Town and county; or Forty years in private service with the aristocracy. (Original manuscript, with mounted photographs).

Manuscript in ink contained in two notebooks (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), oblong octavo (130 x 200 mm), original matching cloth-backed marbled papered boards (rubbed), Vol. 1 with the author’s ownership inscription ‘C. W. Cooper, Ampthill House, Ampthill, Beds. 1930’; pp. 1-188, 189-297, neatly written on rectos only on faint-ruled paper; with numerous original photographs mounted in both volumes; very clean and legible throughout, and with some associated ephemera loosely inserted including two letters and a recipe handwritten by the author and a newspaper clipping from a late 1937 edition of The Luton News and Bedfordshire Advertiser containing an interview with the author (which actually mentions these very ms. notebooks) and a preview of his soon-to-be published book; both manuscript volumes are housed in a custom clamshell box with a partitioned interior, together with a fine first edition copy of the published book, Town and county; or Forty years in private service with the aristocracy. / By Charles W. Cooper; illustrated by J. S. Goodall. London : Lovat Dickson, 1937.

The original manuscript for an extraordinary work that opens a window onto the eccentric world of the English aristocracy before the Second World War. 

Charles W. Cooper’s memoir of forty years in private service – thirty-two of them as butler to Sir Anthony Henry Wingfield at Ampthill House, Bedfordshire – was kept in these “reporter’s notebooks”, as he refers to them,  over the course of several years in the 1930s, after a friend encouraged him to set down in writing some of his many entertaining anecdotes drawn from his experiences in the service of the nobility. Cooper views both his work and his employers as honourable, however, and although his account can be highly amusing (and quite surprising!) in places, it does not deprecate or disparage those Upstairs, and certainly does not sink to the level of sordid gossip about their private indiscretions; on the contrary, Cooper paints an empathetic and affectionate portrait of his idiosyncratic masters, as properly befits a gentleman who is admired by all and sundry for his principles, discretion and wisdom. (We learn of Cooper’s impeccable reputation from his friend Alan Lennox-Boyd, M.P., in his introduction to the published book; also, from the The Luton News article, we learn that he was brought up at Kensington Palace as the godson of the Duke of Teck, and that he was once footman to Prince and Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Park).

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Cooper’s manuscript is the large number of original photographs from his own collection that are mounted throughout its pages. Some, though not all of these are used as the basis for line-drawn illustrations in the published book; but the fact that the published version does not contain any photographic plates makes Cooper’s originals all the more significant – in particular, the remarkable shots of the aristocracy and servants riding ostriches, sheep and hogs, and playing with cheetahs and bears….