What the butler saw
Few know more about putting on the Ritz than the UK's leading toastmaster, Ivor Spencer. But the 69-year-old is now set to out-class even the luxury of the world famous Piccadilly hotel.
He is to launch a new hotel concept in the USA aimed at satisfying the American desire for all things British. His hotels, which will each consist of about five suites, will be run by a butler who will pander to guests' whims around the clock.
The first hotel, in Washington DC, is being backed by an anonymous US businessman. If successful, the concept will be imported to London.
"Unparalleled luxury service" is what Spencer promises, and this will include having one's bath run, clothes laid out in the morning, newspapers ironed, meals prepared by a top chef and everything a true gentleman would naturally expect.
The butler hotels will be a neat addition to his now world-famous Ivor Spencer International School for Butler Administrators/Personal Assistants.
Launched in 1981, it has perhaps done more than any other organisation to conserve the once endangered art of being a butler, and the school's trained butlers now serve top executives around the world.
The school also sends some of its butlers for bodyguard training, where they learn karate, how to use a gun and how to do a handbrake turn at high speed in a limousine.
Spencer is best known not as a butler, but as the man in a red tunic standing behind the Queen, the prime minister, or a visiting dignitary. His origins, however, are a far cry from the five-star world he now inhabits: his father had a fruit business, but often gambled away the profits.
His first job at the age of 14 as a menswear salesman led to a succession of others before becoming trainee chef at the Dorchester, where he grilled the vegetables.
After two years there, he persuaded the head waiter to show him the banqueting hall. "I had only seen such a scene in films and when I saw a man step out of the shadows in a scarlet coat, I decided that was what I wanted to be."
In preparation, he bought a five-year pig skin diary from Fortnum & Mason and some second-hand clothes, including gloves with holes in them, and waited for the phone to ring in his council house.
Eventually, when he was on the verge of quitting, he took a phone-call from the deputy banqueting manager at the Savoy asking him to be butler at a function Princess Margaret was attending that night.
"I pretended it was difficult for me to fit it in. I was very nervous. At the end of it, the head waiter invited me for supper and asked me if I was getting enough work. I said ‘yes' and he just said, ‘You bloody liar. You've got a hole in your shoe!'" says Spencer.
Founder of the Guild of Professional Toastmasters in 1966, Spencer has made toastmaste ring almost his own and is often flown at a moment's notice first-class around the world to preside at a particular function.
He once had to pull the plug on the public address system when the father-of-the-bride started hurling four-letter word insults at his new son in-law.
Spencer has brought a new informality to the 130-year-old British art of toastmastering. "The old toastmasters used to be very severe. If anyone smoked before the loyal toasts they used to be publicly reprimanded. We are much less heavy-handed these days," he says.
