Butlers day book

A 90 page booklet with the complete entries of a day book of David Chalmers a butler at Fingask from 1849 – 1855.

HIGHLAND HOSPITALITY
For much of the 19th century, Fingask was lived in by the last Threipland baronet and his three sisters. None of them ever married, but their lives were certainly not without pleasure. As glimpsed in the surviving daybook of their long-serving butler, Peter Chalmers, they were, in Andrew Threipland’s admiring phrase, ‘energetic, jolly and hospitable’. Mr Threipland also points out that at Fingask there was little Victorian stuffiness. Master and man certainly didn’t live in separate self-contained worlds. In his phrase, ‘there is no sign of the green-baize door’.
For example, Sir Peter and his butler often went shooting together. Not driven shoots, of course, only a couple of men, their guns and their dogs, getting what they could from a long day on the hills. So, on August 12, 1852, Chalmers records that: “Sir P and I went up to the moor to the grouse after breakfast and killed four brace of grouse and four and a half brace of black game’.
And they often went curling together. The Fingask Curling Club, which still survives, is one of the oldest in the country, and in Chalmers’ time competitions between sides from local great houses or villages were a major element in Perthshire winter life. Such days usually ended in a local inn over ‘beef and greens, the real curlers’ fare’, which was inevitably followed by drinking, music, singing and dancing. (Chalmers records at one point buying a new bag for his bagpipes. You can imagine what caused the death of the old.) No doubt, too, both master and man equally appreciated the ‘aqua’, which the daybook records ‘Mr Stewart’ regularly brought down from his illicit still in the hills.

The book gives a charming insight into the daily life at a country house in the 19th century. Some people have described it as the most boring thing ever; however there is a revisionist school of thought maintaining that it is just the minutiae of the Butler’s daily life, and his intimate friendship with the Threiplands of the time which gives the day book a charm of it’s own. Certainly you can imagine the smell of carriage horses coming from the pages. There is a short postscript by Andrew Threipland.

"The Butler's Day Book" 1849 - 1855 is available from the Castle priced £5.00
For more information please email butlers@fingaskcastle.com