Ben Bentley learns how to be a butler

It’s the sort of handshake I could get used to: firm, friendly and containing a fresh £20 note.

Have you ever heard the phrase “to palm someone off?” says the man with money hands, Karl Stanfield.

Welcome to a butler school – or at least a masterclass from professional butler Karl from Oswestry. I am here in the grand surroundings of Attingham Park near Shrewsbury to learn how to bend and scrape and put on a bit of a show for the toffs of the house.

The lesson begins, appropriately below the stairs in the servants’ quarters, with Karl showing me how to open a pour a glass of wine for a guest.

Karl takes out a waiter’s friend – aka a penknife – and cuts through the foil on the top of the bottle before removing the cork.

Holding the burgundy in one hand the way you might a newborn baby, he says: “People tend to pour and lift and you get drips down the side, but if you twist the bottle slightly as you lift it, it stops the drips.

“And if you put your thumb in the cavity under the bottle – don’t ask me the name of the cavity under a wine bottle – you can balance the bottle in one hand and pour it like that. You also have more reach then.”

At home behind closed doors, my technique is to hold the bottle by the neck and pour it like vinegar onto a bag of chips. And although my posh wine-pouring attempt is a bit wobbly and I remain convinced the bottle is about to smash into bits on the floor, none of the guests get wet or sustain lacerations. I take avoiding hospital to mean success.

Flowers or travel?

No-one ever needed medical attention from folding a napkin. I think. Spreading a napkin out on the table, rather inexplicably Karl asks: “Do you like flowers or travel?”

Easy . . . travel. No, flowers. No, travel.

“Travel it is, then,” he adds, deftly folding the napkin up into ever-decreasing triangles. Making it look as simple as making a paper plane, with a few last folds to fan out the apexes, he’s done.

“There you go, your napkin like Sydney Opera House,” says Karl, standing back to admire his handiwork. “If you’d said flowers I’d have done you a bird of paradise.”

My attempt? Let’s just say it’s more Oakengates Theatre than Sydney Opera House.

But I have hidden talents in laying tables. Hidden even to me. The last time I laid the table for a four-course meal it was for chips, a can of Fanta, and a Jacob’s Club bar.

The secret weapon in laying cutlery is the knife from the main course. It being the width of a dining plate, it is placed horizontally as guide for the plating arrangement and I am shown how to build out the cutlery in the reverse order of the courses: pudding, main, fish, starter.

Easy. “Just don’t put your fingers all over prongs of the fork,” Kark advises. “And if your guests are unsure which order the cutlery should be, you can have a word in their ears to spare their blushes.”

Then he spots my deliberate mistake: if a guest were to eat his or her meal in the order dictated by my cutlery it would be pudding, mains, starter. In other words, backwards. We move on to simpler tasks: walking.

Entering a room with due deportment is a quality that eludes me, and being as I lurch around more like a camel’s granny than Hudson the butler off Upstairs Downstairs, I expect a lesson on how to walk.

Karl says he could ask me to march around with a bottle of champagne on my head but he has an easier tip: “As long as you keep your nose level and follow it you should be alright, I think.”

Life-savers

Being a butler often means heading up a team of staff, including servants and waiters.

In Karl’s pocket are several little life-savers: a spare pair of cuff links in case one of his waiters have forgotten theirs; a notepad for reminding him that Lady Farquois VIII is allergic to gammon; and a piece of white chalk “in case you cut yourself shaving and get it on your collar, young man. It’ll look better than blood”.

The lessons keep coming: never address your guests, or your boss, by their first name.

“And if you forget their names, just call them sir or madam,” suggests Karl. “My name is John-Michel Karl Stanfield Esterhazie, but I just get called Karl.”

Trying to get rid of inebriated guests requires diplomacy and a word in the ear.

“If I’m trying to get rid of guests after they have drunk too much, I will say ‘There’s a phone call for you, sir’ and once they are out of the room I’ll suggest they have had a bit too much to drink and that neither me nor a member of staff will be serving any more alcohol,” says Karl.

If there’s one thing Karl drills into me it’s clean fingers and shoes. “Most guests see your hands all the time, whether you are serving wine or food. People often see you from the elbow down and probably think ‘Oh, I know that thumb’.”

I’m taught how to use baby wipes when a dog is sick on the carpet, and how to keep my poor hands soft and smooth using sugar and cooking oil.

I move through cleaning guests’ shoes with spit and polish and how to rid a room of the smell of cigarettes by placing freshly cut onions in each corner.

“And surprisingly the room does not smell of onions in the morning,” says Karl.

A spot of wax that has dripped from a candle is removed with a plastic credit card and the bottom of a glass decanter is cleaned with fine gravel and water.

“Years ago it was lead shot and gin,” adds Karl. “And while we’re on, gin is good for cleaning diamonds. Now you can buy these ‘wonder balls’.

If there is one quality I should develop to become a butler, it would be what?

“A thick skin and a broad smile,” Karl says. “I think you have got it in you – and anyway, it’s easy to get confused with cutlery . . .”