The Unadmirable Crichton

That unparalleled mixture of dignity and servility, the British butler, has lived for generations by the code of discretion. With an impassive "Very good, sir," he nonchalantly brushes a golden hair from the lapel of an employer whose brunette wife is impatiently awaiting him. He uses exactly the right tone of gentle authority when informing distraught young ladies that his master is not at home. Family secrets are locked inside his impassive exterior as in a tomb.

Taken Aback. But in London last week a butler was shrilling secrets from the housetops. His name: Thomas Albert Cronin, 44. His former employer: Mr. Antony Armstrong-Jones, an ex-photographer and present husband of Princess Margaret. On a double-truck spread in the weekly People, Cronin poured out the reasons he left his royal job after only 25 days at Tony and Meg's Kensington Palace residence. With butlerian unctuousness, Cronin declares that the expose is for him "a painful task" but necessary to preserve the "dignity of the royal family and my own reputation."

Cronin first met young Armstrong-Jones in 1958 when Cronin was buttling for U.S. Ambassador "Jock" Whitney, and Armstrong-Jones arrived to take some photographs. "I will say at once," wrote Cronin, clearly in the grip of a remembered passion, "that I was taken aback by Mr. Jones's manner of dress. His coat, if memory serves me, was of leather, and unbuttoned; his trousers much too tight, and of an eccentric material." Cronin confesses that "I betrayed my disapproval on my face and in the unenthusiastic way I announced him to the Ambassador."

But when duty called last spring in the form of an "approach" from Kensington Palace, Cronin gallantly undertook the job--at a salary of $2,200 a year--despite his unfavorable impression of his new master. Tony Armstrong-Jones's pants, in Cronin's opinion, were still much too "tight-fitting." Worse, his new master had not even the rudimentary good sense to stay abovestairs, but popped into the kitchen ("a place I do not expect to see masters") to ask how things were going. Stifling his outrage at this uncouth behavior, Cronin answered stiffly that he must hire two more charwomen to assist the one already employed. "'Three charwomen!" cried Tony. "Why, when I was in digs in Liverpool, Cronin, one charwoman did all the work." Cronin responded icily: "I venture to say, sir, that a royal residence is somewhat different from . . . 'digs' in Liverpool."

Swollen Mandarin. Cronin promises to relate, in future installments of People, the "even more trying times that were still ahead." But some Britons had already seen enough. Cassandra, the terrible-tempered columnist of the London Daily Mirror, dubbed Cronin "this swollen mandarin of backstairs protocol," and railed against his "miserable etiquette, his tawdry patronage and his backbiting desire to make money at the expense of his late employers." British butlerdom reeled with shock. Samuel Bretson, head of the nation's only school for butlers, was in despair at Cronin's repeating "tittle-tattle--and about the royals, too." Cried Bretson: "He is guilty of causing a shameful disturbance, and he didn't ought to have done it!"

The babbling butler's expose seemingly closed all doors in Britain against him. But Thomas Albert Cronin could scarcely care less, at least for the moment. Last week he was in the U.S., appearing on Jack Paar's TV show, and wending his leisurely way to Florida, where he is promised another palace job: as a $17,000-a-year host at a jai alai palace in Dania, a tourist center north of Miami.

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