by Tom Quinn
Echoes of these ancient practices would have survived into Billy’s time in the junior footman’s room. In addition, the sheer numbers of servants employed across the country is now hard to comprehend.
In fact, Billy’s first year in royal service was characterised by a regime that is today all but unrecognisable. Even relatively modest semi-detached houses in London’s suburbs might still have a live-in maid at the time and the dowagers of Mayfair would have teams of servants in houses that are now almost all offices.
For servants there were very strict rules, as Stephen Rhodes, a butler for more than forty years in a number of London houses, recalled:
As hall boy, garden boy, footman, valet and butler, I had to put up with all sorts of nonsense from the people I worked for – childish behaviour, tantrums and ridiculous demands at all hours of the day and night, and often for things you wouldn’t like to tell your mother about! There was also a lot of sexual abuse of the female servants – and God help any particularly pretty maid!
The difficulty with the servant–master relationship was traditionally that all the power was on one side. Aristocratic young men using their power to press for sexual favours from a pretty maid is a literary commonplace. In the upstairs–downstairs relationship, maids and footmen, even butlers and more senior staff, could traditionally be dismissed at a moment’s notice. Of course, there were always many exceptions to the rule that servants were generally not treated well – Queen Victoria, for example, famously sacked her favourite chef, Charles Elmé Francatelli, after hearing that he had hit one of her maids. But in the grand scheme of things, servants simply had to do what they were told, even if the demands were unreasonable. This is the background against which we have to see Billy’s long years of royal service.
The other side of the equation was that servants often grew to be very close to the men and women by whom they were employed. This is especially true of the period in which Billy worked; one in which the power relationship was gradually changing. Stephen Rhodes’s memories confirm this: ‘Later in my career the barriers seemed to come down completely and employers began to treat me as if I was a friend. They’d sometimes be terrified if you told them you were leaving and would do almost anything to keep you.’
Being dependent on servants for everything – once a sign of prestige – had become a sign of vulnerability because those servants could simply leave and get work in the burgeoning world of manufacturing and commerce. Servants who stayed often did so because a curious kind of mutual dependence had grown up between them and those for whom they worked. The financial rewards never amounted to much but there were compensations for those who worked their way up the promotion ladder. For Billy, as for so many male servants, the initial aim was to become a butler – the aristocrats of the servant world. Stephen Rhodes recalled ‘a good butler was supposed to be deaf and blind’.
For example, I had to pretend not to know anything about it when my boss slipped along the corridor and went into another man’s wife’s bedroom, but since they were all at it I suppose it didn’t much signify. But it was worth being discreet as the butler was the best-paid servant in the house and the less you saw and heard the bigger the tips!
Butlers also lived in the best of the servants’ rooms or they might be offered a cottage or a flat if an employer was particularly well off. In royal service a butler or any other senior servant would be treated with great respect by the lower servants, by tradesmen and by visitors.
In his first job as a junior footman, however, Billy could only dream of future possibilities. He was the lowest of the upper servants, above only the kitchen and garden staff in terms of status.
Early on Billy adopted the royal policy of ‘never complain, never explain’, but despite this stoicism, deep down he never forgave one or two of the equerries and advisers for treating him, as he saw it, like dirt. His dislike of Sir Alastair Aird, one of the senior equerries, stems from the 1960s. Aird was a grandee – educated at Eton and Sandhurst – who loathed what he saw as Billy’s inappropriate and growing intimacy with the Queen Mother. But whatever harsh remarks he had to put up with in his early days, Billy bided his time. He kept his head down and got on with the job, despite knowing that further up the hierarchy he was already marked down as ‘a little too full of himself’.
His duties at this time would have been identical to those of a junior assistant in the steward’s room a generation earlier. One former junior assistant recalled life there in the 1930s:
My day as junior assistant started at five o’clock. We never had an alarm clock but when you have to get up in the morning it is surprising how quick you learn to do it automatically. I’d hop out of my bed, get a piece of bread and butter if there was any from the kitchen and eat it as quickly as I could because staff breakfast was later.
As I went along the staff corridors I noticed the walls were dotted here and there with old oil paintings – presumably these were pictures that the family had gone off or they’d been told they were valueless. One showed cattle coming down to a lake in the mountains to drink. It was beautifully done but perhaps a little unfashionable, which is why it had ended up here among the servants. The royals never threw anything away but pictures often went from the drawing room to an old passage and then to the servants’ corridors!
The various maids were always already at work when I arrived and made my way to the servants’ hall, which was just a big room where the servants ate round a giant table. There was a laundry room, butler’s pantry and endless other rooms including, of course, the wine cellar and spirit room – the servants’ part of Buckingham Palace takes up a lot of the basement. I was never allowed in the butler’s pantry at first because this is where all the solid silver the royals ate off was kept.
In my day as junior assistant I also had to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner to the upper servants.
The day-to-day practical duties of the below-stairs world at Buckingham Palace were enlivened by gossip and there were always rumours about the royals, especially the minor members of the family, and the royal hangers-on. Billy later recalled ‘one old lunatic’ who was always at Buckingham Palace but no one – certainly not the servants – had a clue who he was or why he was there. Rumour had it that he was a retired butler, now in his eighties, but no one seemed able to remember. The royals let it be known that the old man was not to be questioned or hindered in any way, as a fellow servant recalled:
Every January he was reputed to give up smoking and drinking and to walk around with half a raw cabbage in his pocket. Whenever he was hungry he would whip out the cabbage and take a bite. He was very eccentric, but was more or less part of the furniture!
Such figures were not uncommon. They seemed to have lived forever in odd parts of the palace – in ‘forgotten corridors and abandoned landings’ – and there was a general awareness that they were a permanent fixture. They were almost certainly elderly servants such as the eccentric described above, who had retired but been allowed, unofficially, to stay on.
If Billy and the other key servants did not always go to Royal Lodge, they were obliged to go often to Balmoral where the Queen and Queen Mother might stay for weeks at a time in the summer. Though there was always a permanent team of servants at Balmoral it was not a big enough team to ensure the Queen Mother was properly looked after. As a result, that relatively small team was sometimes supplemented by Billy, the Queen Mother’s personal maid and a number of other staff.
But both at Balmoral and elsewhere there were odd groups of servants who seemed to occupy a place somewhere vaguely between the upper servants – aristocrats like Alastair Aird who hated to think of themselves as servants – and the lowly footmen and maids.
Peter Baker, who worked for a short while at Balmoral, recalled this strange army of misfits.
They were well-spoken elderly men and women who seemed to occupy rooms that had once been servants’ rooms, but they never did any work. In fact they never did anything. They were waited
on by the other servants and everyone assumed they were either retired ladies in waiting or distant relatives of the royal family who no one knew what to do with. We used to joke that we were paying for them through our taxes.
We didn’t mind the royals themselves but why these others? I think myself they were probably cousins or second cousins of some junior branch of the family and they were so eccentric that the only way to prevent them embarrassing the family was to keep them well fed, well housed and well out of the way. I think the family was worried that there would be another huge scandal of the kind that erupted in the 1970s when it was discovered that one or two of the Queen Mother’s close female relatives had spent their whole lives in psychiatric hospitals.
Other servants remembered similar eccentrics at Windsor. Here three very well-spoken but decidedly odd sisters who appeared to have worked their whole lives at Royal Lodge had been kept on years after anyone could even remember what they had once done. At least one was virtually bed-ridden and could only get about slowly using a frame. No one had a clue what they did or what they had ever done but no one dared to suggest to the Queen Mother that their position should at least be looked at.
And there were oddities too at Clarence House. Here many of the older servants remembered that in the 1950s a junior footman who might or might not have once actually worked in the house appeared still to live there (in the basement) despite not having been officially on the books for several years. The Queen Mother would not hear of his being removed.
The tradition of looking after servants could extend even further – at Windsor, for example, in the 1980s, the royal household built a small bungalow for a retired gamekeeper.
But the situation became untenable when in the mid-1980s the newspapers expressed outrage when it was discovered that many distant relatives of the royal family and former ladies in waiting were living entirely free of charge in grace-and-favour apartments funded by the taxpayer. Many of these were at Hampton Court. The uproar led to changes in the way the apartments were allocated.
But the three sisters at Windsor were long dead by the time the grace-and-favour apartments story hit the headlines. They belonged to an earlier era when loyal servants could expect to be looked after for life. It was all a far cry from the treatment later meted out to Backstairs Billy, who, when describing his experiences of Queen Elizabeth’s elderly maids, explained:
I can remember meeting several old ladies with walking sticks who claimed they were still maids but it was clear that they were far too frail to do any work at all. It was part of Elizabeth’s kindness that she couldn’t bear to treat her former servants harshly, especially if they had nowhere else to go.
In view of Billy’s bitterness at how he felt he was treated by the royal household at the end of his own career, his words were deeply ironic. But for now the junior footmen had shoes to polish and fires to light, as a contemporary of Billy’s recalled:
My first job when I got into the hall at about ten past five was to go to the boot room and start cleaning. A maid would leave the shoes there. We used a special beeswax cream that came in big tins but mostly it was spit and polish and elbow grease – you got a good shine by really going over the leather well with brushes and then cloths. If they weren’t absolutely perfect there was hell to pay. But the boots were only the beginning – in fact it was the easy bit because at least I could sit on a stool to do it. Once the boots were cleaned the fun really started!
It used to make me laugh that members of the royal family wouldn’t even give the fire a poke to liven it up. They would always ring for the footman to do it and of course to put more logs on the fire. Sometimes a footman would spend the whole evening standing in the sitting room in case anything needed to be done and he’d be listening to all sorts of intimate family conversations – when I became a footman I heard the most outrageous things, but they liked footmen who could look like marble for hours on end.
Buckingham Palace was always slightly behind the times in terms of relationships between servants and their employers. As late as the 1960s there was still a rule that servants cleaned the rooms when the royals were absent, as a former housemaid recalled:
The family had tea or a glass of water and sometimes a few biscuits in their bedrooms in the morning and each wanted to be woken up at a different time. Only their personal maids and valets were allowed to bring the breakfast tray into the bedroom itself. Then when they came down dressed for breakfast we would go up the servant’s stairs – Buckingham Palace has lots of different staircases as you can imagine – to clean the bedrooms and make the beds.
If you happened to see a member of the family in the corridor on your way there or on your way back you had to turn and face the wall. You might be dismissed for looking at them. But the staff regulated these things so well that I’m sure the royals thought their beds got made and their socks were washed by fairies who came in the night. We very rarely bumped into them because the routine was precise and of course they would never use the servants’ staircase.
Billy or one of the other footmen would have been responsible for making sure the maids only went to clean the sitting rooms and drawing rooms once they were ‘clear’.
After luncheon, most of the servants would have some time off to write letters home in their rooms or they would wash their own clothes or read a book before starting work on dinner. For all servants the rule was one day and one evening off a week.
In many respects servant life was extraordinarily conservative and in ways that seem hilarious today, as another of Billy’s contemporaries recalled:
The royals and the people who ran Buckingham Palace had a strange attitude in the 1950s that lasted well into the 1960s, I think. Carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners were available by this time but many aristocratic families hated change; servants were still cheaper and gave you more status than these labour-saving devices. I once heard a member of a family I worked for say, ‘Vacuum cleaners, my dear. They are so dreadfully suburban!’ The result was that you would see a line of maids on their knees in the drawing rooms moving slowly across these huge carpets and cleaning them with little brushes and pans as they went. It was ridiculous.
Chapter Seven
A boy at the palace
THERE IS NO question that, right from the start, Billy enjoyed his life in the palace. He was already learning to appreciate the beautiful things with which he found himself surrounded – the palace was, and is, filled with treasures dating back to the time of George III and beyond. Billy quickly developed an eye for good things and in a small way began collecting.
He recalled later: ‘I always wanted the finer things in life – or at least I wanted to know about them and mix with people who knew about them. I was first and foremost a collector. I liked to have interesting things around me even as a very young child.’
Throughout his life his friends commented on how impressed everyone was at Billy’s instinctive good taste.
Billy’s friend Basia Briggs remembers: ‘Like many gay men, William just had instinctive good taste. He liked beautiful things and was hugely appreciative of them.’
Roger Booth, a friend from the early days, agreed:
Billy’s tiny room at the palace had just his suitcase and some writing paper, pens and pencils and a picture of his family when he first arrived, I seem to recall. But within a few months he had acquired a little watercolour and he’d swapped his jug and basin from something plain to one of the prettier ones. How on earth he did it I don’t know.
Billy was also developing his unique style as a storyteller and as his confidence grew his ability to amuse the other servants grew with it, as Roger Booth recalled:
When he wanted to camp it up a bit he was very funny, rather like Kenneth Williams but without such extravagant mannerisms. He had a brilliant way of pausing and making eyes if someone said something that was open to a slightly saucy interpretation. I remember once someone said ‘Cook has a problem in her premises’, and Billy instantly
replied with pursed lips and a knowing glance, ‘Mmmm… does she now?’ Everyone laughed even though he was later reprimanded for the remark. Billy did this sort of thing automatically. It was part of his personality right from the start. It was his way of being noticed. And he quickly realised that similar quips and funny references to people and things would make people remember him and want to have him around.
Towards the end of 1953 Billy moved from Buckingham Palace, where the young Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip and young children were now based. He had persuaded the Comptroller of the Household that his first loyalty lay with the Queen Mother, although there is some evidence that the young Queen Elizabeth was keen to see Billy moved on. A former lady in waiting who did not wish to be named said:
Billy was charming and immensely useful but Elizabeth – the young Queen, I mean – perhaps recognised something slightly wild in him that instinctively made her wary. But she knew her mother was more than a match for the young man and that he in turn was likely to prove terribly loyal.
Billy’s reputation for loyalty was partly based on his personality, but also on the fact that he was homosexual. The assumption was that he would have none of the distractions of someone heterosexual, who might eventually want his own family. He also had an enthusiasm for service that was becoming rare as the 1950s wore on and domestic servants – even for the royals – became increasingly hard to find.
