DOWNTOWN LOWDOWN
What the real butler saw
ON TV it is Downton Abbey. In real life it is Highclere Castle, built in the eighth century. Since 1838, it has been owned by the Earls of Carnarvon, who transformed it into the Victorian mansion it is today.
Richard Taylor, who has lived in South Africa for nearly 40 years but still has a soft Hampshire accent, was born above a pub on the castle grounds in 1945. His father, Robert Taylor, was butler to the sixth earl.
“I don’t know quite how he came there,” said Taylor, now living in Knysna. “He grew up in rural Wales and came down to Highclere as a footman. He was a radio operator in World War 2, and towards the end he was in a tank that hit a mine. He returned to the UK, recuperated and went back into service.
“He was butler until the sixth earl died in 1987. Then Father retired.”
Debonair at 69, Taylor has just retired from a varied career as a laboratory technician, a life far removed from his childhood in a world that has now disappeared.
Seeing his first home reborn on screen as Downton Abbey gave him “quite a jolt”. And he finds aspects of the series annoying.
“I can’t live with what I’m seeing, knowing the truth is different. I keep saying: ‘No, what you’re showing is not how it is.’
“The path the carriage came up in the first episode was not the main entrance. There was a scene with ladies standing around talking with their parasols, and it was down by the garages — the ladies wouldn’t even know those buildings existed. And then there were ladies in side-saddle riding round this lush green patch — that was actually the cesspit to our house. That spoilt the image for me, knowing what was underneath.”
He is more forgiving when it comes to the interior scenes.
“Some of the castle rooms were not what they are portrayed as, but they have to do that for filming. The table settings look fairly authentic. I doubt whether the cutlery is laid out with the precision it used to be. If there was a party sitting round the table for dinner, my father would go in with a measuring tape to check that everything was properly spaced.”
Being the butler’s son gave Taylor advantages over his schoolmates. His parents moved to a house on the estate and he had the run of the castle grounds, where he walked dogs and shot rabbits. “Pheasants were off the menu — they were bred for the shooting season.”
He sometimes caddied for the earl, which would cause a stir at school. “There’d be this silvergrey Vauxhall station wagon parked outside, with the crest on the door, and there’d be this elderly gentleman come to pick up Richard Taylor.
“The earl was a very nice man. If he found you out with the dog and he was driving past he would stop and talk to you, no matter who you were. Not like what I heard about the ones past, who might not even know how many staff there were on the estate. By our time . . . the owners knew everybody. Lady Penelope [the sixth earl’s daughter] was a very down-toearth person, even concerned about the people in the park.”
Queen Elizabeth was a frequent visitor to Highclere. “It wasn’t unusual to find her with four or five dogs on the shooting field,” said Taylor. “I’d go up and say, ‘Excuse me, Madam, can I help you?’ and I’d take her pheasants to the game cart. She’d be there in her waterproof gear and floppy hat. She was not at all like the queen of England when she was in that mode. She was there to relax.”
His father’s tasks, said Taylor, were “to oversee meals and look after the earl, make sure his clothes were pressed and everything was laid out nicely, make sure the silver was polished, the cellars were kept up to date and the wines kept nicely. The staff knew what they were doing, though. It wasn’t like on TV where the housekeeper or butler gives instructions. It was a well-oiled machine.”
During shooting season, guests came to stay and the staff — which after World War 2 had shrunk to a handful of kitchen workers, maids, a chauffeur, groom and gamekeepers — took care of everyone. (By Taylor’s day, visitors no longer arrived with their own entourage of butlers and maids, as they do on Downton Abbey.)
His father would be at work by 6am in shooting season. “His morning dress every day was black jacket, white shirt, black tie, pin-striped trousers, black shoes. That was what he lived in until the evening meal, when he dressed up in the coat with the tails, stiff collar with the wings, stiff-fronted shirt and white bow tie — tied, not on elastic.
“On a normal day with just the earl’s family, dinner was at 8pm, so it would be 10pm before he’d get off. He’d have a couple of hours off in the afternoon. He’d come home for lunch and potter in the garden, then go up later in the afternoon to look after the dinner. In shooting season, if those guys stayed up with their brandy until midnight, he was there, making sure the brandy was poured.”
Like all good butlers, Taylor’s father was discreet about his employer, but he brought home some tales of glamour.
“Once the earl went to [Aristotle] Onassis’s island for a holiday and Father went with him, and they had a helicopter on call in case he needed to go to the mainland to get anything. If you wanted to go to New York in those days, you jumped on the Concorde, and the earl used to take Father with him.”
On one occasion, Taylor was given a physical taste of the lifestyle. “Father took us with him to Paris, to the Ritz, where he was known by his first name. I remember asking for strawberries, and the waiter insisted I have the wild strawberries because they had a better flavour than the cultivated ones.”
Taylor’s father achieved fame in his own right when the sixth Earl of Carnarvon died. The fifth earl had accompanied Howard Carter on the historic expedition that found Tutankhamen’s tomb. Part of Highclere Castle was stuffed with Egyptian artefacts that the fifth earl’s heirs seemed to have forgotten about. But not the butler.
“The executors had packed up everything after the sixth earl’s death,” said Taylor. “They were about to leave and my father said: ‘What about the Egyptian stuff?’ He then took them to open the doors where all the artefacts were packed into panels, the stuff the fifth earl had brought back from Egypt.
“Word got out about this and Giles the Daily Express cartoon- ist did a caricature of my father, with all these Egyptian ladies walking sideways behind him, going up to a guy behind a desk and asking: ‘What about the Egyptian stuff?’ The . . . queen requested the original cartoon and sent it to my father, signed: ‘To Robert, Elizabeth R.’ ”
The sixth earl was the last to make Highclere his home. “That way of life started to decline,” said Taylor. “No one could afford the upkeep of the estates. The eighth earl had to come down to reality, make an income. That’s why the castle has become Downton Abbey, for the filming, and the guided tours. It’s public domain now.”
He pointed rather sadly to a spot on an aerial map of the estate. “The eighth earl lives in this little house here.”
Taylor will travel to the UK next month and plans to visit Highclere to see the plaque on one of the castle’s cedar trees that was put up in his father’s memory after he died in 1990, at the age of 75.
“He got up one day from having lunch, went to sit in his chair for a quick snooze and that was it,” he said. “The family grave is in a village called Hedley, so we’ll be making a little visit there too, just to say goodbye.”
I can’t live with what I’m seeing, knowing the truth is different