Backstairs Billy

by Tom Quinn

  At school, as the time for leaving aged fifteen approached, the other boys played football and made paper aeroplanes in lessons while Billy dreamed of a new life far away. He later told a friend that, much as he loved his family, especially his mother Mabel, he felt he did not have any really close friends as a child. Towards the end of his life, Billy said:

  I was different, definitely. All the boys at my school loved football and Airfix models, or they played in the street as most kids did at that time. I used to play occasionally but my heart wasn’t in it. I suppose it was rather odd that my only interest pretty much was the royal family, but you have to remember that for me they represented a wonderful, exotic world that I wanted to be part of. There wasn’t much that was glamorous about Coventry then. Nobody ever seemed to do anything interesting. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get away. But how was it to be done? That’s what troubled me.

  Barker’s Butts did put many children in for what used to be called CSE exams. CSE stood for Certificate of Secondary Education, a well-intentioned attempt to find some way to recognise the achievements of children who were deemed non-academic. CSE passes were really worth little more than the paper they were written on. Employers knew straight away that an applicant for a job with CSEs rather than O-levels was a child who had failed so far as education was concerned. Billy knew they were worthless and never sat for them.

  Though not academic in the conventional sense, Billy was intelligent enough to know that the school could not give him the start in life he wanted, so the letter writing to Buckingham Palace – he always addressed his letters to the palace – continued as he moved toward his fifteenth year when he could leave school.

  As luck would have it, around this time one of his letters struck a chord with someone in the royal household. Instead of the usual reply, something new and exciting arrived in the post. Billy himself said on several occasions in later life that he had written to the royals so often partly because he really did hope to get a job but also because he loved the thick embossed envelopes that came back carrying each reply.

  The early letters had all thanked him for his interest but regretfully informed him that there were no vacancies. These replies and their envelopes were carefully added to his collection of royal memorabilia. Billy never regarded them as depressing rejections; they were simply part of a delightful link to a world he longed to be part of.

  But then that very different letter arrived.

  It asked Billy to present himself to the Comptroller of the Royal Household as soon as he could. Clearly the endless series of letters had paid off because the interview, as Billy later recalled, turned out to be a mere formality.

  He had been terrified he would get lost so he deliberately caught a very early train and then wandered about for more than two hours in Green Park, with Buckingham Palace always in view, until it was time to approach a policeman, show his letter and be taken to the side of the palace and in through the servants’ door.

  Having had his duties explained to him – opening doors, general fetching and carrying and being obedient to the senior footmen – Billy was sent on his way.

  Billy’s mother was delighted when his return to Coventry was quickly followed by a letter confirming that they really had decided to give her son a job. She too saw royal service as a cut above the rest. She was part of a generation that almost venerated the royals and from having been doubtful that Billy would ever be taken on, she was as astonished as Billy himself when the invitation to the interview and then the acceptance letter landed on the doorstep. She was a proud woman and quickly let it be known among the neighbours that Billy was off to London to the royal household. Her son would not be working in the local factories after all.

  Mabel coughed up the cost of the train fare and a short while after the letter had arrived Billy packed his little bag – he had one set of spare clothes, some stamps and pen and paper with which to write home – and caught the train back to London to start his new life.

  I had been so enthusiastic about joining the staff that I think it was probably a foregone conclusion that I would get the job. I mean, I wasn’t exactly bad looking and I think they had a sixth sense about when a person would fit in well. At the time, I thought I was in heaven and was terrified they might still turn me down. Looking back of course I realised I had got it all out of proportion. I mean, I was only hoping to get the most menial job – I’d have taken anything they’d offered and for those lowly jobs of course the household itself couldn’t afford to be too choosy.

  Always devoted to his mother, he promised to write and return home when he got the chance, but typically he didn’t say goodbye to any of the boys he had known either at school or in the neighbouring houses. Billy’s focus had always been elsewhere and the truth is that he had no particularly close friends among the other Coundon boys. His growing awareness of his homosexuality – still then illegal – no doubt intensified his natural instinct to reticence and secrecy, an instinct that years of royal service would only intensify.

  Billy wrote home soon after arriving at the palace to say that he had his own little room and had just had tea which consisted of ‘eggs and chips followed by jelly’. He loved his family but there was no note of missing them at all in this or in subsequent letters. So far as Billy was concerned, he had finally arrived where he was always destined to be.

  Chapter Five

  Below stairs

  DOMESTIC STAFF WERE difficult to find after the end of the Second World War, even, occasionally, for the royals. The war had given the working classes broader horizons and the ‘shame and tyranny of the maid’s cap’, as it was known, made many girls and boys seek better-paid and less humiliating factory work. But, despite this, the number of domestic staff employed by the royals in the late 1940s was far higher than in more recent times, when public scrutiny and questions about taxpayer value made one or two members of the royal family wary of seeming to enjoy the attentions of an almost medieval retinue of staff. As we have seen, there were exceptions to this; most notably the Queen Mother.

  Like the upper and middle classes, the royals tried in principle to make do with fewer servants as the 1940s and 1950s wore on. People who had grown up without the faintest notion of how to make a cup of tea or boil an egg, who had had everything done for them, found they could no longer afford the teams of servants they had once taken for granted unless they were prepared to pay the sort of wages offered elsewhere. Those they had relied upon for so long were gradually drifting away and those who remained in service had to be treated with far more respect than had previously been the case.

  It was almost as if there had been a subtle power shift. Elderly aristocratic women were terrified the cook would leave because they knew it would be difficult if not impossible to find a replacement. In the past, the cook would not have been able to leave for alternative employment because there was none. But times had changed and well-paid factory and office jobs were always beckoning. The days when servants had no alternative were over.

  But if servants’ conditions generally were improving around the time Billy started work, there was still a sense in which changes in royal service always came later than elsewhere.

  For junior members of staff – hall boys, junior footmen and kitchen maids – royal palaces were divided strictly. Generally speaking, they were told never to leave their immediate areas of work. It was forbidden for any servant to use the main staircase in the house unless they were given special permission and, above all, no servant was 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.

  BILLY 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 a servant 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 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 knack of 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 disliked their 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 royal household this presented a number of difficulties, chief of which was the need for discretion. When there were problems in the kitchen they kept quiet about thefts of spoons and tongs and odd bits of silver, even though they were valuable, simply because they didn’t want the publicity.

  As Peter Livesey puts it:

  They didn’t want people to know they’d employed some really dodgy characters! They were caught in a double bind: if they went for decent people it would cost more, and they might not be able to find anyone at all because the turnover of staff was so high, but if they publicised thefts by bringing a prosecution now and then, it might encourage others to try to get work in the kitchens solely to try to steal things.

  It was widely known in those pre-vetting days that ex-offenders often found their way into jobs in the royal kitchens. Livesey remembers ‘at least one murderer who had been released after a decade in the nick’.

  The fact is that, with a few exceptions, royal service was a dead end, and a low-paid dead en
d at that. In some staff this created a lingering sense of anger and Livesey recalls one ex-offender spitting in a dish that was being prepared for a group of distinguished visitors. Kitchen work was also seen as women’s work and there was no tradition of rising from the kitchen as there was if you were a footman like Billy. Even junior footmen could expect to appear before members of the family occasionally and if the family liked them they were promoted. It was as simple as that. Meanwhile although it is true that Cook might get some recognition if the food was really good – and Cook was the best-paid member of the kitchen team – there was nonetheless a tradition that kept the kitchen staff entirely separate from those for whom they worked.

  Livesey explains:

  I think they never gave a thought to the people in the kitchen. All their lives, servants had provided for them so they took it for granted. They thought it was like magic. Poof – every day three meals appeared before their very eyes! Poof – their beds were made! Poof – their socks were washed.

  But Peter also recalled that the kitchen could be fun. There was a sense of camaraderie and there were rules that were so absurd that they lightened even the dullest days.

  For example, whenever there was a banquet at Buckingham Palace, all the potatoes and sprouts, carrots and other vegetables had to be measured before being served to make sure they were of similar dimensions and would not spoil the appearance of the dinner table.

  ‘I used to wonder what on earth taxpayers would think,’ remembers Livesey.

  And, by any standards the rewards of domestic service were dire, as the wage and salary list for 2006 reveals: footmen and housemaids started on a salary of around £13,500 a year. On promotion to senior footman, that might rise to around £15,500. Things were slightly better for a butler who would start on around £15,000, plus accommodation, but it is easy to imagine how difficult it would be to live in London on these shockingly small sums.