Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [149]
Retirement seemed strange to him: ‘At first I didn’t feel right being out of uniform and in casual clothes in the morning.’ Otherwise, he said, he was content to cease working. ‘After all, I have travelled the world, lived in some magnificent houses and been lucky with my employers. But I still miss the staff. They fought amongst themselves and they always caused me far more trouble than the Lord and Lady – yet I miss them most of all.’ As this narrative has shown, the community of the staff could be all-important to the enjoyment of being a domestic servant.32
Mr Ager began his life in service in 1922, aged fourteen, as the hall boy at Croome Court, Worcestershire, ‘the lowest servant of all’, in the household of Lord Coventry. ‘On my first day it seemed like a house full of servants; there were some forty people of all ages working there. Everyone was friendly except the housekeeper.’ As for so many young people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his choice seemed made for him: ‘after my parents died, entering service seemed the best way of supporting myself.’
Like many younger or more junior-ranking servants, learning the ropes, he did most of his work ‘in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house. I didn’t go to the front where the family lived except for the dining room, until I had worked at Croome Court for six months. When I did, the flowers in the reception rooms struck me first of all . . . I was awed by the general opulence – the silver candlesticks and inkstands on the writing desks, the tapestries on the walls and the thick rugs.’33
As was usual in the pre-war era, he learnt his trade by waiting on the senior members of staff: ‘most young servants moved to a different house after about a year or so to gain promotion and to experience how various houses were run.’ Mr. Ager worked in several, including St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, returning there in 1930 to become valet to the 2nd Lord St Levan.34 ‘I travelled all around the world with him. Wherever he wanted to go, he just went. If it was cold when he returned to England, we’d pop off again. I made all the arrangements, bought the tickets and more or less made the world smooth for him and his party.’35 In 1933 he married and left to become butler to a Mr Dunkels, then to a Colonel Trotter in Berwickshire.
After serving in the army during the Second World War, he returned to work for the colonel, who died shortly afterwards. Mr Ager was then invited to St Michael’s Mount once more as butler to the 3rd Lord St Levan, who had succeeded his uncle: ‘I said I’d come back for three months, which turned into nearly thirty years.’
Cultural shifts during this period made their impact. In the 1920s, ‘when I was a footman, the senior staff stood very much on their dignity, and the rest of the staff were acutely aware of their status within the house. No one could help out anyone else. We didn’t help the kitchen people, however busy they were, and we certainly wouldn’t help a housemaid.’36 Two decades later, the pattern was very different. ‘After the war most people were unable to afford the same amount of staff. I saw great changes in service as our people’s life-styles became less grand. In my youth the butler was always available if the family needed him; otherwise, he merely supervised the staff. He had worked hard all his life, and he wasn’t going to continue if he could help it!’37
By the 1960s, his role had altered out of all recognition: ‘A butler in the old days would never have dreamed of doing as much day-today work as I did. He wouldn’t have cleaned the silver, laid the table or seen to it that the reception rooms were orderly – those jobs belonged to the first footman. Nor did any of my staff