Anna Burnside: Standing up for chivalry

The age of good manners and gentlemanly conduct is alive and well in the likes of TV’s Downton Abbey, but what about in the real world of today?

If Michelle Dockery, the luminous actress who plays Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey, can’t find a gentleman, what hope is there for me? The arched-eyebrowed one is mourning the death of chivalry and the decline in the number of men who stand up when a lady arrives at the dinner table or hold open the door when one hoves into view. “Those old manners are lovely,” she said last week, “and it’s lovely when you see a man doing that today. But young men wouldn’t think about that for a second because it’s not the culture any more.”

Dockery is originally from Essex, not known as the epicentre of seemly deportment. Then again, Glaswegians are far from famous for their courtly manners. Mentally Google the word “gentleman” and it’s unlikely that Billy Connolly, Limmy or Gary Tank Commander will be your top hit. My assignment, however, is to search this city for demonstrations of gentlemanly conduct.

There are hopeful signs. My son, aged six, went through a phase of holding doors open and ushering me through while saying: “Beautiful ladies first.” I had visions of his future as an international playboy, charming the few remaining crowned heads of Europe with his exquisite manners. Sadly, he seems to have grown out of it already. Today he zooms ahead, leaving me to carry his jacket, rucksack and packed lunch.

The school run is not fertile gentleman-spotting territory. Scanning the playground for signs of chivalry I see plenty of weary women but precious few Y chromosomes to dance attendance upon us. Zander’s dad is bumping a buggy down a flight of stairs. He reports that, while no one rushed to help him today, people often do. Men and women. And he is a strapping specimen, well able to manhandle a toddler single-handed. I take this as an encouraging sign.

At the underground station, neither men nor women stand aside to let me through the barrier. Why should they – they were there first. When the train doors open automatically, the man beside me does not stand aside or usher me in first. There is plenty of space, but the students who have plonked themselves down on the seats reserved for the elderly and infirm have no excuse. Good manners – surely the bedrock of gentlemanly behaviour – are based on thoughtfulness and consideration to others. This is a fail.

As the train fills up, a large, miserable young woman gets on. Instead of squeezing in to one of the few remaining spaces, she stays standing, clinging to a pole for support. She could possibly be pregnant but is much more likely just to be overweight. Should some of the fellows offer her a seat? Would that be appropriate – or ruder than pretending not to notice that she is red in the face? Why are all the men in the carriage reading Metro instead of leaping up to assist her? Clearly, not one of them has ever watched Downton Abbey. Lady Mary’s eyebrows would be through the roof.

As there is no definitive guide to being a gentleman in the 21st century perhaps they, too, are unsure about the best way to help a trackie bottom-wearing damsel in distress. (Please note that I am courteously giving them the benefit of the doubt here. You don’t have to wear a top hat to be a gentleman.) The internet, normally so decisive, offers only woolly words about personal hygiene and obvious low-grade politesse. There is much emphasis on ties. Debrett’s Guide For The Modern Gentleman offers tips on airline upgrades and chopping onions. When it comes to ladies and their seating arrangements, the default position seems to be to ignore her and hope she gets off at the next stop.

I navigate the city centre streets, buy Hallowe’en geegaws and drink a cup of coffee without encountering a single gentleman. Two council workmen turn off their power hose so I can enter Poundland with dry feet. I suspect their “On you go, hen,” is the nearest I’m going to get to “good day, madam” and a sweeping bow. While the young man in the coffee chain has the robotic good manners of the customer service script, I am not convinced he really cares about the goodness, or otherwise, of my day, or the temperature at which I would prefer my milk. Unsurprisingly, no one stands up when I arrive at their table, or pulls out my chair for me. It falls to me to hold the door open for a woman struggling out with a tray of takeaway lattes.

Perhaps all the gentlemen are busy at work. I call on one, James O’Donnell, the food and beverage manager at the Blythswood Hotel. This is more like it. A charming chap in a Harris Tweed waistcoat opens the door. Another greets me warmly in the lobby. O’Donnell himself should probably be renegotiating a better deal on wild mushrooms, or reworking the breakfast rotas, but is far too polite to let on. He appears enchanted to see me and inquires solicitously about the health of my ice-cream maker. (It stopped working in 2009, apparently I was telling him all about it at the time.) If I was not already sitting down when he arrived, he would undoubtedly have ushered me into my seat.

Part of this is 29-year-old O’Donnell’s professional persona: whatever your gender, being a perfect gentleman is an important part of working in the hospitality industry. The courtesies that Dockery pines for are part and parcel of the five star hotel experience. O’Donnell would come to work in a shell suit before he let a lady join the table unacknowledged. “Chivalry may have died out,” he says, “but I don’t think manners should.”

O’Donnell admits that a little bowing and scraping is part of the job. And while he and his staff may not operate this way every minute of the day – “we don’t walk around the back corridors saying ‘after you, ma’am” – they are just turning up the volume on their own natural good manners. “To do it well, you have to want to do it. It’s easy to fake it but it doesn’t convince anyone.”

Perhaps Dockery should just move into a hotel. (When she is not wafting around a stately home in an evening gown the actress lives in Clerkenwell, which is not the kind of arrondissement where men lay their capes over puddles to preserve ladies’ dainty shoes.) Or perhaps she should seek some older company. (Her current beau, an architect, must be heartily sick of being teased about his deficiencies in the door-opening department.)

In fact I would be delighted to introduce her to my friend Ken Wright. In his company, Dockery would never need to touch a door handle again. Should he be introduced to her mother, he would address her as Mrs Dockery until instructed otherwise. This is a man who never arrives at the door empty-handed. Since welcoming him in to my circle of friends, I have had to buy more vases.

Wright, 54, who wears a suit to go to Morrisons, puts his exquisite manners down to “old-fashioned working-class culture. I was brought up to open doors for women and stand up when they entered the room.” This evolved, in his 20s, into a decision always to open taxi doors for other people, offer to carry parcels and suitcases and various other habitual courtesies that, as he sees it, “make life easier rather than more difficult”.

He has only once, in a long career of politesse, been rebuffed. (Men who use a fear of rejection, misinterpretation or disdain as an excuse for walking on the wrong edge of the pavement, or continuing to play Angry Birds while pensioners heft vast suitcases on to luggage racks, take note.) In the Rogano, at the height of the 1980s, he held the swing door open for a dame in a dangerously shoulder-padded suit. He recalls her saying: “What did you do that for? I can open the door quite well by myself, thank you.” Then stomping off in the huff.

Undeterred, Wright has continued to take the gentlemanly option at every turn. “I have never had any other woman object to a minor courtesy,” he says. “Most seem pleased.”

Intellectually, he knows it’s anachronistic behaviour. But he just can’t help himself. “The Victorians had this odd attitude to women, that they were beneath men and above them at the same time, putting them on a pedestal while giving them no rights at all. But I don’t think it’s bad that the good side of that carries on. I know that opening doors and so on is hard to justify logically. But I do think they are pleasant traditions for a more hard-nosed age.”

What he calls his “careful attention to manners” can be interpreted as snobbery, or worse. Nothing, he insists, could be further from the truth. “I think it’s the most democratic thing in the world. I treat everyone as nice until I have reason to do otherwise. Some people, when they see the tie and hear me saying ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’, think I must be a closet racist and homophobe.”

That would go against his basic tenet, that manners are an expression of your opinion of other people. “They are about a desire to please. There is no point learning which fork to use if you don’t have that. And sadly, a lot of people” – even the ones lucky enough to spend time in the company of a beautiful actress from the most successful costume drama of a generation – “don’t.”