Moss [37:29]

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11. Reflections: Hotels Now and the Future

• Contemporary Parallels and Ongoing Issues [38:04]
  • Modern slavery in hotels persists, as revealed by 2019 Walk Free report.
  • Hotels continue to reflect and reinforce social inequalities.
  • Moss urges guests and listeners to scrutinize labor divisions and demand better standards.
  • “We should demand better of our hotels because they are bastions of national identity...And so we really want our hotels to reflect the best of us.” — Prof. Moss [39:07]

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12. What’s Next for Professor Moss? [40:19]

• Book on Raffles, the fictional gentleman burglar, and the cultural fascination with criminal glamour.
• Researching a 1926 case involving hotel maids and a Canadian businessman—a transatlantic criminal cover-up.
• “That story deserves telling in its own right...that’s kind of where I’m going next.” — Prof. Moss [41:17]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Hotels kind of rely for their commercial success on a brand of exclusivity...But hotel frauds bring the kind of con artist, the fraudster sometimes even the murderer into close proximity with your average guest.” — Prof. Moss [09:21]
• “A review of my book said it was a kind of bleak and unendingly miserable view of hotels, and that’s not the case. Actually, a great deal of important activism happens within hotels.” — Prof. Moss [30:38]
• “I was kind of shocked in my research at how enduring the politics of gender in hotels are, particularly in relation to the inability of women to obtain managerial positions...” — Prof. Moss [23:57]
• “Hotels play a really critical role in helping to eliminate racism, although obviously that goal has yet to be achieved, very sadly.” — Prof. Moss [35:13]
• “We should demand better of our hotels because they are bastions of national identity...I just say: ask questions and look at who’s performing what job.” — Prof. Moss [39:07]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Book Rationale: [03:02–06:08]
• Hotel Fraud and Class Anxiety: [06:45–10:22]
• Hotel Divorces Explained: [10:32–12:49]
• American Tourists & ‘Olde England’ Branding: [13:39–16:34]
• Opening of the London Hilton: [16:59–19:07]
• IRA Bombing and Thatcher’s Image: [20:06–23:31]
• Gender Politics & Female Guest Risks: [23:57–30:10]
• Queer Activism in Hotels: [30:36–32:30]
• Racial Discrimination & Activism: [32:39–35:20]
• Disability Activism: [35:37–37:41]
• Present-Day Reflections: [38:04–40:03]
• Future Research: [40:19–41:33]

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Conclusion

This episode compellingly reframes hotels as battlegrounds for issues of crime, sex, protest, and prejudice across a century of British history. Moss’s scholarship peels back the façade of neutrality, revealing hotels as pivotal spaces of both harm and progressive change. Her book provides powerful food for thought for anyone who has ever checked in—or worked behind the front desk.

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Transcript

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[Professor Eloise Moss]

Edu Sci welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Eloise Moss, who is here to tell us about a book she's written, just published by Bloomsbury in 2026 titled the Secret Life of the Hotel Sex Crime and Protest in British guest houses since 1918. Now obviously, when a book has words like secret sex crime protest in the title, that already tells us that we have a lot of intriguing things to discuss and we will, I promise, talk about all those things. But it's also interesting to think kind of bigger picture about what this book is doing. This is not a book that is just kind of going through the news and like picking out little anecdotes of like bizarre things that have happened in hotels. The book is actually making a really interesting argument about, like, hang on a second. Hotels are not just sort of neutral spaces where strange things might happen. Like, what is actually going on in a hotel? Who gets to be in charge, who gets to be anonymous? How are those sorts of decisions made? There's a whole lot going on behind the scenes. Sometimes wild and wacky and ends up in newspaper headlines and a lot more that doesn't. So I think we have quite a lot to discuss. Eloise, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Oh, thank you so much, Miranda, and for that wonderful introduction as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, on the theme of introductions, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Sure. So, as you mentioned, I'm a professor of Modern British history at the University of Manchester, but my expert has always been the history of crime. And my previous work was actually on histories of burglary. So I've been interested in domestic spaces, in the security of the home, and who is responsible for that, and also in home like environments. And while I was working on histories of burglary, I came across instances of burglaries in hotels. And that raised a whole range of questions about who's responsible. When someone commits a theft in a hotel, is it the person who occupies the room? Is it the hotel manager? What is the cast of characters that enable strangers to move in and out of different rooms in hotels, sometimes for quite nefarious purposes? And I became more and more intrigued with the nature of the hotel as this kind of strange space where strangers can meet and form intimate relationships, however briefly, and how it can create situations where inequalities are really exposed. So someone can pretend to be rich in a hotel, but they might get found out by the hotel staff who have a rummage through their luggage, for instance, or especially if someone's trying to commit a fraud and get away with not paying for their room. Or it can be that romantic liaisons are taking place in in hotels, but are they all that they actually seem to be? And also, I'm just fascinated by crime and particularly the relationship between crime and discrimination. Who gets stereotyped as a criminal in the past, who's included and excluded at different moments historically? And so the hotel seemed a really good space to explore those themes because hotels themselves are often the first space that any visiting tourist encounters the country. And whether they're admitted with a warm welcome or whether they're excluded and turned away often tells us an awful lot about the mechanisms of society at the time. The Prejudices that people hold against how people look, how they act, and also the kind of commercial role in determining prejudice within society. I think we often think of systems of prejudice and discrimination happening in kind of legal contexts or in other spaces. But actually, I think that hotels have been one of the most powerful places to determine systems of exclusion in the past. So, yeah, it emerged out of a whole range of different research questions and my own personal fascination with crime.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And a whole bunch of the things you just talked about in that introduction come up really immediately in the very beginning of the book. And of course, in terms of time period, the subtitle says since 1918. So we're sort of starting off in the interwar period. And right away there's these questions in the book about these concerns around kind of who has status and what kind of status. Right. Who is actually rich, who is a legitimate guest, what's going on here? And you talk about this in the book, in the period being discussed or being described as hotel fraud. So what was this at that moment and why was this a time where that seemed to be such a concern?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Well, absolutely. The First World War is a really important moment of societal upheaval. It's not seen, as we know, as a particularly good war in the end, in terms of the way in which it was fought and the catastrophic loss of life that entailed. And the kind of the narrative of extremely wealthy and elite individuals determining the deaths en masse of a large number of working class young men in the trenches and through trench warfare as a system, and subsequent to the First World War as well, there are important developments like women gained the partial right to vote in 1918, and I say partial. Women over the age of 30 with a university education who have some property, gained the right to vote in 1918. It's only in 1928 that women are gaining the right to vote on the same set of criteria as men over the age of 21. A lot of working class young men actually gained the right to vote in 1918, as well as a thanks for their war service. And it's also a huge period of economic downturn. We often think of 1929, the Wall street crash, as this really global upheaval in terms of the economy. But actually in Britain, there's a very sharp economic downturn immediately after the First World War, and it's losing its stock status slowly but surely as a major trader in the world. So America and Japan are becoming foremost traders of some key materials in the. In the war's aftermath too. So all of these things, all of these major shifts in gender and the economy and in society are starting to make people think about the old system of the aristocrat, aristocrats being in charge, and the legitimacy of that, who has power and is it justified? And there are a lot more people who now have a kind of political power, but they still feel very disenfranchised because of their economic situation and because of the high levels of unemployment. Hotel fraud emerges in this landscape. People going to hotels, perhaps impersonating someone of a higher rank or status, oftentimes wearing military uniform, because there's a wide avail availability of military uniforms. And a lot of people have a way of claiming military service in this period and then not paying the bill subsequently, or even just going and stealing from hotels in other ways. And it's because suddenly there's this question mark of whether you can judge someone on appearance to be innately of a higher status or not, or whether actually appearances are very deceptive. And that's a really interesting moment to start this book because hotels kind of rely for their commercial success on a brand of exclusivity, especially the sort of wealthier, more upper class hotels. Their whole image is built around them being very exclusive luxury resorts that won't admit certain people. But hotel frauds bring the kind of the con artist, the fraudster, sometimes even the murderer into close proximity with your average guest. And again, it kind of sets the scene for all of the more dangerous and illicit activities that hotel spaces can in fact foster.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So speaking of potentially illicit activities that hotel spaces can foster, you also talk about hotel divorces in this period. What's that?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yes, so the hotel divorce emerges out of changes to the divorce law in, in this era, getting a divorce is incredibly expensive and difficult throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century. And your name, if you are involved in a divorce case, appears all over the newspapers as well. So there's a great deal of shame and stigma attached to getting a divorce. But the 1923 Divorce act introduces the idea that if one or other party is found to have committed adultery, that will actually seal the deal on getting a divorce in a relatively quick space of time. And hotels become the space to facilitate what are called hotel divorces, where one part of this unhappy couple will go to a hotel, perform an act of adultery. So making certain noises in a hotel room that can then be overheard by the hotel staff, or even having staff come across them and another partner in the hotel bedroom, supposedly by chance, or signing in on the hotel register as sort of Mr. And Mrs. Smith at a given moment and then producing that evidence in court and saying, yep, they committed adultery and therefore a divorce should take place. But what happens is that sometimes this evidence is actually fabricated. It even becomes a little bit of a pocket industry to help someone get a divorce in a hotel by being the. The kind of the lady involved. And it causes a real problem for hotel man managers because increasingly their staff are being called to give testimony in hotel divorce cases in court. And it actually disper besmirches the reputations of the hotels themselves, who are seen as places where. Which are seen as places of illicit adulterous affairs, which is not the kind of thing that you really want your. Your hotel to have a reputation for. But it becomes this kind of cottage industry to enable people to actually get out of very unhappy marriages.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect where I think some of the things you describe in the book kind of don't sound like that long ago. And then some things really do like that sort of cottage industry. So definitely interesting to hear about that aspect. But I think I want to pick up on a thread now that you mentioned briefly earlier in terms of tourists and their kind of first encounters with a culture often happening in hotels. And again, if we're in this sort of interwar period, this is often a time when we start to really think about American tourists. Tourists turning up. Obviously they were less damaged economically by World War I than a lot of other countries in Europe. So what's happening with hotels on that front? You discuss in the book that it's not just that tourists are turning up at hotels, hotels really want them to turn up. Right. There's even some element of competition. Is that right?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a real kind of attempt to woo American tourists. As I mentioned before, the American economy is really coming into its ascendancy after the First World War and American tourists have money to spend. But hotels actually kind of change their whole branding and marketing of themselves to fulfill a particular idea of Britishness that's seen as more appealing and attractive to American tourists. So they start to evoke within their spaces a kind of Dickensian, ye olde worldy England. But through their decoration, through hosting like Tudor banquets in the middle of a very modern London hotel at times, through having other things in their architecture that kind of reflect older English values. So knights and maidens and just a kind of what I call a sort of Downton Abbey esque version of Britain is the one that's marketed to American tourists, particularly in the larger hotels, but even in some smaller hotels as well, they're trying to imitate a stately home version of Britain. And I suggest that this actually entrenches some of the inequalities I talk about within these institutions because they're very keen on putting forth an idea of service that's quite servile, where you're going to be waited on hand and foot. There's going to be a particular hierarchy of butlers and valets within the hotel space, space. And it's not a modern version of England that's being put forward as a result. And that lasts a really, really long time, like well past the Second World War into the late 20th century. And even to some extent, I would say hotels today still retain this idea of oldie England when they're marketing to a global tourist population. And it stopped Britain from being seen as this very modernizing society, this quite cosmopolitan society with all of the different problems and challenges that those things entail. And it also breeds a culture of whiteness around the hotel as well, because there's a version of the past that's being presented within its spaces that's really quite exclusionary to people of color and relegates those members of staff into relatively marginalized positions and roles in the hotel. Again to find foster this idea of a very sort of old fashioned white Anglo centric society. So the advent of the American tourist has a huge knock on effect for the way that hotels present the versions of Britishness that they want to sell in their spaces.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And as you mentioned, this is a pretty big change and it's not just happening sort of with one hotel. So it's noticed at the time, right, that like, oh, hang on a second, hotels are changing, we're getting more American tourists. Something's going on. And you discuss obviously a number of details and examples in the book, but maybe we could focus on the Hilton Hotel for a moment and discuss why that chain in particular turning up in London was seen to be controversial.

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Sure. So the Hilton Hotel arrives in London during the 1960s as a really controversial development. First of all, for the London skyline, the Hilton Hotel at that time is far taller than many other buildings and actually overshadows St. Paul's Cathedral. And even more scandalously, it seems that tourists staying in the Hilton will be able to look into the garden of Buckingham palace from the uppermost floors. And the newspapers are in uproar because they're saying all these American tourists are going to be able to spy on the Queen and see what she's doing. In her garden. And there's this idea that the garden surrounding Buckingham palace, there's like a new set of trees grown up to try and shield the Queen from the prying eyes of all of these. These terrible tourists who are just going to be watching her now. And it's seen as a kind of direct affront to Britain's power, it's waning power on the global stage, that this big American wealthy hotel is going to kind of land and change the skyline of London, which has previously been not only the capital of. Of England, but actually the capital of the British Empire as well. And it's also. It's really interesting because Conrad Hilton is given some briefing notes where he to open the hotel and he's very sternly instructed to not make any jokes whatsoever about the royal family or about England's relative prosperity in relation to America or. And to actually to praise the kind of historic greats of England. So mention Chaucer, for instance, and he's clearly really conscious and aware and so are his advisors, that the presence of a new Hilton hotel chain in Britain actually is quite an affront to British national values and Britain's idea of its own wealth and success in the global tourist sector.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing where it seems like a very straightforward, oh, a new hotel is opening. And actually. Right. It kind of touches off all of these different aspects, which is very interesting to see sort of how they're tied together in this moment. And of course, what we've been discussing so far is kind of picking up on what I think we both said in the introduction in terms of things are happening in hotels that are, as you've been describing, kind of bringing together a lot of ideas that maybe we wouldn't associate with hotels. Like hotels would just kind of be quiet, seemingly neutral. And actually there's all these things going on. There are, of course, when we're moving from 1918 to the present, also moments where the hotel is part of the news. Obviously, the Hilton opening is part of it. In that particular instance, there's also the IRA attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that was in a hotel. So the hotel is part of the news there, but probably not what we usually think. Think about as the primary thing there. And yet you discuss this in the book, that the fact it's in a hotel is significant in some way, Right?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah, absolutely. So the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, I mean, this is a horrible, horrible, horrific occurrence perpetrated by members of the Irish Republican army, the ira. And a bomb is planted, several. In a room several floors up from the room in which Margaret Thatcher is staying. And it's detonated during the Conservative Party conference that year. And it kills many, kills members of her, her Cabinet and severely wounds sometimes their wives and people who are, who are just working there as well. And it's, it's this devastating incident. But the hotel, which is Brighton's Grand Hotel, kind of, it's built in the Victorian period, and it transpires that because of the very robust architecture of the Victorian hotel, the bomb could have actually caused worse damage than it really did. And it could have been even more catastrophic than it actually was. And so in the aftermath of this incident, reconstructing the Grand Hotel becomes a symbolic event in which Margaret Thatcher's owner, espousal of Victorian values as a social good, is entwined with the Victorian strength and robustness of the hotel itself. So her success becomes kind of tied to the hotel's re. Emergence like a phoenix from the ashes of this incident. And she personally reopens the hotel when it does reopen after the big refurbishment. And it also provides an opportunity for her to be seen in a slightly different way by members of the public, too, in the aftermath of the bomb. Journalists take pictures of her bedroom and her bathroom. The bathroom was devastated by the bomb. There's glass everywhere. It's very kind of lucky that she wasn't in it at the time, but her personal effects are still there and it shows her as a sort of a vulnerable person who was just staying there, about to go to sleep with her husband Dennis. And even though actually she was up writing a speech at that time, she wasn't about to go to speeches, about to go to sleep, as the papers claim. There's this idea that she was just about to go to sleep when this happened. And she herself speaks very movingly afterwards of often keeping a light on, because she remembers the light that stayed on in the darkness in the hotel and the hope that that gave her that she would survive this incident and having to put on a brave face and very kind of calmly lead her team out of the hotel, out of the rubble, to where there was help waiting. And so it kind of bolsters her reputation. She's often seen as the Iron lady, and in many respects the Grand Hotel becomes the Iron Hotel. But it also gives her a little bit more vulnerability. It humanizes her for the watching public, too. So it's really interesting how the hotel becomes part of her overall legacy as a symbol of her strength and courage in that incident.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. It's definitely interesting to think about those aspects of it that aren't usually where kind of that particular story tends to focus on. But thinking about Thatcher for a moment as a woman, obviously there's gendered elements of the role of women in the workforce and hotel staff and things like that. We've talked a little bit about kind of the whiteness that hotels, some hotels, were sort of promoting as part of this advertising campaign. Can we talk about sort of the politics around gender in hotels?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah. So I was kind of shocked in my research at how enduring the politics of gender in hotels are, particularly in relation to the inability of women to obtain managerial positions or work as head chefs in hotels well into the late 20th and even early 21st century, because hotel training schemes actively exclude women from those appointments and hotel and those opportunities. The Westminster Training School, which is one of the chief hotel training schools that's founded in London during the interwar period period, refuses to build toilets for women to actually attend, so that they can't have the same training as men. And whereas women who want to train for hotel work are given sort of domestic roles, so cleaning, cooking in sort of BnB level hotels, laundry, sewing, care of children. Even in hotels, men are taught the different types of wine, they're taught to speak many languages, they're taught about management, politics and all sorts of key skills that you would need to actually go up in the world of hotels. And it's really not until the 1980s and 1990s that you get some high profile women running hotels. It was interesting as well, because the Scottish Hotels School that's founded after the Second World War is much more democratic and egalitarian where training women is concerned. It takes the English hotel training schools a lot longer to catch up in training women for senior roles. And women also become part of the sexual allure of the hotel. Particularly attractive young women are often placed in positions front of house as waitresses, sometimes as chambermaids, very dangerously, as part of the kind of the promise of hotels as a place of escape and possibly romance or something more. And particularly women put in marginal positions like doing chambermaid work, often find themselves in a very vulnerable situation where they are in a bedroom in a chambermaid's uniform, which has been very much fetishized in popular culture ever since, often with male guests left alone to kind of change bedding. And very sadly, there are a number of incidences that I discuss in the book where women have found themselves prey for sexual assaults or sexual advances by Male guests who find themselves in a position of power over these women in these spaces that have a bed right there.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

You also talk in the book not just about the challenges faced by female workers, but also female guests and concerns around privacy, around agency, around safety. Can we discuss those aspects?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yes. So female guests as well, are sometimes uniquely vulnerable within the hotel space. So one of the chapters in the book is actually about murders that take place within hotels. And I start off telling the story of Agatha Christie, who of course was not murdered, but was the doyen of crime fiction. And she very famously disappeared for seven days in the mid-1920s as a result of the breakdown of her marriage. And she disappears to the Harrogate Hotel, but the communication is lost that she's gone to a hotel and there's a big who and cry put out to find the missing Agatha for Christy. And it's actually assumed that her husband might well have murdered her because she's disappeared. And when she's found in a hotel as a single woman kind of enjoying the hotel life, dancing, shopping, taking a break, the press absolutely vilify her for this. And this becomes a kind of running pattern in other cases where female guests, several of whom, as I record in the book, I've got a few case studies of women who were in fact murdered in hotels, but they're treated almost as having brought it upon them themselves, because they are independent women living alone or staying alone in hotel spaces, just trying to make their way in the world, sometimes using the hotel space for companionship, for being looked after either in old age or for. Actually, one of the victims was a sex worker, and she used hotel spaces to kind of conduct her business relatively safely. Also, she fought very sadly, and it turned out that actually she invited murderer into her bed. And there's this expectation that in a hotel, everyone will watch out for each other, that you are somehow more safe in that environment, and that you also have an element of privacy and independence because you are a customer, you are a guest. But for women particularly, that's often not true. And whether it's hotel staff snooping into your belongings or whether it's people viewing you as a vulnerable woman in that space, you're often at a great deal of danger. And there have been a few recent cases in the news which have happened since I've written this book, where hotels have actually given the key cards of people's rooms to strangers. And this happened quite recently, and a woman suddenly found a man entering her room overnight. And I think that that's. That's Part of the relationship of women to hotels that needs very carefully scrutinizing. I know that I've had experiences staying in hotels where sometimes my room number is passed to me, and sometimes people just say what my room number is, and I'm in a public space there. And I think, hang on a minute. That's a little bit scary.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. That was, unfortunately, one part of the book that felt very similar to the present, regardless of what time period any of the individual case studies you looked at were in. But not, I suppose, everything is doom and gloom. I suppose if we think about, for example, queer guests, you discuss a number of challenges that I think we should discuss for those guests in hotel spaces, but maybe also some possibilities as well.

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah, absolutely. And there was a review of my book that said it was a kind of bleak and unendingly miserable view of hotels, and that's not the case. Actually. A great deal of important activism happens within hotels, which is where the protest part of the title comes in. And for LGBTQ guests, hotels become spaces in which they are able to actually host discos and bring their community together. Sometimes it backfires. People. People spy on them and report them to the police for intimate moments on the dance floor. They get raided. But at the same time, hotels, more often than not, actually start to advertise explicitly for same sex couples to stay there and create facilities because they recognize the value of what's so called the pink pound in the late 20th century and the fact that there is a real market for queer guests to enjoy relationships and romantic moments, even weddings, ultimately, in hotels, and to celebrate their love together. And hotels are really critical because it brings queer guests together who might never have previously found a space where they could celebrate their sexuality or find future life partners and find love and romance or even just to dance and be themselves without scrutiny or stigma. So I think that hotels play such an important role in different civil rights movements as they emerge during the 20th century. And the LGBTQ movement is one of those.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Another one that you talk about is the erosion of the color bar, which is, of course, a big aspect of activism and protests. So can we discuss hotels there?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was really shocked because I was tracing color bar incidents at hotels, and I actually found one right in the 1980s in Scotland. And you think of color bar incidents in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but actually this went on well throughout the later 20th century, where hotels would exclude guests on the basis of color and ethnicity, and often increasingly after the. The discrimination of the race relations acts that outlawed discrimination. People of color who felt that hotels had excluded them on these grounds were able to seek legal redress for the behavior of hotels against them, not always successfully. Oftentimes hotel managers would protest that they, they'd never intended to. To do this, they'd been misunderstood or whatever. But actually, so many of these incidents began to make it into the newspapers that a wider national conversation about discrimination on the grounds of race and ethnicity was had. And going backwards in time, what I found fascinating was that these conversations are being had in the 1920s and 1930s. Conversations about racism and the damage it's doing to society, and particularly the way that hotels can act as vehicles for equality and fostering a more cosmopolitan society, are happening well before the Second World War War. And there's a really kind of fierce debate in pages of hotel newspapers about the ethics and morals of excluding people on the basis of their race. And I think that even very high profile individuals, so Jomo Kenyatta actually writes, you know, later the president of Kenya actually writes into these magazines to talk about an experience that he's had in a London hotel being discriminated against. So do other high profile individuals, film actors, high profile sports people. And the more and more that these incidents come to national press attention, the more they become distasteful to the wider British public and the more robust those acts against discrimination become the legal framework to counter discrimination becomes. So I think that hotels play a really critical role in helping to eliminate racism, although obviously that goal has yet to be achieved, very sadly.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely still ongoing. The third civil rights sort of area of activism and protest that I'd like to discuss with relation to hotels is the section of the book where you talk about disability activism and the ways in which hotels were involved in that, and in some senses, even sites of innovation too.

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Yeah. So people with disabilities are incredibly inspirational activists around hotel accessibility in this period. They are incredibly frustrated at continually finding that hotels don't have simple things like ramps or ground floor access or space for a wheelchair to pass through. They don't have hearing devices. The people like hearing loops so that people can activate that and find their way around the hotel more easily. They don't support people with sight impairments. And their reaction to this is to actually have a very vibrant discussion of exclusions in hotels and the fact that it's preventing this whole section of society from enjoying holidays within disability magazines. And then they fundraise to create accessible hotels and they actually create an entire new sector, a new form of accessible architecture to facilitate disabled holidays. And they're so successful that it pressures hotels for people without disabilities to create increasing adaptations to the extent that it really ends up, ironically, damaging the sector for disability hotels, which increasingly kind of loses funding. The more regular hotels, for want of a better phrase, increase their. Their adaptations. But the fight to have holidays, have leisure, have rest, becomes this really pivotal moment for people with disabilities to assert their humanity, their rights, the fact that they are also workers, that they are people who enjoy romantic relationships that should be enjoyed in leisure spaces as. As well, as well. And again, it's hotels that really are the space in which all of these debates are had.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So obviously we're not covering the book in the same amount of detail as you've written it. I cannot keep you here for 16 hours, but I think we've sort of a sense of a number of the topics you've engaged with, Certainly sex crime and protest in the subtitle of the book. So how do you think all of this history might influence how readers, listeners think about British hotels today?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

One of my key concerns coming into this book was that I was aware of a report in 2019 by the Human rights group Walk Free that identified hotels as vehicles for modern slavery. Hundreds of thousands of people are trafficked into hotels to this day because they retain occupational systems that reinforce menial forms of labor, where some people are hidden from view in the jobs that they perform, where people are still quite servile in the sector in certain roles. And I would wish for those who have read my book to ask questions, to look critically at hotels when they enter them. Who is performing what role and why do you think that is? To what extent do you think you are being sold a particular idea of service that might make you feel a little bit more uncomfortable, hopefully, having read my book. And we should demand better of our hotels because they are bastions of national identity. They are important spaces where diplomatic events happen, where visiting dignity are hosted, where people from all over the world come to visit us for leisure and tourism. And so we really want our hotels to reflect the best of us. And I still don't see that happening at a large number of hotels. In fact, when I approached a few hotels about some of the findings of my research and whether they'd like to have a conversation with me about equality in hotels, I was unanimously rebuffed. And I think that kind of told me its own story. So I would just say ask questions and look at who's performing what job in the hotels where you stay.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, definitely relevant, I think, to Kind of anyone who's ever engaged with the hotel, which is rather a lot of people. So definitely important to have these conversations and of course, facilitated by the fact the book is out in the world for anyone to go read. What, what therefore are you working on now?

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Oh, I have done the stereotypical thing of signing up to an awful lot of projects simultaneously. I'm returning to my work on Burglary because I was asked to write a book about the fictional gentleman burglar Raffles and his many incarnations in fiction and film and theater and radio during the 20th century. Raffles always represents a kind of pleasure culture surrounding crime and criminals where he's a very sexy, sexy gentleman burglar who pilfers from the rich. And I'm interested in what that tells us about society. But then there is actually a story from this book, the hotel's book, that I want to develop into a book on its own, which is the 1926 assault of a number of hotel maids by a high profile Canadian businessman that was subsequently covered up by a number of high profile British and Irish politicians and transatlantically. And I think that actually that story deserves telling in its own right. And I want to do more research on the women whose lives were impacted by being victimized by this businessman because that has. That story hasn't been told, so that's, that's kind of where I'm going next.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, those projects both sound very interesting, so best of luck with them. And of course, while you're pursuing those investigations, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Secret Life of the Hotel Sex, Crime and Protest in British guest houses since 1918, published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Eloise, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor Eloise Moss]

Thank you, Miranda.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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