Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Gardeners and other outdoor servants were paid in cash wages and given cottage accommodation; they were not expected to live in the house nor to eat in it. Many head gardeners, such as the two examples above, were much respected and valued by their employers; the gardens of a country house contributed to its setting and were still intended to impress visitors. Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, recorded how her own love of gardening was engendered by her head gardener, Mr Barnes, the ‘marvellous and creative’ being who managed thirty-five gardeners, with eighteen in the glasshouses, and ‘fulfilled my extravagant plans’. She was honest enough to add: ‘Of course, I never actually did anything myself; I never dug a hole with a trowel or put a bulb in or anything like that.’35

  If gardens added to the prestige of a country house in the early years of the twentieth century, so too did the great shooting parties of the period. These legendary social events, which usually took place over a matter of weeks rather than weekends, would need intricate and careful planning. The steward, housekeeper, cook and the entire indoor staff were involved in preparing ahead for a full house, as well as when the whole event was in full sail.

  The gamekeepers – rearing birds and protecting them from depredations by poachers or vermin – would have to ensure that numbers would be sufficient, and at the turn of the century the bags could be in the thousands. One famous gamekeeper, Tommy Taylor, keeper at Elveden for a half a century, confirms in his memoir that by 1914 some 20,000 pheasants were bred annually for the sport, cared for by complex system of underkeepers.36

  As well as the rearing of game birds, the shoots themselves would require an almost military-style management of underkeepers, loaders, cartridge boys and beaters, who by walking up from a given point would drive the birds towards the guns. This system provided a great deal of sport to the crack shots of the early twentieth century, while in more recent years wild-bird shooting, using dogs rather than beaters, is increasingly favoured.

  The great Edwardian shooting parties – whether at shooting lodges in Scotland, or on the great shooting estates such as Blenheim, Chatsworth and Elveden Hall in Suffolk (bought in the 1890s by the Earl of Iveagh), not to mention Sandringham – define our image of country-house life. Yet they became increasingly elaborate only in the later nineteenth century, especially after the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, became an enthusiast. Lord de Grey, who was present at one great Edwardian shooting party, contrasted its excesses unfavourably with the past: ‘When I am sitting in a tent taking part in a lengthy luncheon of many courses, served by a host of retainers, my memory takes me back to a time many years ago when we worked harder for our sport, and when seated under a hedge, our midday meal consisted of a sandwich . . . I am inclined to think those were better and worthier days.’37

  Shooting parties on a lavish scale declined with the First World War, as did the taste for the very large ‘bags’, but many great estates kept up shoots of considerable style. Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, recalled her first shoot in the 1920s at the home of her future husband at Eaton Hall, Cheshire: ‘The clothes were so interesting. All the keepers were dressed in green velvet tailcoats and black top hats trimmed with gold braid, so that you could spot a keeper whenever you wanted to . . . The beaters came through the wood just like a Breughel picture, and they wore white smocks . . . and large red felt hats with wide brims.’ This was for safety as much as for spectacle, as it also meant that the head keeper could readily command their movements.38

  Lady Phyllis Macrae, daughter of the 4th Marquess of Bristol, had similar memories of interwar shooting parties, with guns coming to stay with their wives, valets and lady’s maids, ‘and very often a chauffeur and a loader, and they all expected to be put up. The loader was quite often the gentlemen’s gentleman [valet] – he was perhaps the first footman who had been taught to load. A few of them did teach the chauffeurs to load.’39

  Behind the scenes of these social events with all their luxury and finery were the servants of the house, inhabitants of a partly invisible world behind the green baize door, explored in the last chapter. Their accommodation in the newer country houses of the early twentieth century was given particular attention by Herman Muthesius, German cultural attaché, whose admiring account was published in 1904–5. Deeply impressed by English country-house life, he remarked that its ‘most genuine and decisively valuable feature’ was ‘its absolute practicality’ over ‘the superficially decorative side’. It seemed to him that centuries of domestic life in such establishments had refined many elements into their best and most practical version, although he recognised that they were still predicated on a large servant body.

  Amusingly, it was the very multiplicity of rooms with dedicated purposes (which only fifty years later would seem so completely superfluous when there were not the working hands to fill them) that for him represented the ‘high level of culture’ in the English country house. He wrote: ‘the continental observer may find that the residential quarters are not so very different from what he is used to, but the domestic quarters come as a total surprise.’40

  According to Muthesius, everything took place in a continental kitchen, from cooking to cleaning – including the servants’ social life. He contrasted this with the English country house, in which ‘the management of the household is broken down into a dozen different operations, for each of which a room is provided’. These arrangements, in his view, had reached an ‘exemplary level’, being placed in recently built country houses in side courts, rather than in basements. This solved three problems: service was made easier; there were no stairs to climb; and it reduced the transmission of cooking smells. It also made the living conditions of servants much healthier.41

  He noted the provision of the various spaces that had been a feature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century house: a large kitchen, a scullery,

  a second kitchen known as a still-room, larders for dry stores, meat, game, milk and butter, store-rooms for wood, coal for the house and for the kitchen, cleaning rooms and store rooms for lamps, boots (Motcombe [Dorset] even has one [a brushing room] for riding breeches), a pantry and bedroom for the butler, with adjoining plate room, a housekeeper’s room with adjacent laundry room and a communal dining room for servants.42

  Muthesius examined every aspect of country-house design in his book, noting especially the provision of a servants’ hall, which by the early twentieth century had become more comfortable than in the previous one:

  besides the domestic room already mentioned, all larger and even medium sized houses in England have a servants’ dining-room known as the servants’ hall. It is a large, long room; it must be as near to the kitchen as possible but at the same time the butler and the housekeeper must be able to keep an eye on it from their rooms. It is not only used as a dining-room but also as a communal sitting-room for the lower servants during their free time.43

  Its position seemed to him to be dictated by protocol and practicality:

  It is never situated that it can overlook the front door to the house, to prevent visitors feeling that the servants’ eyes are upon them as they arrive. It must however be in closest proximity to the tradesmen’s entrance, since it also serves as a waiting-room and visitor’s room for all visitors of the rank of the lower servants (the housekeeper’s or steward’s rooms fulfil the same function for the upper servants).44

  Staff bedrooms continued to be strictly segregated by gender, senior servants having dedicated bedrooms and junior servants sharing dormitories. The introduction of electricity at the end of the nineteenth century might well have ushered in a more radical approach to country-house technology – indeed, it had been installed in some country houses since the late 1880s and 1890s. However, the innate conservatism of the landowning class, and the availability of cheap labour, meant that, as Clive Aslet observed in The Last Country Houses, there was little motive for change: ‘only when it became apparent that the supply of willing labour could not be increased did owners begin to look seri
ously into the alternative possibilities’ of the labour-saving new technology.45

  Novelties such as centralised vacuuming systems appeared in new houses built in the early years of the twentieth century, as well as other useful and functional inventions, such as the internal telephone system at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, with handsome handsets for the aristocracy and less glamorous earpieces in the servants’ quarters.46 The butler’s pantry at Castle Drogo in Devon, a picturesque castle designed by Lutyens for Julius Drewe, and completed only in the 1920s, boasts a memorable internal telephone exchange as part of an unusually handsome sequence of service rooms.47 In older houses, house telephones seem to have been popular, using the old wiring tubes of the bell system, but the public telephone network soon had an even greater impact on country-house life, allowing all sorts of communication that had in the past required the services of a trusted domestic.48 Although at first it only added to the duties and responsibilities of the principal menservants expected to answer the telephone and take messages.

  In contrast, the new technology might itself quickly be made obsolete. In 1913, new motor-driven laundries were installed at houses such as Sledmere in Yorkshire and Carberry Tower in Scotland, but during the interwar period, as attempts were made to reduce domestic expenditure, many country-house laundries were closed and laundry sent out to an independent contractor.49

  Modernisation took place at different rates in different houses, so assumptions cannot be made that innovations in new-built country houses in this period would typically be found in older ones. The conservatism of country-house owners made many slow to modernise their historic houses, certainly before the First World War.

  This is illustrated in Lady Diana Cooper’s memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1958), recording vivid childhood memories of Belvoir Castle in Rutland, where her grandfather, the 7th Duke of Rutland, led an almost fendal life, dying in 1906. Born in 1892, she remembered the many additional hands thronging the long corridors of the house, such as the gong man, ‘an old retainer, one of those numberless ranks of domestic servants which have completely disappeared and today seem fabulous. He was admittedly very old. He wore a white beard to his waist.’50 Even more evocative were the water men who, before Belvoir was replumbed at the beginning of the twentieth century, still carried water by hand around the house:

  The Water-men are difficult to believe in today . . . They were the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than the men of the family, who were remarkable for their height. They had stubby beards and a general Bill Sykes appearance. They wore brown clothes, no collars and thick green baize aprons from chin to knee and on their shoulders they carried a wooden yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water.51

  The point is even more clearly illustrated at Longleat, where the young Gordon Grimmett was responsible for refilling hundreds of oil lamps:

  by 1915 electricity was no new invention, and some big houses by that time were either on the mains or if too remote, had their own generators. Others had compromised by using gas.

  Not so the Marquis of Bath, who felt that to install either would disfigure the house. The rooms had been designed for oil lamps or candle light, and if he were to change to electricity not only might it mutilate the ceilings and walls but the character of the rooms would change. He had the same feelings about central heating. Many of the gentry agreed over this, mainly I think because it was considered unhealthy, if not downright effete.52

  Henry Bennett, a footman at Chatsworth in Derbyshire in the late 1920s and early 1930s, came up against similar attitudes:

  when we moved to Bolton Abbey [in Yorkshire] or Hardwick [in Derbyshire] there was no electric light; oil lamps and candles were the order. A man was kept to see that the lamps contained oil, wicks trimmed and lamp glasses cleaned. It was the footman’s duty to put the lamps around the house. His Grace invariably liked candles, so quite a number of lighted candles adorned his study. When the ladies retired at night, the footmen had to extinguish the lamps and place electric torches, silver candlesticks and matches outside the Drawing-Room for guests to pick up and light themselves to their room.53

  Lady Fingall’s recollections of the plumbing and lighting at her husband’s family home, Killeen in Ireland, were scarcely any different: ‘all the bedrooms were lit by candlelight. Nothing, of course, could be more becoming than that lamplight and candlelight. Fourteen candles were an average to light a large bedroom . . . Then every drop of bath water was carried, and we all had our baths in front of the fire.’ They had no bathroom at Killeen until after The First World War.54

  As these testimonies suggest, large household staffs, close in character to those of the pre-First World War household, generally continued into the 1920s and 1930s. However, there can be no doubt that the demands of wartime dramatically changed the attitude of the generation who might normally have been expected to go into service, not least because so many of the younger servants themselves enlisted. Nationally, four hundred thousand domestic servants left their work, whether for war service in the army for the men, or work in the munitions factories for the women.55

  Calls for volunteers were answered by all classes, and employers of menservants found themselves the target of additional appeals. At the beginning of the war, landowners were encouraged, in a leader in The Times dated 12 August 1914, to release any staff they could do without: ‘There are large numbers of footmen, valets, butlers, gardeners, grooms, and gamekeepers, whose services are more or less superfluous and can either be dispensed with or replaced by women without seriously hurting or incommoding anyone.’56

  In January 1915, Country Life magazine ran a series of questions, beginning: ‘Have you a Butler, Groom, Chauffeur, Gardener, or Gamekeeper serving you who, at this moment should be serving your King and Country?’ followed by ‘Have you a man preserving your Game who should be helping to preserve your Country?’ The Earl of Ancaster guaranteed an income to the wives and families of volunteers, giving £5 to every man who enlisted.57 John Whittle, a hall boy at Sudeley in Gloucestershire, recalled meeting one servant in 1930 whose employer had summoned him in 1914 ‘and suggested that he “do his duty”. He said that he [would] be joining today, if possible. He joined the Guards and later, in the front line used to pray that he would be injured. In due course he was, and survived to be a chauffeur.’58

  Among the thousands of men from all walks of life who died in the trenches and on the battlefields were landowners and their heirs, adding to the insecurity of the country-house way of life, already beset by economic uncertainty, inflation, and rising taxation. Understandably, many men who had been in domestic service before the war did not choose to return to it. New and unfamiliar experiences began to broaden society’s understanding of servants’ lives. Violet Firth, a middle-class woman who had undertaken a gardener’s work, was shocked by the treatment of servants, having become one herself: ‘It offends the innate self-respect of a man or woman to be treated as an automaton.’59

  The real crisis in the servant-supported country-house way of life was an economic one. This was quite simply the result of a reduced return from land rentals at the same time as an increase in taxation and a rise in wage levels. A vivid illustration of this can be found in the diaries of Colonel James Stevenson of Braidwood in Lanarkshire. In 1915, on 6 November, he wrote: ‘The lower orders have a great deal of money – more than they ever they had before. The landowners are those who suffer as their rents remain the same – taxes enormously increased & very much higher wages have to be paid to servants on account of competition of public bodies, county councils, parish councils &c who are most extravagant in the wages they give – not having to pay them themselves’.60

  The economic equation for a landowner could be compared in his mind, a wage bill for one employee equating to the value of one farm rental. In 1917, on 2 June, he is beside himself as an employee had asked for a pay increase from 25 shillings to 34 a week: ‘but as I can’t lay my hand on another man I had
to give it . . . Lapsley’s wage comes to within a few pounds of the rent at Bushilhead farm [a farm on his estate he rented out]. The lower orders are having the time of their lives just now.’61

  In 1924 he made a furious entry in his diary on 6 March, on the subject of the departure of a cook; ‘the woman in the kitchen has made up her mind to leave tomorrow at only a week’s notice – quite illegal but I will let her go. The lower orders are beginning to think that they are not bound by any law. I don’t much regret her, as she is stupid, fat & no great cook – but it is difficult to put anyone in her place at a moment’s notice.’62

  Some shrewd individuals were quick to recognise the impact the war would have on the whole world of service. In 1920, the architect Randal Phillips observed in The Servantless House: ‘girls who formerly accepted the shackles of what was little better than domestic drudgery came into a new liberty. They got good wages for what they did and they got far more time of their own than they ever had before in domestic service.’63 On the other hand, some of the households that had been run by women during the war found they could dispense with the services of men. It was in this period that the parlourmaid began to feature on the staffs of smaller country establishments and London houses, although less so in the great country houses.64