Me, aged 16 working as a Footman at Sandringham House in 1997!
The first time my name was called out across a classroom and asked to stay behind, I braced for the usual: another chat about drifting off, not applying myself, letting people down. School had been a long, grey corridor of that. I wasn’t doing particularly well, and although I was bright in flashes – creative, neat, obsessed with order and presentation – I couldn’t seem to make the marks add up. It wasn’t until my early forties that I was diagnosed with ADHD and all those jumbled years finally made sense. By then, of course, the story had taken a very different turn.
At sixteen, I left school with barely any qualifications of note and went to Thanet Catering College – now Broadstairs College – believing, with the logic only a tidy-minded teenager can muster, that my love of things neat and beautiful would make me a chef. I liked the ritual of it all: whites pressed sharp enough to cut, knives laid out in a precise fan, plates wiped to a mirror finish. I imagined food as architecture, service as theatre, and me somewhere in the wings, making it all impeccable.
The reality was something else. In those hot, frenetic kitchens, everything arrived at once: pans barking, tickets flapping, the pass shouting, timers going, oil spitting, and my mind- hungry and full of energy – couldn’t catch all the balls. Multi-tasking in that chaos felt like trying to tie shoelaces during a windstorm. I could plate beautifully; lecturers would nod at the presentation even if, underneath, the fish was over, the sauce split, or the seasoning shy. You can’t garnish your way out of a misfire, and I knew it.
Six weeks in, my year tutor and lecturer, Mr Southgate, called my name at the end of a lesson and asked me to stay behind. He had this gentleness about him, an old-world decency polished by service, though I didn’t understand that yet. I stood there, a nervous sixteen-year-old who had been a disappointment to my parents more times than I could count, determined that this time I’d get it right.
To my surprise, he didn’t ask me to try harder. He asked me a question that opened a door I hadn’t even known existed.
“How would you like to work at Buckingham Palace this weekend as a footman?”
I remember thinking, with that clean teenage honesty, What’s a footman?
It turned out that before teaching, Mr Southgate had been a Page at Buckingham Palace, and when the Royal Household hosted large events, they needed extra hands-proper, careful hands. Now and then he’d take a handful of lucky students with him, and that week my name was on his list.
On the day, I arrived early, heart rattling like cutlery in a drawer. There was a uniform and a rhythm to everything, and for the first time I didn’t feel the dread of being behind. Service had structure. It was choreography. There were clear lines on the floor and a quiet code: stand here, move there, vanish when you should, appear at the exact moment you’re needed as if you had always been intended to be right there. Every object had a home, every gesture a purpose. There was no clamour, only the hush of people doing their jobs very well.
Someone taught me how to hold a salver so it seemed to float. Someone else corrected my tie knot. I learnt how a perfectly folded napkin can be an act of care and how the weight of silver in your gloved hand confers a kind of discipline. I learnt to read a room without intruding, to anticipate without assuming. I discovered that I could focus so intensely on the edge of a glass, the line of a table, the moment a guest glanced up, that the rest of the world fell away.
In a kitchen I had felt late. Here, I felt in time.
That first weekend as a footman was the beginning. I went back to college with a new sense of where I might belong. Under Mr Southgate’s wing, and later under the watchful eyes of butlers and housekeepers who had mastered the old standards, I began to understand the language of private service: discretion, precision, calm. It wasn’t about deference for its own sake; it was about creating the conditions in which other people could live their lives with ease. It was the art of removing friction until the day moved as if on well-oiled hinges.
I started taking more of those placements when the Royal Household needed extra staff. With every event, the work taught me something: how to polish glass until it held light, how to walk the length of a hall without anyone remembering I had passed, how to be both invisible and indispensable. I learned that what I’d always loved – order, neatness, the beauty of a thing done properly – wasn’t a quirk to be outgrown; it was a vocation. And the parts of me that struggled in noisy, competing environments weren’t faults. They were cues about where I’d thrive.
Years later, long after I’d left college and found my feet in stately homes and private households, becoming a butler and then a house manager, that ADHD diagnosis arrived like the last piece of a puzzle. It explained the early detours, yes, but it also named the things that had become strengths in service: the ability to hyperfocus on detail, to hold a standard in my mind like a north star, to care about the small touches that transform a day from fine to exceptional.
As my career grew, I saw two truths very clearly. First, exceptional service changes lives – quietly, often unnoticed, but profoundly. Second, the profession needed a way to connect the right people with the right households and to train them to the standards that the best work demands. I remembered the boy who didn’t know what a footman was and the man who had opened a door for him, and I wanted to build a doorway of my own.
That’s why I founded Exclusive Household Staff: to bring together talented, dedicated professionals with the families and households who would value them. Not just to fill roles, but to understand them, to match craft with culture, discretion with expectation, skill with setting. And in time, The Exclusive Butler School followed, because the craft deserves a place where it can be taught with respect for tradition and an eye for the realities of modern life. The school is, in so many ways, a thank you letter – to Mr Southgate, who trusted a kid of sixteen to stand straight and carry a tray; to the mentors who let me stand at their shoulders and watch; to the households who understood that good service is a partnership.
I still think back to that first uniform, those first steps across marble and carpet, the muted hum of a grand house preparing to welcome. I think of the boy who wanted so badly to make his parents proud and how, in the end, he learned to serve not just plates and glasses, but people – quietly, wholeheartedly, with care. Private service is often called invisible, but to me it has never been hidden. It’s a light you carry in your hands: a steady, patient commitment to making things better than they were a moment ago.
If there’s a line that runs through my story – from the restless student to the founder – it’s this: not doing particularly well in one room doesn’t mean you don’t belong in the house. Sometimes you just haven’t found your corridor yet. Mine began when a kind man asked me to stay behind and then offered me a weekend at Buckingham Palace. I said yes before I’d even fully understood the question. And that yes has been echoing ever since.
Group Managing Director