Ford says the harder part is holding your tongue around your boss. Especially when he’s wrong. Especially when you’re only trying to help. Butlers don’t wryly dispense nuggets of fatherly wisdom the way wise old Alfred chastises young Master Wayne, not if they want to keep their jobs. The gig is about fulfilling every whim of your employer, no questions asked, no excuses given.

"Imagine you’re giving a VIP dinner party for a client," Ford says to the class. "It’s 9 p.m. and you get a call: Your child is sick and he’s gone to the hospital. What do you do?"

Maybe it’s because I’m expecting my first kid, but the answer seems obvious, to me and to the other students. Explain the situation to your boss, get someone on staff to cover, then hightail it to the hospital.

"No," says Ford. "You stay put. Your boss should never know your problems. The medical staff can handle the situation. If your answer was ’I would leave,’ this life’s not for you."

Nothing impacts a butler’s life like finding the right boss. For some, like Daniel Bentley, 44, that search can take decades. An English country boy trained at a hotel-management school, Bentley is a lifelong butler, though with his close-cropped beard and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks more like a soft-spoken literature professor.

Bentley has managed to build a life around his career, including raising his teenage daughter with his American ex-wife. He met her while he was working for a Mexican media mogul, but the marriage didn’t last. "Most butlers are either gay or divorced," he says, because the hours and travel can be toxic to traditional marriage. Still, the relationship brought him to L.A., where he now runs the 36,000-square-foot Bel Air home of an American financier. In the U.S., green-card requirements make British-born butlers a rare commodity. "My boss jokes that he pays a lot of money for this accent," says Bentley. He appreciates his current boss—or principal, in butler-speak—but hasn’t always been so lucky.

One of his first jobs was a two-year stint as the chief steward aboard the yacht of a sheik—basically, a butler at sea. The sheik wasn’t on his boat all that often, but when he did set sail, he liked to take the vessel "whoring," as Bentley puts it. "The girls would all line up on the dock. The sheik would say, ’You go. You go. You come aboard.’" On one four-day trip from Spain to Morocco, one of the sheik’s wives surprised the crew in port. "She came on board with her daughters, looking in every bed, trying to find a pubic hair." Luckily, Bentley had been given a heads-up. He had his maids strip the sheets. Meanwhile Bentley hid six prostitutes in his own cabin, knowing that a sheik’s wife would never go into the staff’s lower-deck quarters. Then he stayed up all night in the laundry room, scrubbing evidence. Finally, exhausted, he went to his cabin for his first real sleep after the sheik’s four-day bender.

The moment he closed his eyes, a subordinate knocked on his door: The sheik needed him on deck immediately. "Can’t you take care of it?" Bentley pleaded. No, the boss demanded Bentley. So he pulled himself out of bed, threw on his uniform, and raced up to see his employer. The urgent matter? The sheik needed him to turn off a light. "That one, there," he said, pointing to a switch three feet away. "That’s when you have to be thick-skinned," says Bentley, who flipped the switch without a sigh.

You’d think the sheik would be an easy lock for Bentley’s worst boss, but the competition is stiff. There is the American building magnate who split open Bentley’s head with a well-hurled Hermès shoebox. And the Italian businessman who sent him to London to get fitted for a new uniform, which turned out to be a bulletproof vest. Bentley kept his cool around all of these lunatics. It’s not that he doesn’t get frustrated, he says, but even in the heat of battle, he can weigh the gratification of retaliation—say, bludgeoning the sheik on the yacht with the solid-gold candlestick holder—against the value of his career. He gets to live on a beautiful estate, travel the world, and "spend someone else’s money on the best of everything." There are perks.

But every butler has his limit for the amount of abuse he’ll tolerate, and these days, that threshold may be lower than ever. The butler boom means a person with Bentley’s experience doesn’t have much trouble finding a better principal. Soon after the sheik’s seafaring orgy, Bentley walked. He had another job within two weeks.

Pop Quiz: You’re a butler for a sheik having a yacht orgy, and his wife shows up. What do you do?

We students spend one full day of butler school practicing dinner service by waiting on one another, role-playing-style. I’m a natural at impersonating a demanding, half-drunk guest, but I suck at formal service. I’m wobbly and sloppy with the tray, and that’s before Ford starts placing obstacles in my path, like a big bucket that stands in for the family hound. Tongs are considered déclassé, so we serve using a large spoon and fork held between the fingers of one hand. I can never get a good grip on the food, and when I finally do, I slingshot a cherry tomato across the table. I start to sweat, too, and not just from nerves. Despite the butler’ s genteel rep, balancing hot ten-pound platters is hard physical labor. (Ford recommends a change of uniform two or three times a day.) On the plus side, my incompetence brings up some valuable teaching moments for the rest of the class: How does one properly notify Sir that one has dropped arugula in his hair? And what does one do after one clocks Madame in the face with one’s tray?

All the students are more graceful servers than I, particularly Davis Govender (not his real name), a handsome 49-year-old white South African. He maintains perfect posture even when kneeling with a heavy tray, and he nails the butler smile: warm, welcoming, and completely inscrutable. To be fair, Govender has had some practice. He’ s the only student who has already worked as a butler in private homes. Some recent servant trauma sapped his self-assurance, and he enrolled to get his nerve back.

Having spent much of his working life in the wedding-planning industry, Govender moved to London eight years ago to become a butler, initially for an old-money husband and wife. He would serve them three-course dinners as they were driven around in their Land Rover—crystal glassware, silver utensils, the whole bit—all delivered by Govender from the front seat. He’d happily still be pouring champagne roadies if the hours weren’t so brutal (fourteen hours a day, six days a week). Instead he took a higher-paying job with a young British financier and his wife, who used Govender in her quest to become a famous actress. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring film crews to re-create scenes from Hollywood movies—only this time starring her. To shoot one scene, she booked a mansion in Kent and a crew of forty for a full week. Meanwhile, she hid all of this from her husband—and made Govender do the same. The grunt work and secrecy eventually wore him out. "I wasn’t doing dinner parties, because they never entertained. I was just earning a salary. I wasn’t a proud butler," he says. "I believe I am the ultimate servant, and I just want to get paid for that."

Ideally that would mean not working for a nouveau riche couple. Govender says that they often have no clue how to interact with household staff. Govender’s been in situations where the wife would cry on his shoulder one minute, then treat him like the help the next. New-money families often make the mistake of palling around with the butler, then reverting to master and servant when their real friends arrive. Govender hopes his next gig will be with one of the relatively rare old-money families who’ve had butlers for generations. The kind who don’t need their servants to teach them how to be aristocratic.

Gary Williams, the London-based staffing agent and instructor, just received a request from a developer in eastern China for 160 butlers, all for one massive new luxury community. The builder is dangling British butlers as sweeteners, the way an American developer might include a golf-club membership or a Sub-Zero-stocked kitchen. Williams, who runs the British Butler Institute (a competitor of Bespoke), says he doesn’ t have the manpower to meet that demand. He can _ maybe _deliver twenty.

For a recruiter, this is a good problem to have, and Williams isn’ t joking when he thanks Downton Abbey for the assist. Sure, the reason for the show’ s popularity in China is, largely, the same as here: It’ s addictive and fun. But it also reflects a certain Chinese enthusiasm for how Westerners handle and display great wealth. You could even argue that Downton works as a tidy, albeit dated, guide to the type of class-obsessed society that Communist China spent decades resisting. The show depicts the type of have-it-all service that the modern upper crust of China is eager to re-create at home, which explains why Nick Bonell* is there.

Bonell, 52, moved to Shanghai from London last year and is the Platonic ideal of the British butler. He was born to parents who served on an English estate, and apprenticed to the head butler at age 8. He tells me that he even worked at Highclere Castle, the manor where Downton Abbey is filmed. And he ends every sentence with a polite "sir," even when talking to a journalist. Bonell strayed into high-end restaurant work when butler jobs were scarce in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s, but seeing the new boom, he took a course last summer at the British Butler Institute to burnish his résumé. Three months later, he went to China.