Along the Ho Chi Minh trail in West Ealing

The Drayton Court Hotel, The Avenue, West Ealing (below), built in 1894, a nice example of Brictorian Britain.

And a story I heard many years ago that was worth checking out online. So I did. Apparently, the founder of modern Vietnam, communist leader Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), worked in the kitchens of the Drayton Court Hotel. He wrote a ten-volume autobiography in which he claims to have worked at the 'Hotel Drayton Coc' on 'Di Avenue' in 'Oet Ilinh' in 1913-14, according to American Vietnam expert Lady Borton.

 Not a 'lady' in the sense of British aristocracy, rather an American given name, Lady Borton is a Quaker, and worked charitatively in Vietnam during the war - and stayed on. She tracked down the location of this popular West Ealing watering hole as being a part of Nguyen Sinh Cung (his birth name)'s early years. Full story here.

Today, the communist party he founded (ruthlessly having any opponents to his hierarchical, top-down leadership murdered) still rules Vietnam; the fallen South Vietnamese capital of Saigon bears the name of Ho Chi Minh City. In Poland, the word saigon means 'a confused mess (think fall of Saigon, 1975), while 'saigonki' are spring rolls, a staple of Viet-Pol cooking in Vietnamese restaurants across the land.

Below: according to the autobiography, Ho Chi Minh lived in a small room at the top of the hotel overlooking the beer garden, so either the one to the right of the fire escape or somewhere along that corridor. Echoes of Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel.

Sunday lunchtime and the pub (and its garden) were full, many families (including Polish ones) here with small children - a good thing, pub-going integrates immigrants into British society. And, as the story of Ho Chi Minh suggests, immigration is not a new phenomenon in West Ealing.

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