The superwealthy have a new worry to keep them awake on their 1,000-thread-count sheets at night: the global butler shortage.
Butlers are making a big-time comeback as the number of millionaires and billionaires steadily grows in Canada and around the world. And, while Canadians have traditionally held tight to their hardy, self-reliant image, increasingly they are succumbing to the allure of formal domestic help.
The modern butler is not the Jeeves of yore, though. He (or she) can still fold a mean napkin and answer the door with aplomb, but many modern butlers run the equivalent of a mid-sized business, managing multiple estates in different countries, reviewing contracts and supervising dozens of staff members - in addition to walking family pets and driving the children's carpool.
"The worldwide butler shortage is a serious problem. It sounds silly, but it is," says Charles MacPherson, former butler to the Eaton family who now runs a placement service in Toronto.
"The wealthy family that used to be happy with an 8,000- to 10,000-square-foot house is now living in a 40,000-square-foot home," he said.
"To manage that takes a small army of staff."
The general of that army is someone like John Binette, former butler to the Cirque du Soleil who currently works for a family in Vancouver. His average day may include planning and cooking gourmet meals, light housekeeping, having luxury cars detailed, dealing with contractors and renovators, organizing the wine cellar, chauffeuring his clients and supervising other household staff.
All while anticipating his clients' needs and discreetly blending into the background, of course.
"You have to be attentive, you have to listen, you have to understand the first time they tell you something, because repeating is not something they like to do," Mr. Binette says. "A butler's aim is to please - to do whatever is physically possible and morally responsible."
Salary for a novice butler may start at about $50,000; more seasoned butlers can command $150,000 or more in Canada, and far more in New York or London, says Mr. MacPherson, who's also vice-chairman of the International Guild of Professional Butlers and teaches at the International Butler Academy in the Netherlands.
"It's a role of diplomacy and service," says Mr. MacPherson, who taught a refresher course this week for the two dozen butlers on the Queen Mary 2. Requests for butlers, along with personal chefs and head housekeepers, have increased dramatically in Canada, he says. "There's more demand today for domestic staff than there has been in the past 100 years."
Mr. Binette started his career cooking and cleaning for a businessman who had had a stroke. From there, he worked for a succession of families in progressively grander homes. His toughest job, he says, was in a house where the staff were always fighting.
"Oh, it was every day," he recalls wearily. "You could hear them all the way from the west wing."
He offers no horror stories of screaming clients, perhaps because, after 10 years in the business, very little bothers him.
"Clients are clients," Mr. Binette says. "You take a lot with a grain of salt, and you get on with your job."
Mr. Binette is moving to Toronto this summer, and hopes to work for one family that has a 150-acre, 18-bedroom estate in Ontario plus several other houses in the region and homes in Florida. If that doesn't work out, he has four other interviews lined up with families seeking butlers.
The role of the butler has evolved continuously, from low-level servant in charge of the wine cellar and beer-making in the middle ages, to head of the household staff in the 19th century, to near-extinction in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the modern incarnation, the butler is a household manager and personal assistant rolled into one.
The current butler boom springs directly from the growth in global wealth.
The number of millionaires (assets measured in U.S. dollars, houses not included) grew 8.3 per cent last year to include 9.5 million people worldwide, according to the 2007 World Wealth Report published by Merrill Lynch and the wealth-management firm Capgemini.
