Up and Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson Read Free Book Online

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.’ 48 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.’ 49
     
    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.’ 50
     
    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. 51
     
    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 wouldoften be found helping with the washing up in houses where his employer was staying. 52
     
    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