Australians looking to Jeeves pouring the beer

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 50

Australians looking to Jeeves pouring the beer

NZPA London Australian status-seek-ers planning to employ a butler will be offered lessons by an Englishman in the proper handling of a man servant.

Requests, for Jeeves to go Down Under — including one from a star of the TV soap opera, “Neighbours” — has prompted Ivor Spencer, founder of the International School for Butlers in London, to test his skills in new territory. He is planning to spend six weeks based in a luxury Sydney hotel at the end of this year offering intensive three-week £2500 ($7118) courses for butlers. If it proves a success, he will open a permanent school.

Running alongside will be a special one-day course, “How to handle your butler,” for prospective employers. Mr Spencer, who has placed butlers with the Royal family, King Hussein of Jordan, and the Australian media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, said: “Having a butler is a big status symbol. “Australian prospective employers quite frankly — and this is not being derogatory — tend to be ‘new money,’ successful people who have never had a butler in their family before.” In a similar course to one he runs in America, Australia’s nouveau riche will be taken through a course of “What the Butler Does,” including that

ultimate service of ironing the morning newspaper. Australians, noted for their informality, will be taught to address their butler by his surname, while he will call them Mr and Mrs in the morning and last thing at night but Sir and Madam during the day. Mr Spencer believes they will become more formal under the influence of their butler. “When a butler serves his employer’s beer it will be in a glass on a tray, not from a can,” he said. The status symbol does not come cheap. Butlers’ salaries are about £20,000 ($56,947) a year, plus good accommodation, food, a car for shopping, private medical care and maid service.