Backstairs Billy (7 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
Buckingham Palace was always slightly behind the times in terms
of relationships between servants and their employers. As late as the 1960s there was still a rule that servants cleaned the rooms when the royals were absent, as a former housemaid recalled:
The family had tea or a glass of water and sometimes a few biscuits in their bedrooms in the morning and each wanted to be woken up at a different time. Only their personal maids and valets were allowed to bring the breakfast tray into the bedroom itself. Then when they came down dressed for breakfast we would go up the servant’s stairs – Buckingham Palace has lots of different staircases as you can imagine – to clean the bedrooms and make the beds.
If you happened to see a member of the family in the corridor on your way there or on your way back you had to turn and face the wall. You might be dismissed for looking at them. But the staff regulated these things so well that I’m sure the royals thought their beds got made and their socks were washed by fairies who came in the night. We very rarely bumped into them because the routine was precise and of course they would never use the servants’ staircase.
Billy or one of the other footmen would have been responsible for making sure the maids only went to clean the sitting rooms and drawing rooms once they were ‘clear’.
After luncheon, most of the servants would have some time off to write letters home in their rooms or they would wash their own clothes or read a book before starting work on dinner. For all servants the rule was one day and one evening off a week.
In many respects servant life was extraordinarily conservative
and in ways that seem hilarious today, as another of Billy’s contemporaries recalled:
The royals and the people who ran Buckingham Palace had a strange attitude in the 1950s that lasted well into the 1960s, I think. Carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners were available by this time but many aristocratic families hated change; servants were still cheaper and gave you more status than these labour-saving devices. I once heard a member of a family I worked for say, ‘Vacuum cleaners, my dear. They are so dreadfully suburban!’ The result was that you would see a line of maids on their knees in the drawing rooms moving slowly across these huge carpets and cleaning them with little brushes and pans as they went. It was ridiculous.
T
HERE IS NO
question that, right from the start, Billy enjoyed his life in the palace. He was already learning to appreciate the beautiful things with which he found himself surrounded – the palace was, and is, filled with treasures dating back to the time of George III and beyond. Billy quickly developed an eye for good things and in a small way began collecting.
He recalled later: ‘I always wanted the finer things in life – or
at least I wanted to know about them and mix with people who knew about them. I was first and foremost a collector. I liked to have interesting things around me even as a very young child.’
Throughout his life his friends commented on how impressed everyone was at Billy’s instinctive good taste.
Billy’s friend Basia Briggs remembers: ‘Like many gay men, William just had instinctive good taste. He liked beautiful things and was hugely appreciative of them.’
Roger Booth, a friend from the early days, agreed:
Billy’s tiny room at the palace had just his suitcase and some writing paper, pens and pencils and a picture of his family when he first arrived, I seem to recall. But within a few months he had acquired a little watercolour and he’d swapped his jug and basin from something plain to one of the prettier ones. How on earth he did it I don’t know.
Billy was also developing his unique style as a storyteller and as his confidence grew his ability to amuse the other servants grew with it, as Roger Booth recalled:
When he wanted to camp it up a bit he was very funny, rather like Kenneth Williams but without such extravagant mannerisms. He had a brilliant way of pausing and making eyes if someone said something that was open to a slightly saucy interpretation. I remember once someone said ‘Cook has a problem in her premises’, and Billy instantly replied with pursed lips and a knowing glance, ‘Mmmm… does she now?’ Everyone laughed even though he was later reprimanded for the
remark. Billy did this sort of thing automatically. It was part of his personality right from the start. It was his way of being noticed. And he quickly realised that similar quips and funny references to people and things would make people remember him and want to have him around.
Towards the end of 1953 Billy moved from Buckingham Palace, where the young Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip and young children were now based. He had persuaded the Comptroller of the Household that his first loyalty lay with the Queen Mother, although there is some evidence that the young Queen Elizabeth was keen to see Billy moved on. A former lady in waiting who did not wish to be named said:
Billy was charming and immensely useful but Elizabeth – the young Queen, I mean – perhaps recognised something slightly wild in him that instinctively made her wary. But she knew her mother was more than a match for the young man and that he in turn was likely to prove terribly loyal.
Billy’s reputation for loyalty was partly based on his personality, but also on the fact that he was homosexual. The assumption was that he would have none of the distractions of someone heterosexual, who might eventually want his own family. He also had an enthusiasm for service that was becoming rare as the 1950s wore on and domestic servants – even for the royals – became increasingly hard to find.
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s things had definitely begun
to shift and even the grandest families were beginning to be less formal with their staff. Billy sensed this shift and it added to his confidence. Even as a relatively junior footman he was able to make odd little jokes and amusing asides that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.
‘He was brilliant at these little theatrical asides,’ recalled Roger Booth. ‘And he had a wonderful drawl which always made the Queen Mother smile. He would say “But my dear, they were simply made for each other”, and the word “made” would slowly drip off his tongue.’
This kind of theatricality delighted Billy’s friends and his employers because it affected almost everything he did. Whether carrying flowers along the corridors or serving at table, whether leading the corgis or just opening doors, he did everything with a kind of exaggerated flourish. There is a famous photograph of Billy with armfuls of flowers smiling at the camera where he looks almost as if he is himself part of a floral display; the centrepiece of a bright and colourful collection.
Of course, when he made the short trip along the Mall from Buckingham Palace to his new home at Clarence House he would have been acutely aware of how the hierarchy worked both for servants – chambermaids at the bottom and butlers at the top – and for equerries and other well-born advisers. William was a political animal who knew who he had to impress and who he could ignore; who to flatter and who to avoid.
Robert Fisher, who worked at Buckingham Palace in the mid-1950s, remembered meeting Billy for the first time.
He was very self-assured and though he was still a relatively lowly footman – which was admittedly the start if you wanted to climb the ladder – he always behaved as if he had a far superior role. The Queen Mother noticed him from the start, I think. She began to ask for him more often than she asked for other servants but it was all very odd because it happened gradually without anyone really noticing how or why it was happening. Billy had a way of dealing with her which she liked and which he knew she liked.
Roger Booth is certain that the Queen Mother knew Billy was gay and didn’t mind in the least.
I would say she positively welcomed the fact, as there had been a long tradition of homosexual servants at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Some commentators have said this was partly because the royals felt that their female children would be safer if the male servants were homosexual, but it almost certainly had far more to do with the fact that homosexual servants were perceived – rightly or wrongly – as having less need for a life outside the palace.
And even though homosexuality was illegal until the mid-1960s, the royals took a very lordly view of that kind of illegality. They had always known homosexual men – in service and in their families – and couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. It’s also nonsense, I think, to say that Queen Elizabeth didn’t mind so long as her gay servants were discreet in their affairs. I’d say the opposite was true and she liked the fact that her gay servants were often very indiscreet indeed, but just so long as they didn’t go too far. It provided
a bit of excitement for her and at no risk to herself or her reputation. She famously said that without gay servants the royal family would be reduced to ‘self-service’.
If a footman were caught soliciting in Hyde Park and the story ended up in the papers, he could simply be sacked and the royal household would never be mentioned in the newspapers as the person’s employer. There was an automatic instinct almost everywhere to avoid any scandal attaching to the royals, which is a very different picture from the picture we have today where I think often people are keen to embarrass the royals wherever and whenever they possibly can. If a servant happened to get caught in the 1950s or early 1960s, the police might also sometimes discreetly contact the palace and there would be a quiet word in the right ear and the servant would be let off with a warning.
But if Billy was sexually indiscreet, he had an uncanny survival instinct and would only ever go so far. He would never allow a sexual conquest to threaten his position. And there were many liaisons both before and after he started his relationship with his lifelong partner, Reg Wilcox.
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HERE WAS TO
be an unwelcome break in Billy’s royal service before he was able to consolidate his position with the Queen Mother. Billy’s life as a junior assistant and footman in the stewards’ room at Buckingham Palace was interrupted
dramatically after little more than a year when he was called up to do his National Service. He had expressed a desire to continue working for the Queen Mother but everything had to be put on hold. Billy spent two years in the RAF and, remarkably, those years mirrored in many ways his life at the palace. As soon as his commanding officer discovered what Billy had been doing before call up, he asked him ‘on the spot, there and then’, as Billy himself later recalled, if he would like to do something similar in the air force. Billy felt it would be no bad thing and found himself assigned as batman to a ‘rather delicate but aristocratic senior officer’.
It is interesting that, even in the RAF, a very different environment in many ways from the palace, Billy found his natural role as servant to someone from a socially superior background. ‘He was a very nice man,’ Billy said. ‘Very grand, but kind, and I learned a huge amount from him about how to behave.’
Billy was always slightly reluctant to talk about his time in the RAF. To some extent he felt it was two wasted years; years he could and should have spent working for the royals. ‘We did have some fun,’ he once said, ‘but thank heavens I didn’t have to play at soldiers for too long!’
It was towards the end of Billy’s National Service – two years was then compulsory – that the widowed queen, knowing that Billy had expressed a desire to work for her, arranged for a letter to be sent to him offering him a job at her new home, Clarence House. That’s one story. A more likely account is given by Reg Wilcox, who said Billy wrote several letters to the Queen Mother after the King died to ask if he could come back and work for her.
Reg claimed she remembered him, liked him and said yes. That’s all there was to it. If the later story is true it was a repeat of Billy’s strategy of always writing directly to the man or woman at the top. After a short stay in Coventry to see his family after he was demobbed, Billy was back in London.
L
IFE AT CLARENCE
House was very similar to life at Buckingham Palace: the long days, the hours spent waiting for instructions and endless door opening and serving at table. For years after he started work there Billy lived in a small room at the top of the house, just as he had lived in a small room at the top of Buckingham Palace.
The interior of Clarence House had been largely neglected for more than fifty years. It was threadbare and almost shabby in places. ‘It may have been shabby,’ recalled one servant, ‘but it was definitely shabby genteel. You would find the most expensive objects lying in corners or covered in dust on a forgotten window-sill somewhere.’ One of Billy’s visitors later recalled the ‘rickety old wooden lift’, the cold in winter and the general air of decline. But Billy’s room was always a little sanctuary of brightness.
It was only when Billy’s parents died in the 1970s and he no longer had a home outside the palace that the Queen Mother gave him the use of Gate Lodge, a small cottage just by the entrance to Clarence House from the Mall. Even today the lodge looks like nothing more than a tiny one-storey guardroom, but it was
to become Billy’s pride and joy and his home for the last thirty years of his time in service.
But for now it was life in a small bed-sitting room.
There is no doubt that from the time he returned to work at Clarence House in 1953 his aim was clear, as he explained in a brief – and slightly drunken – conversation many years later:
There was something about Elizabeth the Queen Mother that drew people to her. It wasn’t just that she had once been queen. It was her personality as much as her status. She inspired respect, even awe, I think. But apart from wanting to work for her I also wanted to get to the top in service. People might have looked down on servants – they certainly still did in the 1950s – but not on the senior servants and certainly not on royal servants. As time passed, of course, and fewer people had servants at all, royal servants came to have an aura of real glamour.
Billy’s time as an officer’s batman had taught him a great deal about looking after the personal needs of an individual and he made good use of this knowledge. Where other junior footmen would open doors and collect letters to be taken to the post, Billy always went a step further by asking if anything more was required, or he would suggest serving drinks in a certain way, as fellow servant John Hodges remembered:
