A Butler

In my Autobiography in Words and Pictures I have written fairly extensively about my early life at our house in Silchester. And I may have noted that we were rather poor at that time, especially during the Great Depression when my father’s chicken farm was ruined by fowl pest and the importation of cheap eggs from Poland. 

Although we were poor, no-one minded as we had several Knights in the family. My grandfather was one, my uncle also an MP another, a cousin yet one more and a Great Uncle Dean of Salisbury. So we were accepted as gentry, which meant giving dances on our sprung floor, tennis parties on our immaculate grass court and many bridge parties where I was dragged around and given marrons glacé to keep me quiet. 

Should my parents loose at bridge, one of the table would volunteer to cover their losses. It was just considered unfortunate that we did not have a lot of money. We had a maid, but certainly not a butler.

Because of our position in society we children were given the run of many a grand house and invited to lots of balls and parties - ones where the contents of crackers might be mechanical wind-up toys, for instance. 

It was, however, our dealings with butlers that I recall as being of interest.

For some reason or other we were staying with the Firths at their previous house to the one near us. 

They were great family friends and, because of Harry Firth’s family being part of Firth Stainless Steel, very wealthy.

The Firths were keen on playing bridge. Harry shot rooks for some reason, certainly not to eat, though game pies at that time did contain quite a mix of animals.

I was a friend of their hair-lipped gardener, and visited the servant’s side of the house to have our wet batteries for the wireless changed with their battery of batteries that lit their house from a huge and lovely, single cylinder generating machine.

One day the Firth’s cook ordered from us two chickens to roast for a dinner party. My sister June was given the task of delivering these two fine oven-ready birds to the house and, naturally, took them to the front door where Sherrard, the butler, told her to take them around to the servant’s entrance. This upset June so much that she never forgot it.

I suppose it was Sherrard who was their butler when we stayed with them at Calcot. This was a grand house which, small as I was, remember it having separate lavatories for men and women (with stalls like public ones for men).

When we left for home I knew that one should tip the butler. I gave him sixpence. It was a cause for family hilarity but may have been much of my pocket money. 

The other butler story I have certainly told elsewhere that also involved the Firth’s and their butler Sherrard.

Harry Firth seldom visited his well-stocked wine cellar, but one day did so. There he found Sherrard drinking his favourite port from a teacup. Harry could, perhaps, have forgiven Sherrard had he been drinking the port from a proper glass. But from a teacup was just too much to bear for Harry, who sacked the long-standing Sherrard on the spot. 

Sherrard, I believe, emigrated to Australia. 

A LIFE OF TANGENTS

On reaching a 100 years old I thought that I might write a short summary of my lifespan, mostly of art, wine, travel, garden - the details of which can be found from my books, articles, my blog (www.webpageroberts.blogspot.com) and the yet-to-be published Autobiography in Words and Pictures. 

After a country upbringing of untutored art, and reaching Wellington College, I was offered a safe wartime retreat as a refugee in the USA - and took it, as my mother, with most of us at that time, feared that Mr Hitler might well take the country and subjugate our people. She wanted one of the family to live. 

From the USA I returned to England in 1942 when old enough to join the RAF as a trainee pilot. Then, in waiting for a training vacancy I worked as a farm labourer and then as a prop-swinger. 

For operational experience during flying training I was posted to several RAF stations. 

One of these was to fly in Coastal Command Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall, over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath to drop on six parachutes to bailed-out aircrew. 

My job in the second pilot’s seat was to look out for the dangerous German Condor aircraft flying out from Brittany. They could have made mincemeat of us.

At another station I flew in the fully armed-up tail turret of a Lancaster bomber on an engine test from RAF Skellingthorpe, near Lincoln, to Scotland and back - checking the drift and on the lookout for enemy aircraft. 

When waiting at RAF Hornchurch for training in America, I volunteered as a slater - being part of my war effort. Given an hour’s training and a mate to climb the ladder to supply me with rather poor quality Welsh slates, I mended several bombed roofs in Plumstead, south-east London.

I was later awarded my wings after final training in Oklahoma, USA - when the war in Europe had just ended but not in the Pacific. I was not wanted there, so returned to England and grounded. 

I then became a Photographic Intelligent Officer, and then invalided out of the RAF with TB. 

TB returned when I was a medical student. There was no cure at that time. 

Living in two council rooms I bought and rebuilt a bombed-out house in London, went to art school and theatre design school, designed for TV and theatre, painted scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, also painting landscapes for exhibitions and sale. 

To extend my artistic knowledge I bought a clapped-out builder’s flat-back van and converted it into an unusual mobile lodging, and travelled Europe for three months and three days meeting people, viewing landscape, and enjoying art and theatre. I covered 5,227 miles - not without mishap. 

In 1958 I set out on a world tour of a year’s drawing, then exhibiting my work in both London and Japan. With notes and drawings I wrote the book Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World. 

A tumbledown thatched cottage that I had bought before leaving on this voyage to have roots to return to, I burnt to the ground and designed and help build a one-bedroomed house in its place. 

After selling the house to Francis Bacon in 1965, I bought a Thamesside warehouse in London’s Limehouse and, with the help of a Pole, converted it to two studios.

After marriage and now taking care of my two children, I moved to Cambridgeshire, then Hampshire, creating a garden for BBC2’s Gardeners’ World, sculpted three large dead elm trees into animals and birds that had been connected with the ancient Icknield Way nearby, wrote a weekly newspaper column on wine, followed by some 700 articles for newspapers and magazines and 14 books. Then divorce. 

I returned to London to exhibit paintings, got married to a lovely wife and later worked for six years on my blog, and Autobiography in Words and Pictures, which has now reached to over 150 episodes. 

A culmination of my 100 years was a party we gave at a pub frequented by myself and fellow airmen in the war. There, 150 people from home and abroad, family, friends, acquaintances and neighbours, met and thoroughly enjoyed an evening to celebrate.

A card of congratulations signed by King Charles III and Queen Camilla attracted much attention as few had seen one before. 

And that’s about it - a life of tangents, taken at opportune times, described here without detail, and in the minimum of words.