Backstairs Billy by Tom Quinn Read Free Book Online

permitted to speak to a member of the family in the unlikely event of meeting one of them.
    Junior servants were also told that under no circumstances should they address remarks or queries to the senior servants. The maids always reported to the housekeeper – and addressed any queries to her – while the junior staff, including the hall boys, reported to those immediately above them in the hierarchy, never to the butler. As a contemporary of Billy’s at Clarence House recalled:
    You have to remember that big houses were designed to ensure as little contact as possible between servants and their employers. It was a very strict rule, but strict rules existed at every level – that’s why I couldn’t speak to the butler or the cook. I was too lowly and even the servants wanted their status.
    Of course, the top of the servant tree was always working for the royal household. For the career minded, work in a royal palace was just a stepping stone to highly paid work overseas – for rich Americans or other wealthy foreigners who were always dazzled if a servant they hoped to employ had previously worked for the British royal family.
    But, however impressed outsiders might have been, the truth remained that, in the palace, servant work was pretty much the same as it was in any other large house: it was a daily grind of cleaning, tidying up, preparing meals, laying tables and standing around waiting for orders.

    B ILLY HAD BEEN offered a job as a junior steward or footman at £2 a week. The key elements of the junior steward’s job included opening and closing doors, cleaning shoes, running errands and, above all, remaining invisible.
    The pay may have seemed meagre but the job included accommodation, food and a new suit of clothes each year. Billy would have known that if he worked hard and blended into the background he might be promoted. Best of all, of course, he had arrived where he had always wanted to be, and it was not a disappointment.
    I was very nervous it is true, so nervous that my first few days are now a blur, but I worked on the simple principle that I would do whatever I was told to do promptly and without arguing. And I made sure I was absolutely immaculately dressed from the very first day. I realised that smartness was very important to the royal family so I spent a long time each morning in front of the mirror!
    A servant who started work in the early 1930s in a large house just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace recalled the atmosphere of those times:
    On my first day at Spencer House I was told that on my afternoon off each Tuesday I was to go home to my family and not to talk to any other servant who was having a half day on the same day, neither aservant from Spencer House nor from any other house round about. I was also told that meeting friends on my day off was not allowed. I didn’t quite understand, but since I had no friends outside a tiny area of Paddington I thought I could probably ignore this advice!
    The ban on talking to servants from other houses was strictly enforced so far as possible because families employing many servants – and especially the royal family – hated the idea that their secrets should be spread abroad, and there was a class-based idea that the lower orders were addicted to gossip.
    Of course, the risk of family secrets becoming the talk of the town was greatly exaggerated. It is difficult to imagine that a kitchen maid would discover anything of any real interest – except perhaps to other servants. It was felt that servants were a necessity but a problematic one. They had to be allowed lives of their own, but had to be kept under control; at the same time they mustn’t be treated so harshly that they would leave. This created an atmosphere of discipline and rigid hierarchy that many found stifling. Billy, on the other hand, loved order and discipline.
    In these very early days Billy would have been aware of legendary figures such as Walter Taylor, who