Backstairs Billy by Tom Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

was then Groom of the Backstairs, a highly regarded post to which Billy would eventually be appointed when Walter died in 1978. Almost nothing is known of Taylor beyond the fact that he was discretion personified and hugely popular with everyone in the royal household.
    ‘He was a remarkable man: solid and dependable; friendly but not given to gossip. He knew the job inside out and had a knackof always being in the right place at the right time in terms of making sure the royals got what they wanted. There was something almost uncanny about him!’ remembered a contemporary. Taylor seems to have been the model on which, at least from a professional point of view, Billy based his own career.
    In the heady below-stairs atmosphere at Buckingham Palace Billy quickly learned who was important and who was not. He was ambitious from the start, which surprised many of his colleagues. One said:
    Well, Billy’s family had run a shop but the shop had failed and he grew up in an environment of loss and failure; an environment where people had fairly low expectations. But Billy was different. From his first day at the palace his sights were high, perhaps because he did not want to repeat his own family’s financial failure. He was determined not to fail. He wanted to live up to his mother’s expectations and not fall through the cracks as Mabel, Billy’s mother, seems to have felt her husband, William, had done.
    Billy had been very much the odd man out at home in Coundon and at Buckingham Palace something of this feeling remained. He felt he was somehow different from the other servants. Certainly he was part of the below-stairs team, yet he was a cut above the kitchen and domestic staff. He always felt destined for higher things. He had enormous amounts of what we would now call self-belief. It was something all his colleagues and friends noticed.
    Those in lower jobs and who perhaps saw no way of rising dislikedtheir jobs in a way that would have surprised Billy. Peter Livesey, who worked in the kitchens at the palace, is probably typical.
    In the kitchens at Buckingham Palace we hated it because our chances of promotion were precisely zero; we were menials, far lower in a way than the junior footmen. We washed up and stacked dishes and kept the place clean – that was it.
    People higher up had to die before you could take their place, so to make up for the low wages some people would even steal the spoons and anything else they could get their hands on!
    Peter also recalled some of the lighter moments in the royal kitchens, where, as in many grand houses, different kitchens were used to produce different parts of a meal. At breakfast, for example, the toast was made in the coffee room while the eggs were made one hundred yards away in another kitchen. In the mornings as a result footmen were regularly seen racing along the corridors holding aloft plates of toast (or going in the opposite direction with eggs) desperately hoping everything would stay warm until it reached the breakfast table. Occasionally two footmen would collide and eggs and toast would hurtle in various directions.
    But with low wages and better-paid employment elsewhere, the palace was forced to employ pretty much anyone in some of the most menial jobs in the late 1950s and 1960s. Servants had become so hard to find that desperation sometimes led to wildly inappropriate appointments, as Peter Livesey recalled: ‘You’d often find yourself working next to someone who had been in prison,and someone like that would spend the whole time looking for stuff to nick and then one day they wouldn’t turn up for work and you’d find loads of silver missing.’
    It was too time consuming and expensive to check up on everyone and employment agencies were under similar pressure: to stay in business they had to place people and it was in their interest not to ask too many questions. It was a huge security risk but there seemed little alternative at the time.
    For the