A Life in Private Service: A Personal Introduction
A personal note from our Founder and CEO, Robert Wennekes, on more than forty-five years in private service and the pleasure of writing these monthly essays.
It is a true pleasure for me to introduce this small collection of essays, which I shall, with patient regularity, write each month for the readers of our Insights section. I have spent rather more than forty-five years in private service, and it is a quiet privilege to set down, in this unhurried form, some of what those years have taught me about the running of a great house and the stewardship of a distinguished family.
I began, as so many in this profession properly do, at the very front of the house. My first position was as a butler in the United States, where I learned, under the patient correction of older colleagues, the small disciplines by which a private household is held to its standard. From there I went to Austria, where I served as Executive Head Butler in a house of considerable formality, and finally to Germany, where I had the honour of serving as Head Butler at the American Embassy, a posting which taught me a great deal about the meeting of private service and public representation.
After those years at the front of house, I established a small private staff recruitment company, through which I came to know, in close professional confidence, a great many of the principal families of Europe and beyond. That work grew, in the natural course of things, into what is now The International Butler Academy, which I founded twenty-six years ago and which remains, I am quietly proud to say, the foremost school of its kind in the world. The Academy has, over those decades, prepared many hundreds of young men and women for serious careers in the great houses, and a number of its graduates are today the senior staff of households I have had the privilege to advise.
There is no substitute, in this profession, for the years one has actually spent in the pantry, in the dining room, and at the side of the principal.
I write these monthly essays for two reasons. The first is that I have, over the years, come to hold private service as a serious calling, and I believe that the small disciplines by which a great house is run are worth recording with care, in a tone proper to their subject. The second is more personal. I have had the rare privilege of standing in this profession in three roles at once, as a butler myself in my younger years, as the employer of a large private staff in the houses I have run, and as the trusted confidant of a number of exquisite families across the world. Each of those vantage points has taught me something the others could not, and these essays are, in their quiet way, my attempt to bring all three to the page.
I shall write, in the months to come, on the matters our principals return to most often, the recruitment and care of staff, the rhythms of the country and town residences, the quiet governance of the family office, the education of the next generation, and the small institutions by which a family is, across the years, known to itself. I shall write plainly, in the British manner, and without the inflated language which has, regrettably, attached itself to parts of our field. The houses I have served have always preferred restraint, and I shall keep to that.
It remains for me only to say that I write these essays with genuine pleasure, and in the hope that they will be of some quiet use to our clients, our colleagues, the principals, the senior staff, and the trusted advisers who read them. I am, as ever, at the service of the families we have the privilege to advise.
HouseholdService Across Borders and Cultures
On the quiet courage required to enter another country's household, the disciplines that allow a member of staff to flourish far from home, and the rewards which extend well beyond the salary.
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