Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (24 page)

The butler wore a dark suit. In the evenings, when the family and their friends changed into tails he did so too. Though this made him look from a distance like someone from ‘upstairs’, the difference would have been obvious to anyone who knew the customs of this world. He wore a black bow tie in the evenings while the family and their friends wore white. He supervised the service at mealtimes, and poured the wine unless there was a wine butler to do so.

He did not have charge of the valets, who answered direct to the family member for whom they worked, but he was in charge of other indoor male servants. In an average-sized household, he was, first and foremost, responsible for the wine cellar and other drinks. He traditionally kept the key to the cellar, and thus according to popular perception was often drunk. Similarly he was charged with responsibility for the plate, which would be kept in a safe or a strong room. This would usually be sited next to his pantry and reachable only through the room in which he slept, so that he could protect it.

In John Galsworthy’s short story about the Forsyte family, ‘Revolt at Roger’s’, can be seen the paradoxical difficulty that these two responsibilities could create as Smith, the family butler, comes to grief: ‘When the house of Roger Forsyte was burgled in the autumn of 1870, Smith was drunk and made no serious attempt to rebut the accusation. To be drunk without anyone knowing is a tort; to be discovered drunk, a misdemeanour; to be drunk when burglary is committed under one’s nose, a crime. This, at least, was Roger’s view, and he acted on it by immediate dismissal. His spoons had gone and Smith must go too.’ The butler was also responsible for opening the door to visitors, and his domain, on the ground floor or in a basement, would often have a window commanding a view of the drive so that approaching vehicles could be seen and recognized in time for him to welcome their occupants and announce the visitors on their arrival.

No other figure among the servants was so familiar, so potent or so powerful as the butler. He is also one of the great stock characters of English fiction. The notion that the chief male servant in a household has a respectable status of his own – that he is a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, and displays qualities of wisdom, discretion, courage, stoicism or generosity – is a very English concept. Other servant figures in literature, both in Britain and elsewhere, have traditionally been characterized by craftiness, laziness, venality and an inclination to join in any mischief that is going on, such as helping a young lady to elope. They appear this way in Shakespeare, and – to take other well-known examples – in Mozart’s operas and Molière’s plays. They are comic creations, and their appearance is normally the cue for some buffoonery or other. They are a world removed from the figure of Jeeves or of Bunter, the manservant of Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novels. These men too appear for the purpose of amusing the reader, but it is their droll acceptance of the absurdity of their employers that provides the humour, or the manner in which they rescue them from the scrapes that their impulsiveness gets them into. They themselves command the respect of the reader.

Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel
The Remains of the Day
, muses on why this is so:

Butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are incapable of emotional restraint, which only the English race is capable of. [They] cannot control themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour. For this reason when you think of a great butler he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman.

There is no question that this stoical, unflappable nature was and is the quality most admired in the successful butler. He was required to be present at all manner of important, or awkward, or embarrassing moments in the family’s life, and he must not visibly react. He must be discreet and not gossip about what he had seen or heard. He must be able to deal with any number of unexpected situations – fire and flood, attempted burglary, quarrels among the other servants, deaths or illnesses, affairs between guests or family members. He often owed his position to the trust he had earned from the family, and a good butler was greatly valued. Because he had reached the top of his profession, he was not usually looking for further career opportunities, and was more likely to remain with his employers until retirement.

Lady Cynthia Asquith, who came from a servant-owning background, remarked that one thing even good butlers could not always control was their reaction to the conversation of the dinner guests. She said: ‘Few butlers, however imposing their mien and deportment, were above being visibly, at times audibly, amused by dining-room jokes or mishaps.’

The cartoonist H. M. Bateman, one of England’s greatest lampooners of the twentieth-century middle class, produced a drawing called ‘The maid who was but human’. The young woman is serving potatoes while one of the guests tells an amusing story. The others laugh, but when the maid also bursts out laughing, the guests all look up in horror and then carry on with their meal in embarrassed silence. A perfect butler, or any other servant, would not be guilty of such a gaffe, no matter what the temptation, but who could blame them if this was not always possible?

While Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth has all the characteristics of the dotty aristocrat that readers enjoy and expect, P. G. Wodehouse’s most famous creation, Jeeves, shares the sense of unflappability seen in the butlers of numerous country-house murder novels – an ability to remain calm when all around them guests and family members are being found dead in suspicious circumstances. Most people have never met a real butler, and it is possible that Wodehouse himself was not familiar with the breed, but he wrote of them in a manner already established by the likes of Oscar Wilde and J. M. Barrie, and the stereotype of a butler thus created is one that the British, and the rest of the world, have taken to their hearts. It is surely an image on which real members of this honourable profession still model themselves.

Yet the fictional manservants of Wodehouse and Barrie and Agatha Christie occasionally had their counterparts in reality. Roger Childs was butler, for two decades or so from just after the First World War, to John Christie (no relation of the authoress). Christie, scion of a large landowning family, was the owner of Glyndebourne in Sussex, in the grounds of which he built the famous opera house. Childs entered Christie’s employ as a manservant when the latter was a bachelor master teaching mathematics at Eton, and remained with him until his death in 1940. The distinction between a valet and a butler was sometimes minimal, and Childs would have graduated to the latter, more senior, post when his master moved to a larger house.

Childs was the epitome of the unflappable butler. When John Christie was to read a lesson in the parish church one Sunday and could not find the place, Childs – who was in a pew nearby – prompted him in a stage whisper from the congregation, but said afterwards: ‘I think, sir, it would be better if
I
read the lessons in future.’ And so he did. He regarded his employer’s marriage in 1931 as a ‘lapse’, yet remained in his service. In fact, Christie asked him to be best man at the wedding and to stand godfather to his eldest son. Childs’ employer was a man of marked eccentricities, and gestures of this sort therefore did not seem out of place in him. It would have been unthinkable, however, for most families’ butlers to be given such privileges. In his spare time Childs ran a local scout troop (which collected the money at early Glyndebourne recitals) and, delightfully, took part in one of the operas in a non-singing minor role. During the 1935 season he was paid fifteen guineas – the going rate for an
artiste
– to appear as the ‘Dumb Servant’ in the production of
The Abduction from the Seraglio
, and brought the house down with a hilarious performance. One suspects that, had he been required to take one of the leads and sing an aria, he would have done so with similar aplomb. Clearly able to turn his hand to anything, he was greatly missed by Christie when he died. His employer had him buried beneath a handsome stone, inscribed in Latin, in the nearby church at Ringmer.

The butler continues to be a major character in fiction and in films. Arguably the most famous English screen butler of all is one who is virtually unknown in Britain itself or in the United States. ‘James’ is one of only two characters in an eighteen-minute comedy film called
Dinner for One
, made in 1963. This short piece is perennially popular in Scandinavia and throughout the German-speaking countries. In Germany itself it is watched by up to half the population every New Year’s Eve – indeed it is as much a part of the celebrations as singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ would be in Britain. The story deals with an elderly lady who annually dines with her oldest friends. All of them have long-since died, but she maintains the fiction that they are present at her table, and toasts are poured for them to drink. Her butler (magnificently played by the comedian Freddie Frinton) pretends to be each of them in turn, filling – and emptying – their glasses. He becomes more and more inebriate, but manages to serve impeccably.

The notion of the butler as a man who can do anything is seen to even greater effect in J. M. Barrie’s play
The Admirable Crichton
, which was first staged in 1902 – at the height of the Edwardian ‘golden age’. Its central character is the usual model of rectitude – a butler who knows his place and ensures that the other servants keep to theirs. When his master Lord Loam institutes the well-meant practice of inviting the entire servants’ hall to tea once a month, during which they are waited on by the family, the occasion is hated in equal measure by the servants and their betters – not least by Crichton who is shown to be the wisest character in the play.

In the film version there is an exchange about this that is revealing. Encouraged by the loosening of hierarchical bonds within the household, the page boy, on hearing that the servants are to be invited upstairs, says: ‘I reckon it’ll be all friends together, eh, Crichton?’ He is told by the butler, who is played by Kenneth More: ‘You might, one day if you work hard, reach a position in which you may call me “
Mister
Crichton”.’ In fact, the boy is at once dismissed from his post, for having taken the liberty of addressing the head of the servants’ hall with such familiarity. This would have happened in any genuine Edwardian household, as well as in any office or other place of work.

Both play and film go on to show that, when the family is shipwrecked while cruising on their yacht, it is the butler’s initiative, and not the ‘natural leadership’ of the aristocracy, that saves the situation. Yet when at the end they are rescued from the island after two years, masters and servants all resume their former places as if nothing has happened, despite having lived on equal terms and learned a great deal about each other in the meantime. A character they encounter once back at home, the formidable Lady Brocklehurst, quizzes the servants to ensure that the proprieties were upheld. She is reassured on being told that throughout their exile the domestics took their meals separately from the family. The play is very funny, but it makes the point that there must be such a hierarchy if an ordered way of life is to be maintained.

It is sometimes remarked that employers and their servants lived only feet apart but had little to do with each other. This is true, but perhaps not so unnatural or out of the ordinary as we might imagine. How many people today live only feet from their next-door neighbours yet know nothing about them? Servants inhabited a parallel universe. Their lives were governed by a mysterious timetable of which most family members remained in ignorance, carrying out tasks that were largely unseen and overlooked. Their names, if they were maids or footmen, might well not even be the ones they’d been christened with. The accepted convention among both employers and servants was that each side should leave the other alone. Servants were there to be busy, and any talking to them would only be wasting their time and getting them into trouble. Besides, the inhabitants upstairs did not want any further intimacy with those who already knew so much about them, while the servants’ own lives remained mysterious to their employers. It would make for a very unequal relationship.

Not every butler was trained to the life of a servant, and it would be wrong to assume that it was necessary to have spent a lifetime learning the duties and preparing for the role. Though the responsibilities could be considerable, the tasks were not especially complicated, and a matter of days or weeks would be enough to familiarize a man with what was required of him. Anyone with the appropriate manner – a certain natural presence, an authoritative voice, an undemonstrative nature and the ability to remain calm in the midst of domestic crises – could make an effective butler. In the first series of
Downton Abbey
, one of the most delightful moments is provided when it is revealed that Carson, who surely was intended by nature to be a manservant in a great household, has at an earlier stage in life been one of a pair of stage comedians in the music halls, called ‘The Cheerful Charlies’. In fact a stage career, though certainly not seen as respectable, would have been invaluable training, for it would have required similar qualities of confidence, timing and voice projection. Such is Carson’s imperturbability that he is able to survive this public exposure with his dignity intact – a sure sign that he is made of the right stuff!

A butler was less likely to find his way into the affections of family members than other servants, such as the nurserymaid or the cook (doubtless generations of children learned to obtain food between meals by wheedling from the latter). Sometimes, however, he could become a pronounced influence on members of his master’s household. Henry Moat was butler at Renishaw, ancestral home of the Sitwell family. The children who grew up there in the last years of the Victorian era – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell – all went on to become influential figures in the arts. The children had a distant relationship with their parents, but Osbert found an ally and a mentor in Moat. A man of intelligence and wide reading, he possessed a general knowledge that enabled him to answer many of the boy’s questions and to channel his curiosity in profitable directions. When in later life Osbert appeared in
Who’s Who
, he described his education as having been obtained ‘during holidays from Eton’. Moat, who was by that time living in retirement, took this statement as a compliment, writing to his charge that: