This was not the most convenient of solutions however. Taking no further chances, it was decreed that in future any table of thirteen would be joined by a member of staff as a fourteenth guest, and for the next twenty-five years a waiter would duly be roped in as necessity dictated. Joel’s death made a particular impression on his dinner guests, and by extension the management of The Savoy. Back home in Johannesburg a few weeks later, Joel was shot dead. Joel scoffed at the suggestion, and sportingly offered to allay his guests’ fears by leaving the table first. Over the meal there was some discussion about the various superstitions associated with unlucky number thirteen, including the one that the first person to get up from a table of thirteen would also be the first one to die. One or two guests had to cancel, with the result that only thirteen people finally gathered for dinner on that fateful evening. One evening in 1898, a wealthy South African named Woolf Joel hosted a small private dinner at The Savoy. His intended function was to act as the fourteenth guest in the private dining rooms when thirteen guests were present, and his creation was directly related to the unfortunate demise of a Savoy client over quarter of a century earlier. The Savoy’s famous black cat, Kaspar, was carved in 1927 by the designer Basil Ionides, from one single block of plane.
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