Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants

by Maloney, Alison

  Wednesday

  If possible sheets were hung outside to dry and bleach in the sunlight. If not, they would be hung in the drying room. More delicate items that could not be soaked, such as coloured silks and muslins, were washed separately with widely available yellow soap. Borax was often added to the water to prevent fading. They were then hung on a clotheshorse in the drying room, away from harmful rays of the sun. Woollen garments were washed in cold water, to prevent shrinkage. The copper pots then had to be cleaned, the York stone floor of the wash house scrubbed and everything put back in its correct place.

  Thursday and Friday

  The laundry maid’s week would end with the starching, mangling and ironing. Household items such as tablecloths, aprons, collars, shirtfronts and cuffs would need to be stiffened to avoid wrinkles and, to do this, they were dipped in a paste made from starch and water. The actual starch could be bought but home-made varieties made from potato, rice or wheat were also common, and cheaper. For lace, of which there was an abundance in the smart houses, sugar was added to the last rinse and the delicate fabric was then laid between white cloths and placed under books to help it dry flat. ‘Very delicate lace may be wound around a glass jar or bottle,’ suggested the magazine Home & Health in 1907, ‘then washed […] leaving it on the glass jar till dry.’

  Linen without frills or folds, such as sheets, tablecloths and napkins, was passed through the heavy metal mangles, with two large wooden rollers, to squeeze the water out and flatten it. It was then dried, folded and put into a linen press, a heavy wooden contraption that resembled a huge flower press, to keep it flat.

  Pressing the clothes, especially the fine ladies’ dresses, was an arduous and fiddly task. Electric irons were invented in 1882 but appeared unsafe, as the few who had used them reported strange noises, flying sparks and blinding flashes of light. A safer one was finally introduced in the US in 1904 but most households carried on with the traditional irons, heated by the fire, until well after the First World War. Most often the laundry maid would use heavy flat irons, weighing around 10 lb each, which were heated on an ornate stand by the fire. Two or three would be used in rotation so that when one was in use and losing heat the others were warm enough to replace it immediately, preventing unnecessary breaks in the process. Some used a box iron, a hollow metal model that could be filled with hot coals and therefore stay warm for longer and, for the frills and fluting, there was a goffering iron, a strange metal test tube into which a hot metal poker was inserted before the item was wrapped around the outside, although these were dying out by the Edwardian era.

  An early advertisement for a wrought-iron mangle

  The Wash House

  In the ‘big houses’, the work was done in a wash house, which was either a few rooms attached to the kitchen or a single-storey building across the yard. It was comprised of a washing room fitted with a series of tubs and coppers, placed at a convenient height for the maid, and a stove to heat the water, unless plumbing allowing hot running water was fitted. The floor was of York stone slabs with a drainage system to draw away the water that slopped on the floor and a flue to draw off the steam. Next door was an ironing room and a drying room, ideally heated with a furnace. The laundry maid spent most of her time in the hot steamy environment, often with her hands plunged into very hot water, and was left with chapped, reddened hands as a result.

  For those households that did not boast a laundry maid, there were local laundresses or washerwomen who would take the dirty fabric away on a Monday and return it, washed, starched and pressed, later in the week.

  SPRING-CLEANING

  When the winter weather turned warmer and the leisured classes began to organize their calendar around forthcoming social events such as the Derby, Cowes week, the London season and the shooting season, life below stairs took on a less monotonous routine. Families with more than one home would move from their country home to their London house for months, taking selected servants with them but leaving others behind on ‘boarding wages’ to pack up and look after the house. The family exodus would then be the signal for the annual spring clean.

  The ornaments, clocks and small items of furniture would first be packed away and the larger furniture draped with sheets, after being cleaned with vinegar and given a new application of beeswax. The loose carpets would be pulled up and taken outside for a thorough beating and the heavy winter curtains taken down from the windows.

  The maids would dust and sweep each room before climbing towering stepladders to scrub the ceiling with soda crystals and remove months of grime and grease. Then they would wash down the woodwork using a special paste to whiten the painted areas and get on their hands and knees to scrub the vast wooden floors with soapy water, or soda crystals dissolved in buckets of warm water, before polishing with beeswax. The windows were cleaned with vinegar, the silver and gold plates were given an extra going over and the hundreds of copper pots in the kitchen scrubbed until they shone. The linen was also examined and any repairs needed were carried out and, finally, the summer curtains were hung.

  Skirting Boards

  As well as the floors and ceilings, there were hundreds of feet of skirting boards to be scrubbed using pipe clay to remove stains. The following is a cleaning recommendation from Cassell’s Household Guide:

  Scrubbing. – Neglected boards will not come clean without extra pains. If of a very bad colour a mixture of three parts of powdered pipe clay with one of chloride of lime, about the thickness of cream, will be useful. This should be laid on to dry in some time before scrubbing. Or some white sand laid on the brush when scrubbing will remove the dirt. Grease will only yield to fuller’s earth spread on the spots for several hours. Well-kept boards, especially in country houses, require nothing but cold water. Soap and soda in hot water make boards black. In scrubbing, only arm’s length should be wetted at the time, taking care that the flannel is wrung each time dry of the soiled water. Good bass scrubbing-brushes are more cleansing than those of hair. Vulcanised India-rubber scrubbing-brushes are the best of all, but are rather expensive at the first outlay.

  Spring-cleaning lasted up to four weeks and, according to maid Margaret Thomas, it was ‘a great business in those days’.

  ‘As well in the kitchen we had to spring clean whenever the sweep came, which in Yorkshire, where I worked later, where we had the smoke jack, was every six weeks.’

  Housemaid’s Knee

  A 1909 advert shows a smiling maid on her hands and knees, surrounded by furniture covered in white sheets, scrubbing the floor with a brush under the caption ‘For spring cleaning, use Calvert’s no. 5 carbolic soap’ as her benevolent mistress looks on. In reality, few domestic servants would have been so happy about the annual spring clean, which was an arduous process and the young girl in the picture would be quite likely to suffer from housemaid’s knee, a painful swelling below the kneecap that afflicted many a maid in service after hours spent on all fours sweeping and scrubbing.

  TIPS FOR THE LADY’S MAID

  The mistress’s personal attendant had her own recipes, or receipts as they were commonly known, for all sorts of things from hair treatments to boot polish, and an array of brushes and other tools to keep her employers smart. Beauty products such as cold cream could be bought or mixed at home and were made from a variety of ingredients including lanolin, almond oil, cocoa butter, coconut oil, white wax, witch hazel and spermaceti – a wax obtained from the head cavity of a sperm whale.

  At the end of each day, the lady’s maid examined the dresses that had been worn and gently removed any dust or mud with a soft brush or a handkerchief. Footwear was brushed or cleaned with a cloth and kid leather was wiped with milk, to preserve its softness. Bonnets were dusted with a small feather duster, kept for the purpose, and each decorative flower or feather teased back to its intended shape.

  As well as a working knowledge of millinery, and a basic understanding of the mixing of lotions and potions, the lady’s maid was expected
to be an expert hair stylist, often sent on courses to learn the latest trends. Mrs Beeton declared, ‘Hairdressing is the most important part of the lady’s maid’s office.’ And she recommended some strange concoction designed to make the lady in question look, if not smell, divine.

  A Good Wash for the Hair.

  INGREDIENTS

  1 pennyworth of borax, ½ pint of olive oil, 1 pint of boiling water.

  Mode – Pour the boiling water over the borax and oil; let it cool; then put the mixture into a bottle. Shake it before using, and apply it with a flannel. Camphor and borax, dissolved in boiling water and left to cool, make a very good wash for the hair; as also does rosemary water mixed with a little borax. After using any of these washes, when the hair becomes thoroughly dry, a little pomatum or oil should be rubbed in, to make it smooth and glossy.

  To make Pomade for the Hair.

  INGREDIENTS

  ¼ lb of lard, 2 pennyworth of castor-oil; scent.

  Mode – Let the lard be unsalted; beat it up well; then add the castor-oil, and mix thoroughly together with a knife, adding a few drops of any scent that may be preferred. Put the pomatum into pots, which keep well covered to prevent it turning rancid.

  Unlike today, hair was seldom washed as Edwardian ladies tended to feel that water was too harsh on their crowning glory. In an interview with Every Woman’s Encyclopaedia, celebrated soprano Aline Vallandri, described as having ‘the Most Wonderful Hair in Europe’, said that while cleanliness of hair and scalp were essential, ‘I am perfectly certain that much washing of the hair with water is bad. As a matter of fact, I wash my own hair as seldom as possible.’

  The secret, she said, was to brush the hair regularly, and to use only clean brushes. ‘Every morning when I get up my maid brushes my hair,’ she revealed. ‘As it is so long I have had to have a specially high stool made to sit on. The maid brushes both my scalp thoroughly and my hair from the roots to the end for half an hour. The other quarter of an hour I devote to dressing it for the day.

  ‘In addition to keeping the hair perfectly clean, this brushing prevents the possibility of any scurf or dandruff – and scurf is death to the hair.’ She also, alarmingly, recommended that a compound of mercury be used if ‘scurf’ did appear.

  TIPS FOR THE VALET

  Like his female counterpart, the valet took a great deal of time ensuring that his master looked presentable. He would brush his clothes before they were worn and remove grease spots from the collar of his coat on a daily basis, using ‘rectified spirit of wine’ or ethanol. Boot polish was easy enough to buy, but many a valet prided himself on his own recipe.

  An advertisement for Scrubb’s, the multipurpose preparation

  POLISHING THE ‘PLATE’

  The footmen or butler were responsible for the appearance of the vast array of silver or silver-plated cutlery known as the ‘plate’ as well as the table silver. The cutlery would be washed every day and wiped clean with a soft rag or leather cloth. At least once a week it was also cleaned with a paste made from hartshorn powder, otherwise known as ammonium carbonate, which was obtained from the dry distillation of oil found in the horn of a red deer stag. Cassell’s Household Management Guide maintained, ‘Towels boiled in a mixture of a hartshorn powder and water are an excellent rubber for plate in daily use. Rags – old chamber-towels of huckaback (a style of rough weave) are best – boiled in a solution of a quart of water to six ounces of hartshorn powder, are excellent for the purpose.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Special

  Occasions

  FINE DINING

  LED BY THE love of opulence often displayed by King Edward VII, the Edwardian upper crust regarded lavish dinner parties as an essential way of maintaining their status in society. It was not unusual for a society hostess to throw two dinner parties a week, and weekend guests would be treated to two lavish feasts with a lunch party in between.

  Margaret Thomas remembered one London house where entertaining was a weekly event:

  On Friday night we used to have a dinner party. They consisted of eight or nine courses and there was usually a luncheon party the next day. Everything was prepared in the kitchen except salads and desserts. The butler had charge of those in his pantry. The cook made all the etceteras for the table, pastry sticks, candies, salted almonds.

  While the downstairs staff dined on cold meats, potatoes and bread, the food which formed the nine or ten courses that graced the dining-room table was of the finest. Oysters, caviar, lobster, truffles, partridge, quail, ptarmigan (white grouse), pressed beef, ham, tongue, chicken, galantines, melons, peaches and nectarines were all ingredients for the Edwardian banquet and a typical dinner party for twenty people would cost up to £60 – five times the annual salary of a scullery maid.

  Those below stairs who made these lavish feasts possible would benefit the next day, having an array of leftovers for their own meals in the servants’ hall. Even so, it must have been hard for a maid who could barely afford her own stockings to witness the amount of money lavished on these meals, when the wastage in some of the richer households could have fed their family back home for weeks. Margaret Powell began her life in service as a kitchen maid at a house in Adelaide Crescent, Hove. She recalled, ‘The amount of food that came into that house seemed absolutely fabulous to me, the amount of food that was eaten and wasted too. They often had a whole saddle of mutton […] And sirloins. Sometimes with the sirloins they would only eat the undercut and the whole top was left over, so we used to eat that for our dinner. Even so we couldn’t eat everything and a lot got thrown away. When I used to think of my family at home where we seldom had enough to eat, it used to break my heart.’

  In houses where the staff was not sufficiently large to wait on a dinner party, outside help was brought in on special occasions, often in the form of a local greengrocer. The Servants’ Guide, published at the end of the nineteenth century, frowned upon this practice: ‘The traditional greengrocer from round the corner or a waiter from a confectioner’s are not the best class of waiter to employ for the purpose, or from whom good waiting is to be expected,’ it sniffed. ‘Servants out of place, personally known to the butler, or persons who have formerly been gentlemen’s servants, are most to be depended on.’ A satirical cartoon in Punch magazine suggests the practice was already common in 1876. It shows a haughty-looking shopkeeper and a well-dressed customer and has the caption: ‘Comely Greengrocer (who waits on Evening Parties to Lady Customer): “Shall I ’ave the pleasure of meeting you this evening at Lady Fitzwiggle’s, Ma’am?”’

  In Cassell’s Manners of Modern Society the writer urges hosts and hostesses never to use anything other than trained waiters at their table: ‘Dexterity, rapidity and above all quietness, added to a thorough knowledge of his duties, form the essential requisites of a good waiter. In this department, as in others, only practice makes perfect.’ He adds that the common practice of using outdoor staff to serve at big dinners was doomed for disaster:

  Hands that have been accustomed to handle spade and besom, to grooming horses, and what not, have not the delicacy of touch necessary for the handling of glass or silver.

  […] Have we ourselves not felt on one occasion a dish of oysters à la crème gliding down the back of our best dress suit and on another had our risible faculties excited and our good manners put to the test at the same time by seeing a young waiter lying prone on the floor, surrounded on all sides by rolls of bread?

  Invitations

  Invitations to dinner were engraved on card and delivered by the footmen. It was customary to give three weeks’ notice, although that rose to five or six by around 1910, and the hostess expected an immediate reply. Guests were expected to arrive fifteen minutes before the appointed time and arriving later was considered a faux pas. A typical invitation might be pre-printed with gaps left for the guest’s name and date. For example:

  Setting the Table

  The table was the hostess’s chance to make the best firs
t impression and she relied on her footmen or parlourmaid, under the instruction of the butler, to make it spectacular. First, a felt or cloth covering was placed on the table and secured at the legs to stop it slipping. This protected the highly polished surface and deadened the sound of cutlery and china being set down. A starched white damask cloth was laid on top, and the footmen made sure the fold of the cloth was exactly in the centre, with the same drop each side. A dinner plate was then set at each place and the table laid with the cutlery, starting with the soup spoon or oyster fork on the outside and working inwards towards the knife and fork for the main course. Dessert forks and spoons were brought in when required. Wine and water glasses were then set on the table and a bread roll placed to the left of each place in a starched white napkin, half-covered and half visible. Salt and pepper were provided between each two places, flowers placed on the table and silver candelabra placed symmetrically in the centre.