If the servants shut their mouths, the very beasts, the dogs, the posts, the marble pillars will speak out. Shut up the windows, draw the curtains close, bar the doors, put out all the lights, let all be hush, let no soul lie near, what the rich man does in the morning at three will be the talk of the next tavern before day; there you will hear the lies raised by the steward, the master book, the butler of the family.

  By 20 July there had been twenty consecutive days without rain, and Richard Stratton, an elderly farmer in Monmouth, reported gathering his earliest harvest since 1865. Schoolgirl Amy Reeves, aged ten, took off her boots and stockings and left them on the grass beside a shallow pond at Longcross near Chertsey. She was discovered drowned later that afternoon, her head caught in the weeds beneath the water. Two days later fires began to break out spontaneously along the railway tracks at Ascot, Bagshot and Bracknell, and the gorse on Greenham Common in Newbury caught light. In London the sky seemed unusually clear, and in King’s Lynn a temperature of 92°F broke all previous records for that part of the country. Motorised fire-engines tested their water jets for the first time on St Paul’s Cathedral. The water reached the 365-foot-high dome, well above the cross.

  The ‘Harriet’ story rumbled on over the next few weeks to mixed reactions of outrage and amusement, and took an entertaining new turn when on 21 July a law suit was brought against Amalgamated Newspapers by Miss Irene Chester, a Manchester tobacconist and moneylender. She was suing the company for identifying her with a character of the same name in a novel by Mr Douglas Welshe, The Scandal Mongers. ‘I want you to provide us with all the scandalous titbits you can pick up,’ said Miss Chester of the novel to another character, Miss Rachel Fleming, to whom she had lent a few pounds. ‘I will pay you well for them and so long as you continue to act as one of my secret correspondents, I will allow your loan to run out.’ Mr Welshe, speaking as a witness for the defence, said he had never heard of a real Miss Chester or Miss Fleming, and that they were both the product of his creative mind. Miss Chester of Manchester was the next day awarded £75 in damages.

  However, ‘Harriet’may well have influenced Miss Louisa Mary Heritage, who claimed to run a charitable agency for out-of-work servants. She admitted in the magistrate’s court that there was no such agency and that she had been taking contributions on a false basis from Mrs Walter of Bryanston Square, Mrs Henry Bentinck of 53 Grosvenor Street, and Mrs Helen Fletcher of 10 Grosvenor Place, as well as a sovereign a year for eight years from Mrs Leopold de Rothschild. Miss Heritage said she had the blessing of the vicar of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and had amassed £100 for her fictitious staff. Miss Heritage lost her fortune, and was invited to spend the next six months in gaol.

  Eric and others like him in senior positions in a servant-rich household objected not just to being taken for granted but to the expectation that they would not complain about it. There was also another less immediately evident reason for their discontent: they were distressed because the old ways of doing things had in some respects changed too much. There had been security in the familiarity of a routine that had remained the same for generations. The butler in his smart dark trousers and immaculate dark tail-coat was often so grand a figure that he might have been confused with the master of the house himself. A butler referred to the servants of house guests by their employers’ names: their identities effectively merged. The grandest butler wore a top hat to walk down the street. He knew his place, and it was at the top. ‘Under and upper servants are as likely to converse with one another as Kings and Queens are to the sentries in the boxes,’Eric explained. ‘They have caught a disease from their employers, snobbery, damn snobbery.’

  When a butler was not working upstairs he was to be found downstairs in one of at least two rooms set aside for his own special duties. The servants’ hall formed the nucleus of ‘downstairs’ social life, but various servants, including the butler, the housekeeper, the cook and the footmen, had rooms allocated for their particular use. At Chatsworth the vast stone underground floor where the servants spent their time preparing to meet the needs of those upstairs comprised 10 different rooms of varying sizes. It resembled a department store. There were specific rooms for plucking game, peeling vegetables, brushing gentlemen’s coats, and washing up. There was a confectionery room, an electrician’s room, an ice safe, and a meat larder as large as a butcher’s shop. The Housekeeper’s Room was separated from the Servants’ Hall by the Steward’s Room, and on the other side of the passage was the Butler’s Room and his adjoining pantry.

  The butler’s pantry was Eric’s private domain, and contained the house silver. Some butlers were known to sleep ‘on guard’, across their pantry door.Keeping the silver cleanwas a source of pride, but the jeweller’s rouge mixed with ammonia thatmust be applied with the fingers to produce the most sought-after shine was so corrosive that at first it blistered the skin, which eventually hardened up into ‘plate hands’, the badge of honour of an industrious butler. Butlers were also in charge of the cellar, and Eric would refine the sherry wines, ferment sack, mead and shrub, and produce ginger beer and perry, as well as cherry, apricot and orange brandy. In large households the butlerwas the choreographer of the dining table,working in conjunction with the gardener for the flowers and the cook for the menu. Eric had seen the sort of disasters that could occur at the table when the butlerwas inattentive: peas inadvertently spilled into a décolletage, an elderly lady’s ear trumpet, laid beside her plate when not in use, mistakenly filled with mashed potato.

  A first-class butler possessed a fund of special information. He knew that a finger rubbed first on soap and then round the top of a bottle of champagne would stop the wine frothing. He could quote pages from the current Bradshaw, the bible of train times, his knowledge of which was as profound as the vicar’s was of the Prayer Book. Lady Cynthia Asquith knew she was in the presence of a superior servant if he was both ‘puma footed’ and ‘of impalpable presence and uncatchable eye’. The butlers most highly treasured were those who managed to retain their distance, scepticism and sense of humour but were at the same time capable of revealing a fellow humanity where it was needed. Some found a way of being firm yet not severe, kind yet not familiar. Henry Moat, butler to Sir George Sitwell, remained undaunted by his mistress’s querulous enquiries about the malfunctioning servants’ bell, which was always going off by mistake. ‘Sign of death, my lady,’ he would murmur as he offered her a dish of glazed salmon mousse.

  As sceptical a character as Eric, Henry complained that Sir George spent nearly as much time in a horizontal position as Lady Ida. ‘Tired of laying in bed, he would get up to have a rest,’Henry explained to his confidante the housekeeper, ‘and after he had rested get back into bed again like a martyr.’He was critical of Sir George’s thriftiness, not amused when travelling and staying in hotels at being sent out in search of eggs which he was then expected to whip up into a money-saving omelette in the hotel side-kitchen. But Henry’s prevailing good humour was evident. He had a passion for singing hymns with all the operatic drama of a Caruso. His voice Sir George’s daughter Edith described as ‘some foghorn endowed with splendour’, and it irritated the entire household, particularly the women, who detected a pagan enjoyment in his doom-laden delivery of ‘For those in peril on the sea’.

  Young Edith saw the 6-stone butler who swung his arms so vigorously when walking – ‘as if he was in a state procession’ – as ‘an enormous purple man like a benevolent hippopotamus.’ And when Master Osbert Sitwell was found to be anxious about his first day at boarding school, Henry accompanied him on the train, telling him long and funny stories all the way to ‘divert me on the way to the scaffold’. Osbert never forgot his kindness: ‘treating me thus as someone whose good opinion he wanted and whom he liked to amuse, he restored . . . my self esteem.’ During the term Henry wrote to the homesick boy:

  Oh Tall and merciful Mr Osbert,

  I hope you have not erred nor stayed from your way like a lost lamb. Nor has followed the devices and desires of your own heart (where chocolate and fruit is concerned) nor offended against the laws of the Railway company, nor has done those things which you ought not to have done or left undone those things you ought to have done but hope you arrived at Snettisham in peace and I trust your stay at Ken Hill will be joyful and when you depart that place you may safely come to your home and eternal joy and lemonade.

  Trusting you are in the pink of condition, Sir George is A1.

  Yours obediently,

  Henry Moat

  And it was not only children who benefited from the sympathy and wisdom of servants. Edith Lytton, wholly ignorant of the facts of life, managed to persuade her older and wiser lady’s maid to enlighten her a few days before her wedding, although it was not easy. ‘I pretended to know more than I did,’ she explained, ‘to draw them out. A cousin and I made a bargain to find out all we could and report our discoveries to each other.’

  Loyalty in servants was often rewarded with perquisites or ‘perks’. At Worth, a house belonging to the Montefiore family, the servants had their own billiards table, ballroom, theatre and piano, and had the reputation of being ‘arrogant and presumptuous in proportion’. The Earl of Lonsdale took his 24-strong-band of musicians abroad with him, an unusual and enviable opportunity for travel. From Royalty downwards the great families gave parties for their staff, and sometimes attended themselves. Conversation could be a little sticky. In J.M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton the master of the house, searching desperately for a suitable conversational topic, asks the housemaid, ‘What sort of weather have you been having in the kitchen?’ Eric played his violin (and sometimes the second fiddle, which he enjoyed less) at many servants’ parties, and made sure the programme of dances mirrored exactly the lancers, quadrilles, waltzes and polkas favoured at Buckingham Palace. At Longleat dances were held regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the housekeeper acted as chaperone, keeping an eye on the housemaids to make sure they did not flirt too much.

  Access to alcohol was the best perk of all. At Chatsworth and Longleat there was always a jug of beer and a plate of cheese on a table in the servants’ hall for the benefit of below-stairs visitors. The ready availability of alcohol was often abused. In a Punch cartoon of 9 July a guest at a country house is pictured in the cellar with the butler, in front of a keg twice the size of both men. The guest remarks to the ‘affable and possibly slightly inebriated’ butler, ‘Ah Ha! So you’ve been laying down the fashionable drink I see. The doctors are all mad about it.’ To which the ‘Affable Butler’ replies, ‘Yezzir, less hacid they say in good malt whiskey than in any other form of alco’ol. I’ve took to it to myself. In fact I may say I’ve quite given up champagne, clarets, burgundies and ’ocks.’

  Butlers were not the only servants ‘in the habit of taking a drop too much’, and one afternoon Eric was much amused by the sight of the fat cook shouting at the top of her voice and ‘dancing up and down in the passage in her nightgown blind drunk.’ She set all the call-bells ringing at once, and the mistress of the house had no choice but to sack her, although as Eric knew, the loss of her pastries was mourned for years afterwards. At Woburn beer was used in making the wooden floors shine, and a footman would be dismissed on the spot for stealing a drink from the bucket instead of washing the floor. After Hwfa Williams, husband of the irrepressible socialite Mrs Hwfa Williams, was accidentally shot and wounded in the Mall by ‘an overworked telegraph clerk whose brain had given way under the strain’, the arrival of four hundred visitors calling to commiserate was too much for the butler. He began taking little nips from the brandy bottle and answered the door singing (‘rather well’, according to Mrs Hwfa) one of Nellie Melba’s favourite songs, ‘Home Sweet Home’, at the same time trying to balance the empty bottle on his thumb.

  Some servants, as ‘Harriet’ well knew, were seeking freedom from the restrictions of domestic service. Many found that freedom by working in hotels, and the Savoy was one of the most popular. By the time it celebrated its twenty-first year in 1910 it employed a thousand people who in the course of each year prepared half a million meals and made a cumulative total of 125,000 beds in the rooms adjoining 244 bathrooms. Wally Allen was the chief pageboy, and while he received only half a crown a week for putting out footstools for ladies to rest their tired feet on, he was often tipped as much as a sovereign.

  Hwfa Williams had helped form the Savoy Group, which included Simpsons in the Strand, Claridge’s and The Berkeley as well as The Savoy. To promote the hotel restaurants Mrs Williams used to take parties of her good friends – and those whom she planned would become her good friends – to dine. The Savoy’s reputation soared after Edward VII implored the famous French chef Escoffier to leave his Paris restaurant and come to London to introduce the English to his exquisite cooking. Escoffier was determined not to alarm what he believed to be an unsophisticated clientele with such novel delicacies as frogs’ legs, so in the summer of 1911 he capitalised on the glamour of the Russian ballet with a dish he called ‘nymph à la rose’ (after Nijinsky’s famous ‘Spectre’), in which the amphibians’ legs were cleverly disguised in a pink paprika sauce. The dish was the hit of the menu until the day someone realised what those protruding ‘jambes’ really were. Mrs Hwfa was as disgusted as Escoffier by the fickle tastes of the diners. ‘So foolish is popular prejudice’, chastised Mrs Hwfa, ‘that a dish people enjoyed one day is revolted at the next.’

  Most of the hotel’s innovations won more lasting acclaim, including the paved courtyard at the front, lined with rubber to muffle the sound of vehicles. Traffic circulated to the right – the only such road in London – to keep the adjoining theatre entrance free and ease the tight turn into the Strand. The restaurant did not demand evening dress of its patrons, and the racy novelist Elinor Glyn, wearing one of her sister’s ‘Madame Lucille’ gowns, would drop in at the end of the day on the Savoy’s Café de Paris after calling at the offices of her publishers Duckworth, near the hotel in Henrietta Street. Guests enjoyed the American-style mail chutes on each floor and were delighted by the new, mirrored lifts. Mrs Hwfa was thrilled to see that those who thronged the hotel on Sunday evenings often included such fashionable people as the actress Ellen Terry, the millionaire Aga Khan, and more than a few dukes and princes. An American lady challenged the hotel by asking for any fruit ‘not in season’. Nellie Melba gave a dinner party with a scintillating literary guest list including the Australian-born writer and anti-suffrage campaigner Mrs Humphry Ward, Jerome K. Jerome, author of the Victorian comic masterpiece Three Men in a Boat, and the writer of humorous short stories W.W. Jacobs.

  Many of the staff were so intrigued by the hotel’s labour-saving devices that they decided to cross the Atlantic to find work in America where such marvels as vacuum cleaners, lifts or ‘elevators’ and telephones were commonplace, and instead of coal fires, houses were ‘steam heated’. Here was a country where the ‘no talking’rule at staff mealswas unknown and where, unlike the hierarchical custom of an English servants’ hall, all servants were considered equal. The Home SecretaryWinston Churchill’s butlerwas among those to have joined the exodus, but this was not enough to convince Eric to think life abroad was a choice he would make.

  J.M. Barrie lived round the corner at Adelphi Terrace, and was often to be found in the Savoy’s excellent Grill Room. He was recently divorced and just beginning to emerge from mourning the death of Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, mother of the boys who had provided him with the models for those in his 1904 play Peter Pan (the novel based on the play was due out later that year, but he planned to take the boys up to a remote part of Scotland in August to escape all the unhappiness associated with London). Barrie revelled in the incongruity of someone who had started life in a weaver’s cottage spending time in a place as opulent as the Savoy, and at the same time was grateful to the hotel for having provided him with the inspiration for The Admirable Crichton.

  Sir George Reeves Smith was the managing director of the Savoy Group and, though far too grand to be told so to his face, certainly the grandest ‘butler’ in the country. He already spoke French, and had been taking Italian lessons to enable him to communicate with his many foreign staff. He was a kindly man, always ready to give an employee the benefit of the doubt, but for his one obsession, an intolerance for an unevenly-tied bow tie. Wearing a morning coat and high collar, Reeves Smith walked to work through Green Park, and a policeman would hold up the traffic for him as he crossed to the grass-lined Embankment. At ease in an erudite conversation with a customer about philosophy or literature, he also kept an eye on the daily market prices of meat and vegetables and, like all the best butlers, was a connoisseur of the finest wines. There was something of the air of an old-world diplomat about Sir George, but he never forgot that he was there to serve. In the summer of 1911 two diners in the Savoy restaurant stood up at once, suddenly taken by the celebratory frenzy of the season, and began to dance in the open space between the tables. It was not long before Sir George had had the chairs and tables moved back towards the walls, creating the novelty of a restaurant with a dance-floor. Twenty-three-year-old Irving Berlin happened to be staying in the hotel, and to the surprise and delight of the assembled guests he took to the piano. Duchesses in tiaras danced to the composer’s own hit of that summer, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and to counteract the July heat, the dancers were sprayed with ozone from iced cylinders. The Savoy was definitely the ‘in’ place to be that summer.