by Byron Rogers
The Duchess was enthusiastic about Mrs Thatcher, even, oddly enough, about the way Mrs Thatcher spoke. ‘Heath’s voice I couldn’t stand. But Mrs Thatcher’s I like. She’s so normal. She’s got a husband. She’s not kinky, let’s be thankful for that.’ Mrs Thatcher has been praised for many things, but surely not for that before. Her Grace also thought Mrs Thatcher would ‘fix the unions’. She herself dreamt of becoming dictator, in which case her programme would include the execution of terrorists and people who were cruel to children. Her state would thus have something of an Islamic republic about it. ‘It’s such a free and easy age. I read about people who live together for two years and have a child without marrying. I’m shocked it should be so open.’
She was not, she said, a tough person. ‘I can be quite subservient. If they like golf, I’ll walk the golf course with them. I’ve done the lot, racecourses and all. I do have a quick temper, and I never retract. But you can touch me in two minutes and I’m an absolute sucker. I’ve been crying a lot about these wretched Vietnamese. I’m heartbroken about them. My worst thing is that I can become too argumentative. I have strong views about cruelty to animals, to children and about social climbing.’
She thought she had had a raw deal from the press over the divorce, but did not care any more. Invited to sum up her life, she said, ‘A woman who’s had an interesting and varied life; and who has grabbed every opportunity to have a varied life.’ Invited to sum it up in one word, she said, ‘Adventuress.’ She must have seen some surprise. ‘No, no: adventurous. Adventurous.’
The house she lived in for almost 40 years was some 400 yards from her penthouse. The Dorchester, where she spent the war, was 100 yards away. She had to dine at the Dorchester when she gave dinner parties, for the penthouse had no dining room: she said this with the glee of a Girl Guide forced to camp out in Park Lane. Her London was as small as a mediaeval village, and so it must always have been for people of her background. I asked who had lived in the penthouse before her.
‘Arabs,’ said the Duchess.
The Butler of Britain
T WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY news item. With even Chinese restaurants – a reliable guide to the late 20th-century British economy – beginning to close (two in one year in the town of Brackley), and with public pay rises pegged, there was still one area of uncontrollable growth. Last year the Government managed to increase its drinks bill by 35 per cent, spending £15.6 million on entertaining itself and others. And in a Northamptonshire village an elderly gentleman closed his newspaper and settled dreamily back in his chair.
The MP Tony (‘Its a disgrace’) Banks and the latter-day Anabaptists who write Sun editorials, were in complete agreement (‘Eat, drink and be merry! That’s the Government’s new slogan’). But fourteen years into his retirement, home-made wines at 17 per cent alcohol steadily fermenting behind him, the man who for three decades was the Butler of Britain smiled in the knowledge that whatever else had changed, it was still party time in the Gardens of the West.
All my life I had dreamed of meeting such a man. You find them in the footnotes of history, men who are at the centre of things, yet whose perspective on events is so different from that of the great, the latter might be just bit-players in their own history. Fate ruled I was not to meet the Chief Black Eunuch of the Turkish Sultans Harem, or the two Brandons, father and son, who were the seventeenth-century headsmen of Old England. But fate did allow me to meet Bernard Pettifer, now 78, and, in retirement, my neighbour.
For almost 30 years he held the keys to the state wine cupboard. Governments came and governments went; and to him, deep underground beneath Lancaster House, they were all just so many brandies drunk and clarets consumed. He entered these in his ledgers, just as in the harem above the Bosphorus, the Chief Black Eunuch recorded the copulation of the sultans, and the Brandons inspected the vertebrae of the lately great. Men rose and fell, and to him they were of interest only if they insisted on Malvern water or decaffeinated coffee.
You may remember Walter Pater’s lines on the Mona Lisa – ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits: like the vampire she had been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her . . . and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes. . .’. So it was with him.
It is the Banqueting Hall in London’s Whitehall, that huge room through which Charles I stepped to his rendezvous on the scaffold with the younger Brandon, and where now the Government and its guests are awaiting the arrival of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. All are high on the self-satisfaction of being present at such an occasion and do not notice that the white wine they are drinking will do their teeth enamel no good at all. The Butler and I, we are drinking champagne cocktails.
Everyone else who is there has been invited by the Government, but I am his guest. His authority appears to be older than that of democratic government, and the champagne cocktails have been materialising on the quarter hour. I have already had five and am philosophical, staring up at, and occasionally managing to focus on, the Rubens ceiling. The Butler, ram-rod straight like the sergeant-major he once was, is also philosophical.
‘They come and they go,’ says the Butler. ‘You meet someone who seems to be in charge of the world almost, then he’s gone. I remember the Turkish Prime Minister Menderes. Charming fellow. They hanged him.’ He nods distantly to Edward Heath, who nods back. Assistant secretaries are making small-talk to other assistant secretaries whom they meet every day and do not like much. William Rees-Mogg floats by, impassive as a balloon. But then there is the plop of flash-bulbs, the Chinese have come. Hearing a rhythmic murmur by my side, I turn, and the Butler, his face its usual impassive mask, is quoting Omar Khayyám, his favourite poem: ‘Sultan after Sultan with his pomp/Abode his destin’d hour and went his way.’
Together we toast the Sultans. And then he says something I will find difficult to forget, for history of a sort is being made around us – years of diplomacy have led to these handshakes and these toasts (the Chairman is drinking orange juice) – as the Butler says, ‘Of course, you get a much better party when it’s nonpolitical; things are much more relaxed when it’s something like the Olympics.’ He stops, rummaging among his memories for other landmarks in his long career. ‘Or the International Congress of Dermatology.’
It all began in what seems now to have been another world. In 1929 in Northamptonshire a boy was leading a shire horse through the rows of a ploughed field; the boy was young and the horse was very big. It turned, the boy was slow to react, and it trod on his foot. ‘I ran home to tell my mother. I was very tearful, for it had been a heavy horse, and I begged her, could I go into service like my brother?’ Also his three sisters, for that was all there was, the Land and the Big House, and that was all everyone on those flat acres thought there ever would be. The Butler’s tale would be a sombre fable of the old world, were it not for its last strange twist.
Sixty years on, I know that Big House; I know its owner, and might have seen something of life on the other side of the green baize door, except there is now no green baize door. There are no servants either. Yet when Bernard Pettifer started in service there were 20 of them, and it was his job as Hall Boy to serve their meals. In the pyramid of privilege he was at the very bottom.
‘I can remember my master telling a guest at dinner that his father had had 200 servants, and had taken to his bed to sulk when they raised Income Tax by two pence in the pound. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, for to a pauper Income Tax means nothing.’ There was no expression on his face as he told that story. There rarely is, except when he bursts into laughter and looks like a small boy: the years of service saw to that. As a young man he did not once see a soccer match or cricket game, except when teams visited the Big House. He worked seven days a week, from 6.00 a.m. to midnight each day, and was paid £18 a year.
‘What do I think about it now? As with politics and religion,
I rarely talk about my old life, but at least I knew where I stood. When you go into the Civil Service, as I eventually was to do, everyone thinks he is in charge of you. In service you have no doubts as to who is. And there was one thing about the men in the Big Houses: they preserved old England – they preserved it as it was. You could say my feelings are complicated.’
It was only when someone left service and returned with tales of a world outside (‘of men’s work’) that he began to question his lot. In 1935 he entered the remote and formal world of the Biggest House of all: he became sixteenth Footman at Buckingham Palace, where there were seventeen footmen. From here, when George V died, he made his first attempt to break away and join the police. He was turned down on the grounds that he had too many false teeth. So his life in service continued. He moved to Marlborough House with the widowed Queen Mary: by now he was married and his wife was a cook there. Then suddenly out of the East came a great wind which blew open the green-baize doors.
He went to war, and at Monte Cassino was promoted to sergeant-major, and was later offered a commission he did not take; he could not have coped with that. At no time during the war did he tell any of his fellow soldiers what he did in civilian life; he was too embarrassed.
The end of the war was the blackest time of his life. His wife and son had been evacuated to Rudand, and on the second day he was home the farmer turned up to say he needed the cottage they were living in for a farm labourer. So Bernard Pettifer turned farm labourer. Not being mechanical, he was given the roughest jobs, and his hands swelled until they were so bad his wife had to tie his boots for him each morning. In despair he went back to service in Marlborough House, and was there when the old Queen died, when he was pensioned off.
And it was then that the extraordinary twist occurred. He saw the job advertised of Catering Manager (One) in the Government’s Hospitality Fund, and applied. To his considerable surprise, he found himself appointed the Government Butler, a job he did not even know existed.
His office was an ante-chamber to the State wine-cellar under Lancaster House, the best wine-cellar in the country, he says – and he should know. That in Buckingham Palace was bigger, but there was nothing of interest there. When we met he showed me round the state cellar, pausing at the two bottles of Mouton Rothschild 1953, all that was left, for no one has come up with an excuse for an event which would require such legendary claret. His duties were roughly those of his surviving counterparts in the big houses, except he was in the strange position of being in service without a master. ‘With a master he knew how far he could go with you before you’d sulk or leave. Here you came up against so many personalities, some stuffy civil servant or a PPS who was a pig, a proper snob. You had to use diplomacy.’
But he had the wiles of the servants’ hall on his side. A single sherry in his office, he said, did more to cut red tape than 500 letters. They were heady days, for in addition to the booze he was in charge of the government silver, and one day he reported to his superior in the Hospitality Fund that there were no proper table decorations for banquets. That afternoon the two of them spent £10,000 of your money, and mine, in the jewellers.
His world was Lancaster House, Hampton Court, the Banqueting Hall, Henry VIII’s wine cellar in Whitehall, and the two Downing Street houses, numbers 10 and 11. The biggest change in his duties was when Harold Wilson came to power – a man he always liked (‘He never called me anything but Mr Pettifer’) but who would insist on strange parties with show business guests. ‘I remember one of these. Everyone had gone except this actor, who was very drunk and kept telling the Prime Minister, “Yer no bloody good, d’you know that?” Nobody knew what to do with him, so I went up and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, your car’s at the door.’ He was so surprised, for he didn’t have a car, that he got up, and when I got him to the front door I kicked him out. He came from Liverpool.’
George Brown he disliked intensely. ‘He never knew what to call you. “Leave that, steward,” he’d say of an unopened bottle, but I didn’t. I had to do my returns and make sure they added up.’ He liked the old-style Tories best, he said, for he knew where he was with them, and they knew where they were with butlers. Some of the Labour people tried it on with him. ‘“Pettifer,” this man said, “Try this wine, will you?” “A perfectly good Burgundy, sir.” “Well, my friends here say it’s off?” “That’s probably because they think it’s claret, sir.’”
I met him when he was one year away from his retirement. This had been planned with the care with which he approaches everything, and the bungalow had been bought in the Northamptonshire village where he was born, but, after all they had been through together, his wife died suddenly before they could move in. That was the year before we met.
The interview had been set up by a magazine I then worked for, and as I pedalled my bicycle towards Lancaster House, I kept thinking there had to have been a mistake, for the idea of a government butler was pure Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘Where d’you reckon on putting that bicycle, sir?’ asked a policeman suddenly stepping into my path. Startled, I said I had thought of chaining it to the railings, but he shook his head and looked very tired. ‘You put that within a hundred yards of this place and there’ll be blokes inside having heart attacks.’
It was then I realised that everywhere I looked there were policemen accompanied by armed soldiers, and when I eventually got inside Lancaster House there were others staring into closed-circuit screens. I had forgotten that upstairs Rhodesia was being negotiated away. But then I was through the cordons and, in a lift, sinking through concrete like a bathysphere in the sea, to a certain depth at which there is always peace.
That was eighteen years ago and Bernard Pettifer’s odyssey is complete. The bungalow he bought is in the village where the bell calling children to his old school is the only one he hears – he whose life was once full of bells. It is all behind him now, that little white cave where he agonised over the drinks trays of foreign potentates; and over Mr Wilson, who was polite; and Mr Brown, who was not; and Mr Heath, for whom once, at Trooping the Colour, he substituted champagne for the usual Pimm’s No. 1, knowing he loved champagne. ‘What, no Pimm’s?’ asked Mr Heath grumpily.
The 27 Troopings of the Colour are also behind him. And Buckingham Palace, where he was given six weeks just to find his way round its subterranean passages.
Yet none of his neighbours have been told any of this.
Ghost Train to Stalybridge
She is not any common earth
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye
Where you and I will fare.
WAS EARLY. I SAT alone on Platform 3a at Stockport Station, a sort of half forgotten annexe to the main-line platforms, gloomily remembering what the lady in the ticket office had said in answer to my question when I bought my £1.75 single to Stalybridge. ‘How long does this train take?’
‘Let me see.’ The service did not appear to be listed in the usual timetables, and the queue behind me was getting more and more restless so that when she finally said, ‘Ah, here we are.’ I would not have been that surprised had she announced she had found it in the Book of Kells. ‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Can I have a return?’
‘Well you can, but that’ll mean you catch a train into Manchester, then another back. This train does not return.’
A light rain was becoming mist as, on other, through, platforms, some admirer of Lord Haw-haw called people with somewhere to go to, and places to see, to exotic Stoke and legendary Cardiff. But on 3a, where the line ends, I stared at the weeds and the rusting rails beneath me, and was a man at the edge of the world.
Ten years ago there was an hourly service through the outer suburbs of Manchester from Stockport to Stalybridge. Now there is just one train a week. This leaves Stockport every Friday afternoon at 3.00, and does not come back, or rather, it does, but then no passengers are allowed on it. Every week they disappear into Stalybridge and what becomes of them is
of no interest to the railway company. You will not need reminding that there were trains like this in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Russia, and it does not help that the Stockport to Stalybridge is known in the railway press as the ‘Ghost Train’. But to Northwest Trains, the company responsible for it, this is known as a ‘Parliamentary Service’. By running it once a week the company is able to avoid the lengthy, and costly, bureaucratic procedures which attend the closing of a line, even one that has outlived its commercial use.
There were, indeed still are, two stations in Manchester, the one on the main line South, the other on the main line to the North East, and until the late 1980s anyone needing to cross the Pennines, from London to York say, had to change trains and cross the city in the process. The Stockport to Stalybridge was thus a link service between the two, enabling travellers to avoid Manchester altogether, but for ten years now there have been through trains from the South of England to the North East. So a busy suburban link became a parliamentary service.
When this happens you enter a world meaningless to anyone who is not a lawyer or an accountant, for there is no obligation on a railway company to make a profit on such a line, a profit might even be an embarrassment. All it has to do is provide a service which passengers could use if they chose, and the company has no interest in attracting them to something which long ago disappeared into the small print of railway timetable footnotes. Even finding it in these is something akin to the three-card trick. . . Now you see it, now you don’t. . .