Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  The laundrymaids too had a physically demanding job that was carried out in a series of outhouses, such as a washhouse and a dry laundry (with a range suitable to heat irons), often connected to the main service courtyard. They worked with their hands in very hot water, handling wet clothes such as shirts and neckcloths, bedlinen and towels, which then had to be starched, bleached, dried, pressed and ironed.72

  The proper care of household linen was reckoned one of the most important demonstrations of good housekeeping and there were massive quantities of it. The inventory at Blenheim in 1740 lists ‘Damask and Diaper Napkins Sixty Seven Dozen and five, Table Cloths of the best Sort Ninety three, Stewards Table Cloths twenty Fine Sheets Eighteen pair, Servants Sheets Forty Five pair,’ and so on.73 At Shugborough in staffordshire in 1792, the inventory included ‘85 Damask tablecloths, 92 dozen damask table napkins, Damask breakfast cloths, 23, Damask tea napkins, 29 dozen,’ to which should be added seventeen pairs of ‘Holland sheets & pillowcases’, nineteen pairs of ‘second sheets’, and eighteen pairs of ‘second pillowcases’.74

  Laundry work was largely done by hand. Sometimes washing was pounded with wooden bats, but it might also need steeping in a liquid such as urine or lye (an alkali cleansing agent made by soaking wood ash in water to extract potassium salts), as well as soap-washing and boiling. Bleaching was a regular event, and up until the early twentieth century most country houses had specially dedicated bleaching or drying grounds, where linen, which could easily yellow, was laid out on long grass to dry and bleach in the sun – preferably a midwinter sun.75

  The dairymaid separated cream, churned butter and made cheese for consumption in the house. The dairy was usually specially designed to remain cold and was sometimes an ornamental feature of the grounds of a great house. It had to be kept very clean, as the author Thomas Hale observed in the Compleat Book of Husbandry (1765): ‘First thing, and the most important of all in a Dairy is Cleanliness. Not only the vessels and utensils but the very Floor, walls and ceiling, everything that is in it and everything that is about it, must be thus managed with the utmost nicety of Cleanliness or there will be continual Damage and Losse.’76

  The country-house nursery was of prime importance as the birth and upbringing of a healthy male heir were central to the aristocratic mindset. Thus great efforts were made to ensure that babies were kept safe at a period when infant mortality was high among all classes; the mortality rate among upper-class children did not improve dramatically until the later eighteenth century.77

  Hannah Glasse in The Servants Directory takes an unusual view of the nurserymaid’s duties: ‘A child when it comes into the world, is almost a round ball; it is the nurse’s part to assist nature, in bringing it to a proper shape.’78 Nurses often travelled with their charges. Among the Blount family letters is one in 1787 making preparations for a visit by the son and heir with his family. He writes saying that he will be travelling ‘with my wife’s maid, two nursery maids, & two men. The children may all be in the great Room . . . we will bring a little bed & bedding for the youngest . . . & the two maids may sleep in the large bed.’79

  Infants would be cared for by a nurse and a nurserymaid, with additional help when required, and would often be breast-fed in their early months by a specially employed wet-nurse. The eighteenth-century beauty, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, famously defied convention and nursed her children herself, dispensing with a wet-nurse, although she did employ a ‘rocker’, literally a menial who rocked the cradle but was also expected to clean up the baby’s mess. The duchess had to dismiss her for drunkenness: ‘I perceived that she made the bed stink of wine and strong drink when she came near it . . . This morning I learnt she had been so drunk as to fall down and vomit.’80

  Later on there would be tutors for the boys and governesses for the girls, who would attempt to provide a rounded education, always assuming that the boys were not sent away to school. It was a commonly held belief that private education by a tutor produced a more virtuous child.81 Daniel Defoe, in his book The Compleat English Gentleman (published around 1725), noted that aristocratic mothers were unwilling to let their boys go to school to be taught by a social inferior.82

  The daily round of teaching a child was not necessarily unpleasant. In 1705, Lady Grisell Baillie wrote a note to her daughter’s governess on how she should spend her day: ‘To rise by seven o’clock and goe about her duty of reading, etc. etc., and to be drest to come to Breckfast at nine, to play on the spinnet till eleven, from eleven till twelve to write and read French. At two o’clock sow her seam till four, at four learn arithmetic, after that dance and play on the spinet again till six and play [by] herself til supper and to bed at nine.’83

  Mary Wollstonecraft spent some time at the end of the eighteenth century as a governess to the children of Viscount and Viscountess Kingsborough at Mitchelstown Castle in Ireland, of which she wrote: ‘I am treated like a gentlewoman but I cannot easily forget my inferior station – and this something betwixt and between is rather awkward – it pushes me forward to notice.’ Much alone, she was thrown back on her own company and thoughts: ‘I commune with my own spirit – and am detached from the world – I have plenty of books.’84

  Later in the century, Lady Kildare boldly asked the admired philosopher Rousseau (incidentally himself a former footman) to be her children’s tutor, and when he declined she appointed one William Ogilvie to teach her many children on Rousseau-esque principles, with plenty of freedom and time outdoors. Ogilvie was a mathematician, a classical scholar and a French speaker; perhaps because of his education Lady Kildare was prepared to treat him as a gentleman (although when he was appointed, there was much discussion about whether he was a gentleman or not and should be given wax or tallow candles). He taught Latin verse and grammar, French language and English history as well as mathematics to her boys as well as her girls, although the latter had additional lessons in deportment, singing and needlework.85 He was clearly a success in more ways than one. In her widowhood, Lady Kildare married her children’s tutor and they retired together to France.

  There were one or two other rare marriages between the classes worth mentioning. In 1785, Mary Cole, an eighteen-year-old lady’s maid of great beauty, first received the attentions of the 5th Earl of Berkeley and bore him seven children before he married her formally, causing great confusion later over the inheritance, as the title went to the son born after their marriage.86 However, one of her younger sons recalled that she had managed the house with great competence. He wrote: ‘When she found herself mistress of Cranford and Berkeley Castle, with unlimited sway over the domestic establishment, and the command of an entire revenue of the estate, she exhibited extra-ordinary natural talent for management, and unquestionably saved Lord Berkeley a good deal of trouble that he particularly disliked.’87 Sir Henry Harpur of Calke Abbey in Derbyshire married an accomplished lady’s maid in 1792.88

  Lady Henrietta Wentworth (the sister of Lord Rockingham) married her footman, John William Sturgeon, in 1764, upon which they withdrew not to France but to Ireland. Horace Walpole in his letters remarked on her legal settlement, which gave her husband £100 a year and entailed the remainder on any children of the union. She had, he said, ‘mixed a wonderful degree of prudence with her potion’.89 Marriages between master or mistress and servant were outnumbered by the illegitimate off spring of similar unions.

  The outdoor staff of a country house could be just as critical to the prestige of the country house as the regiment indoors. The stables might be managed by a clerk of the stables (the successor to the gentleman of the horse), who organised the coachmen, grooms and footmen when they were accompanying a coach or a horse. In many households his role might be absorbed into the duties of the coachman, another senior liveried servant who not only had to drive the coach but, along with the other footmen, could act as a bodyguard to the family. His responsibilities extended to the continual maintenance of the horses and the carriages.

  In the
eighteenth century, the display made by a fine coach and horses of quality, together with the attendant coachman and footmen, was exceptionally important. A visiting American, Benjamin Silliman, wrote in 1805 that ‘One great point of emulation is to excel all rivals in the number of footmen. Some of the coaches had two, three, or even four footmen, standing up, and holding on behind the carriage, not to mention a supernumerary one on the coachman’s box.’90

  A coachman would usually be given his livery in addition to his wages. Every second year, Ambrose Campion, the coachman in 1776 to Philip Yorke of Erddig, received a pair of plush breeches, another of buckskin, a waistcoat, a frock greatcoat and boots.91 His work began at 6 a.m., preparing the stables and the horses, and ensuring that the carriage and harness were cleaned and ready for use.92

  Tam Youall, coachman to Lady Grisell Baillie at Mellerstain in Berwickshire, was employed as a groom in 1706, at an annual wage of £1 10s, plus his clothes. When he became coachman and moved with the family to London, his annual pay rose to £3. He was still in post in 1740, but was later fined for misconduct or carelessness and injuring another servant when drunk.93

  The stables of many country houses had space for many kinds of horses, not only to draw the carriage and for riding, but also for hunting, an increasingly popular sport in the late eighteenth century. The supporting servants were often depicted in paintings by George Stubbs, such as the Hunt servants of Lord Torrington.94 Apart from the twenty-plus stable staff at Holkham Hall in Norfolk in the 1720s, there was a hunt staff, including a fox huntsman with an assistant, a hare huntsman, a whipper-in, a dog-boy, a helper and a gamekeeper. Holkham Hall boasted a coachman’s stable and a pad-groom’s stable for easy-paced horses.95

  As in any period, handsome grooms could lead to marital problems. Clara Middleton of Stockeld Park, Yorkshire, became infatuated with John Rose, who had been hired as the groom of the hunting stable but had became her favourite companion on rides – shades of the stories of ‘Handsome’ Macdonald.96 It ended in tears, with the Middletons’ divorce.

  Every house had a head gardener responsible both for the pleasure grounds and for the kitchen gardens that supplied produce for the house. The staff under him ranged from unskilled local women, recruited to weed the gardens, to the jobbing labourer. Head gardeners sometimes went on to become independent landscape gardeners such as William Ewes, head gardener to Sir Nathaniel Curzon at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, between 1756 and 1760.97

  Highly literate and able, some became authors in their own right. One such was William Speechly, who had worked at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, then for Sir William St Quintin, and from 1767 was employed by William, 3rd Duke of Portland, at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. He published Treatise on the Culture of the Pine Apple in 1779, followed by a Treatise on the Culture of the Vine in 1790.98

  The scope offered to gardeners of the period had been increased by the mastery of better regulated hothouses or ‘stoves’. Using hotbeds of tanner’s bark, they could create the hot and humid conditions necessary for tropical plants. Thus by the 1730s most noblemen were the proud owners of hothouses, greenhouses and pineries for exotic fruit. This extension of responsibilities clearly put pressure on gardeners to acquire the necessary skills and experience.

  Those at the top of their game were highly valued. Lord Petre, for example, employed a number of gardeners at Thorndon Hall in Essex, two of whom, John Miller and James Huntback, appear in a 1742 list of his servants as the most important in the hierarchy after the chaplain and the estate manager.99 In his later years Mr Miller fell from grace. First, Lady Petre wrote to the agent complaining of his unreliability in money matters. In April 1744, he was responsible for a failure to keep the hothouses properly supplied with tanner’s bark, so that many plants including the large melon died. He had also allowed all the pineapples to fruit so that there would be none the following year.100

  A gardener was usually expected to be well mannered enough to act as a guide when showing the gardens to prestigious visitors, if required. Anthony Heasel wrote in Servants’ Book of Knowledge (1733): ‘Take every opportunity of entertaining those who come to visit your master, with a particular description of every thing in the garden, and have always some places ready for them to rest themselves on, while passing from one part to another.’101

  One great gardener to an aristocratic house, Thomas Mawe, published Every Man His Own Gardener in 1769. A later writer penned a brilliant portrait of the grandeur of such gardeners. In his introduction to the second edition of John Abercrombie’s Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener, published in 1817, James Mean says: ‘When introduced to Mawe, whom he had never before seen, poor Abercrombie (as he used facetiously to narrate) encountered a gentleman so bepowdered, and so bedaubed with gold lace, that he thought he could be in the presence of no less a personage than the Duke himself.’102

  Another head gardener to a noble household who rose to great national (indeed, international) prominence was Capability Brown, the son of a yeoman farmer, who first worked for Sir William Loraine at Kirkharle. He became Head Gardener at Stowe in Buckinghamshire in 1741, which involved him in major landscape excavation and remodelling. In 1751, after Lord Cobham’s death, he left Stowe and worked in his own capacity, charging impressive fees. He earned over £10,000 in 1759.103

  There was a considerable preponderance of Scottish head gardeners in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Horace Walpole commented to the Countess of Ossory in 1777 on the absurdity of this; our ancestors, he said, ‘were not so absurd to import peaches, nectarines, and pine-apples from the south, and highlanders from the Orcades to look after them’.104

  At the beginning of the century, gamekeepers were primarily concerned with the preservation of deer. Hunting deer, or stag, was a traditionally aristocratic pastime, and it became an important status symbol to consume, or to make gifts of, venison. Edward Bishop, the gamekeeper at Hursley, Sir William Heathcote’s estate in Hampshire, in the 1730s, was charged with looking after the deer population as well as the sheep on the park, whilst destroying vermin. He was also expected to kill game for despatch to London, or dispersal as gifts.105

  With a sharp rise in the value and status of venison in the eighteenth century came innumerable problems with armed poachers, as illustrated by the Black Act of 1723. This specified that any armed men who were caught with blackened or disguised faces in any ‘Forest, Chase or Park’ where deer were kept could be put to death.106 Clashes between gamekeepers and poachers were commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  In fact, an Act of 1671 had restricted shooting small game and birds to qualified people, namely owners of land with £100 a year, or leaseholders of land worth £150 a year. Lords of the manor were allowed to appoint gamekeepers to enforce these regulations and in 1707, new legislation authorised these gamekeepers to shoot game themselves. Those appointed could be either estate servants, or, increasingly, local gentry who enjoyed shooting pheasants and the like as a sport.107

  As shooting gained in popularity during the eighteenth century, gamekeepers needed to raise the numbers of game birds, which meant protecting them even more rigorously against poachers, especially at night. One gamekeeper complained of his daytime concentration being ruined because he had ‘laid ought [out] Many cold Nights in your Woods and Plantations When the Rest of your servants Were a Bed’.108 Indeed, battles with poachers became a preoccupation of all gamekeepers.

  At Longleat their numbers swelled from two keepers in 1750 to seven by 1787. By 1818, their numbers nationally were recorded as 3, 336.109 The relationship between sport-loving landowning employers and their trusted gamekeepers could be close. The portrait of Jack Henshaw, the gamekeeper of Philip Yorke, which hangs at Erddig, carried the celebratory verse:

  A lover true to fur, and feather,

  Who tired not, nor lost his leather:

  Near forty years, through bush and bry’r

  He beated for the elder squire.110

 
Gamekeepers may well have relished their outdoor role, free of many of the constraints of indoor service, as they were not expected to live in the main mansion.

  4

  Behind the Green Baize Door

  The Eighteenth Century

  THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COUNTRY house required huge numbers of staff with increasingly specialised duties. The landowner, or his wife and/or the upper servants, had to not only recruit but retain them. So where did they come from, how were they managed and where did they live? As might be expected, they were often found locally or through the recommendation of a third party, such as a family friend. The letters of aristocratic ladies positively hum with information about potential servants, not least in seeking or giving references. Senior servants – especially stewards and housekeepers in larger households – former senior servants and trusted tradesmen might all be given the task of finding suitable people.

  There were also agencies, special registries and newspaper adverts but, as John Macdonald’s memoir shows, word of mouth was very effective. The open market took the form of the ‘Statute Fair’, a country fair that was held every autumn in most market towns and was set aside for the hiring of labour of all kinds. Contracts would usually initially be entered into for one year.1