Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Sir Robert’s heir, Henry, took the boy on for the winter, no doubt feeling that the family had some responsibility for him, at first just to look after his boat. ‘A short time after Mr Gore engaged me he wished me to be in his room at all the dressing hours for meals and to call him in the mornings, bring his hot water and learn to valet him. I had £8 a year, [and] one suit of clothes.’ He adds laconically: ‘Wages was small then but most things were cheap. I slept at the stables [in] what is now the outer office. The coachman and his wife and child slept in what is now the inner office. Quite comfortable rooms. Batchelor [sic] gentleman also slept in rooms at the stables. They were equal if not better than many of the rooms in the house.’42

  Sir Robert was the MP for Sligo, so the family spent considerable time in London, when typically most of the servants went with them. ‘The housekeeper did not go there as there was a housekeeper for the London house, a Mrs Tigwell. They [took] the first and second housemaids, house steward, groom [of the] chambers, under butler and first and second housemaids, first and second footman and steward’s room boy. All the other servants were put on board wages till they returned . . . [and] allowed milk and vegetables.’43 These were exactly the arrangements in place at the Earl of Kildare’s household at Carton a century earlier.

  Henry Gore-Booth became interested in Kilgallon’s education, sending him briefly to a private school and later teaching him himself: ‘All days we were not sailing I assisted the under butler and footman with their work. It was a happy time. I had no master but Mr Gore. When he was away, I had to write to him, telling him what I was doing with reference to my work and nothing else. He always kept my letters and when he returned he showed me my errors.’44

  Although senior servants tended to be recruited from the wider world, Mr Kilgallon’s memoir illustrates how many of the servants in the house and on the estate were related, either by being married to other servants, or through the marriages of their children. For instance, Mrs Carter, Henry’s old nurse, who is described as giving him a ‘great hugging’ on the announcement of his engagement, was married to the coachman, and her daughter was married to the head gamekeeper. One daughter of Mr Ball, the house steward, was married to Holmes, the huntsman, and his second son, the estate carpenter, was married to Miss Burchell, maid to Sir Robert’s wife.45

  Gentlemen’s houses of this period, and kept in the style as Lissadell was kept had a house steward. Mr Ball was house steward when I came. He paid all expenses in connection with the house, both inside and out that is such as repairs [to] buildings inside or out. He engaged all the servants in the house and stables, paid their wages, and dismissed them when necessary, ordered and paid for all wines. He waited at dinner, but not at other meals. He just handed around the wines.46

  Kilgallon evoked the service of meals with a neat brevity, almost a shorthand, that is suggestive of a close attention to detail:

  The groom [of the] chamber carved, and with the footmen waited at all meals, dispatched the post, opened all newspapers and ironed them, placed them in the rooms. Attend at the door at the coming and leaving of guests. Attend at the door when carriages leaving. With the help of one or two of the footmen seen to the polishing of all the furniture in the drawing room or reception rooms. Seen to all the writing tables, both reception and bedroom.47

  Of the footmen, he recalled that there were three:

  first second and third. The under butler he was of course also footman. Only he had more special duties. He was responsible for keeping all dinner silver in order, laying the dinner table. See that all plates, hot and cold were ready for use . . . When there was big dinner on, Mr Ball, the groom [of the] chamber, three footmen and under butler, John Kerins and I waited. I was the only one not in full dress. The full dress livery had dark blue coat, red vest, red plush breeches, white stockings, shoes with buckles. The footmen wore white thick cotton gloves at all times for dinner.48

  With a sense of awe, Mr Kilgallon summoned up the vision of a grand party at the house that took place years earlier: ‘Lissadell house on the night of a ball, when fully lit up; to me it looked like what a fairyland would be like in my imagination at the time, with all the different coloured dresses of the ladies flitting about [and] the great number of footmen in their red plush breeches and vest.’49

  His recollection of the maids in his early days suggests a certain sympathy. ‘There were three housemaids and help. Their work was hard. They had to be up at 4 am. There was no hot or cold water laid on. They had to carry all upstairs. Heavy work emptying baths. A great many fires in bedrooms.’50

  The kitchen staff was, as you would expect, ‘cook, pastry cook, kitchen maid scullery maid and help when required. Kitchen boys whose duties were to light all fires, clean out ashes, scour all coppers, all cooking was done in coppers. Look after two boilers one in the top scullery and one in the bottom scullery. From these boilers [came] all hot water for baths, washing up etc.’51

  Typically for a larger country house in the nineteenth century, there was a foreign male chef. ‘The cook was a Frenchman called Friburg. He was fond of whiskey, and engaged George Griggs’s horse and cart to take him to Sligo one or two days a week . . . they sat in a public house in Sligo till it was time for Friburg to think about dinner. There was such a great number of servants in the house and stables and guests and callers, it took a great quantity of meat to supply all. It was more like a hotel.’52

  Typically, the ritual of aristocratic life was reflected in the hierarchical arrangements below stairs, particularly for servants’ own dining arrangements, which were even more archaic than the fashions in gentry dining at the time. ‘All the servants did not sit together for all their meals, only for the principal meal, dinner.’ As often happened, the house steward took the head of the table, the under butler the other end,

  as there was always two joints, one at each end . . . All the women sat on one side of the table. The men the other. The housekeeper sat on the left of the steward. The maids according to their rank next to her . . . The house steward said grace and when all room servants had finished their meat, the others laid down their knives and forks, and the steward said grace. The housekeeper rising, the lady’s maid following, the steward taking up the rear, went to the steward’s room for the next course, the under servants did not always get a second course . . . Steward room servants had the same food that was served in the dining room.53

  They were served at table by the steward’s room boy, dressed in livery.

  As suggested by many other accounts, most discipline was meted out by the higher servants: ‘If you did not carry out the rules, your time would not be a pleasant one, steward and housekeeper would make it very uncomfortable for you.’ But there could be compensations: ‘At night there was whiskey and wines served. Usually, there was a small dance in the servants’ hall once or twice a week for three or four hours. They were allowed beer and a bottle of whiskey for punch. There was an old fiddler gave them music.’54

  Looking back to the 1860s from the early twentieth century, Mr Kilgallon wrote: ‘I often wonder where all the servants slept. I know there were three or four beds in a room. Many of the men had folding or press beds here and there in the pantry and the hall,’55 – echoes of the sleeping arrangements of the sixteenth-century household.

  Former footman and later butler, Eric Horne, left a splendidly rumbustious kind of memoir reminiscent of that of John Macdonald in the eighteenth century, but which tactfully – but sadly for us – leaves out all the names of the houses and his employers: What the Butler Winked at (1923). Despite this anonymity, the stories ring true. His account is much more openly critical than Kilgallon’s, starting with his first job as a footman in a country house: ‘It is useless trying to describe the thousand and one things that comprise a footman’s duties, which in every place he goes to, is different . . . in those days footmen in good families had to be not less than six feet, and taller if possible, to show off the family liveries, and look important.
’56 This frustrated Mr Horne, who was only five foot nine.

  His first employer, in the 1870s, was a man of property, title and a miserable-sounding temperament. Indeed, Horne described him as ‘the surliest, [most] bad-tempered man I ever met’. The house was a ‘very large, an old Elizabethan mansion, partly modernised inside, but in the rooms upstairs Moderator colza oil lamps were used, and wax candles; gas was used in the basement, made on the estate; the passages were so wide a horse and cart could easily go up them. These passages all met in a large stone flagged square, so that it took some time to find the way about.’ The household consisted of twenty-five indoor servants. ‘We [footmen] had to powder [our hair], and wear breeches and white stockings. The livery was green, covered with yellow and black braiding, the family crest being worked in braid.’57

  Showing how much distance there could be between butler and footmen, Horne recalled: ‘The butler was a pompous sort of man, though a very good sort. He had previously served the Rothschilds. As long as we did our work properly he would not trouble us, in fact he very seldom spoke to us liverymen.’58 Mr Horne had to valet for the baron, who liked to have his hair parted in the middle. This was never easy as ‘he [kept] moving his head about’ so it was difficult to get the requisite straight line. The baron used ‘some very flowery language. But I was full of life as an egg and free from care. The Baron’s bad language was like water on a duck’s back.’59

  Mr Horne had good memories of the companionship of the servants’ hall. ‘There was a goodly company of us in the servant’s hall at night, as the grooms and the under gardeners would come in and wash up all the silver and glass in the pantries; more for company than anything else, for there was nowhere for them to go for miles, in the evenings.’60 Looking back from the 1920s, he wrote nostalgically of ‘the usual old-fashioned usages observed in the servants’ hall, such as drinking the “Health” every day, etc., also a certain amount of Esprit de Corps among us all, which at the present day is entirely absent’.61

  Most country-house establishments held daily prayers, and church attendance was compulsory:

  the pews for servants were opposite to those of the gentry, so that we were under observation all the time. One Sunday the Bold Bad baron sent for the butler and asked him if we had been drinking too much beer as he noticed several of the men were asleep during the sermon. The parson was brother to the Baron; the living was in his gift, so of course he preached a sermon to please him; generally about the lower orders being submissive to their betters . . . No wonder we went to sleep.62

  Typically for the period, and clearly in part for moral reasons, the sleeping arrangements of men and women were strictly separated: ‘All the men slept in the basement.’ Equally typically, for security reasons ‘the under butler [laid] his bed down in the pantry, across the front of the plate room door, so as to guard the plate at night. To get at it, burglars would have to move his bed: if that did not waken him nothing would.’63 One member of staff was subjected to a memorable prank: ‘One night we arranged to have a game with the under butler, so we got a reel of cotton, put it on top of his let-down bed, taking the end of the cotton down the passage round the next corner with us. When we saw him put out his light we gently began to pull the cotton. We heard him get out of bed, strike a light to see what it was rattling on the top of his bed. Then we thought it prudent to disappear to our own rooms in stockinged feet.’64 Mr Horne felt: ‘All this fun helped to neutralise the bullyings and jawings I got from the Bold Bad Baron when valeting him . . . all his money and power did not make him happy.’65 Later Horne described being caught in a pillow fight by the baron, as a result of which the first footman was dismissed.66

  The hierarchy and the segregation by gender were also manifested in the dining arrangements:

  The maidservants only came into the servants’ hall for dinner and supper, their other meals they got in their own appartments [sic], the kitchen maids never came, except when a dance was on. The laundry maids in the laundry, the housemaids in housemaid’s room; the dairy maid would feed with the stillroom maids; nursemaids in their nursery; butler, valets, groom of chambers, housekeeper, lady’s-maids in the steward’s room. So that there is a lot of one servant waiting on another, the under ones of each department doing it, they in turn being waited on, when promoted.67

  Thus even the meals were like minor military operations, but also seen as a way of training junior staff.

  The baron liked to impress but had a frugal side: ‘In cases when visitors were staying in the house we wore our dress liveries, with a lot more yellow and black braid plastered up the back and across the front. The butler wore black cloth breeches and black silk stockings. Our silver shoe buckles were on the plate list, and had to be given up when leaving the situation.’68

  London visits amused some servants more than others:

  As the London season came round, we packed up, and went to town. On going out to dinner, or other functions, the Baron always had two footmen standing up behind his C spring carriage, and the coachman with his curly wig on. The Baron was a big bug at his seat in the country, but when he got to London, among the other big bugs, he was not a big bug after all. A London season is very tiring to servants. There is not only the day work, but the night work as well. They would keep us out regularly till one, two, or three o’clock, but we had to start work at the same time as the other servants. Often during the London season we were kept so short of our hours of sleep that I used to go to sleep on the carriage . . . We were all glad to get back to the country house again after the London season with its dinner parties, tea parties, evening parties and night work.69

  At significant moments, Mr Horne felt hemmed in and desperate to leave service, but in the end he stayed the course:

  I felt that I was gradually going into a net, and losing all liberty in life: the constraint became almost unbearable, but what could I do? I had no trade in my hands. I knew nothing but gentleman’s service wherewith to get a living. I suppose some men does not feel it, men with no further ambition than to fritter their lives away from day to day in such a calling; a sort of man-woman existance [sic], at the mercy of the gentry’s whims and fancies; cooped up day and night with out variation.70

  The pay too was sometimes barely adequate: ‘All this time I had been away in service I always sent the greater part of my wages home, but in those days a second footman only got £28 a year, and had to pay his own laundry bill out of that. We were allowed £2 per year for hair powder, but always used flour.’71

  Horne found a more congenial berth in the service of an employer better tempered than the baron:

  It was not long before I met with an under-butler’s place to a Noble Earl, who had a house in London, in the country, and one in Scotland. It requires great strength to polish silver, also great care and endurance . . . Here our livery was very smart. Scarlet breeches and waistcoat, blue coat with scarlet collar and cuffs, trimmed with inch wide silver lace, and one epaulet on the left shoulder, white stockings, and buckles.72

  The earl’s household was substantial: ‘There were twenty-five indoor servants at this place, besides housemaids at the other houses. The butler did no manual work, he only superintended the men, the work was all done for him. All he had to do was to walk into the dining room, the boy carrying his wine basket, at the last minute, cast his eye over the table, when all was ready to begin.’73

  Mr Horne had more respect for this employer than he did for many of his later ones:

  This place was the best regulated situation that I have ever been in . . . When the bell rang to clear breakfast, the butler would answer it. Her Ladyship was the sister of a Duke. She would remain in the breakfast room, give the butler his orders for the day, how many visitors (if any) and which rooms they would occupy, the number that would be at meals, also orders for the carriages.

  Then he would come out, and the housekeeper would go in and get her orders, she would come out and the cook would go in. Then the butler would
ring the bell twice for the footman to clear away the breakfast. All this took only a few minutes to do. The butler would come to the pantry and give us our orders. Perhaps he would say to me, Eighteen, or twenty, for dinner, use the silver, or the gilt service, as the case may be . . .

  The housekeeper would give her orders to the head housemaid, and stillroom maids. The cook would do the same to her kitchen and scullery maids. Everything went like clockwork, no confusion, no jealousies, no treading on each other’s toes; no occasion for saying I didn’t know this or that; for each department got their orders, and acted up to them.74

  Mr Horne was touched, as many servants seemed to have been, by the history, tradition and atmosphere of the house in which he lived and worked:

  The Castle was a fine old place, with a wide moat . . . Often I sat up all night with ‘Old Daddy’ as we used to call him. He had brewed the beer for the Castle for over fifty years, and listen to his tales of olden times, of what they used to do in previous lords times. Still, a great many of the old customs were kept up; we still ate our food off pewter plates and dishes, each with the coronet and crest engraved on them, we also drank our beer out of horns. We had the choice of small beer or tea for breakfast (as tea on its first introduction into England was only drunk by the gentry). [Whether these customs were genuinely old or revived, there is no way of telling.]