Up and Down Stairs (45 page)

Like many younger or more junior-ranking servants, learning the ropes, he did most of his work ‘in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house. I didn’t go to the front where the family lived except for
the dining room, until I had worked at Croome Court for six months. When I did, the flowers in the reception rooms struck me first of all . . . I was awed by the general opulence – the silver candlesticks and inkstands on the writing desks, the tapestries on the walls and the thick rugs.’
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As was usual in the pre-war era, he learnt his trade by waiting on the senior members of staff: ‘most young servants moved to a different house after about a year or so to gain promotion and to experience how various houses were run.’ Mr. Ager worked in several, including St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, returning there in 1930 to become valet to the 2nd Lord St Levan.
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‘I travelled all around the world with him. Wherever he wanted to go, he just went. If it was cold when he returned to England, we’d pop off again. I made all the arrangements, bought the tickets and more or less made the world smooth for him and his party.’
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In 1933 he married and left to become butler to a Mr Dunkels, then to a Colonel Trotter in Berwickshire.

After serving in the army during the Second World War, he returned to work for the colonel, who died shortly afterwards. Mr Ager was then invited to St Michael’s Mount once more as butler to the 3rd Lord St Levan, who had succeeded his uncle: ‘I said I’d come back for three months, which turned into nearly thirty years.’

Cultural shifts during this period made their impact. In the 1920s, ‘when I was a footman, the senior staff stood very much on their dignity, and the rest of the staff were acutely aware of their status within the house. No one could help out anyone else. We didn’t help the kitchen people, however busy they were, and we certainly wouldn’t help a housemaid.’
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Two decades later, the pattern was very different. ‘After the war most people were unable to afford the same amount of staff. I saw great changes in service as our people’s life-styles became less grand. In my youth the butler was always available if the family needed him; otherwise, he merely supervised the staff. He had worked hard all his life, and he wasn’t going to continue if he could help it!’
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By the 1960s, his role had altered out of all recognition: ‘A butler in the old days would never have dreamed of doing as much day-today work as I did. He wouldn’t have cleaned the silver, laid the table
or seen to it that the reception rooms were orderly – those jobs belonged to the first footman. Nor did any of my staff wait on me as they would have done on a butler in the past.’
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He kept his standards high, and was very proud of the many staff he had trained, some of whom had gone on into royal service. He was careful to retain his classic butler’s uniform from the 1930s until his retirement: ‘a butler would wear a black evening tailcoat all day long. In the evening he changed from the gray trousers into a pair of black trousers with a fine silk line running down the side.’
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Although nannies and au pairs are familiar to us today, they cannot replace the sense of absolute safety produced by the English country-house nursery and the classic British nanny. This was very much the experience of the present Lord Crathorne, whose childhood was spent at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire in the 1940s and 1950s.
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He was looked after by Nanny Messenger, who was born in 1891 and came to work for his family in 1939, living at Crathorne Hall until her death in 1976.

During the 1940s and 1950s, she was one of only half a dozen indoor staff. When his parents had first moved into the house, there was also a butler, Mr Jeffreys, a cook, Mrs Davidson, a housekeeper and an assistant cook. ‘The whole family had tea in her room every day for thirty-six years. I have tremendously warm memories of her; she was a perfectly wonderful lady who epitomised all the best things about the English nanny. After my mother died in 1969, she really became the core of family life.’
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Nursery tea, with Nanny and the children, became such an institution that every guest in the house would be expected. As Lord Crathorne’s father was a government minister, over the years this included Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, and Ted Heath. Later there were university friends like John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor. ‘It was always at four o’clock, and Cook prepared cakes, while Nanny made very delicate strawberry jam sandwiches. She heard all sorts of interesting and personal things at the tea table, but never repeated a word, never gossiped about it.’
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When asked whether his nanny was ever a rival to his mother in his affections, he replied:

No, not at all, she would always make it clear that my mother was the most important person in our lives. I remember my mother remarking how, during the war years, Nanny would pack away the clothes we had grown out of, so that they would be there for our children, such was her confidence that the world would go on as before. Actually, Nanny made a lot of our clothes, she was endlessly knitting. I can remember her asking my mother how she liked buttons fixed. She never ever got cross with David and me, but somehow discipline was enforced by the way she treated us; she led by example, I suppose.
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The daily routine

began with breakfast in the nursery, which was on the first floor, and part of the servants’ wing. There was a nursery, a small scullery, bedrooms for my brother and me, and one for Nanny beyond that. We had all our meals with Nanny in the nursery, although we might have lunch with our parents in the dining room if there were no other guests. Nanny would read to us, and spend time with us making things out of paper and pipe cleaners.

In the summer we would often walk down to the river with a picnic and play there. If we were playing outside she had a little horn she would blow to summon us back for meals, like the ones gamekeepers used at the end of a drive. She had a great love of nature and would explain it all to us, birds, trees and fields. It was also wartime and we couldn’t drive anywhere. We were, I think, the focus of her whole life and we couldn’t have been closer or happier. It was a very idyllic life. She really created a very idyllic world for us.
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After the death of the present Lord Crathorne’s father, the huge family home, built for an entirely Edwardian way of life, was turned into a comfortable hotel. Since the 1970s the present Lord Crathorne has lived in a much smaller modern house on the same estate. While nannies are a familiar feature in country houses – as they are still in many thousands of English families today – Miss Messenger belongs to the last era of the career nanny, who would expect to devote her whole working life to one family. It is the end of a long tradition that is centuries old.
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The forced retreats and adaptations of country-house service are amply illustrated by the career of another butler, this time from a
younger generation. He began service immediately after the war in a house with a full complement of staff that went through several phases of reduction. Micheal Kenneally, butler to the Sykes family at Sledmere for forty years, occupies a special place in Yorkshire country-house legend. He arrived from Ireland in 1952 to become pantry boy to landowner and baronet, Sir Richard Sykes. As one of Sir Richard’s sons, Christopher Simon Sykes, recalled, Sledmere ‘was still run on an Edwardian scale, with a house staff of at least 10, as well as nannies, governesses and chauffeurs.’
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A strict hierarchy was in place, ‘at the top of which was the butler, Cassidy (never Mr in those days), and Michael Kenneally at the bottom. He slept in a room in the attics. If a visiting servant came to stay who outranked him, the pantry boy had to move out on to a truckle bed in the corridor.’ As Mr Sykes later remarked: ‘Imagine anyone putting up with that now.’
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Kenneally became footman and then in 1959 butler. According to Mr Sykes, ‘He turned buttling into an art form. He dressed the part to perfection, black jacket and pinstripes for formal daywear; a white apron for cleaning the silver; and a black tailcoat for grand dinners. Those under him were drilled in the laying of an impeccable table.’
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Legendary for his pranks, Mr Kenneally once tried to serve dessert from a bicycle, dressing up as a maid and curtseying to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He was also described as liable to ‘overindulge in butler’s perks’ – unfinished bottles of wine. Mr Sykes says: ‘As children we spent all our time in the kitchen areas, more than in the front part of the house. Michael was like a friendly adult figure and our parents never objected to us spending our time there.’
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Inevitably, Mr Kenneally had to contend with the inevitable staff shrinkage, even though the household continued to be run on an ‘Edwardian scale’ until the death of Sir Richard Sykes in 1978. The house and estate were inherited by his son, Sir Tatton, who employed a smaller staff. Mr Kenneally had to run ‘a pared-down household in which he found himself as much janitor as butler’. In addition to his traditional duties, he found, like many modern butlers, that ‘he became clock winder, boiler man, electrician, and cellar man and dogkeeper. He could turn his hand to anything.’

Mr Kenneally died in 1999, only fifteen days after retiring. Christopher Simon Sykes, Sir Tatton’s brother, observes: ‘He was not replaced, partly because it would have been so difficult to replace Michael; it is today a much more mobile profession and the school-trained butler is a rather more mobile figure, unlikely to spend his whole career with one family.’
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Mr Kenneally was only one among many who defined life at Sledmere in the 1950s of Christopher Simon Sykes’s childhood, described in his book,
The Big House
(2005): ‘the person we were all most in awe of in the house was Dorothy, the housekeeper. [She was] short, with pebble-lens spectacles . . . a devout Catholic, with a strong character and a short temper, which meant she was absolutely not to be crossed’. Like all housekeepers from the seventeenth century onwards, ‘she knew every inch of the house like the back of her hand and woe betide anyone who moved anything without her permission.’

The centre of her world was the two pantries, tall rooms with tiled floors and huge china sinks, repositories for the brushes and dusters, mops, buckets and cleansers ‘with which her team of four or five ladies would arm themselves for their daily battle against dirt and dust.’ They started at dawn, so that the house awoke to the sound of the shutters being opened and the smell of fires being lit.
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Mr Sykes also recalls the chauffeur and valet Jack Clark, who had worked for his father since the late 1930s and returned to his post after wartime service. Clark ‘saw more of Papa than he did of his wife, Lilian, who ran the village post office’. ‘Jack’, as he was known, was ‘the living incarnation of Jeeves’, always dressed immaculately in a blue suit, plus his chauffeur’s hat. His first duties of the day were as valet, taking Sir Richard his breakfast, running his bath and laying out his clothes.

Mr Sykes remembers Jack saying, ‘I always chose his clothes because I knew exactly what he would wear.’ He spent the rest of the day in the garage, until the evening when he would lay out his father’s dinner jacket, even if there were no guests. When his father went down for drinks, ‘he would turn down the bed and lay out his pyjamas. If there were guests he would help in the dining room.’ In fact, Mr Sykes says that Jack was so hard-working that he would
often be found helping with the washing up in houses where his employer was staying.
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Sledmere is now looked after by a team of dailies who come in from the local village. There is still a full-time cook, Mrs Maureen Magee, who has been there for twenty-seven years, beginning in 1982, and has strong memories of working with Michael Kenneally. She took over from a previous cook, ‘who worked with me and showed me what was what. She told me lots of short cuts and highlighted things in the recipe books that were family favourites.’
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There ‘was still a full-time housekeeper and butler, Michael, then’, and extra help would be brought in for shooting parties. When the shooting is let now, ‘the same family come every year and stay in the house. I cook for them too. This includes a good breakfast, a shoot lunch at the house, of two courses, cheese and celery, and then dinner of three courses, cheese, celery and coffee.’
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Mrs Magee says: ‘I think sometimes it has been like two generations since I arrived. Sir Tatton had just taken over when I came, and is much more informal than his parents, who changed every night for dinner.’ The country-house tradition is maintained, however: ‘Food is served at table and guests help themselves, although some things like a first course or fruit fool can look attractive if served in individual portions. This is not the country-house tradition and the old butler Michael would say: “It’s not a café, you know!” The advantage is that guests take only what they like and there is no waste.’
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Tea continues to be served in silver teapots by maids dressed in black and white. Mrs Magee loves to see everything prepared for a grand dinner party: ‘The housemaids clean the silver; everything comes out on the polished mahogany. The girls take a great pride in the presentation and arrange a display down the middle of the table. It can look absolutely wonderful, with the drapes drawn, and the fire lit.’