Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [151]
The forced retreats and adaptations of country-house service are amply illustrated by the career of another butler, this time from a younger generation. He began service immediately after the war in a house with a full complement of staff that went through several phases of reduction. Micheal Kenneally, butler to the Sykes family at Sledmere for forty years, occupies a special place in Yorkshire country-house legend. He arrived from Ireland in 1952 to become pantry boy to landowner and baronet, Sir Richard Sykes. As one of Sir Richard’s sons, Christopher Simon Sykes, recalled, Sledmere ‘was still run on an Edwardian scale, with a house staff of at least 10, as well as nannies, governesses and chauffeurs.’46
A strict hierarchy was in place, ‘at the top of which was the butler, Cassidy (never Mr in those days), and Michael Kenneally at the bottom. He slept in a room in the attics. If a visiting servant came to stay who outranked him, the pantry boy had to move out on to a truckle bed in the corridor.’ As Mr Sykes later remarked: ‘Imagine anyone putting up with that now.’47
Kenneally became footman and then in 1959 butler. According to Mr Sykes, ‘He turned buttling into an art form. He dressed the part to perfection, black jacket and pinstripes for formal daywear; a 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