would appear to have been a number of houses in recent times, some of the

highest pedigree, which have tended to take a competitive attitude towards each

other and have not been above showing off to guests a butler's mastery of such

trivial accomplishments. I have heard of various instances of a butler being

displayed as a kind of performing monkey at a house party. In one regrettable

case, which I myself witnessed, it had become an established sport in the house

for guests to ring for the butler and put to him random questions of the order

of, say, who had won the Derby in such and such a year, rather as one might to a

Memory Man at the music hall.

 

My father, as I say, came of a generation mercifully free of such confusions of

our professional values. And I would maintain that for all his limited command

of English and his limited general knowledge, he not only knew all there was to

know about how to run a house, he did in his prime come to acquire that 'dignity

in keeping with his position', as the Hayes Society puts it. If I try, then, to

describe to you what I believe made my father thus distinguished, I may in this

way convey my idea of what 'dignity' is.

 

There was a certain story my father was fond of repeating over the years. I

recall listening to him tell it to visitors when I was a child, and then later,

when I was starting out as a footman under his supervision. I remember him

relating it again the first time I returned to see him after gaining my first

post as butler - to a Mr and Mrs Muggeridge in their relatively modest house in

Allshot, Oxfordshire. Clearly the story meant much to him. My father's

generation was not one accustomed to discussing and analysing in the way ours is