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invited them to recruit a team of nine of their compatriots to help prepare and clean the house for opening. As the duchess recalls in her book, they ‘immediately made their presence felt by setting about the rooms methodically and thoroughly, dressed like Tabitha Twitchit in cotton kerchiefs against the dust, while delicious smells of goulash in the kitchen passage reminded one that the Hungarian takeover was on’. In their capable hands, the house was made ready for its public opening in Easter 1949. 29
     
    There were similar patterns in other great houses. At Weston Park, Shropshire, in the 1960s, the Earls of Bradford employed domestic servants from St Helena, one man recalling spending much of his youth barefoot and then, as a teenager, on his first day in England learning to tie a white tie. At Longleat in the 1970s, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath were looked after by a couple from Portugal (although in his youth there had been forty-three indoor servants); since the late 1950s, the Bromley-Davenports at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, have been taken care of by an Italian, Gilda. For fifty-one years, Gilda Mion has been their cook and housekeeper, catering for shooting parties every weekend in the season, with her husband, Luciano, working as a painter and decorator to the estate and eventually in the house, too. 30
     
    Whilst those born and brought up in houses with large staffs mightstruggle to manage their own households with a minimum of help, it must have been doubly hard for the generation of staff who had been trained in traditional country-house service and attained senior positions to discover that they had little or none of the support that in their youth they had themselves supplied as junior servants.
     
    Mrs Davidson’s observations on the greater workload of post-war service are echoed again over and over. As former butler Stanley Ager pointed out in his memoirs, those who remained in service, or returned to it, had to combine in one person duties that had once been the preserve of many.
     
    Mr Ager was born when Edward VII was on the throne, and his training dated back to the 1920s. He was a butler for more than three decades, retiring in 1975. His book,
The Butler’s Guide to Clothes Care, Managing the Table, Running the Home and Other Graces
, published in 1981, includes a short memoir that looks back with warmth on his years of experience of working in beautiful historic houses. 31
     
    Retirement seemed strange to him: ‘At first I didn’t feel right being out of uniform and in casual clothes in the morning.’ Otherwise, he said, he was content to cease working. ‘After all, I have travelled the world, lived in some magnificent houses and been lucky with my employers. But I still miss the staff. They fought amongst themselves and they always caused me far more trouble than the Lord and Lady – yet I miss them most of all.’ As this narrative has shown, the community of the staff could be all-important to the enjoyment of being a domestic servant. 32
     
    Mr Ager began his life in service in 1922, aged fourteen, as the hall boy at Croome Court, Worcestershire, ‘the lowest servant of all’, in the household of Lord Coventry. ‘On my first day it seemed like a house full of servants; there were some forty people of all ages working there. Everyone was friendly except the housekeeper.’ As for so many young people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his choice seemed made for him: ‘after my parents died, entering service seemed the best way of supporting myself.’
     
    Like many younger or more junior-ranking servants, learning the ropes, he did most of his work ‘in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house. I didn’t go to the front where the family lived except forthe dining room, until I had worked at Croome Court for six months. When I did, the flowers in the reception rooms struck me first of all . . . I was awed by the general opulence – the silver