At Your Service – Move over, Jeeves. Today’s butlers are slick multi-taskers and they’re in demand, writes Amanda Hodge.

The Australian WISH Magazine – 3 February 2006

The pressure is enormous. Six of us sit around a table in the grand dining room at the Doncaster Inn. At the head of the table is Diana Fisher, former BBC royals expert and arbiter of all things refined. Bubbles, as she was known on TV’s original Beauty and the Beast, is here to assess our table manners. One after another we collapse under her relentless questioning, the cutlery and plates before us becoming the tools of our social undoing.

Leon is the first to fall, failing with his mid-dinner small talk. All but two of us use knives to cut our asparagus. Out! Finally, only Lynette, assistant house manager for the Governor-General at Yarralumla, and Allison, a sturdy 54-year-old Queenslander, remain. Allison takes a dive after calling for a spoon for her spaghetti – apparently an unforgivably crass Americanism. ‘Never a spoon’, Bubbles splutters, horrified.

We are attending Australia’s only butler school, in the heritage town of Braidwood, two hours southwest of Sydney. Well-spoken Fisher enlightens us with glamorous name-drops and inviolable rules. Break bread; never cut. Thank-you notes on the plainest paper. Once raised, cutlery must never touch the table. ‘Some hostesses don’t know these things,’ she tells us. ‘If you’re in a household that behaves atrociously then it’s up to you to bring them around.’

Next morning, Allison marches back to class waving proof (from the recommended reading) that spaghetti spoons are acceptable. She can’t let the issue drop. It occurs to me that Allison may lack the quiet humility of a traditional butler – a question I later put to Pamela Spruce, who runs the school. She nods gravely; these are qualities that must be drilled out of the students.

The ever-gracious and unruffled Spruce founded the Australian Butler School in 1997. Her courses aim to equip students with the polish and poise for ‘a world of high commission dinners, titled people, moneyed farmers, protocols and etiquette’, she explains. ‘What we do is take them up another notch and teach them the refinements of living with the rich and famous.’ She offers a four-week, live-in course, restricted to six students at a time, for $5,000.

Looming large on the agenda are topics such as bow-tie tying, shirt ironing and starching, table setting, silver service, valeting, flower arranging and etiquette. Then there’s how to pack and unpack a suitcase, pick a good wine, restore and maintain antiques and balance a household budget. The thornier – and spicier – themes of conflict resolution, staff management, guest relations and sexual harassment are peppered throughout to keep things lively.

Butlers may work in the palatial homes of the super wealthy but Spruce drums into her new recruits that they must be prepared for dirty work. ‘I always say: ‘Don’t think you’re above it because if the guest toilet needs smartening up and the cleaner’s not in that day, it’s your job. I don’t want them going into it with the illusion that they’re going to be butlers saying ‘Welcome your Highness’ and not ever getting their hands dirty. Even the grandest homes can’t afford to have 20 or 30 (permanent) staff so they require people to have a much broader range of skills’.

The butler business is booming. As well as the school, Spruce runs Australian Butler Services, an agency that matches butlers – or ‘personal service professionals’ or ‘household managers’ – with clients. Spruce maintains there are more positions going in Australia than there are qualified butlers to fill them. Her graduates work in homes, hotels and resorts, or join the surprisingly high number of staff employed by state governors, consuls and high commissioners. Then there are the countless temporary positions to fill when the rich and famous come to town.

Interestingly, it’s not only the super-wealthy who are employing butlers. Spruce says much of the demand is coming from busy corporate families who’ve already hired the cleaner, gardener and nanny but find there’s no one at home to co-ordinate them.

‘It’s fine to have dog-walkers and car-cleaners and window-washers and pool-cleaners, but somebody still has to be there to organise them, let them in and make sure they do the job,’ she says. But isn’t the idea of hiring a butler a tad un-Australian? Not any more, Spruce insists. There is, she says, far less embarrassment at the concept of butlers than there was even five years ago.

Australian Butler Services has a client base of about 100 Australian families and an associate in the UK who helps find jobs for any of Spruce’s graduates who want work overseas. The Australian temperament and work ethic has made her butlers increasingly popular abroad.

‘My guys understand and know the importance of discretion,’ she boasts. For an experienced butler the average salary package hovers around $80,000, including car and phone, although there are butlers in Australia earning six figures. Butlers contracted to stratospherically wealthy American families earn as much as $275,000, though the hours are considerably longer and expectations greater.

‘Overseas they all want people to work seven or eight-day stretches and have several days off, whereas here I try to keep clients thinking five-day weeks,’ says Spruce. ‘People with hospitality backgrounds understand shiftwork but I don’t like to see clients take advantage of a butler.’

Spruce was inspired to convert her domestic employment agency, which specialized in au pairs and nannies, into a butler business nine years ago when she realized she was sending 22-year-old party girls into the homes of wealthy clients who were regularly traveling abroad and leaving their most valued possessions – children, cars, pets and homes – in young, flighty hands.

All doubts crystallised when a client on an overseas trip phoned in a panic after a call from his au pair. She was on the side of a freeway with a broken-down car, the children were at school awaiting pick-up, the dog was at the groomers and the house was left open with a painter in it. Spruce stepped in to save the kids, the dog and the girl but the die was cast. ‘I just thought it was crazy. I looked at my clients, who are mostly corporates, and thought they all need someone who’s doing all the things that a wife used to do full-time. I also recognized that you needed some training to do it.’

Training the butlers has proved a relatively straight-forward task. However, educating clients to see butlers as service providers who deserve respect and a good salary has taken a little longer.

‘The old families were pretty okay, because they’re used to having people work for them and they respect them and usually pay them quite reasonably,’ Spruce says. ‘The people you have the most problems with are ‘new money’, people who have got their money by being tough businessmen and women.’

Back at the student accommodation Allison explains the ‘lateral thinking’ that led her to the butler course. The married mother-of-three from the Sunshine Coast gave up work to have a family, then returned to the workforce a few years ago as an aged carer, only to leave the industry shortly afterwards in disgust at falling care standards. ‘I really love working with people,’ she says. ‘I like wine, food, antiques, art – all those things you deal with as a butler – and I thought that if I was going to change careers it was a good choice. You know it’s going to be fairly hard work, but everyone likes working in beautiful surroundings.’

Fellow student Dan, a 27-year-old sous chef, already has an ideal workplace in mind: a corporate couple with no kids or pets, who go away a lot. Or perhaps a celebrity boss: ‘Fabulous houses, jets, views and they’re a bit more modern, too.’ Two weeks later, he changes his mind again, this time saying his ideal employer is an old man who’s had a vasectomy: ‘No kids, no wife and no animals.’ And of course Dan ended up with exactly the opposite – a large family desperately in need of his new skills.