4th November 1902. The Butler Did It.

The word butler comes from the medieval buttery, Latin butticula, a diminutive of buttis a cask. Theobald Butler or Walter le Boteler, the first Baron Butler, was Chief Butler of Ireland and Butler of England, an hereditary title-holder, who attended the King at coronations.(1)

Today in 1902 the Duke of York’s Theatre, London witnessed the opening night of J.M. Barrie’s Admirable Chrichton whose theme centred on the butler of the progressive Lord Loam, who saved the day when the family were shipwrecked  on an island.(2) 

It was an imperturbability much displayed in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, especially by Reginald Jeeves’, butler, though more manservant, to Bertie Wilberforce Wooster, a role similarly adopted by Mervyn Bunter with regards to D.L. Sayers’ sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Butlers proliferate with Wodehouse in the ‘Blanding’ books where we have Silversmith, Bulstrode and Sebastian Beech, the faithful portly and venerable butler with a ‘voice like a tawny port made audible’.

In Ukridge we see Oakshott, butler to his sister Julia where: ‘Meeting him in the street and ignoring his foul bowler he wore on his walks abroad, you would have put him down as a bishop in mufti, or at least, a plenipotentiary at one of the better courts’.

Though butlers do appear in early  literary works as with Shakespeare’s Stephano in the Tempest, they were mainly cameo roles as where Jane Austen surprisingly introduces Baddeley, who like all classic butlers enjoyed an ironic smile in Mansfield Park.

Later in the century, came the reliable and dutiful old Betteredge in the Moonstone  who Wilkie Collins uses to narrate the opening chapters. Later still with Conan-Doyle we find the butler Brunton found dead beside the chest of the family treasure after having paid for his perfidy with his life.(3)

It is in the 20th century however in Agatha Christie’ creations that the butler is seen in large numbers, though by this time they are rather creaking and doddery, and not likely to be replaced in a changing social system whilst managing on reduced staff.

Tredwell in the Seven Dials Mystery and ‘old Lanscome’ the aged retainer of the Abernethie Family who ‘moved tottering from room to room, pulling up the blinds’.(4).

Then Tressilian obviously decrepit,  ‘who made his slow way across the hall’, and complaining that ‘the damp affects my rheumatism’, and reflecting after the footman Walter drops a pear whilst serving, that they ‘were no good nowadays, they might be stable boys’.(5)

The book published in the year 1939, would by next year probably see Walter in the army, Tressilian retired, and the house used by the military.

So where once butlers  reigned supreme at the head of the pecking order of male servants in the big houses, which were being demolished or destined for other uses, between the wars, a decline reflected in the butler.

Post World War II in the novels of Michael Innes, some impecunious aristocrats manage to retain the imperturbable traditional butler, but more one feels to balance the eccentricity of their master. In fact many employed by the nouveau riche have become decidedly shifty and parodies of butlering.

Punter in ‘Carson’s Conspiracy’ is a crook, and Swindell in ‘A Night of Errors’, who in the absence of any master of the house, spent most of his time asleep, walking about in slippers and ‘recruiting himself with port wine’, whilst his duties were rather sketchily pursued. The designing Bread who later appears as Butter manages, by blackmail, to get a stranglehold over his employer, in the Gay Phoenix.

(1) Butlers were important members of Court as shown by the Royal Charter as shown when Richard I conferred on Alexander de Barentus, butler to Henry II, ‘all his properties fairly purchased and conferred to him by Henry II’. (Westminster Abbey London Muniments No 657.

(2) It ran for 828 performances. It became a film in 1957 with Cecil Parker as the butler.

(3) The Musgrave Ritual, Conan-Doyle, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes 1893.

(4a) The Seven Dials Mystery was first published on 24.1.1929 by Collins.

(4b) Described in P.7 After the Funeral.

(5) In ‘Hercule Poirot’s Christmas’ (1939)

Ref: de Fig Vereido & Treuherz 1988 P.106.

Ref: John Mullins, Guardian,Sat,10.1.2009. ten-of-the-best-butlers.

Ref: straight.dope.com/whodunits-its-the-butler-who-did-it-first.