The Remains of the Day - By Kazuo Ishiguro Page 0,12

of favour with his employers, leaves the house where he came to fame and is never heard of again. Meanwhile, those same gossipers will have found yet some other newcomer about whom to enthuse. Visiting valets, I have found, are often the worst offenders, aspiring as they usually do to the position of butler with some urgency. They it is who tend to be always insisting this or that figure is the one to emulate, or repeating what some particular hero is said to have pronounced upon professional matters.

But then, of course, I hasten to add, there are many valets who would never dream of indulging in this sort of folly – who are, in fact, professionals of the highest discernment. When two or three such persons were gathered together at our servants’ hall – I mean of the calibre of, say, Mr Graham, with whom now, sadly, I seem to have lost touch – we would have some of the most stimulating and intelligent debates on every aspect of our vocation. Indeed, today, those evenings rank amongst my fondest memories from those times.

But let me return to the question that is of genuine interest, this question we so enjoyed debating when our evenings were not spoilt by chatter from those who lacked any fundamental understanding of the profession; that is to say, the question ‘what is a great butler?’

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To the best of my knowledge, for all the talk this question has engendered over the years, there have been very few attempts within the profession to formulate an official answer. The only instance that comes to mind is the attempt of the Hayes Society to devise criteria for membership. You may not be aware of the Hayes Society, for few talk of it these days. But in the twenties and the early thirties, it exerted a considerable influence over much of London and the Home Counties. In fact, many felt its power had become too great and thought it no bad thing when it was forced to close, I believe in 1932 or 1933.

The Hayes Society claimed to admit butlers of ‘Only the very first rank’. Much of the power and prestige it went on to gain derived from the fact that unlike other such organizations which have come and gone, it managed to keep its numbers extremely low, thus giving this claim some credibility. Membership, it was said, never at any point rose above thirty and much of the time remained closer to nine or ten. This, and the fact that the Hayes Society tended to be a rather secretive body, lent it much mystique for a time, ensuring that the pronouncements it occasionally issued on professional matters were received as though hewn on tablets of stone.

But one matter the Society resisted pronouncing on for some time was the question of its own criteria for membership. Pressure to have these announced steadily mounted, and in response to a series of letters published in A Quarterly for the Gentleman’s Gentleman, the Society admitted that a prerequisite for membership was that ‘an applicant be attached to a distinguished household’. ‘Though of course,’ the Society went on, ‘this by itself is far from sufficient to satisfy requirements.’ It was made clear, furthermore, that the Society did not regard the houses of businessmen or the ‘newly rich’ as ‘distinguished’, and in my opinion this piece of out-dated thinking crucially undermined any serious authority the Society may have achieved to arbitrate on standards in our profession. In response to further letters in A Quarterly, the Society justified its stance by saying that while it accepted some correspondents’ views that certain butlers of excellent quality were to be found in the houses of businessmen, ‘the assumption had to be that the houses of true ladies and gentlemen would not refrain long from acquiring the services of any such persons’. One had to be guided by the judgement of ‘the true ladies and gentlemen’, argued the Society, or else ‘we may as well adopt the proprieties of Bolshevik Russia’. This provoked further controversy, and the pressure of letters continued to build up urging the Society to declare more fully its membership criteria. In the end, it was revealed in a brief letter to A Quarterly that in the view of the Society – and I will try and quote accurately from memory – ‘the most crucial criterion is that the applicant be possessed of a dignity in keeping with his position. No applicant will satisfy requirements,