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included Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, and Ted Heath. Later there were university friends like John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor. ‘It was always at four o’clock, and Cook prepared cakes, while Nanny made very delicate strawberry jam sandwiches. She heard all sorts of interesting and personal things at the tea table, but never repeated a word, never gossiped about it.’ 42
     
    When asked whether his nanny was ever a rival to his mother in his affections, he replied:
     
No, not at all, she would always make it clear that my mother was the most important person in our lives. I remember my mother remarking how, during the war years, Nanny would pack away the clothes we had grown out of, so that they would be there for our children, such was her confidence that the world would go on as before. Actually, Nanny made a lot of our clothes, she was endlessly knitting. I can remember her asking my mother how she liked buttons fixed. She never ever got cross with David and me, but somehow discipline was enforced by the way she treated us; she led by example, I suppose. 43
     
    The daily routine
began with breakfast in the nursery, which was on the first floor, and part of the servants’ wing. There was a nursery, a small scullery, bedrooms for my brother and me, and one for Nanny beyond that. We had all our meals with Nanny in the nursery, although we might have lunch with our parents in the dining room if there were no other guests. Nanny would read to us, and spend time with us making things out of paper and pipe cleaners.
     
In the summer we would often walk down to the river with a picnic and play there. If we were playing outside she had a little horn she would blow to summon us back for meals, like the ones gamekeepers used at the end of a drive. She had a great love of nature and would explain it all to us, birds, trees and fields. It was also wartime and we couldn’t drive anywhere. We were, I think, the focus of her whole life and we couldn’t have been closer or happier. It was a very idyllic life. She really created a very idyllic world for us. 44
     
    After the death of the present Lord Crathorne’s father, the huge family home, built for an entirely Edwardian way of life, was turned into a comfortable hotel. Since the 1970s the present Lord Crathorne has lived in a much smaller modern house on the same estate. While nannies are a familiar feature in country houses – as they are still in many thousands of English families today – Miss Messenger belongs to the last era of the career nanny, who would expect to devote her whole working life to one family. It is the end of a long tradition that is centuries old. 45
     
    The forced retreats and adaptations of country-house service are amply illustrated by the career of another butler, this time from ayounger generation. He began service immediately after the war in a house with a full complement of staff that went through several phases of reduction. Micheal Kenneally, butler to the Sykes family at Sledmere for forty years, occupies a special place in Yorkshire country-house legend. He arrived from Ireland in 1952 to become pantry boy to landowner and baronet, Sir Richard Sykes. As one of Sir Richard’s sons, Christopher Simon Sykes, recalled, Sledmere ‘was still run on an Edwardian scale, with a house staff of at least 10, as well as nannies, governesses and chauffeurs.’ 46
     
    A strict hierarchy was in place, ‘at the top of which was the butler, Cassidy (never Mr in those days), and Michael Kenneally at the bottom. He slept in a room in the attics. If a visiting servant came to stay who outranked him, the pantry boy had to move out on to a truckle bed in the corridor.’ As Mr Sykes later remarked: ‘Imagine anyone putting up with that now.’ 47
     
    Kenneally became footman and then in 1959 butler. According to Mr Sykes, ‘He turned buttling into an art form. He dressed the part to perfection, black jacket and pinstripes for formal daywear; a