Carden Hall, Clutton, Cheshire, burned 1912
Image: Lost Heritage - Demolished Country Houses of England

As you know, many a resume and curriculum vitae these days is an unlovely thing, a history of previous employers now renamed, merged, bought, dissolved, bankrupt, closed and in some cases simply ceasing to exist.  Rather the fate you might have wished for former lovers, but awkward when on the job search and being asked for references.     

So before moving on from the memoirs of Frederick-John Gorst, Royal Footman (see previous entries below), I thought it might be useful if not also comforting to point out that, with the notable exception of Welbeck Abbey, everywhere Mr Gorst was employed is, in a word, gone:

St. Aiden's Theological Seminary, Birkenhead. Founded in 1847, closed in 1969.  Gorst's first job in service, as a young boy in the 1890s, is here as a page boy carrying coal to the students' rooms, polishing shoes, running errands, working in the kitchen, and carrying pitchers of warm milk to the Rev. Beibetz in the evening.

Carden Hall, Cheshire.  Burned 1912.  The teenager Gorst, having outgrown his page boy uniform, learns to be a footman.

S.S. Germanic of the White Star Line.  After suffering exhaustion by age 19, a physician advises Gorst that sea air might improve his health and the young man is hired by the White Star Line, serving on the S.S. Germanic from Liverpool to New York.  Sold in 1904 to the White Star's sister company the American Line, subsequently rosold and renamed several times, the S.S. Germanic sees service in two world wars before it is cut up for scrap in 1950.

Court Hey.  Disenchanted with life at sea as a saloon class steward, Gorst returns to shore and enters the service of  the Gladstone brothers, nephews of the illustrious Prime Minister William Gladstone, at their stately Georgian home Court Hey on the outskirts of Liverpool.  Demolished, 1956.  Source

19 Rutland Gate, London.  Gorst is hired as travelilng footman to Lady Howard.  The house is sold at the death of Lord Howard, and eventually demolished in 1932 to make way for a block of flats.

Welbeck Abbey, where Gorst is employed in the early years of the last century as a Royal footman to the 6th Duke of Portland.  Still standing. 

The world changes.  In Hollywood if you're lucky your resume is a list of hit shows that are still in syndication; the sets, the offices, the props and the people who ran those shows long gone, of course, the crew dispersed, but the product lives on.  In other lines of work the remaining evidence is less tangible.  The name of the company you started with may even have changed a couple times while you were still there, before they asked you to clean out your desk.  But a friend of mine experienced in these matters says no one ever survives more than three take-overs.  Apparently more than that is simply too much for a normal human being to bear. 

If you're like the young footman Gorst, however, you learn to keep moving.  You change with the world.  You are one step ahead of the fires, the scrap yard, and the demolition crews.  You stay ahead of the game.  And as my wise friend advises, you always want to be nice to the little people on the way up.  Because you will surely meet them on the way back down.