Read Up and Down Stairs for Free Online Page A

candlesticks and inkstands on the writing desks, the tapestries on the walls and the thick rugs.’ 33
     
    As was usual in the pre-war era, he learnt his trade by waiting on the senior members of staff: ‘most young servants moved to a different house after about a year or so to gain promotion and to experience how various houses were run.’ Mr. Ager worked in several, including St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, returning there in 1930 to become valet to the 2nd Lord St Levan. 34 ‘I travelled all around the world with him. Wherever he wanted to go, he just went. If it was cold when he returned to England, we’d pop off again. I made all the arrangements, bought the tickets and more or less made the world smooth for him and his party.’ 35 In 1933 he married and left to become butler to a Mr Dunkels, then to a Colonel Trotter in Berwickshire.
     
    After serving in the army during the Second World War, he returned to work for the colonel, who died shortly afterwards. Mr Ager was then invited to St Michael’s Mount once more as butler to the 3rd Lord St Levan, who had succeeded his uncle: ‘I said I’d come back for three months, which turned into nearly thirty years.’
     
    Cultural shifts during this period made their impact. In the 1920s, ‘when I was a footman, the senior staff stood very much on their dignity, and the rest of the staff were acutely aware of their status within the house. No one could help out anyone else. We didn’t help the kitchen people, however busy they were, and we certainly wouldn’t help a housemaid.’ 36 Two decades later, the pattern was very different. ‘After the war most people were unable to afford the same amount of staff. I saw great changes in service as our people’s life-styles became less grand. In my youth the butler was always available if the family needed him; otherwise, he merely supervised the staff. He had worked hard all his life, and he wasn’t going to continue if he could help it!’ 37
     
    By the 1960s, his role had altered out of all recognition: ‘A butler in the old days would never have dreamed of doing as much day-today work as I did. He wouldn’t have cleaned the silver, laid the tableor seen to it that the reception rooms were orderly – those jobs belonged to the first footman. Nor did any of my staff wait on me as they would have done on a butler in the past.’ 38 He kept his standards high, and was very proud of the many staff he had trained, some of whom had gone on into royal service. He was careful to retain his classic butler’s uniform from the 1930s until his retirement: ‘a butler would wear a black evening tailcoat all day long. In the evening he changed from the gray trousers into a pair of black trousers with a fine silk line running down the side.’ 39
     
    Although nannies and au pairs are familiar to us today, they cannot replace the sense of absolute safety produced by the English country-house nursery and the classic British nanny. This was very much the experience of the present Lord Crathorne, whose childhood was spent at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire in the 1940s and 1950s. 40 He was looked after by Nanny Messenger, who was born in 1891 and came to work for his family in 1939, living at Crathorne Hall until her death in 1976.
     
    During the 1940s and 1950s, she was one of only half a dozen indoor staff. When his parents had first moved into the house, there was also a butler, Mr Jeffreys, a cook, Mrs Davidson, a housekeeper and an assistant cook. ‘The whole family had tea in her room every day for thirty-six years. I have tremendously warm memories of her; she was a perfectly wonderful lady who epitomised all the best things about the English nanny. After my mother died in 1969, she really became the core of family life.’ 41
     
    Nursery tea, with Nanny and the children, became such an institution that every guest in the house would be expected. As Lord Crathorne’s father was a government minister, over the years this