Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  Sir David Walker and Edward Griffiths are very keen on benchmarking – comparing this place with similar organisations. It’s not easy to benchmark a fendersmith when you’ve got the only ones in the land but Griffiths explains that it’s simply a question of comparing like with like. He uses embassies, hotels and large institutions to evaluate his own team. And there is always some sort of exchange programme going on. For example, a group of footmen have just been sent to study meet-and-greet techniques and ‘guest history systems’ at the Ritz. They will write a report on their return. It turns out that there is more of a science to this than might be imagined.

  ‘If you study where people go when they go to a restaurant,’ says Griffiths, ‘most go back to a place where they’re recognised, where the maître d’hotel says, “Hello, so good to see you again.” These hotels have observed for a long period of time that a reception desk is a barrier. So the answer is not to wait for your customer to come in and then ask their name but to find out what time they are arriving.’

  The Ritz spirit works in reverse. Staff from some of the big hotels will be invited to spend a few days watching a state banquet being pieced together. Seven years ago, the Palace joined a secretive club which wields huge clout in the food world and which recently elected Griffiths as its chairman. Nothing could be less calculated to attract interest than a body calling itself the Food Service Management Group. However, its members include the Houses of Parliament, banks, department stores, public institutions – anywhere serving food, in fact, apart from hotels and restaurants. All their deliberations are entirely confidential, but by pooling information, they can ensure that they are getting the best value from suppliers and staff alike. It sounds like catering’s answer to a papal conclave. Perish the supplier who crosses this lot.

  The Palace is an organisation which takes its food extremely seriously. The most popular page on the entire royal intranet system is the daily menu for the Palace restaurant. Everything from the soup of the day to the Queen’s cottage pie will be prepared in the same kitchens under the auspices of the Royal Chef, Mark Flanagan. He had a tough act to follow when he arrived in 2002. His predecessor, Lionel Mann, was a muchloved Palace fixture who had spent forty-two years cooking for the Queen. In the old days, Flanagan would have joined straight from school and worked his way up from peeling potatoes. These days, the Queen recruits like any other mainstream business in the services sector. After many years with household names like Raymond Blanc and the Roux brothers, Flanagan was running the Wentworth Executive Club when he was invited to submit his CV to the Royal Household. He is now in charge of a kitchen team of 53, cooking up to 1,000 meals a day for the entire staff as well as for the Queen and her family. It is an operation that, on any given day, will involve preparing meals in up to four of the five royal residences (Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Holyroodhouse, Sandringham or Balmoral). Along with the job comes automatic membership of a club straight out of P. G. Wodehouse. The Chefs des Chefs is restricted exclusively to the personal chefs of the world’s heads of state. It is an assembly of some of the world’s greatest cooks and yet does not contain a single celebrity chef. Nor does it include, say, the head chef from Number Ten Downing Street or the US Senate. You can only join if you cook for your head of state.

  The club meets once a year – the latest gathering was in China – to swap ideas and promote members’ national cuisines. It is particularly useful, in the run-up to a state visit, to have a hotline to the person who knows how the visitor likes his eggs. It’s all very well asking the embassy but diplomats are usually too preoccupied to talk to the person at the stove. The forthcoming South African state visit will not present Mark Flanagan with any surprises. ‘I know the chap who looks after President Zuma’s residence very well,’ explains Flanagan. ‘I can contact him directly and say, “Is there anything you really need me to get hold of?” Sometimes people can be very guarded whereas I can get to the right people. They know what I need to know and when I need to know it.’ Discretion, needless to say, is the club’s primary rule. Flanagan is often asked what sort of food the Queen likes best. He won’t say. Aside from adhering to a strict code of confidence, he points out that if everyone knew the Queen’s ‘favourite’ dish, she would never be served anything else.

  Flanagan epitomises the new Palace ethos in terms of people management. He is a member of the Académie Culinaire, a network of chefs who provide apprenticeships for newcomers. He always has two raw recruits in training at the Palace and, by the end of their three-year apprenticeship, they should be good enough to run a royal houseparty on their own. When the heat is on for a big event like a state visit, he will also offer ‘chance of a lifetime’ work experience to star pupils from selected catering colleges. Like Griffiths, he is glad that the Palace has moved on from the old ‘job for life’ culture. ‘We actively encourage our young guys to go back out into industry rather than plot a more laidback path here. It’s a meritocracy here. We want to know what you can bring to the organisation.’ But he is also adamant that all his staff absorb the old Palace traditions. This may be something as minor as cucumber sandwiches (not only are the crusts removed but they must be cut into squares, not fingers). It also extends to history lessons. ‘There’ve been some fantastic chefs here. Carême – he was a legend. That’s something I keep reminding the young ones. They say to me: “Who is this bloke?” And I give them a book and say: “Have a read of this.” He’s not like our celebrity chefs. He is still very much revered.’*

  The kitchen staff are surrounded by history, particularly when working in the soaring medieval kitchens at Windsor. Royal cooking is another example of ancient and modern. The average Palace meal will probably have involved at least one antique saucepan plus the latest gadget from Japan. In the Georgian cooking halls beneath Buckingham Palace, one side of the main kitchen still has the original roasting spit and a huge wood-burner called Queen Mary’s Oven, neither of which sees much action these days. But there is also a knee-high hotplate from the same period which is still in regular use because its low height allows two cooks to heave cauldrons of soup and stock pots on and off easily. Shelf after shelf is piled high with polished copper pans engraved with the cyphers of different monarchs. Many are from the reign of Queen Victoria; some go back to George IV. There is an enormous Edwardian trough specially designed for cooking turbot. Next door, in the ‘Copper Store’, is a pan the size of a baby’s bath. Flanagan explains that he has invested in a lot of new stainless steel equipment but none of it can do the really big tasks and nothing beats copper for an even spread of heat.

  An adjacent storeroom could be a cookery museum, full of magnificent old ice-cream bombes, tiny savarin moulds for finger-sized rum babas, jelly moulds for preparing the sort of blancmange mountains only seen in period dramas. It’s all still in use. And alongside these gems is the most up-to-date catering machinery in the business. Flanagan’s latest acquisition is a new sous vide water bath which gently melts the meat for his casseroles. Other innovations include the camera and the computer. Astonishingly, until recently no one bothered to write down recipes from particular banquets. In many cases, the only recipes consisted of a few notes and what was stored in the head of Flanagan’s long-serving deputy and head chef, Mark Fromont. ‘In the past, we would just rely on Mark’s memory which is phenomenal. But now, we take a photograph of everything and do a standard operational manual which helps with training and consistency. In the past, you never took a photograph and if you didn’t have handwritten notes, then it didn’t happen.’

  The kitchen structure is not unlike that of a large restaurant. Below the Royal Chef – who does more managing than cooking – is the head chef, the sous chefs (in charge of sections), the chefs de parties (who focus on specific areas – the sauce, perhaps, or the canapés), then demichefs de parties (juniors) and, finally, the apprentices. And there are no separate sections for royal food and staff food. On an ordinary day, the Duke of Edinburgh and the porter might e
nd up with the same gravy on their roast chicken. ‘We find it works much better if we engage everybody and there’s no division between preparing staff meals and royal meals,’ Flanagan explains. Of course, members of the Royal Family will order their own dishes. The kitchens are one part of the Palace where there is an ‘open line’ with the ‘principals’. There is no need for a Private Secretary to get between the Queen and her boiled egg. If she has a special request, she may call down herself. But royal food is a tiny part of the operation. The chefs are much more likely to be doing lasagne for two hundred staff than cooking a salmon fresh from the Dee for the Princess Royal. ‘At least 75 per cent of our role is about looking after the staff,’ says Flanagan.

  Monarchs have had chefs since time immemorial, but no monarch ever had something called a Head of Personnel until the Queen began the great shake-up of the Royal Household in the nineties. Before then, the task of running the staff had been left to a gentleman called the Establishment Officer, assisted by a couple of lady clerks and a few filing cabinets. These days, it is a twenty-five-strong operation run by Elizabeth Hunka, who arrived in 1999 after a career at the top of the commercial sector. She certainly does not feel as if she is helping an ancient organisation keep up with the rest of the world. She believes that the Royal Household is one of the most progressive workplaces of its size.

  ‘To be a talented organisation you’ve got to pull in people from all quarters,’ she says. ‘We’ve widened it out now.’ She lists some of the changes, not least the fact that 80 per cent of the five thousand job applications in the previous year came via the internet. For some people, she says, applying online is much less daunting than writing to the Palace. She is pleased but not satisfied with her diversity figures – 50/50 male/ female across the Household and 30 per cent female in the most senior positions (‘broadly equivalent to Whitehall’). The Palace is ‘in the forefront’ of equal pay scales between men and women. The overall number of staff from ethnic minorities is just under 6 per cent overall but nearly 11 per cent in financial areas. There are no corresponding figures for gay or lesbian staff – ‘we don’t ask’ – but the Palace has never been seen as under-represented in that regard.

  Union numbers have remained steady since unions were recognised in the seventies with a fifth of the staff split between three trade unions (Unite, Prospect and PCS). It’s a particularly sociable workforce, too. The £5 per year Royal Household Football, Sports and Social Club incorporates staff from all the residences. Besides organising keenly fought sporting encounters with other institutions (the Corporation of London, perhaps, or the Bank of England), it arranges quiz nights and barbecues. It recently took over the entire upper tier of Tower Bridge for a staff ball. For employees who routinely run garden parties for eight thousand, such events are not unduly challenging. The cricket pitch and golf course at Windsor Castle, plus the football pitch at Kensington Palace, are open to all. As well as the twenty-four-hour independent counselling service, there is the ‘Well Being’ service which sorts out maternity, paternity and adoption leave and allows staff to ‘buy’ extra holiday. There are free lunchtime and after-hours courses in ‘customer care’, ‘finance for nonfinancial managers’ and even ‘taming your grammar gremlins’. The more dedicated can study for a Chartered Management Institute qualification.

  It has all been approved by the Queen, along with all the reforms to the pension scheme and perks like a loan scheme for buying bicycles. ‘I think we do change rather well and that’s led by the Queen,’ says Hunka. ‘I never get the sense she says no to something progressive. She’s practical. I remember the first staff survey in 1999, which was a bit of an unknown, and the Queen and the Duke were very keen to read the report.’

  Hunka’s boss is Sir Alan Reid, the man with the Palace purse strings, hence that ancient title, Keeper of the Privy Purse. ‘We are seriously into training now and we get a huge amount of return for investing in people,’ he says firmly. ‘But we needed to empower a lot of people and it’s taken years.’ He was astonished to arrive in 2002 and find no external computer links. ‘It took three days to communicate with the outside world,’ he recalls. ‘You’d get a letter in, you sent one back and everything was happening unbelievably slowly. That was based totally on risk aversion. That’s why the risk-averse culture is so daft. The Queen is not remotely risk averse.’ The filmmaker Edward Mirzoeff would agree. Even more frustrating than his evening at the Ghillies’ Ball at Balmoral was his attempt to film a 1991 Privy Council meeting for the same documentary, Elizabeth R. The restrictions, he says, were almost comic. ‘It should have been very straightforward but the staff suddenly said: “You can cover the first item of business but not the second or third so you’ll have to leave the room and come back for the fourth.” This was crazy as the whole thing only lasted a few minutes and would have been over by the time we came back in with all our kit. We couldn’t do it. I saw the Queen talking to Robert Fellowes at the end of a corridor and I screeched up to her and said, “Excuse me, Ma’am, but I’ve got a huge problem. We can’t go in and come out again.” The Queen looked faintly puzzled and said to Robert: “I can’t see that there would be a problem.” And so Robert said: “No, I think that should be fine.”’

  The historian Kenneth Rose has studied royal risk aversion through the ages and has a favourite story about two courtiers at Windsor looking out of the window during the reign of George V. One says to the other: ‘Don’t quote me, but there’s a blackbird on the lawn.’ The Household mindset has progressed somewhat since then. Reid says that he is all in favour of constructive innovations from today’s younger staff, admitting that fresh ideas were less welcome in the not too distant past when retired generals ran most things round here. ‘Someone in their second career is not the best pilot for change,’ says Reid. ‘They’ve done the dramatic stuff. They want to run a safe ship. And they’re not getting the best out of junior staff. People used to think: “Everything is done superbly. Why put it at risk by letting footmen come up with ideas?”’ By computerising every section of the Palace, he says, there has been a major shift in staff relations. ‘A lot of people don’t understand how technology breaks down management structures,’ he explains. ‘It’s very easy for someone to send an email to the Private Secretary. He may not want to receive it necessarily but it’s a lot easier than getting a fifteen-minute appointment with him.’

  The Palace intranet site is open to all 1,100 employees. Relaunched in 2010, it is very much an organ of the staff rather than the bosses. More than forty different departments nominate ‘editors’ and, while it has yet to embrace blogging, it is never short of suggestions and is about to launch eBay-style royal classified ads. It is run by computer scientist Nicola Shanks who used to run websites for children’s television characters like Bob the Builder and Angelina Ballerina. Now she is in genuine fairy-tale territory. Having moved from a tieless, jeans-and-T-shirt industry to the Palace, she has been surprised by the fact that the supposedly stuffy royal world seems to have more fun. ‘I was struck by the sense of community – all the clubs and things that go on. Even compared to the media industry, it’s very sociable.’

  A random glance at the intranet pages shows a lot of charity and social events, including a fun run in sumo costumes and a sponsored golf marathon at Windsor. The Royal Household Book Club is turning its attentions to The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal and Any Human Heart by William Boyd. The Royal Household Film Club is about to show The Adjustment Bureau and The Social Network in the former cinema (it’s been renamed the South Drawing Room but the old projector still works).

  All this change has not always been easy. Privately, some lament the passing of particular perks or quirks. Few doubt that the Queen must have had misgivings herself. As the recurring refrain goes: ‘The Queen does not like change.’ Yet she is also well aware of when sentimentality must yield to necessity.

  Throughout the Royal Household, no department was more resistant to the changes of the eighties
and nineties than the Royal Mews. This is a part of the Palace which did not employ women until 2004. With its seventy stalls and an indoor riding school dating from 1766, it is a very grand but busy working equestrian centre and car depot in the very heart of London. It is also a major tourist attraction. The job of the Mews is to transport the Queen and her family by road. For 99 per cent of the time, this is done by a team of seven chauffeurs using a fleet of eight official limousines and several less conspicuous cars, all of which are based in a gloomy garage and workshop at the back of the Mews. On a handful of occasions each year, they travel by horse-drawn transport. This is done by around thirty horses which also enjoy larger, grander accommodation than anyone in the entire Palace.

  Britain likes to pride itself on doing pageantry better than anyone else, and at the heart of any great state spectacle, you will usually find horses and carriages. The wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was a superb example.

  The Royal Mews has nothing to do with the Household Cavalry which comprises front-line army troops performing ceremonial duties between deployments. During most state visits – or royal weddings – it’s the Household Cavalry which provides the gleaming, clattering, swaggering Sovereign’s Escort which rides fore and aft of the royal carriage procession. The Royal Mews is the civilian operation which moves the Monarch and her family. But it is always run along military lines by an ex-army officer called the Crown Equerry. And given the Queen’s love of horses and the Duke of Edinburgh’s knowledge of competitive carriage driving (he wrote the modern rulebook), the Royal Mews always attracts keen royal interest. It was also a semi-autonomous province when Michael Peat and his consultants looked through the gates in the late eighties. The Crown Equerry of the day was Sir John Miller, a distinguished former Welsh Guards officer who was awarded the MC and the DSO within a month of each other for bravery in 1944. He could be similarly robust towards anyone interfering with the Royal Mews, which he ran for twenty-six years. As his Daily Telegraph obituary concluded in 2006: ‘Miller was effortlessly polite and wholly devoted to his Sovereign – though he was rather less genial to those whose social position was unclear to him.’ Fellow Welsh Guards officer Kenneth Rose has fond memories of talking to Miller shortly before a dinner at Windsor Castle. The Queen had planned a treat for her guests in the form of an after-dinner recital by Mstislav Rostropovich, then arguably the greatest living cellist. Miller was less than thrilled. ‘I’ve had a very difficult day,’ he informed Rose. Gesturing towards Rostropovich, he went on: ‘See that fellow talking to the Queen? He’s been playing his damned fiddle outside my office all day.’ Miller was close to all the Royal Family, having introduced Prince Philip to carriage driving, the Prince of Wales to hunting and the Princess Royal to eventing.*