Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants

by Maloney, Alison

  Even when the family were not entertaining, a large breakfast was followed by a hearty lunch and a dinner of many courses with tea in between. There may also have been soup or snacks at eleven in the morning and sandwiches in the late evening so there was plenty of work to keep the cook and the kitchen maid busy all day.

  While the kitchen maid contributed to the cooking, the scullery maid, where there was one, was charged with cleaning the kitchen and washing up. She would light the kitchen fires in the morning and sweep the floors, clean the range and the flues and heat the hot water for cooking.

  Lily’s Story

  Lily Graham was put into an orphanage in 1900, at the age of seven, after the death of her father. At eleven, Lily was sent out to work in order to earn enough money to buy her maid’s uniform and spent two years as a messenger and general helper at a dressmakers’. By 1908, she had saved enough money for her blue cotton dresses, white aprons and caps and she went into service as a scullery maid in Mayfair. She rose at 5.30 am to scrub the floors, clean and light the kitchen range and she toiled until nine or ten in the evening. She was 13 and she was paid just £6 a year.

  Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants

  Footmen

  In the age of the carriage, footmen had been an essential part of every rich household and many houses employed three or four. Dressed in high livery, a footman would accompany the mistress on her afternoon outing, holding the carriage door for her, helping her avoid muddy puddles and carrying any parcels and purchases. He would also leave her in the carriage while he called to see if the lady she wished to visit was in, and if not would leave a calling card. A second would accompany the master as he went about his business and a third, if there was one, stayed at home to open the door to any callers, or to run errands for the family. A typical task would be to relay messages from one house to another, or to call on another household to ask after the family within and send his employer’s regards. In the evening he would wait on the table at dinner, under the watchful eye of the butler. As liveried footmen were an indication of wealth, the grandest homes had many more than four. At Woburn Abbey, the family seat of the Duke of Bedford, a footman would stand behind each chair in the dining room, no matter how big the occasion. The biography of Mary Du Caurroy, who was Duchess of Bedford in the Edwardian period, observes:

  Everything was done in splendid, if flamboyant, style. Liveried servants were evident in large numbers. Breakfast was served at ten each morning […] Herbrand (the Duke) insisted on retaining all the ancient traditions of the house, he continued to ensure that every guest was provided with his or her own gold teapot.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, many of the footman’s functions had become obsolete because of two new inventions. The motor car, increasingly popular among the upper classes, meant the groom and footman were replaced with a single chauffeur on journeys, and the telephone made the carrying of messages about town unnecessary. Nonetheless some footmen were still kept on in a more ornamental role, more as an ostentatious show of wealth than a useful addition to the household. They were used to wait on tables as well as performing general tasks such as carrying coal, cleaning silver, announcing visitors and retrieving coats as dinner guests left. Some were given to the sons of the household to act as a personal assistant, like their fathers’ valets, or performed the same duties for guests who arrived without their own valet.

  Bizarrely, they were often given a generic name, such as William or James, which would be used for every footman employed by the household.

  Hallboys

  Like the maid-of-all-work, the hallboy came at the bottom of the pecking order and was the servant to the servants. He would not set foot in the main house during the course of his duties and would be at the beck and call of the butler and the footmen at all times. In his memoir, Green Baize Door, Ernest King said he went into domestic service at the very bottom, in a well-to-do north Devon house, and he spent all his time there waiting on the other staff. He had ‘the table in the servants’ hall to lay, the staff cutlery to clean and the staff meals to put on the table. In the butler’s pantry I spent most of my time at the washing up tub.’

  Other duties included cleaning the boots of the family’s men as well as those of the butler and footmen and cleaning the kitchen knives.

  The position of a hallboy, or houseboy, could be taken by a local lad who still lived with his parents, as Frank Honey recalled in Lost Voices of the Edwardians. Working at the house of an army captain in Canterbury, he was expected to turn up at six in the morning to start his chores. ‘My first job was to groom two big black retrievers they had and then I had to let them out into the garden. Then I used to have to chop the wood and clean the shoes, the knives and the forks. There was no stainless steel cutlery in those days. We used to use brick dust.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Pay and

  Conditions

  PAY PACKETS AND PERKS

  IN 1899, THE average yearly wage of a housemaid, aged between twenty-one and twenty-five, was found to be £16. 5s., the equivalent of £927 today. A younger maid would earn considerably less, perhaps starting on £10 a year, £570 in current value. While this seems a remarkably small sum, it must be remembered that servants had little need, and even less time, to spend any money. Every position came with bed and board, so there were no bills to pay, and unless an employer was exceptionally mean, there was a plentiful supply of food and drink.

  With a sixteen-hour day, and only one afternoon off a week, there was little time to spend their hard-earned cash and much of the money they received went back to their often poverty-stricken families. Many a young girl scrubbed her fingers to the bone, year in year out, to put food on the table for younger siblings or even just to keep dad in gin!

  Servants were paid quarterly, sometimes annually, and rarely was a penny paid in advance, so the youngsters in their first job had a while to wait before they saw the spoils. Despite the meagre amount, breakages and any items they needed to buy throughout the year, such as stockings and shoes, were deducted on payday.

  Yearly wages in 1901, with today’s equivalent

  Wage 1901

  Value 2011

  Butler

  £60

  £3423

  Housekeeper

  £45

  £2567

  Cook

  £40

  £2282

  Lady’s maid

  £32

  £1826

  Kitchen maid

  £24

  £1370

  First footman

  £26

  £1484

  Second footman

  £24

  £1370

  First housemaid

  £28

  £1598

  Second housemaid

  £22

  £1255

  Scullery maid

  £12

  £685

  Coachman

  £18

  £1027

  Hallboy

  £16

  £913

  Figures from Report on Changes in Rates of Wages and Hours of Labour in the U.K., with Comparative Statistics for 1900-1908 [1910 Cd.5324]

  VITAL STATS

  The pay structure wasn’t always straightforward, however, and money was often decided on more than experience. The lady’s maid, for example, was expected to be young so if she hit her mid-twenties and was still employed, her annual salary began to decrease.

  Footmen, on the other hand, increased in value with every inch of height as the liveried uniform was considered to look smarter on the taller man. An extra premium was paid for two who were similar in stature and appearance. A matching pair of six-footers was considered quite a catch so was worth a few pounds more than the manservant of average proportion. They were often trained to act in unison, standing either side of a hallway or both accompanying a mistress on her visits.

  In 1849 a letter to the magazine Sidney’s Emigrant Journal
asked for advice on this very issue. ‘I am twenty-four years of age, a native of Scotland, and at present a gentleman’s servant; but as I am not a six-foot man, nor particularly handsome, I have not the best chance of succeeding here.’ He added that he had a reasonable education, great body strength and the capacity to withstand any climate, and asked whether he would do well in Australia or America. The magazine’s adviser urged him to try Australia, where he could rise ‘from man to master’ and warned that ‘service is considered rather degrading in America’.

  In The Life and Labour of the People of London, published at the turn of the century, Charles Booth recorded the sliding scale of a footman’s wages thus:

  2nd footman, 5 ft 6 in.: £20–£22; 5 ft 10 in. to 6 ft: £28–£30

  1st footman, 5 ft 6 in.: Up to £30; 5 ft 10 in. to 6 ft: £32–£40.

  This height-conscious attitude was by no means confined to the footmen, although they bore the brunt of it.

  Butler Eric Horne, author of What the Butler Winked, bemoaned the fact that he would never ‘hope to attain the top of the tree’ because he was only 5 ft 9 in., and in some houses even the maids were passed over for promotion to parlourmaid because they weren’t tall enough.

  FOOD AND BEER ALLOWANCE

  As well as their wages, each employee was granted meat and sugar rations and a daily beer allowance according to their gender and rank in the household. In the majority of houses the food portions were generous with a typical allowance being 1½ lb of meat a day plus 1 lb of tea and 4 lb of sugar per month. Supper was usually comprised of the family’s leftovers and dinner parties meant more delicacies to feast on ‘below stairs’.

  The etiquette manual Cassell’s Household Guide, issued in 1880 and still used by the mistresses of the Edwardian era, advised employers that the provision of food and beer was more satisfactory than cash payments to cover food and drink:

  For some reason or other, which it is difficult to account for, many housekeepers do not undertake to find grocery and beer, but allow money for those articles of consumption. Either such things are necessary to the diet of servants, or they are not. If they are necessary, it is better by far to provide tea, sugar, and beer, than to give money, which may not be applied to its proper use. In point of economy, the money payment is a losing one, because a housekeeper having to feed a certain number of persons daily, the better all the meals are supplied, the more regular is the consumption likely to be. A girl that goes without a good tea is more likely to prove an inordinate supper-eater than one who has previously enjoyed a good meal.

  With regard to beer money. If beer be a necessary, the money ought to be spent in buying the required nourishment; if not, there is no sense in giving wages in lieu of it.

  In a household where the family was away a lot, perhaps at a second home used for the hunting season, the staff packed up the house for long periods and enjoyed a little more time to themselves. In this instance, they were given an extra bonus to make up for the lack of dinner scraps, known as a ‘board wage’, to spend on food.

  Coming from households where lack of money had meant a steady diet of bread and potatoes, the majority of the servants were better fed than they had ever been. Canterbury lad Frank Honey, employed as a houseboy while still at the local school, found the food a considerable perk in one house. ‘The beauty of that job as far as I was concerned was that I had a jolly good breakfast,’ he said. ‘Prior to that I might have taken a piece of bread and butter to school with me when I went out, but I used to get eggs and bacon there – something I never got at home.’

  Below is the list of beer allowances for servants at Leighton Hall, the Lancashire home of the wealthy furniture-making family the Gillows, as recorded on 17 June 1893.

  1893 Beer Allowance for Staff at Meals Only

  Pints

  Butler

  3

  Coachman

  3

  Groom

  3

  Cook

  2

  Lady’s Maid

  2

  First Housemaid

  2

  Second Housemaid

  2

  Laundry Maid

  1

  Kitchen Maid

  2

  Extra man

  2

  Total Allowance

  22

  1893 June 17: At present three servants do not take beer.

  Extra Allowances of Beer

  [For] sweeping kitchen and other chimneys 4 times a year and cleaning back – two men each

  1

  For cleaning [garden walkway] Ash Path once a year – each man

  1

  For cleaning house and washhouse cisterns once a year – two men each

  1

  General coal loading day when they work all day. Each man. At dinner

  1

  During rest of day

  2

  Man going to Lancaster on return if [he is] sober

  1

  Postman on Sunday bringing and taking back [post]bag

  1

  Man staying at home on Sunday morning if not a servant getting beer in house

  1

  Beer was weaker than today’s pub brands and the quantities allowed were unlikely to result in inebriated servants. As there was no time to go to the pubs or clubs more than once a week, it was considered sensible to allow the servants to enjoy a pint with a meal and, for the upper staff, there would be wine as well.

  PERKS AND EXTRAS

  As well as the day-to-day sustenance, there were many perks to be had below stairs, especially for the more senior servants and those who waited on guests. For the lady’s maids and valets they came in the form of gifts from the master and mistress and cast-off clothes that could be worn or sold on. Housemaids who were lucky enough to become temporary ladies’ maids may also have received a financial boost for their trouble.

  The footmen would pick up the odd shilling as a tip for attending to guests in the hallway or helping them into carriages and, while accompanying employers on a trip to a wealthier establishment, would be invited to participate in the fine cuisine in the kitchen.

  Alfred West, a groom and valet for an old gentleman in the Edwardian era, remembered taking him on shooting and hunting trips to Hertfordshire, where he was allowed to taste his share of the spoils. ‘The game was wonderful,’ he said in Lost Voices of the Edwardians. ‘I used to be treated very well. When I was working in the stables, washing down the horses after the hunt, I was able to go into the servants’ quarters in the “Big House” and I was given the same food the toffs had had, after they’d finished with it. There was pheasant, duck and venison. It built me up no end.’

  Being in charge of the wine cellar, the butler was expected to sample the goods before serving them at the table and one or two were known to overindulge from time to time. He may also have been given the occasional bottle as a perk for overseeing the cellar, the usual tariff being one bottle to every six opened, and was able to take the odd nip of the stronger tipples in his care, such as brandy and port. A shrewd butler could make a few bob selling candle ends, corks and the like and, in addition, visiting guests would also dig deep to cross his palm with silver.

  A contemporary etiquette guide called The Manners of Modern Society examines the thorny subject of gratuities and concludes:

  Servants, like railway porters, look after the douceurs [sweeteners]. All those who have rendered a guest any assistance look for acknowledgement and their hands are always on the alert when the moment of your departure arrives, to receive and close upon the gold or silver deposited therein.

  A lady gives to the maid who has assisted with her toilette and the housemaid. A gentleman remembers the valet, the butler, coachman, gamekeeper – all or any who have rendered him any service.

  Down in the basement, the extras depended on the opportunity and honesty of the staff. Cooks were given rabbit skins and offcuts to keep or sell and could raise a few shillings for the animal fats p
roduced from roasting tins. Some sent a little of the food that arrived at the back door home to their families. Margaret Thomas remembers working with one cook who dispatched her with a parcel of groceries to send home each week, as soon as the orders arrived. ‘As well she had commission from the tradesmen every month when the books were paid, and woe betide them if they didn’t turn up with it, because there were complaints about their goods until they did. Because of these extras perhaps it didn’t matter that the cook’s wages were only £45 per year.’

  The housekeeper, being in charge of daily expenditure, had plenty of opportunity to line her own pockets, honestly or otherwise. Like cook, she might receive a sweetener from the traders she used to provide linen, cleaning goods and food or even made money by showing interested tourists round the grand house. One fortunate lady, Mrs Hume, was housekeeper at Warwick Castle in the nineteenth century and, by showing interested visitors around the property, she managed to pile up a fortune of £30,000, now worth £1.3 million, in wages and gratuities.

  ACCOMMODATION

  In her 1905 children’s novel A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett describes a servant’s attic bedroom, from the point of view of a child used to a more privileged existence. Although a fictional room, it is undoubtedly similar to those found in almost any upper-class home:

  Yes, this was another world. The room had a slanting roof and was whitewashed. The whitewash was dingy and had fallen off in places. There was a rusty grate, an old iron bedstead, and a hard bed covered with a faded coverlet. Some pieces of furniture too much worn to be used downstairs had been sent up. Under the skylight in the roof, which showed nothing but an oblong piece of dull grey sky, there stood an old battered red footstool.