English Butler Trains Hong Kong Chinese in Job That Can Be a Ticket Out

Ivor Spencer is that quintessentially English phenomenon, a butler.

But Spencer--soft-spoken and ingenious--is no ordinary butler. He is a king among butlers and has his own school in London to teach the long-time art.

That isn’t all. Like the fictional ideal gentleman’s gentleman--P. G. Wodehouse’s debonair manservant Jeeves--Spencer is something of a schemer.

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, he explained a project that would have made Bertie Wooster, Jeeves’s bumbling upper-class boss, drop his monocle.

This teeming British colony, capitalist home to more than 5 million people, is due to be turned over to communist China in less than eight years. As a result, thousands are desperate to escape, especially since Chinese troops crushed student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square last June.

Spencer, 57, is helping a selected few get out.

“We like to please,” he said with a slight inclination of the head.

He instructs would-be butlers on how to carry bottles of champagne on silver trays and iron newspapers so that readers avoid getting inky fingers. Then he helps them get jobs as butlers abroad.

Butlering--especially old-style English butlering--is in demand and is such an unusual skill that usually there is not much trouble getting a working visa to go abroad.

“After Tian An Men Square, we had so many calls and letters from Hong Kong about the course,” Spencer said in an interview in a plush Hong Kong hotel. “But I didn’t realize until I got here their actual feelings. They are very scared and very worried, and I would certainly like to help them.”

Out of the original inquiries, Spencer--who is as accomplished at dealing with the media as he is at mixing a dry martini--chose 20 applicants for interviews. Among these were a doctor, a banker, a pilot and a stockbroker.

Being the soul of discretion, Spencer would not identify the applicants, but said the doctor was a general practitioner who feared that it would be difficult to get a passport and wanted a backup occupation.

A spokesman for the Canadian Consulate here--Canada is a favorite destination for Hong Kong Chinese--said that for immigration purposes a butler would be classified as a domestic servant and there is considerable demand for servants in Canada. After working two years in Canada, a butler would be eligible to apply for landed immigrant status, he said.

Spencer stressed that he does not guarantee that trainees will find a job or get a work visa, but he said the chances are good.

The classification “domestic servant” is anathema to him.

“The modern butler is more a manager,” he said. “It is all about running someone’s household in great style.”

Would-be butlers, who pay $4,800 for his seven-week course, learn everything from keeping the household finances to how to book a round-the-world cruise.

Spencer’s graduates are working at several royal homes in England.

In the United States, butlers can expect to earn between $35,000 and $55,000 a year, with medical care, a car, food and lodging often included.

“It is a fascinating job, but very demanding--no room for clock-watchers, especially in America,” he said. “You become a confidante and friend.”

Before World War II, there were more than 30,000 butlers in England but now there are only 70, Spencer estimated.

Perhaps because of their rarity, most people have no idea of how to deal with a butler, which is why Spencer also runs brief courses for employers.

“There were a couple of rich Americans from Dallas who were going to take one of my butlers,” Spencer said. “They were arguing and the woman was saying she was sure you tipped the butler after every meal. ‘No, no,’ said the man, ‘you only tip him after dinner at night.’ ”

Spencer had to explain to them that you never tip a butler.

For Americans in particular, he said, an English butler is a status symbol.

Although Spencer trains modern “butler-administrators,” the essential service is traditional. “In the morning you lay out your employer’s clothes and run the bath,” he said.

Would he, like Jeeves, object to a loud Bertie Wooster-style waistcoat?

“We do, by suggestion, often get our way,” he replied.

“You may find that a rich Oklahoma oil millionaire is used to coming down to dinner in his jeans and hat,” he said, “but we generally find that after a few weeks he is wearing black tie to dinner at least once a week.”

Spencer has come a long way from his roots in working-class East London. In addition to teaching and organizing private parties, he is a toastmaster in great demand for glittering London galas.

Along the way he has acquired a taste for the good life and now wears impeccably tailored suits and hand-made shoes and shirts. He has even thought about employing his own butler at his home in Dulwich, London.

It would serve the dual purpose of giving a trainee some experience and taking a load off his wife, Estella.

She isn’t ready for that, however.

“Too grand for us,” she said. “What would the neighbors say?”