Don’t know about anybody else, but ever since the do gooder crackdown on castration occurred I can’t find a butler I trust. Chinese eunuchs may be roly poly by the time they’re 30 but they hardly ever steal.
“Major-domo” actually is incorrect. The position is originally termed “domo-arigato.”
Yes - quite a story: Eugene Allen dies at 90; White House butler from Truman through Reagan
Here’s the Wiki article on buttling. Apparently butlers are a hot commodity in China, India and the Middle East right now: Butler - Wikipedia
“woosh” acknowledged :smack:
Nah, they’d change their last name to “Jeeves.”
It could be a movement, once it gets out why there aren’t any Butlers anymore. As a matter of fact, we could all have our own butlers, and be butlers, too, if we all change our surnames to Jeeves and work shifts for each other. Except for the buttresses, of course. They’d have to take shifts buttressing, obviously.
The days of inequality are over, now that we’ve stumbled upon the solution of all changing our surnames to Jeeves.
On the downside, it would make using the phone book really hard.
Seriously though, I can see eunuchs being favorable to solve any adultery problems in a household, by how on earth does castration prevent theft? They just don’t have the balls to do it? he he
:dubious:
I think the logic was "they don’t have families to support and [so long as they were snipped early or snipped completely] they won’t be chasing women to spend it on, so they shouldn’t be needing money enough to steal. That said, it didn’t work out in theory: many incidents in the courts of Persia and China and Byzantium of eunuchs robbing their masters blind. (There’s a scene in The Last Emperor in which the title characters orders an inventory of the palace and its warehouses to deduce the extent of eunuchs stealing, and some of the eunuchs set the place on fire to prevent it; when they are banished from the Forbidden City they leave carrying jars that contain the remains of their severed parts [the Chinese imperial houses went full monty with eunuchs, unlike some cultures where they just took the testicles]).
I saw a segment on some magazine show about one as well. This one was in England and in an old mansion where instructors played the family and they trained upscale domestics of all sort, but butlers were the rock stars.
They actually went through all manner of real-life situations to use as teaching experiences. One that I remember: the butler comes into the master bedroom in the morning while the master is away to serve madame her coffee and breakfast and she is in bed with a man who is not her husband. How should he react?
The answer to that particular one: pretend the man next to her in bed is invisible. Do not offer to bring him breakfast or for that matter do not address him directly unless the lady of the house instructs you to do so. (Discretion is evidently a major lesson in butlering school.)
Confidentiality is a major concern today I would think. Ike Hoover was a butler at the White House for many years and wrote a memoir of his experiences. Other members of the White House domestic staff have written books as well- Backstairs at the White Houseby Lillian Rogers Parks (she and her mother worked at the White House from Taft through early JFK) became a miniseries (pretty good one).
The Parks book was good. You found out which First Ladies the staff considered bitches (Mrs. Taft, Mrs. Hoover, Mrs. Eisenhower) and which they really liked (both Mrs. Wilsons, Mrs. Coolidge, Eleanor Roosevelt) and which presidents they liked personally (Harry Truman, Taft), etc… There’s some insight on tragedies that occurred and how it affected the president (Nellie Taft’s stroke torpedoed any political ambition her husband had, the Coolidges fell into deep depressions over their teenaged son’s death). The worst depiction is of the Hardings- he’s portrayed as a horndogging bastard who flaunted his infidelities and she’s portrayed as the craziest First Lady since Mary Lincoln (complete with spiritualist consultations).
In any case, even though neither book was a tell all (in fact you figure they probably could have told a lot more), today they wouldn’t be possible. Domestic staffs from Head Butler down to part-time cleaning staff sign confidentiality agreements and have to get all kinds of clearance and dispensations before they can write anything about the presidents or any members of the first family which means that anything people would pay to read is indadmissible. In the past few decades about the only thing to be published under the author’s own name have been recipe books from some of the White House chefs and cooks, though occasionally you’ll have an “anonymous White House employee” cited in a tell all (Kitty Kelley for instance, or the more recent book about he Secret Service in which anonymous agents dissed some as obnoxious (Al Gore, Jimmy Carter) and others as super nice (Bush 2, Clinton) or gave tidbits such as spraying air freshener and making sure there were no cameras anywhere near whenever Obama or Laura Bush smoked a cigarette.
You’re thinking of a valet. A butler is the manager of the entire staff of a large household (originally, the keeper of the wine cellar – the “bottler”).
And if the Jeeves and Wooster/Upstairs-Downstairs/etc. stories are anything to go by, a valet is a literal body servant. He even bathes you and dresses you. Would a man today let a personal assistant do that?
Pheasant shooting! Surely you meant pheasant shooting. Good God man, we have appearances to keep up.
Jeeves never bathed Bertie. The thought is appalling.
If you have to consider whether it would be cost effective to have a butler, you can’t afford one.
Wipers!
I believe the correct term is buttless.
Their legs keep dropping off.
[quote=“Sampiro, post:41, topic:589857”]
Don’t know about anybody else, but ever since the do gooder crackdown on castration occurred I can’t find a butler I trust. ]
Personally I think that its political correctness gone mad.