Book description
During more than thirty years in a variety of houses, Bob Sharpe
managed to rise from garden boy to valet and butler.
As a boy he had to kill pheasant chicks, boil rabbits for the estate
dogs, carry the wood up and down stairs every day for thirty fires and
sleep on the floor outside his master's room. He cleaned shoes, ironed
underwear and socks and once had to stand all night in the hall
waiting for a late visitor to arrive.
But as a butler he was the best paid servant in the house, waited on,
feared and respected by the other servants.
Bob Sharpe knew the real world of upstairs downstairs and the secrets
of the landed gentry - even to the point of incest and attempted
murder!
'Reading this fascinating book is likely to unleash
almost anyone's Inner Bolshevik…!'
Bob Sharpe, who was born in 1902 and died in 1985, worked
both in London and in several country houses. Tom Quinn is the editor
of the Country Landowner's Magazine. He has written several small
books for small independent publishers. He has spent the last twenty
years interviewing people who worked in domestic service, getting them
to tell him their life stories.
