Authors: Juliet Nicolson
Eric Horne had been a highly regarded butler for over fifty years but now found his circumstances wholly altered. Most recently he had been working for ‘a noble family’ who had been financially ruined during the last four years. Eric had enjoyed this job so much that for the whole last year he had worked without any wages. He found himself taking on duties that he would never have considered part of the position of senior butler before the war. He had to understand lavatory ballcocks, repair and glue furniture and have a working knowledge of carpentry and painting. He even had to take up the carpets in the house, beat the dust from them and lay them back in place. The job was a heavy and long one with sixteen hours on his feet – something of a challenge for Eric, who was well beyond his allocated three score years and ten. He wondered to himself, in the diary he had now been keeping for several decades, ‘what would the Trades Unions think of this little lot?’
Because he liked the family he did the jobs willingly but in the end when the indoor staff was reduced from twenty-five to three and numbers on the estate fell by the same proportion, the position became impossible. Eric found himself unable to find work, despite a strong network of friends in service, and the placing of advertisements in the
Morning Post
. There was less call for a butler of his experience, age and, it must be said, occasional intransigency. He began to imagine he had become something of a combined threat and irritant to younger staff, even though in his early days of employment he had taken instruction without complaint. In one early job he had scrubbed the silver coins from a gentleman’s trouser pocket in case they had become contaminated with germs. At least he wasn’t as badly off as a friend of his who had ended up in the workhouse. This old man kept a coat left over from a more affluent era in Eric’s brother’s shop in the Fulham Road. Whenever the old butler came out of the workhouse he would come straight to the shop and put on his smart coat and imagine himself back in the old days.
Eric had already noticed a shift in what could only be called the
‘class’ of employer who could afford his wages in the years leading up to the war. After the war he became increasingly pessimistic at the effect the economy was having on the grand houses of the gentry. ‘The way things are going’, he gloomily predicted, it will not be long ‘before they are all turned into institutions or schools or perhaps hotels’ and ‘homes for the weak minded’.
Plans to close up Devonshire House in Piccadilly were already rumoured, even though the Duke was out of the country in his continuing role as Governor General of Canada. Eric estimated that it would take a millionaire to keep up with the demands of a country estate ‘with their deer parks, acres of gardens, peach and grape houses and bricks and mortar’. As well as the running costs, he foresaw a dearth of servants ready to return to their jobs of sustaining these great houses. The day would come when the gentry would fall so low in economic health that they ‘would have moved into suburban villas and begun to grow scarlet runners instead of peaches’.
Liberal-minded members of a class a rung or two below the aristocracy applauded the emancipation of the servant class, while persisting in making use of the old system. Leonard Woolf, a committed socialist who felt ‘the class war and the conflict of class interests’ to be ‘the greatest of curses’, still employed a cha lady at the lowest of low wages impervious to any suggestion of hypocrisy.
Eric’s own circumstances had become even more distressing in the spring of 1919. His wife Emma, or Aunt Em as the family knew her, had been gradually losing her sight over the years, and when she became blind the whole family, including Eric and Emily’s son, daughter-in-law and grandson, had moved to Coronation Villas in Sutton and Cheam. Eric had taken the job with the snuffling cook and visited his wife whenever possible. But one snowy cold evening after an outing to the pantomime, Eric’s son and his wife and child were unable to find an indoor seat on the bus home and were forced to take outside seats in the freezing night air. They all caught Spanish flu and passed it on to the weakened Emily. Within a day she had died, her daughter-in-law barely clinging to life.
The expenses for Eric and his family that first winter of peace were horrifying. Only one butler in a hundred had a pension and many, especially the married ones who had an extra drain on their
reduced resources, ended up in the poorhouse. A special nurse had been called in to care for Eric’s family through the worst of the crisis, as on top of the flu the young grandson had caught measles. Then there were the extra cylinders of hydrogen brought in to hydrate the sickroom and finally the most costly and saddest expense of all, Emily’s funeral. Eric had saved £100 in the Prudential that covered it and he thanked the Lord for his own foresight.
After Emily’s death Eric had stayed in London, partly to be near his brother Frank, whose taxi-driving skills had served him well during the war. Eric’s flat in Bessborough Place, Victoria, was not much to write home about, being a stuffy garret at the top of the building, and on the long climb to the top Eric could feel his heart thumping in an alarmingly irregular manner. He was still writing his memoirs, his own safeguard against state poverty. He had been keeping the diary throughout his fifty years of service and thought he would end the book with an advertisement for a vacancy for a butler valet. Eric himself would be the ideal employee. The wording was specific and accurate. ‘First class, life experience, strong, healthy, active worker, excellent references.’ He thought he would add that any position would be considered ‘where honesty and integrity would be appreciated’ – a rare combination of qualities these days, Eric thought.
Living in the city, Eric also noticed how the pace of life, so leisurely and civilised before the war, had changed. The motor car, suddenly affordable to countless thousands, seemed to be in large part responsible for the change of speed. A year earlier, on the day the Peace Conference had begun in Paris,
W
.O. Bentley or W.O. to his friends, known for his manufacture of rotary aero-engines in the war, had announced the opening of a factory at Cricklewood, north London, where he planned to produce the most elegant car on the roads. ‘Gentry need not leave their houses to go out to dinner until within a few minutes before dinner should be on the table,’ Eric observed with a critical note in his voice. ‘They dart up in a stinking car that sends out noxious fumes; offensive to everyone but themselves.’
But Eric had a still deeper anxiety concerning the moral laxity and fragmentation of society that went beyond inconvenience and selfishness. ‘English home life is all broken up,’ he observed. ‘At any given meal time or at any entertainment, the chances are that the
gentleman will be found dining with a “lady” not his wife and the lady dining with some gentleman, not her husband; and the chauffeur is waiting outside for hours in the cold and the wet. And the chauffeur is, by the professional rules of his employment, to remain silent about what he has seen.’ Or, Eric might have added, not seen. The conspiracy of not speaking the truth pervaded all parts of society.
Some of Eric’s younger relations rolled their eyes behind his back, realising for the hundredth time that there was no hope of accustoming Uncle Eric, now well into his seventies, to the new ways of behaving. But the eye-roll was undoubtedly of the affectionate kind. Everyone who knew him agreed that Uncle Eric was one of a kind and that they didn’t make butlers like that any more.
For a brief interlude, however, Eric had been given a job that took him back to memories of happier times. Rajah Sir Harry Singh, whom Eric had served before the war, returned to London. He had taken a house in Curzon Street for six months from June 1919 from where he celebrated the Victory Parade. The Rajah, ‘one of the most likeable men there has ever been’, brought his own Indian staff with him for his immediate needs but he also took on several English servants and ran the house in a style that Eric approvingly noted was ‘princely without being extravagant’. Here was a household where ‘flowers and fruit abounded’. Visitors were served delicious home-prepared Indian curry and while the Rajah was an abstemious man he made sure the ‘choicest wines’ were served to his guests.
Only once, with Eric’s help, did proceedings become a little excessive. On the night of the Victory Parade itself, the prince had taken a box at the theatre and when the beauty of the lady in the adjoining box was noted and remarked upon by the prince’s all-male guests, Eric slipped next door and ‘by the exercise of a little influence’ with the butler there, conveyed champagne and supper into the box, whereupon the lady herself agreed to be lifted over into the Rajah’s own box. Members of the audience who noticed this small transaction applauded with polite but envious laughter and the jollity of the evening helped a little in forgetting the recurring pain of Emily’s death. Despairing of a return to the good old days of life before the war, Eric took comfort in his association with an Indian prince whose intelligence ‘far surpassed any Englishman I ever met’.
Mid-Spring 1920
Driving days were over for Tommy Atkins, the former under-chauffeur of the Marquis de Soveral, even before they had begun. Having never managed to learn the skill since the humiliating incident when he was caught having a go at the wheel of the Portuguese ambassador’s Rolls-Royce, Tommy was further ashamed to have been invalided out of the London Irish Rifles on account of his feet. He had enjoyed a moment or two of authority when guarding prisoners of war in the North of England. One day, overseeing some German prisoners digging a trench in the English mud and relishing his new-found gift for languages acquired in ‘Paree’, he asserted this authority with a German phrase that sounded pretty good to him even though he could not confirm its accuracy. As he bellowed out ‘Ein Mun mit spaden’, simultaneously indicating to the men that they should pick up their digging tools, he noted with pleasure how his words had the instant effect of making them jump to his command.
Tommy was the second youngest of twelve children and although Albert, one of his four brothers, had been killed in the fighting, Tommy was proud to know that the name of Private Atkins, a former engine cleaner for the London and South Western Railway Company, would appear in a special memorial plaque at Waterloo Station. Tommy had never had much time for religion, especially after he had seen his first dead German body lying in the mud with the words on his belt buckle still visible,
Gott mit uns
. No God, reasoned Tommy, could be on both sides of this ghastly carnage. Any belief he might have had evaporated immediately.
But Tommy’s faith in human love remained undimmed. He had always been a romantic, although the sight of a couple in an unashamed
embrace, or the lingering comings and goings between the milkman and the lady of the house next door, troubled him. He did not approve of public demonstrations of affection. However, he had been ecstatically happy to come back south to his sweetheart Kitty whom he had married immediately after the war. He treasured a photograph taken at Elstree of the two of them, their heads leaning into each other, Tommy jauntily bending his knee, his new moustache emphasising his handsome features. Everyone said he was a dead cert to win first prize in any competition searching for Mr Debonair. Tommy and Kitty were happy, despite having very little money, but he did not think that a return to life in service was for him even though most of his brothers and sisters had once worked for the gentry. Although Tommy had left school at the age of thirteen and was a bit of a dreamer, there was enough of an air of authority about him in the smart uniform that went with his new job as a meter reader in the Hackney Electrical Company.
Tommy and Kitty rented a room in a boarding house in Stoke Newington in London’s East End run by a large woman called Annie who was three years older than Tommy. Marital prospects for Annie were slim not only because of the coldness of her expression but also because of her thrice-widowed and immensely demanding mother who lived with her and banged her stick on the floor whenever she wanted her daughter’s attention. Annie was a hard-working woman, a seamstress by day, turning out exquisite panels of smocking which she would deliver to the factory up the road to be made up into children’s dresses. In the evening she would cross London to fulfil her barmaid duties at Lambeth’s Elephant and Castle Theatre, with its distinctive figure of an elephant sitting on the top of the entrance. Charlie Chaplin had grown up in a street not far away.
But Annie was not a happy woman. From the age of three her mother had farmed her out to be brought up by an aunt. Annie secretly dreamed of the day she would have a little girl for whom she could make pretty clothes and send to dance lessons in a theatre and for whom she would always be waiting when she returned from school. She would be a mother who might not be able to show much warmth, but who would make sure that when the occasion
was right she would let her daughter know that she loved her unconditionally. But even while Annie dreamed of finding a decent man as a husband and father of her children, she knew the probability was remote. Meanwhile her lodgers, Tommy and Kitty, in the first flush of marriage, kept themselves to themselves.
Although Tommy’s ambitions to drive a Rolls-Royce had not been realised, the post-war passion for driving was increasing every year. Douglas Ann, a dashing moustachioed ex-soldier, a passionate naturalist and owner of a modest farm in Sussex, thought he could make some money out of this new craze for motoring. Immediately after the war Douglas had married a plain but ambitious woman called Drusilla. For two guineas a week ‘all found’ the enterprising Mr and Mrs Ann had offered to train half a dozen well-to-do girls in the skills of becoming financially self-sufficient, just in case the limited post-war supply of wage-earning husbands should be denied them. The eager girls mastered the care of the cow, the three pigs and the varied selection of beautiful chickens including White Wyandottes, Red Dorkings and Light Sussex hens kept by the Anns. By the end of their stay and after several months immersed to their knees in muck and mire, the girls had become qualified to run their own smallholdings.