The Real Life Downton Abbey: How Life Was Really Lived in Stately Homes a Century Ago

by Jacky Hyams

  In the upper floors of this grand mansion, inhabiting vast luxuriously appointed spaces, lived the pampered, leisured upper-crust ladies and gentlemen and their families, their everyday lives dominated by centuries-old snobbery, convention and immense inherited wealth.

  Today, most of us splash out on an exotic holiday in a far-off destination for a taste of luxury, being waited on, having whatever we want for an all-too-brief time. Yet many of the early twentieth-century country-house owners, like the fictional Earl of Grantham and his family, wallowed in luxurious living every day of their gilded lives.

  Far below them, in more ways than one, tucked away in the hidden reaches of the big house, sometimes in cramped living quarters – and frequently invisible to outsiders and even their own masters – were their live-in servants, constantly at the beck and call of their masters who never needed to lift a finger to do anything for themselves – other than following a carefully mapped routine of grand entertaining, eating, visiting friends and relatives, running their estates and pursuing socially acceptable pursuits or outdoor activities.

  The irony is that the two groups can’t survive without each other. The country house servant classes worked, sometimes virtually round the clock, for a mere pittance, their sole means of survival. Yet it was only their crushingly relentless toil, often backbreaking and physically tough, that enabled their masters and mistresses to live such smoothly run, cushioned, lives of luxury – for without servant labour such a house and the land surrounding it couldn’t function properly at all.

  A visitor to the house in the early 1900s sees an incredibly well run, perfectly organised endeavour. Wealthy foreign visitors at this time sometimes marvelled at the amazingly well-organised way the English country house was run. But the truth is it can only work so well for one reason: the long established day-in, day-out hard work of the smaller cogs in the massive wheel, those who do the fetching, carrying, dusting, rubbing, polishing, heaving, cleaning, washing, gardening and many more complex tasks, scurrying to obey each and every command or summons from their masters’ bells.

  This army of servants is the hidden element in the enterprise that ultimately gives the house its air of serene, leisured opulence. Even though equality between the sexes and the classes is now ahead on the horizon, here, among the rich, leisured classes, it still seems a long way off.

  So who are they, these two groups of people whose lives are ruled, 24/7 by class and birth, the opposing ends of the social spectrum? And how do they come to be living this way in the early years of the twentieth century? Before we take a look at the many different aspects of their day-to-day lives, let’s take a closer look behind the grand façade to find out more about who these people are and how they got here…

  THE TOFFS

  The families that own the vast country house estates during this period are in one sense an elite power group, part of a super-rich ruling class of land-owning aristocracy and high-born gentry that have remained at the very epicentre of power and royal patronage in Britain for hundreds of years.

  Effectively, they are a ruling class, around 10,000 people from l,500 families whose privilege, ancient lineage and wealth has kept them at the top of society for hundreds of years.

  Aristocrats, where the head of a family might be a knight or a baronet, hold the very highest political influence and power in government. And they own 90 per cent of the nation’s land, much of it in vast, sprawling estates. As a result, their wealth, frequently handed down to the eldest son over the centuries, is immense: large country house estates valued at over £5 million (around £300 million in today’s money) were not unknown in the years just before 1914.

  But it doesn’t stop there. These multi-million pound vast country homes are also continuous and awesomely impressive power bases for social networking, places for relaxing, extravagant dining, hunting and shooting parties with their owners’ wealthy equals, other aristocrats and royalty, once the cares of running the country are set aside. Moreover, some of these homes have been created, at huge expense and usually by ‘new’ money (the millions earned by entrepreneurs in trade, shipping or mining, rather than ‘old’ money, i.e. inherited wealth) as a showcase for their owner’s wealth and top-notch status, with big collections of priceless art, luxurious furnishings and enormous and perfectly tended gardens and tennis courts.

  Some of these aristocrats own grand town houses too – located in specific upmarket areas like Piccadilly, St James’s Square or Park Lane in London: only the ‘right’ address will maintain the upper-crust profile, postcode snobbery of the highest order. Others own more than one estate, so they may frequently move around the country, visiting each one, according to the time of year.

  As a result, huge numbers of servants have, by tradition, always been needed to work and run these mini empires: think of the many hundreds of thousands of people employed by Britain’s big supermarkets and you get some idea of the scale of the Edwardian landowners’ power as employers and bosses. So not only do the elite, exclusive group of aristocrats, gentry and highly esteemed members of the House of Lords run the country – they have been, for centuries, its greatest providers of work, perhaps the biggest employers in their area, keeping hundreds of servants and workers in employment.

  But these earls, knights and duchesses, once supremely confident of their prime position in the pecking order, are having to confront unsettling changes in the world around them. None of these changes have happened overnight. But the march of progress and the spectre of war are about to topple their pre-eminence.

  And so as the storm cloud of World War I starts to gather over their gilded world, the decline of their once overwhelming influence – through what comes to be known as a ‘golden’ era – accelerates. Essentially, this is the slow beginning of the end of their tightly held reign over society, the extreme rule of privilege and wealth.

  THE POWER SHIFT: HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

  The shift in the power of the aristocratic elite started half a century before in the mid-1800s with the massive industrial revolution of the Victorian era and the early beginnings of what we now know as modern industry and the consumer society.

  Until then, the poorest people faced limited employment options other than as agricultural rural workers or in service. But these big changes start, over time, to provide alternative means of employment for large numbers of people in mills, factories, railroads and shops. And eventually, as people begin to have greater mobility to move around – an important factor in the growth of Britain’s economy – a slow but steady shift evolves in the ways people live and work.

  Bit by bit, decade by decade, the rich and powerful elite landowners find themselves under fire, criticised for their treatment of the poor – and for the shocking inequalities of a society where this 10 per cent of the British population own 92 per cent of the country’s wealth.

  Taxation is also starting to be a bit of a headache for the ruling classes, nibbling away at their inheritances. Death duties on their estates, introduced in 1894, come on the heels of a long agricultural recession brought on because Britain has started to import more foodstuffs, thereby bringing down local agricultural prices. And this, in turn, reduces the value of land in the great estates – a late nineteenth-century property slump, if you like.

  Some of the wealthy ruling class have huge debts to pay and they start to sell off their estates – or, if they own several country houses, some of their houses. Following continuous political pressure to increase the taxes paid by the very richest landowners, in 1909 the ‘people’s budget’, championed by the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George, introduces big tax increases for the most wealthy people in society.

  Country-house owners at this time already paid tax for each male servant they employed (this started in 1777 and didn’t end until 1937), but the servant tax did not apply to female servants, who were much cheaper to employ anyway. So by the early twentieth century, the big country households had already undergone their
own version of cutbacks, starting with their wages bill – often the biggest expense when running their big estates. They’d already been replacing male servants with cheaper females; previously traditional male servant roles like house stewards, hall ushers and grooms of the chamber were gradually replaced in the late 1800s by the butler, the housekeeper and the parlour maid. In some cases, footmen too were replaced – by housemaids. And by now, only the really great households continue to employ the more expensive male cooks. The hard-working and harassed cook, Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), heading up the Downton kitchen might well have learned her duties as a kitchen maid working for a temperamental male chef with better take-home pay.

  Technology too has started to influence the way the rich live: the motorcar is not reliable or even widely accepted by 1900 – but cars gradually become commonplace for the wealthy over the next few years, with the chauffeur replacing the coachman. As a result of these changes in technology, less manual labour is required in some houses.

  Yet as badly paid as they are by our standards, by the early twentieth century domestic servants are getting slightly more expensive and not quite as easy to recruit as in the past, partly thanks to the growth and development of towns and cities, which eventually creates more job options for the working classes in shops, factories and offices.

  Even so, most of the big country houses are still well staffed, an average of about twenty to thirty indoor servants living in each house. And the need everywhere for servants remains consistent: large numbers of them work for middle-class families in the big cities. Only the very poorest people cannot afford some sort of servant or domestic help.

  Yet although the middle class tend to have far fewer servants for their smaller households, they too are often finding it difficult to employ and retain good servants: youngsters from the poorest backgrounds who might have willingly followed their relatives into an entire life working in service for the wealthy, generation after generation, are now actively starting to question this: some realise that there are different, less restrictive, ways of earning a crust other than being a live-in servant, even if the wages are low.

  However the biggest power shift that is nudging the aristocracy from their lofty perch is that they are no longer the only rich kids on the block. With the English industrial revolution of the mid-1800s and the expansion of the British Empire – which spanned a quarter of the globe at its height – comes the gradual rise of the moneyed industrialists, the factory and mill owners, a new breed of get-up-and-go entrepreneurs. The Richard Bransons of their day, they are making millions from overseas trade, coal mining, shipping and cloth, rather than mere inheritance handed down from generation to generation. Some aristocratic country-house owners have benefited from this, of course, because they already own huge tracts of land ready to be developed as the towns and cities expand.

  But the ever-growing spending power and influence of the new entrepreneurs – combined with the influential voice of the professional middle classes – is starting to unseat the snobbish, class-bound aristocrats who now have to face facts: they can no longer afford to shun or ignore the existence – or the company – of equally wealthy people who may have started life without an ancient name or high-born lineage – but who, through their own endeavours, can easily match the aristos’ spending power.

  Some wealthy industrialists have also started to buy into the aristocrat’s way of life, building vast houses and estates of their own, sometimes with all the latest mod cons; a few have installed their own heating system, electrical plant, telephone network – and a telegrapher to send off urgent telegrams.

  While the more conservative players in the aristocratic world don’t always rush to adopt the latest new technologies like electricity – some country-house owners are extremely reluctant to change rooms designed for oil lamps and candlelight – the penny is starting to drop: other people can – and do – match their vast influence. And some of these ‘new money’ people have started to marry into the aristocracy, a clear case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em – join ’em’.

  Despite the big role that even the pleasure-loving King, Edward VII, has already played in introducing the aristocrats to the ‘nouveaux riches’ (the new rich) via lavish entertainments, trips abroad and expensive parties in an attempt to smooth away the rough edges of this transition, extreme snobbery about where money comes from still lingers over certain sections of the country-house world.

  Super-snobs like the Dowager Duchess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) who can’t tolerate the idea of the family wealth being in the hands of a middle-class heir – a mere Manchester solicitor who actually earns his money and prefers not to have a team of servants fussing over him – underline the reality of the toffs’ position: their supremacy as masters of all they survey is all but over. And it hurts.

  But as we will see, by the way they continue to live – and party – you’d never have guessed the storm was coming.

  THE SERVANT CLASS SYSTEM

  This incredible class divide where everyone ‘knows their place’ and has a firmly set series of tasks to perform day-in, day-out, is not just a division between the two groups, master and live-in servant. For such is the long-established country house servant tradition – in Tudor times a noble with a vast country estate might have hundreds of staff working for him – that even in the early 1900s, when the British class system is already beginning to buckle, there is frequently a hierarchy amongst domestic staff, two separate servant classes living under one roof. Three very distinct groups of people all labouring and living under the same roof in the big country house or within its vast surrounds.

  First in the pecking order are the upper servants, an experienced group of well-drilled slightly older professionals with specific areas of responsibility and direct, if usually formal, access to their employers. (In some instances they will have to make an appointment to talk to their master or mistresses.)

  Then, way beneath them in status – even applying to the areas of the house they sleep in – is the second tier, the lower servants, frequently younger, ‘invisible’ workers, some of whom virtually work as servants for the upper group.

  The harsh and rigid line dividing the two servant classes may only be crossed by the lowers in one way: hard work – strict adherence to all the restrictive rules and regulations governing a life in service and complete, unstinting deference to both their masters and the upper servants, from whom the lowers learn the ropes. Careful behaviour and steady, if gruelling, toil for years can eventually mean a move up to the higher servant ranks. Promotion. Of a sort. Because while the upper-class of servants live more comfortably, often with their own live-in quarters, earn more (but not much more) and have far greater access to their employers’ private lives – and their darkest secrets – theirs is still a working life of rigid formality, unstinting routine and furious bursts of planned activity when large groups of rich and famous guests are due to be entertained or the family go travelling – and very little else.

  OK, it represents a steady job for life for many, at a time when the majority of the population are living in less than luxury (and the upper echelon of servants can sometimes be just as snobbish about their position in life as their masters). But this is definitely not anything like a working life as we might recognise it.

  THE SERVANTS

  The size of the very grand country house varies from estate to estate. Yet the working traditions of these houses remained pretty much the same over hundreds of years. Anyone who worked as a servant in a big country house remained a servant: that was it. Provided you stayed employed, of course.

  By 1901, an estimated two million people work as domestic servants (out of a total population of 40 million). Many of the servants working in the biggest, grandest houses continue to be drawn from a vast pool of poverty stricken, sometimes rural families: in some areas, successive generations have been working for a local aristocrat for centuries, a long-standing means of survival for millions in a harshly delinea
ted existence.

  Mostly, though, their education has been restricted. Although the official school-leaving age in Edwardian times is 13, attendance by poorer children is frequently haphazard, simply because so many have to work to help provide for their family. Even the brightest poverty-stricken child has no option other than to work, if circumstances dictate, rather than study.

  Literacy, however, is now becoming important: employers prefer to take on servants who can read, write and add up. In some cases, poorer people have become more literate since the late 1800s. But there are still huge discrepancies in people’s knowledge. A young, illiterate girl entering service at the lowest level is at a distinct disadvantage with scant chance of promotion: there’s a great deal of paperwork involved in running a country house: archives show lots of bills, accounts, letters, inventories. A cook or her assistant should be able to read and write a menu, for instance. And if a servant can’t write properly, they can’t even communicate with their own family should they find themselves working some distance away from home. The consequences of poverty, such as malnutrition, poor health and lack of communication skills, don’t exactly help anyone’s prospects if they follow a life in service.

  And, of course, poverty itself continues to cast a terrible shadow over Edwardian families as it did in Victorian times; a family of ten children or more could be reduced to the breadline – or worse, the workhouse, where the very poorest in society wind up – if its sole wage earner, a working father, dies or becomes too sick or injured to keep working.

  So most Edwardian country-house servants begin their working life at a very low social level indeed. Perhaps bitter and twisted sneaky lady’s maid O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) got that way because she started her working life in another country house in the same job as Daisy (Sophie McShera), the lowliest scullery maid, the person with the hardest and worst job in the household.