Once this was a place run by gentlemen amateurs. Today, it is proud to talk of ‘professionalism’ and ‘excellence’. But there is one word which is not encouraged. ‘The word “corporate”,’ says Lord Peel, ‘is a word the Queen does not like. When we get on to the subject of the Household, she always says: “I understand the need for effectiveness, efficiency and so on but we mustn’t be too corporate.” Getting that balance is quite difficult really. I do agree with her. We don’t want to be overtly corporate. It would destroy the very essence of what we’re all about.’ As Air Vice-Marshal Sir David Walker puts it: ‘The Royal Household is not a business but we operate in a businesslike way.’ Walker is one of the Royal Household’s five heads of department. As Master of the Household, his is one of the two largest, covering everything which makes the royal residences tick – from maintenance to footmen to the kitchens. It is his department which is responsible for all forms of hospitality. The Queen may be the longest living monarch in British history but the monarchy is actually doing more entertaining now – in terms of receptions, theme days, special garden parties and charity events involving other members of the family – than when she was half her age. Hence the 50 per cent rise in hospitality in five years. Walker’s workforce, however, has remained exactly the same, at 240. ‘It’s just a case of greater efficiency,’ he says, explaining one bright idea which has helped his staff cope with the surge in activity. He simply trained the cleaning staff to assist the footmen on big occasions (the Queen has even approved two special liveries for the cleaners – a blue one for official events and a scarlet one for state occasions). At the same time, the footmen have been trained to do various cleaning tasks.
‘It doesn’t matter if you’re commanding a hundred thousand people or a hundred,’ he says. ‘The same principles come to bear. The number of people you actually deal with is much the same. You deal with people through people.’ Historically, the Master has always been a senior officer from the Services but Walker – the first from the RAF – was no stranger to the Palace when he arrived in 2005. Nearly twenty years earlier, he spent three years here as equerry to the Queen, a post which rotates between the three Services, each of which will send a rising star to spend three years acting as the Queen’s diary manager, gift carrier and meeter and greeter. When Walker was doing that job, Michael Peat and his team of consultants were only just beginning their exhaustive overhaul of the Household and its ancient work practices. Many of today’s jobs – like Palace maintenance – were done by civil servants, not royal staff. It was a quieter place. ‘The world was different,’ says Walker. ‘The people were less diverse. It was a much smaller organisation. The Household has expanded hugely since those times. We were living in a much less litigious environment. It’s more efficient now and doubtless some would say a few babies have been tossed out with the bath water. But I recognise it as a much better place.’
He remembers the rigid hierarchies of the five different dining rooms – the Household dining room (for ‘members’ of the Royal Household as the most senior staff are known), the officials’ dining room, the junior officials’ dining room, the stewards’ dining room and the staff dining room – plus an in-house pub. It took more than a decade to change all that, with the strongest resistance coming from the junior end of the spectrum (‘the office workers didn’t want to eat with the cleaners’, as one veteran of that exercise puts it). These days, all that is left is the Household dining room and the staff restaurant. Everyone, from top to bottom, eats in the staff restaurant, although the Household dining room is still used for meetings and the occasional guest lunch.
Walker is well aware that all this reform works both ways. Any changes, however small, in a traditional place like the Palace need to be handled carefully. ‘People tell you they’re agents for change. But it’s one thing inflicting it on people and it’s quite another thing being on the receiving end. In my experience, change, in general, is badly managed. Good change requires a lot of thinking.’
He points to the staff restaurant as an example. ‘Wash your mouth out,’ he jokes when a colleague refers to it as the ‘canteen’. It is actually several first-floor rooms with the ambiance of a comfortable and slightly eccentric boutique hotel. There are eighteenth-century portraits, an exhibition of royal gifts – model ships, a silver tray presented by the Mayor of Kandy, a bronze of the Queen’s beloved mare Burmese – and a selection from Prince Philip’s cartoon collection. A large self-service area fills the space previously occupied by the Palace pub. A mural shows a blow-up of the menu card from the wedding breakfast for the Queen’s parents: ‘Consommé à la Windsor, Suprèmes de Saumon Reine Mary, Côtelettes d’Agneau Prince Albert, Chapons à la Strathmore, Jambon et Langue à l’Aspic, Aspèrges Sauce Crème Mouseuse, Fraises Duchesse Elizabeth, Panier de Friandises [sweets], Dessert [fruit], Cheese.’
Today’s staff menu – slightly healthier and in English – is no shorter. However, staff are not expected to eat the whole lot: ‘Lentil soup (suitable for vegans), chicken chasseur, veal and bacon pie, polenta with chilli and vegetables, baked potato, cold meats, apple crumble with cream, banana mousse, fresh fruit, yoghurt or cheese.’ There are warnings about dairy, gluten and nuts but no prices. Lunch is included in the job package and is consumed in a large, open-plan dining room. It’s all creams, beiges and soft carpet with free-for-all seating. Next door, beyond a Giles cartoon from the Daily Express of 1954, is an all-day cafe selling snacks and coffee beneath Coronation prints and a plasma screen showing Sky News. At 75P for a cappuccino, it’s certainly mindful of the Queen’s edict not to be too ‘corporate’. Any profit – and there can’t be much at that price goes into the staff welfare fund.
Next door to this is the Breakfast Room which, in addition to a large portrait of Louis, due de Bourgogne, has computer monitors for those – footmen, cleaners and so on – whose jobs do not come with a desk and a screen. With no Palace wifi on security grounds, online opportunities can be limited. This is where out-of-hours meals are served to the dwindling band of single staff who live inside the Palace in single-room, barrack-style accommodation on the upper floor (tonight, their dinner menu is ‘chorizo chicken’ and ‘cassis delice’). The Master of the Household and his team are determined to get the live-in numbers down to a bare minimum. A block of offices above the Royal Mews has been converted into modern three-bedroom flats with shared kitchens and living areas. It’s been a cultural rather than an economic decision. ‘We’ve spent a lot of money so that staff don’t live in this building. The majority go “home”,’ he says. ‘They leave here, they go out of the door, they walk down the street and they re-enter their home. And that is very helpful from a psychological perspective. They’re not so institutionalised.’
Perhaps the grandest part of the staff wing is the Jubilee Room, a large, airy corner room full of sofas, armchairs and a large leather footstool in the shape of a corgi. It feels like the library of a St James’s gentleman’s club. People are reading or sipping contemplative coffees. The Buckingham Palace book club meets in here. In the corridor outside, a book exchange is piled high with old paperbacks while the walls are lined not with Old Masters but with entries to the Royal Household art competition.
Not so long ago, the smell of smoke and beer would have hung heavy in this part of the Palace at certain times of the day. Now, as in every workplace in Britain, smoking is consigned to a yard at the back. And the bar is no more. The only alcohol served in the staff restaurant is a glass of wine to mark the birthdays of the Queen (at least she has two of them) and of Prince Philip. ‘The culture of the organisation is completely different now,’ says Mike Taylor, Assistant to the Master. ‘Today, people are interested in the gym or in the pool or the squash court or the tennis court. They’re not necessarily interested in going to the bar. They finish work and they go home and drink there if they want.’ In 2003, after an undercover tabloid reporter had spent two months working at the Palace as a footman, he was forced to return vario
us items which he had removed. While the management was furious at the deceit, there was, none the less, quiet satisfaction that one of the pilfered items had been the list of daily lunchtime drinks orders for senior members of the Household. Not one of them had requested alcohol. It’s not all alcohol-free territory, however. There are staff bars at both Sandringham and Balmoral because of the distance to the wider world. Sandringham has never been booze-friendly. None of the estate villages has a pub and drinking is confined to social clubs. At Balmoral, though, there have been occasional problems with drinking among the staff who are brought from London to look after the Royal Family and its guests. The Highlands have never been as popular with the staff as with the Windsors. Some employees are unashamedly urban creatures who cannot see the appeal of a mountain hike in driving rain. It is by far the most remote billet on the royal rota. As a result, some preferred to spend their off-duty moments in the bar rather than enjoying the scenery.
A few years ago, the Master and his team decided more variety was called for. So, staff are now offered mountain bikes and kayaks. The Queen also lets them ride the estate ponies, the first time some employees have ever sat in a saddle. And for those who still cannot see the appeal of the Highlands, every staff bedroom has now been equipped with its own television using the proceeds from the Palace cafe. The Metropolitan Police have also noticed problems when recruiting volunteers for Balmoral shifts. ‘You need to find city-dwelling policemen who are not scared of being out at night with the wind whistling in total blackness,’ says a former officer from the royal beat. ‘You’d be surprised how many don’t like it.’
It’s hard to dispel public perceptions of a Downton Abbey/Upstairs, Downstairs forelock-tugging culture in a place where frock coats are still part of the uniform and there is an entire department devoted to horsedrawn carriages. Sir David Walker is a stout defender of tradition and of terminology against those who think the Palace should do away with some of its ancient rituals. ‘The Yeoman of the Glass and China Pantry still looks after the glass and china. We could, I suppose, rename him the Glass and China Manager but I don’t think he’d be that pleased. Perhaps we’d be losing a little bit of where we’ve come from. Do we need a Master of the Household for that matter? What would they call me instead? General Manager, Administration and Catering?’
But, behind the scenes, the culture has been transformed. Walker is proud that his department recently became the first to be accredited to the government-endorsed Investors in People scheme. All the other Palace departments have since followed suit. Walker is also wary of complacency. ‘You can’t sit here and think you’re absolutely excellent. There was a sort of feeling, perhaps, that we were terrifically good. But you can always do better. You’ve got to be constantly critical.’
To that end he decided his senior staff should visit a group of his old colleagues for whom complacency usually means death – the Red Arrows. The parallels between the RAF’s formation flying team and, say, dishing out the canapés at Windsor is not immediately obvious. But Walker says it made a big impact on his team. ‘The thing that impressed them most was the systematic approach the Reds have put in place to doing the same thing over and over again. During the season, they will do, say, a hundred displays. They treat each one as if it had never happened before and then they debrief themselves mercilessly. Everybody wants to identify where they have not done as well as they should have done. Now that’s the culture we try to put in place here. We’re not into self-flagellation but we’re saying: “OK, we’ve done this event over and over again but we’ll sit down and identify where it could have gone better.” I tell you, every time, we find things we can improve on.’
The Master’s own background is in aerial warfare. He makes no pretence to be an expert in cooking or napkin-folding. He splits his domain between two deputies. One, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Richards, arranges the Queen’s private and family entertaining, as well as all her appearances at the big annual events like Royal Ascot. The other is Edward Griffiths, a former senior executive with the Roux brothers’ catering empire. He likens his job to running the ‘hotel service’ side of the Palace, although he is the first to make it very clear: ‘We are a private house rather than a hotel.’ It’s a team of 135, split between F branch (food), G branch (general – footmen and so on) and H branch (housekeeping). And, until recently, they were virtually autonomous units. Jobs were for life. Promotion was a matter of waiting for someone older to retire or die. And no one ventured into someone else’s territory. Having come from the outside world, Edward Griffiths was surprised. ‘If you worked as a waiter in a hotel and walked past something on the floor and didn’t pick it up because “it’s not my job”, then you wouldn’t last very long as a waiter,’ he explains. ‘One thing I would say in defence of the old regime is that they always did their best to deliver. But there were all these people with these titles all doing things which were very closely linked. An underbutler would work in the pantry, cleaning china and glasses and laying tables but he wasn’t involved in service. The attitude was “This is my job and you can’t do that.”’
All that has changed. Words like ‘cross-training’ and ‘multi-tasking’ have entered the Palace vocabulary. People like Lindsay Steele are now rising up through the ranks. She is one of the first female footmen, an entirely alien concept back in the days of ‘lady clerks’ and ‘chambermaids’. No one has suggested tinkering with the title of ‘footman’, however. ‘When people ask why not “footwoman” or “footperson”, I say footman is part of history and to change that now would be to lose that,’ argues Steele who was twenty-five and on front-of-house duty at a Michelin-starred restaurant when she spotted an ad for a footman in the Caterer magazine. A country girl from Cheshire, she says a love of history drew her to the idea of royal service. Three years in, she says the thing which has surprised her most is the variety of the job – from spit-polishing shoes, to making a 5 a.m. breakfast for a visiting finance minister to serving on the Royal Train. Her favourite off-duty moments have included pony-trekking and bingo at Balmoral (several staff cite the weekly bingo sessions as the best bit of their stint on Deeside). The highlight of her career, says Steele, was receiving a lesson from the Queen herself in how to revive the embers of a dying fire.
When friends ask her what a footman does, she has a ready answer: ‘I start by saying it’s similar to being a butler and if they don’t know what that means I mention Jeeves and Wooster.’ But what sets Steele apart from the footmen of yesteryear is not just the fact that she is a woman. It is that she is a holder of Britain’s first university-endorsed Butler Diploma. What’s more, she’s now training to teach it.
The Royal Household has teamed up with the University of West London and the hospitality industry to produce a national qualification covering everything required of the modern Jeeves, from valeting to shooting lunches to cigar storage. Much of the syllabus was written by the Palace Steward (the most senior liveried figure in the Royal Household). Once, a boy would join the Household from school and work through to old age before reaching this position. The current Palace Steward is Nigel McEvoy, who joined as a trainee footman at nineteen when he realised he was never going to be a chef. He reached the top slot while still in his thirties and is just as much of a perfectionist as his predecessors. But that hasn’t stopped him from embracing new ideas like radio earpieces at big events. His team may be wearing Georgian tailcoats but if the Lord Chief Justice is still waiting for his gravy while the Foreign Secretary’s wife has already finished her longe de venaison de Balmoral, then someone needs to know pronto.
Edward Griffiths acknowledges that the more his staff are trained, the greater the chance that someone will poach them. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have turnover. Fresh blood is vital,’ he says. Some move on to big hotels or become butlers in private homes. ‘It’s important to understand that young people have a very different outlook from baby boomers like me who are writing the job adverts,’ says Griff
iths. ‘They are far more interested in work/life balance than two generations ago. People are not coming to stay for ever. If they get a job here, it’s very portable. Just saying that they have had three years work in the Royal Household – a lot of employers will look at that.’
Through internet recruitment, the Royal Household is increasingly seen as a mainstream employer rather than a throwback. Pay grades are now set in the mid-range of hospitality industry salaries. The Palace has an established work experience programme for hospitality students from four British universities plus one in Switzerland. One bright spark from Bournemouth University did his work experience here, graduated with a BA in hospitality, came back and, within a few years, has now risen to one of the most senior liveried positions.
Many – indeed most – arrive with other qualifications. The chances are that the cleaner dusting that bust of Prince Albert or the footman opening the car door will actually have a degree – in anything from history to psychology. No fewer than 70 per cent of housekeeping assistants are now graduates. The figure for footmen is only marginally lower at 60 per cent. Yet, considering that annual staff turnover in the Master’s department is 5.5 per cent – in an industry where 50 per cent is not unusual – job satisfaction does not appear to be a problem. It is also accepted that staff can supplement their income doing out-of-hours freelance work for catering firms who need slick reinforcements with a safe CV. It is not unusual for a member of the Royal Household to turn up at a smart London house for dinner and find a colleague serving the drinks. Everyone knows, though, that there will be trouble the moment it detracts from the day job. If anyone needs to be reminded where their loyalties lie, says Griffiths, then their days are numbered.
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