Visualise a butler and you may well find yourself thinking of a figure such as PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves, Carson in TV series Downton Abbey or Stevens, central character of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day.
‘A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully,’ wrote the Japanese novelist, ‘he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume.’
His book and those of Wodehouse were set in an era when servants were still key to British country houses, the early decades of the 20th century.
