Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  A brushing room, for the wet- and dry-brushing of hunting clothes, was frequently encountered in Victorian country-house plans. In the eighteenth century, brushing was often done in the servants’ hall. Early brushing rooms seem to have opened off the hall, but later were usually separate. Westonbirt House in Gloucestershire had two brushing rooms, one for the household and the other to be used by visiting valets.134

  In the early nineteenth century, lamp rooms were common, as the cleaning and refuelling of lamps required considerably more space than replacing candles in candlesticks. However, after the 1890s, the lamp room was gradually superseded by a switch room or generating room providing electricity, with Cragside in Northumberland being one of the first to have electric light throughout. Before the 1870s, new houses always had their own brewhouse, although after this point they were rarer.135

  Servants’ sleeping quarters naturally varied depending on the age and scale of the house. During the nineteenth century, there was an increasing emphasis on separating them from those of the family, whereas up until the eighteenth century close personal servants often slept close to their employers, to be on call. From the mid nineteenth century, the pattern was to remove servants as far as possible from the principal bedroom floor.

  For largely moral reasons, as well as practical – in order to avoid unwanted pregnancies – the separation of menservants and female servants was taken increasingly seriously. In the nineteenth century the maids often lived in attics, often accessed only by walking past the housekeeper’s bedroom, while the men occupied basement rooms or rooms over the other offices.136

  Up until the 1840s, menservants often slept in dormitory accommodation, sometimes called the ‘barracks’. Later on, senior menservants usually had a single room each, whilst their juniors shared. Housemaids and kitchenmaids would also be expected to share, in twos or fours, while the housekeeper, cook and lady’s maid would expect a room of their own, as would the head housemaid and head kitchenmaid.137

  Some of the best-preserved service quarters laid out in the last half of the century can be found at Lanhydrock in Cornwall. After a fire, it was rebuilt for Lord Robartes by Richard Coad, who had worked on an earlier remodelling of the house. The attention given to the service areas and accommodation reflects the preoccupations discussed in Kerr’s book, adapted to the needs of an older house.

  The plans illustrate perfectly the multiplicity of service rooms that exemplified the High Victorian country house. In the centre of the south range on the ground floor were the butler’s sitting room, bedroom and pantry with a strong room, which had a safe for the plate (silver) and the pantry boy by the door for security. The housekeeper’s quarters were near by, on the other side of the pantry court, with the maids’ sitting room adjoining. As usual, the still room was beside the housekeeper’s room and the substantial servants’ hall completed the courtyard.138

  Beyond the servants’ hall, to the west, were the lamp room and gun room, wine and beer cellars. The huge kitchen ‘was built like a college hall with great wooden roof trusses supporting a high roof over.139 It lay close, but not adjacent, to the dining room. A series of associated rooms were close at hand, with a large scullery to one side, plus a bakehouse, dry larder, fish larder, meat larder, dairy scullery and dairy, which had its own external access. Between the kitchen and the dining hall were a servery and a china closet. The male and female servants’ bedrooms were approached via different staircases. The nursery accommodation for the Robarteses’ large family was arranged above the servants’ hall, still room and housekeeper’s rooms.140

  These areas survived remarkably unaltered and are much cherished. Today they are presented convincingly by the National Trust, which was given the house by the 7th Lord Clifden, who continued to live there until 1966. He would little have imagined the interest that the service quarters would ignite in modern visitors.

  Not all nineteenth-century architects revelled in the excessive elaboration of service quarters. In 1880, the architect J.J. Stevenson wrote in House Architecture of the need to simplify the intricacies that had become the norm: ‘Keeping pace with our more complicated ways of living, we have not only increased the number of rooms, in ordinary houses, but have assigned to each a special use. Instead of the hall and single chamber of the middle ages, with which even kings were content, every ordinary house must have a number of separate bedrooms, at least three public rooms, and a complicated arrangement of servants’ offices.’ Stevenson sensibly went on to point out how this complexity itself demanded extra labour: ‘All these places, with the interminable passages connecting them, have to be kept in order; and, if they increase the facility of doing the work, they increase the labour of the house, and necessitate a greater number of servants.’141

  As the century drew to a close, there was a growing awareness of the social disparities between master and servant as a matter of political principle. In some households, more thought was given to the continuing welfare and education of servants, although, bizarre as it may seem, a serious concern of this kind could rebound on the reputation of the employer, and not always in a positive way.

  But you cannot always please everyone and giving servants too comfortable quarters alarmed some social observers. The diarist Augustus Hare famously always used the word ‘luxurious’ to describe the houses of the newly rich in a tone of disapproval, and could hardly credit the comfort of the servants at Worth Park, in Sussex, the home of the Montefiore family: ‘I went to Worth, the ultra-luxurious house of the Montefiores, where the servants have their own billiard tables, ballroom, theatre and pianofortes, and are arrogant and presumptious in proportion.’142

  And not only comfortable rooms were criticised, general benevolence could be a problem, too. In the last years of the century, the Countess of Aberdeen was somewhat taken aback to find herself notorious for her supposedly radical views; indeed, such was the credibility given to the idea that she used to dine once a week with her servants, while Lord Aberdeen was serving as Governor, that Queen Victoria asked Lord Rosebery to look into it: ‘we gave our good friend Lord Rosebery the necessary information as to the strictly orthodox character of our household arrangements.’143 The same rumour reached Edward VII shortly after he ascended to the throne: ‘[it was] only very recently that an intimate friend of ours, who was staying at an Alpine resort, was solemnly told by another guest at the hotel when visitors came to Viceregal lodge [that] they were liable to be taken to dinner [i.e. on the arm of] by the butler or the housekeeper.’144

  In their affectionate, co-written memoir, ‘We Twa’: Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen (Vol. II, 1925), Lady Aberdeen mentioned a newspaper article, warning the people of Canada that

  they would have to put up with a lady with a bee in her bonnet with regard to the servant question, one who would never allow her servants to wear caps, and who was in the habit of playing hide-and-seek and other such games with the housemaids and footmen, at all sorts of odd hours of the day. Moreover, it was stated as a fact that Lord Aberdeen and I dined habitually in the servants’ hall on certain days of the week.145

  The real origin of these stories was that Lady Aberdeen had founded ‘The Onward and Upward Association’ for the benefit of farm servant girls working on Lord Aberdeen’s estates, as well as a Household Club for their immediate staff. The first association was intended to give the girls ‘an occupation and recreation outside their daily work, and assistance with keeping up their education’. There were also social occasions intended to encourage a common purpose between girls and their mistresses.

  The Household Club was ‘really the outcome of an uneasy feeling on our part that whilst sharing in various philanthropic movements . . . we were doing nothing in the same direction for the members of our own household . . . nothing to bring all into human relations with each other and ourselves, beyond our daily gathering in the Haddo House Chapel for family worship day by day, and on Sunday evenings’ – daily prayers were commonplace in country
houses throughout the nineteenth century.146 The committee, formed in 1889, was elected annually from the heads of department, both indoor and outdoor. ‘Before a fortnight had passed we had a singing class of twenty members . . . and a carving class of twelve members, led by our governess; a drawing class of thirteen members, led by our butler, who attained no mean proficiency as an artist; a sewing class, led by our nurse’ and so on. There were social evenings with entertainment provided ‘by home talent’.147

  Lady Aberdeen wrote: ‘there is no doubt but that the classes and social gatherings drew all the household very closely together’, noting with pleasure that a ‘branch of our club was formed, with our butler as secretary’, when Lord and Lady Aberdeen were in Government House in Ottawa. She felt that she depended on her servants for everything they did in terms of hospitality and entertainment and that the Household Club introduced ‘the element of deep, mutual regard and understanding and sympathy for one another’s lives, and a basis on which to build a common fellowship for all true and noble purposes, which should surely be the aim and desire of every thoughtful householder’.148

  Lord Aberdeen even included a letter from J.M. Barrie, refuting the widely circulated rumour that the Aberdeens’ relationship with their servants had inspired his 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, about an aristocratic family who are shipwrecked with their butler. It is Crichton’s physical dexterity, intelligence and ingenuity that save them and which lead to his becoming effectively their chief. When they are all eventually rescued, he returns without batting an eye to his former subservient role.

  It was rather the servants’ skills and intelligence, observed by Barrie in the great houses of the aristocracy, that had prompted his teasing allegory, rather than the socially minded projects of a well-meaning countess. Even then, however, the world was already shifting. The glory days of the Edwardian country house, the subject of the next chapter, marked a definitive turning point. The structured world of the country-house servant that had seemed, as H.G. Wells suggested in his autobiography, such an assured and confident feature of British achievement and of British life would change out of all recognition in the twentieth century, even if it did not quite disappear altogether.149

  7

  In Retreat from a Golden Age

  The first half of the Twentieth Century

  WE HAVE NOW traced the story of the country-house servant from the 1300s to the beginning of the twentieth century, a time that is only just out of reach of living memory and is often looked on as the Indian summer of the country-house world. While the great rural households of the time might have seemed foreign to the sixteenth-century servant, used to a more public form of service, they would have been recognisable in daily routine to an eighteenth-century time traveller. In 1900, most major landed estates continued to support large regiments of staff but their days were numbered.

  As so often in history, change came in waves. After the great earthquake of the First World War, nothing was ever quite the same. Although many houses continued to employ staff in the same numbers as before (nationally more than 1.4 million people were still employed in domestic service1), gradually these numbers were eroded, with new shocks following taxation, inflation and the effects of the Great Depression of the 1920s. After the massive upheaval of the Second World War, the landscape was unimaginably different, as will be shown in the final chapter.

  To remain for the moment in the early twentieth century, among these shocks were changing social attitudes and expectations. After the 1870s there was more widespread state education and more widespread literacy. People had access to the popular press, and then to radio and cinema. Those who had had little choice in their professions were presented with immeasurably wider horizons than the previous generation, and young girls became more reluctant to go into service, when they could work in shops, factories and offices.2

  The deference of traditional service was possibly becoming more difficult to bear in an era of febrile political activity, as the country moved slowly towards universal suffrage. The two significant dates are 1918 and 1928; before the first, no male or female domestic servant, however responsible, had the vote; after 1918, the only women who could vote had to be over thirty; it was not until 1928 that all female servants were enfranchised. Various attempts to set up a trades union for domestic service were unsuccessful, compared to those of industrial labour movements. Until the passage of the National Insurance Act in 1911, there was actually no legislation that legally protected the servant in sickness or old age.3

  The constant refinement of technology during the nineteenth century meant that light and heat no longer needed so much manual labour. Even the carrying of messages by trusted hands was made obsolete by the successive invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and the telephone in the 1870s. Most significantly perhaps, increased taxation had an immense impact on the economy of the country house. Large staffs began to shrink in the 1930s – some houses dispensing entirely with senior menservants and opting instead for parlourmaids who were paid less. After the seismic shifts of the Second World War, few establishments could return to the complex and stratified staff hierarchies that until then had been so much a part of the cultural prestige and demography of the British country house.

  But up until that point, and especially between 1900 and 1914, most of the great country houses of the early twentieth century remained lavishly staffed and complex organisations. The principal jobs were much the same as in the previous century, although with subtle variations reflecting new technologies, such as technicians for private electricity generators, and chauffeurs for cars. (Some services such as laundry were also beginning to be put out to private companies.) However, in the early 1900s the demarcations, refined over a century or more, were drawn more carefully yet than in the preceding hundred years.

  This peak of specialisation was underlined by the slow process of training country-house domestic servants from their youth, with upper servants coaching the younger ones in the strict disciplines of their duties, giving them the necessary experience to move on eventually to the more responsible roles of steward, butler, valet, housekeeper, lady’s maid and so on. As Ernest King recalled when he started as a hall boy early in the century: ‘I suppose I first learnt to be a servant by being a servant to the servants: the table in the servants’ hall to lay, the staff cutlery to clean and staff meals to put on the table.’4

  That these complete and seemingly self-contained communities still existed is clear from so many personal histories, one of the most vivid of the Edwardian period being Frederick Gorst’s memoir of life as a footman to the Duke of Portland. The duke’s large estate in Nottinghamshire, as well as his other coal mining interests, brought him in ‘many millions a year’. He also had a court appointment, as he was Master of the Horse to King Edward VII. At that time, ‘the estate of Welbeck Abbey was more like a principality than anything else . . . It was, in a sense, like working for the reigning prince of a small state within a kingdom.’5

  He was one of the four ‘Royal footmen’ who worked at Welbeck Abbey, unless they were required for ceremonial duties in the Royal Household in London. Mr Gorst recalled arriving at the former along a private tunnel, ‘electrically lighted and wide enough to accommodate a horse and carriage or one motor car’. He was shown to the steward’s office by a pageboy who also carried his luggage to his room on the top floor of the abbey, which he would share with another footman.

  Although they sound like some of the most comfortable servants’ rooms of the day, they were nevertheless shared, a custom that continued until the interwar period: ‘I was delighted to see we had an open fireplace, which would be cosy in the winter. The rooms were kept spotlessly clean by a housemaid assigned to the footman’s quarters,’ a comment that reminds us that in a great household a number of servants were still employed essentially to look after other servants. ‘There was a large bathroom which we all shared. Because we powdered our hair before the wide mirror and shelves, it was cal
led the Powder Room.’ That evening he explored the house and played in the menservants’ billiards hall, in one of the many underground rooms below the lawn.6

  As well as serving at meals (breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, in rotation, with every fourth day off duty), Mr Gorst had to ‘attend’ the duke: ‘I sat in a comfortable leather chair behind a twelve foot screen which blocked off a corner of the room. I could not see the Duke nor could he see me.’ Despite bells being a part of domestic technology at least since the eighteenth century, ‘his Grace disliked ringing a bell for a footman when he wanted something, so the man on duty always sat ready within earshot to answer his “hello,” which was his way of summoning us.’7

  Poor Mr Gorst found this pretty dull, but a touch of humanity enters the story at this point: ‘I must say I thought this was a boring assignment, but suddenly the Duchess appeared from behind the screen and handed me several newspapers and magazines. “Gorst,” she said, “move a lamp over to the chair and read if you like. There is no reason not be at ease. However, be sure not to fall asleep in case his Grace needs you.”’ The duchess was clearly considerate to her footmen, not least because at Welbeck they were rather well fed and she wanted them to keep in trim. To this end, as well as giving them each a bicycle and a bag of golf clubs, she decided that all four had to be instructed in ‘callisthenetics in the gymnasium at the specified hours and she engaged a Japanese ju-jitsu expert to train us.’8