Backstairs Billy (6 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
Of course, everyone knew all about Billy’s origins and the fact that he was a footman and later groom meant they also knew he was not, as it were, out of the top drawer as they themselves inevitably were, but his ambiguous nature often made them slightly uneasy. Even when Billy made a mistake it was often a mistake that did his career no harm at all. In his first year, for example, he gave the Queen Mother a postal order for seven shillings and sixpence on her birthday. He was given a good telling off and the money was returned, but it is hard to imagine that the Queen Mother was not touched by the gesture. She must have noticed this oddly deferential boy who was so eager to please yet so dignified at the same time. It was around this time too that Billy first came to the attention of the equerries when the Queen Mother asked about her ‘rather dashing young footman’.
Billy was always rather vague about this early period, but it seems as if he really was noticed at first because he looked the part, rather than because he was especially efficient at his daily duties. ‘Looking the part’ may not sound a particularly important part of a footman’s duties, but fifty or sixty years earlier it had been standard procedure in many grand houses to measure the calves of applicants for footmen’s jobs. A good calf was seen as absolutely essential as recently as the 1880s because footmen were not just employed to work; they were also status symbols and ornaments.
James Lees, who worked as a footman in a number of grand houses, recalled the importance of appearance:
My first boss, who had started work as a junior footman in one of the London palaces at the end of the nineteenth century, was a fascinating character who loved telling me about how things were done when he first began in service. After working for a number of years in a very lowly position, he had applied for a job elsewhere as a footman proper. Satisfactory references were forthcoming and as there was no stigma attached to the desire to change jobs he was full of confidence when he presented himself for interview. But the interview was a very odd experience. It began with the senior butler staring at him for ten minutes without saying a word and then asking the young man to walk about the room while he continued to stare. He then asked a series of very general questions about former duties before suddenly standing up and leaving the room without a word of explanation. Five more minutes elapsed before he returned with an extremely elderly and rather unsteady man in tow. This second man appeared to be dressed in the fashion of the late Georgian period! Having done
his
share of staring, the doddery old chap pulled a strange looking pair of callipers out of his pocket and then knelt at the young applicant’s feet. He applied the callipers to the boy’s calves, staggered back up, said, ‘He’ll do!’ and promptly left the room.
Echoes of these ancient practices would have survived into Billy’s time in the junior footman’s room. In addition, the sheer numbers of servants employed across the country is now hard to comprehend.
In fact, Billy’s first year in royal service was characterised by a regime that is today all but unrecognisable. Even relatively modest semi-detached houses in London’s suburbs might still have a live-in maid at the time and the dowagers of Mayfair would have teams of servants in houses that are now almost all offices.
For servants there were very strict rules, as Stephen Rhodes, a butler for more than forty years in a number of London houses, recalled:
As hall boy, garden boy, footman, valet and butler, I had to put up with all sorts of nonsense from the people I worked for – childish behaviour, tantrums and ridiculous demands at all hours of the day and night, and often for things you wouldn’t like to tell your mother about! There was also a lot of sexual abuse of the female servants – and God help any particularly pretty maid!
The difficulty with the servant–master relationship was traditionally that all the power was on one side. Aristocratic young men using their power to press for sexual favours from a pretty maid is a literary commonplace. In the upstairs–downstairs relationship, maids and footmen, even butlers and more senior staff, could traditionally be dismissed at a moment’s notice. Of course, there were always many exceptions to the rule that servants were generally not treated well – Queen Victoria, for example, famously sacked her favourite chef, Charles Elmé Francatelli, after hearing that he had hit one of her maids. But in the grand scheme of things, servants simply had to do what they were told, even if
the demands were unreasonable. This is the background against which we have to see Billy’s long years of royal service.
The other side of the equation was that servants often grew to be very close to the men and women by whom they were employed. This is especially true of the period in which Billy worked; one in which the power relationship was gradually changing. Stephen Rhodes’s memories confirm this: ‘Later in my career the barriers seemed to come down completely and employers began to treat me as if I was a friend. They’d sometimes be terrified if you told them you were leaving and would do almost anything to keep you.’
Being dependent on servants for everything – once a sign of prestige – had become a sign of vulnerability because those servants could simply leave and get work in the burgeoning world of manufacturing and commerce. Servants who stayed often did so because a curious kind of mutual dependence had grown up between them and those for whom they worked. The financial rewards never amounted to much but there were compensations for those who worked their way up the promotion ladder. For Billy, as for so many male servants, the initial aim was to become a butler – the aristocrats of the servant world. Stephen Rhodes recalled ‘a good butler was supposed to be deaf and blind’.
For example, I had to pretend not to know anything about it when my boss slipped along the corridor and went into another man’s wife’s bedroom, but since they were all at it I suppose it didn’t much signify.
But it was worth being discreet as the butler was the best-paid servant in the house and the less you saw and heard the bigger the tips!
Butlers also lived in the best of the servants’ rooms or they might be offered a cottage or a flat if an employer was particularly well off. In royal service a butler or any other senior servant would be treated with great respect by the lower servants, by tradesmen and by visitors.
In his first job as a junior footman, however, Billy could only dream of future possibilities. He was the lowest of the upper servants, above only the kitchen and garden staff in terms of status.
Early on Billy adopted the royal policy of ‘never complain, never explain’, but despite this stoicism, deep down he never forgave one or two of the equerries and advisers for treating him, as he saw it, like dirt. His dislike of Sir Alastair Aird, one of the senior equerries, stems from the 1960s. Aird was a grandee – educated at Eton and Sandhurst – who loathed what he saw as Billy’s inappropriate and growing intimacy with the Queen Mother. But whatever harsh remarks he had to put up with in his early days, Billy bided his time. He kept his head down and got on with the job, despite knowing that further up the hierarchy he was already marked down as ‘a little too full of himself’.
His duties at this time would have been identical to those of a junior assistant in the steward’s room a generation earlier. One former junior assistant recalled life there in the 1930s:
My day as junior assistant started at five o’clock. We never had an alarm clock but when you have to get up in the morning it is surprising
how quick you learn to do it automatically. I’d hop out of my bed, get a piece of bread and butter if there was any from the kitchen and eat it as quickly as I could because staff breakfast was later.
As I went along the staff corridors I noticed the walls were dotted here and there with old oil paintings – presumably these were pictures that the family had gone off or they’d been told they were valueless. One showed cattle coming down to a lake in the mountains to drink. It was beautifully done but perhaps a little unfashionable, which is why it had ended up here among the servants. The royals never threw anything away but pictures often went from the drawing room to an old passage and then to the servants’ corridors!
The various maids were always already at work when I arrived and made my way to the servants’ hall, which was just a big room where the servants ate round a giant table. There was a laundry room, butler’s pantry and endless other rooms including, of course, the wine cellar and spirit room – the servants’ part of Buckingham Palace takes up a lot of the basement. I was never allowed in the butler’s pantry at first because this is where all the solid silver the royals ate off was kept.
In my day as junior assistant I also had to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner to the upper servants.
The day-to-day practical duties of the below-stairs world at Buckingham Palace were enlivened by gossip and there were always rumours about the royals, especially the minor members of the family, and the royal hangers-on. Billy later recalled ‘one old lunatic’ who was always at Buckingham Palace but no one – certainly not the servants – had a clue who he was or why he was there.
Rumour had it that he was a retired butler, now in his eighties, but no one seemed able to remember. The royals let it be known that the old man was not to be questioned or hindered in any way, as a fellow servant recalled:
Every January he was reputed to give up smoking and drinking and to walk around with half a raw cabbage in his pocket. Whenever he was hungry he would whip out the cabbage and take a bite. He was very eccentric, but was more or less part of the furniture!
Such figures were not uncommon. They seemed to have lived forever in odd parts of the palace – in ‘forgotten corridors and abandoned landings’ – and there was a general awareness that they were a permanent fixture. They were almost certainly elderly servants such as the eccentric described above, who had retired but been allowed, unofficially, to stay on.
If Billy and the other key servants did not always go to Royal Lodge, they were obliged to go often to Balmoral where the Queen and Queen Mother might stay for weeks at a time in the summer. Though there was always a permanent team of servants at Balmoral it was not a big enough team to ensure the Queen Mother was properly looked after. As a result, that relatively small team was sometimes supplemented by Billy, the Queen Mother’s personal maid and a number of other staff.
But both at Balmoral and elsewhere there were odd groups of servants who seemed to occupy a place somewhere vaguely between the upper servants – aristocrats like Alastair Aird who
hated to think of themselves as servants – and the lowly footmen and maids.
Peter Baker, who worked for a short while at Balmoral, recalled this strange army of misfits.
They were well-spoken elderly men and women who seemed to occupy rooms that had once been servants’ rooms, but they never did any work. In fact they never did anything. They were waited on by the other servants and everyone assumed they were either retired ladies in waiting or distant relatives of the royal family who no one knew what to do with. We used to joke that we were paying for them through our taxes.
We didn’t mind the royals themselves but why these others? I think myself they were probably cousins or second cousins of some junior branch of the family and they were so eccentric that the only way to prevent them embarrassing the family was to keep them well fed, well housed and well out of the way. I think the family was worried that there would be another huge scandal of the kind that erupted in the 1970s when it was discovered that one or two of the Queen Mother’s close female relatives had spent their whole lives in psychiatric hospitals.
Other servants remembered similar eccentrics at Windsor. Here three very well-spoken but decidedly odd sisters who appeared to have worked their whole lives at Royal Lodge had been kept on years after anyone could even remember what they had once done. At least one was virtually bed-ridden and could only get about slowly using a frame. No one had a clue what they did or
what they had ever done but no one dared to suggest to the Queen Mother that their position should at least be looked at.
And there were oddities too at Clarence House. Here many of the older servants remembered that in the 1950s a junior footman who might or might not have once actually worked in the house appeared still to live there (in the basement) despite not having been officially on the books for several years. The Queen Mother would not hear of his being removed.
The tradition of looking after servants could extend even further – at Windsor, for example, in the 1980s, the royal household built a small bungalow for a retired gamekeeper.
But the situation became untenable when in the mid-1980s the newspapers expressed outrage when it was discovered that many distant relatives of the royal family and former ladies in waiting were living entirely free of charge in grace-and-favour apartments funded by the taxpayer. Many of these were at Hampton Court. The uproar led to changes in the way the apartments were allocated.
But the three sisters at Windsor were long dead by the time the grace-and-favour apartments story hit the headlines. They belonged to an earlier era when loyal servants could expect to be looked after for life. It was all a far cry from the treatment later meted out to Backstairs Billy, who, when describing his experiences of Queen Elizabeth’s elderly maids, explained:
I can remember meeting several old ladies with walking sticks who claimed they were still maids but it was clear that they were far too frail to do any work at all. It was part of Elizabeth’s kindness that she
couldn’t bear to treat her former servants harshly, especially if they had nowhere else to go.
In view of Billy’s bitterness at how he felt he was treated by the royal household at the end of his own career, his words were deeply ironic. But for now the junior footmen had shoes to polish and fires to light, as a contemporary of Billy’s recalled:
My first job when I got into the hall at about ten past five was to go to the boot room and start cleaning. A maid would leave the shoes there. We used a special beeswax cream that came in big tins but mostly it was spit and polish and elbow grease – you got a good shine by really going over the leather well with brushes and then cloths. If they weren’t absolutely perfect there was hell to pay. But the boots were only the beginning – in fact it was the easy bit because at least I could sit on a stool to do it. Once the boots were cleaned the fun really started!
It used to make me laugh that members of the royal family wouldn’t even give the fire a poke to liven it up. They would always ring for the footman to do it and of course to put more logs on the fire. Sometimes a footman would spend the whole evening standing in the sitting room in case anything needed to be done and he’d be listening to all sorts of intimate family conversations – when I became a footman I heard the most outrageous things, but they liked footmen who could look like marble for hours on end.
