Robert Fleming, born to a Devon shoemaker in 1820, worked his way up from domestic service to become valet for the Marquis of Anglesey at Uxbridge House on Old Burlington Street. By 1851, the year of London’s Great Exhibition drew six million visitors in need of lodging, Fleming and his wife Mary had purchased a townhouse at 10 Half Moon Street and opened it as a hotel. Business grew steadily enough that the couple expanded into neighboring townhouses over the following decades, some dating to 1731 and originally built to house young aristocratic bachelors.
Among early guests was George Hudson, the so-called Railway King, a member of Parliament who took refuge at Flemings between 1855 and 1857 after being exposed for falsifying railway share prices, protected from arrest only by his parliamentary seat. Oscar Wilde frequented the hotel’s tavern, and Agatha Christie is widely believed to have drawn on Flemings, along with Brown’s Hotel, for the fictional setting of her novel At Bertram’s Hotel.