Some relationships were more strained: ‘The first nanny I can remember was a horror. She was ugly and a bully and was eventually dispatched, taking with her a great deal of our gloom. She beat us with a hairbrush, and threatened to put sticking plaster on our mouths if we committed the unspeakable crime of Answering Back. And burnt our hands on the tea pot.’
Typically for memoirs of an interwar, country-house life, ‘Nanny was permanently at war with the cook and would send insulting messages inside the vegetable dishes: “The children cannot be expected to eat this.”’117
Mrs Richard Cavendish, looking back on her childhood at Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire, recollected that her parents would never be there during the week: ‘Nanny Abbott took charge of us and during the week we did exactly what Nanny said. We had walks, and then we rode our ponies . . . we messed about and had a few lessons.’ She had warm memories of one family retainer: ‘the butler, Frederick, was the nicest fellow that ever walked. When my parents were away, we were allowed to fish from his pantry window into the moat.’ Not unusually in those days, their governesses ‘never stayed, because we were so nasty to them.’118
In 2008, Sir John (‘Jack’) Leslie, Baronet, explained the make-up of the household of Castle Leslie, County Monaghan, in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time of writing, he lives there still and has recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, although the house is now run in part as a hotel by his niece, Sammy Leslie.
Mr Wells, our last butler, who was English, was here through the war, and for a while afterwards we had Mr Murray, although he was more like a senior footman. The butler in the early part of the century was Mr Adams, with two footmen under him; at that time maids slept in rooms accessible only by passing through the housekeeper’s room. I think most of our junior servants tended to come from the estate or local village. My grandmother lived here until she died in 1944, and [between the 1920s and 1930s] she certainly gave the orders for the meals for the day to our cook, then Annie Simpson.
My father was a bit of a revolutionary and a Roman Catholic convert, more interested in forestry and writing, and I think he just took the servants and the smooth running of the house as a natural part of life.
His father was, in his youth, very influenced by the Castle Leslie forester, Mr Vogan, who, according to his sister, was described by their grandmother as the boys’ ‘real governess’, even though they had two, one French and one German.
My grandmother also had a German personal maid, called Winter. In the kitchen there was a cook, kitchenmaid and scullery-maid, and the housekeeper, Rose Mead, who looked after all the female staff and was level with the butler. There were three housemaids and the junior one looked after the nursery. There was a butler and a footman (sometimes two), the odd man, who looked after the boiler and the fuel, and the coachman-chauffeur. I think there was a pantry boy. The under servants always ate in the servants’ hall, which was under the dining room, and the upper servants in the butler’s room, which was under the drawing room.
I had governesses in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a whole string of them, all from England, and then I had tutors, a Mr Marks, recommended by the headmaster of Downside, and a Mr Ireland. They would eat with us in the dining room, and dress for dinner every evening. He slept in a room near mine and I can remember him calling out, telling me to switch off my light and stop reading in bed.119
The Hon. Mary Birkbeck, daughter of the 2nd Lord Somerleyton, was born in 1926 and grew up at Somerleyton Hall, Norfolk. She has vivid memories of life there in the 1930s. Between 1928 and 1935, the family shared the house with her father’s parents who owing to ill health were unable to cope with managing the estate:
During the intervening seven years we were all together – parents living in the north wing, grandparents in the large rooms behind baize doors and us children in the nurseries on the top floor. The other top floor rooms were bedrooms for the house and kitchenmaids. Male servants, footmen and so on, slept in the lower tower rooms or on the ground floor near the pantries.
Mrs Birkbeck recalls being aware of the early start made by the maids and how they would not be seen in the front of the house after the family had risen.
There were eighteen indoor staff before the war including Nanny, the nurserymaid, and two ladies’ maids who cared personally for my mother and grandmother. Mr Cole the butler lived with his family in the village and came in every day on a bicycle.
We children lived more or less in the nursery, supervised by Nanny and waited on by a series of nurserymaids. The favourite of these was Violet – known affectionately as ‘Oddy’. She later married William Beechner, the head footman, known by us as ‘Willikins’. The latter often accompanied us, plus Nanny, for happy picnics by the lake where he taught us how to swim – on the end of a rope.
There is no criticism of my parents but it is hard in modern times to realise how little we children saw of them – it was simply not the fashion. Our parents probably saw more of us than most landowning families, in that we were routinely dressed up by Nanny and taken down after tea for a ‘children’s hour’ when we played cards and listened to the gramophone. In the summer they used to take us for picnics. There were always wonderful small ponies led by Jack, my father’s ex-soldier groom who taught us to ride.
For Mrs Birkbeck as a child:
The stables and gardens were full of lovely people – always so nice and kind to the children and inclined to take our sides in the event of misbehaviour behind our parents’ backs. My childhood by any standards was privileged, but it had some disadvantages compared to a modern childhood; for instance, because of the class structure it was incredibly lonely. I was not allowed to go to the village school and we seldom saw other children unless they were brought in chauffeur-driven cars ‘to play’ from other equally privileged establishments.
When war was declared in 1939, ‘Everything changed. Everyone fit to do so was called up for some form of service and Somerleyton Hall itself became an advanced Dressing Station.’ Looking back on those pre-war days, Mrs Birkbeck feels that in many ways she was ‘brought up by the servants’ and stresses her personal view of them: ‘they were wonderful people – my grateful memories of their friendship, loyalty and love know no bounds.’120
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the Telegraph, recalled in his recent memoirs the butler who served his mother and his grandmother, James Burton: ‘James embodied job satisfaction long before it was invented . . . Having him as a member of our family brought us many advantages over and above the advantages of what he did as a butler so well. If we broadened his horizons, he certainly broadened ours.’121
Sir Peregrine also recalled how James, a First World War veteran of the trenches, became as butler: ‘an expert on the care and maintenance of beautiful furniture, pictures silver, objets d’art as well as wines – notably champagnes.’ He was also a walking encyclopaedia on ‘the minutiae of good manners’, famously out-staring Winston Churchill who had tried to grab a bottle of champagne out of his hands at the dinner table.’122
These affectionate accounts of what seems now a different world remind us that such households persisted solidly up to the eve of the Second World War. These communities, and those who grew up and trained in them, are alive in the memories of thousands of people who were in service in the second half of the century, during which country-house staffs have metamorphosed into something rich and new.
8
Staying On: A Changing World
The later Twentieth Century
THE SECOND WORLD WAR was clearly a major watershed in the style, character and condition of the servant body employed in country houses. Nothing would ever be the same. Although some owners of large establishments reassembled their sometimes extensive staffs immediately after the war, many more found it simply too difficult. The diaries of James Lees-Milne attest to the struggles of aristocratic ladies suddenly trying to run such houses without enough help.1
This scarcity of personnel
had a huge impact on the practicality, even desirability, of maintaining a large historic house. Many were given up, either taken into care by the National Trust, leased, or sold for institutional uses, such as schools or hotels. A critical factor was the inability to recruit new servants, not merely to look after the landowner’s family personally, but also to maintain the contents and fabric of the house. The loss of the ‘odd man’ who had once swept the gutters and cleared the drains was in many ways as significant as the loss of a steward or a butler.2
Those estate owners who had survived the trials of the immediate post-war years, keeping together their houses and collections in the teeth of every adverse circumstance, continued to call on the services of certain key individuals, supplemented by daily cleaners. On the bigger estates they could often draw on support from the estate works department for some of the essential care and maintenance that in earlier times had fallen to the indoor staff.
Indeed, in certain country houses those who had trained up in service returned to their pre-war employment and worked on into retirement in the 1960s and 1970s. For some observers, this is when the final watershed came: when the whole generation trained before the war finally retired.3 The remarkable story of Harvey Lane, the butler of Leigh Manor in Shropshire, is symbolic of this. He trained as a house-boy and then as a footman to William Bridgeman, later 1st Viscount Bridgeman, becoming butler in 1920 and remaining with the family until his death in 1989. He served both the 2nd Viscount Bridgeman and his grandson and heir, David Stacey, many years his junior.4
When demobbed from the armed forces, Mr Lane returned to his former post as butler in 1945, but with little additional help. Mr Stacey observed with wry amusement the silent tussle between man and master:
at every opportunity [Harvey] would bring out the silver and the white linen tablecloth and make sure that the dining room was used in the style which he expected from a lord. My grandfather, a man of great humility and no pretension at all, hated this kind of behaviour – he would have been much happier eating in the kitchen – but Harvey would always get his way and would appear in a white jacket and insist on serving at the table.
Mr Lane continued to work, despite being confined to a wheelchair, right up until the 1980s, becoming a close friend to his employer, who was young enough to be his grandson.5
The size of post-war staffs generally depended on the age and income of the employer. The older generations often tried to stick to the way of life they had been brought up to, but were usually forced to reduce staff numbers over the decades in the face of higher taxes, inflation, and a wholly modern desire for increased privacy.6 By the 1970s, the advantages of new technologies, which had promised so much in the interwar years whilst not actually delivering very much, had begun to make a noticeable difference. This was especially true of central heating and modern vacuum cleaners. By the 1980s and 1990s, the younger generation of country-house owners were accustomed to doing much more of their own day-to-day cooking.
Where staff were still employed, they were also expected to be adaptable and flexible. This meant that while some traditional titles survived, individuals often took on much wider duties than had ever been demanded of them before. Mr Lane at Leigh Manor found himself doing the job of butler, footman, houseboy and gardener all rolled into one. As David Stacey points out, ‘but for the fact he couldn’t drive he would have become the chauffeur as well.’7
By the end of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, there is such diversity in domestic service and it has been so little researched that it is impossible to discuss entirely representative patterns of staffing. Equally, although the word servant is no longer used, most country-house owners continue to employ some staff to make living in their houses feasible. Very often, without staff it is impossible to make opening their houses and gardens to the public viable and profitable. A by-product of this has been an increase in the colleagueship and camaraderie among staff that had so declined in country houses in the immediate post-war years.8
Certain themes seem to be representative, so this chapter will examine a sequence of individual stories, based on interviews, to illustrate some of those key themes; such as the continuance of practical support, the link between members of staff employed on a large estate, the prevalence of long service, long-standing associations with the estate, and personal loyalty. Many domestic and estate staff on the point of retirement today began working in the late 1950s and 1960s, often having just left school at the age of fifteen. They can remember working alongside senior staff who had been trained in the 1920s and 1930s, in a world more intimately connected with the late Victorian and Edwardian apogee than might seem apparent.
First, it is important to understand the dramatic impact of the Second World War. Between 1939 and 1945 most major country houses were turned over to wartime uses, whether for military occupation, to provide a home to evacuated schoolchildren, or to house government departments relocated far from the hazards of the Blitz. As for their staff, young men in domestic service often went into the armed forces while women either joined the auxiliaries, or helped the war effort by working in munitions factories, much as they had in the First World War.9
At the end of the war things were never going to ‘return to normal’ (not least because change had first begun in the 1920s). The economic and physical strains of worldwide conflict were followed by the Labour landslide victory of the 1945 election, leading to a massive increase in taxation, especially death duties. All of this seemed to herald a new age in which the communities of the old country-house world could hardly expect to return to pre-war practices.
Many country houses simply did not revert to private domestic occupation. A sad number of important historic buildings were abandoned, sold off and ultimately demolished. These losses to our culture were catalogued by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1973 exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House, which showed how the trend, which had begun in the 1920s and 1930s, only intensified with the economic and political situation after the war.10
In her illuminating account of a life of service, first as maid, then as cook, in town houses in Hove and in London, titled Below Stairs (1970), Margaret Powell described returning to domestic work during the Second World War, having left it some years earlier: ‘Large houses that were once opulently furnished and had had a large staff were now reduced to no staff at all; just someone coming in for a few hours daily. Much of their lovely stuff had gone; they had had to sell it to pay their income tax.’ She worked mostly for elderly ladies, who ‘accepted their change in status with fortitude’. One told her wistfully, as she polished a silver tray, of the silver service that had once stood on it: ‘when the butler carried it into the drawing room, it used to look a picture of safety and security. We never thought our way of life would change.’11
When the collapse of the country-house world was recognised in the immediate post-war era, leading civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers was commissioned by the government to write a report, eventually published in 1950, on these threats to the national heritage as they occurred.
In past times, the great houses of this country and their grounds were maintained by their owners mainly from the rent of their estates. The estate and mansion formed a single economic whole; the former provided not only income and produce but also servants to run the house and craftsmen for the upkeep of its fabric. Now owing to economic and social changes, we are faced with a disaster comparable only to that which the country suffered with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century.12
Whilst he could see that taxation, meaning estate duty and increased income tax, was primarily responsible for this ‘impending catastrophe’, Gowers thought that problems in recruiting staff could prove almost as decisive:
A secondary factor is the growing difficulty of getting, and the expense of paying, the necessary staff, both indoor and outdoor. In the heyday of these houses wages were low and service at the big house, around which t
he whole social life of the neighbourhood revolved, was much sought after. Those conditions have disappeared. There is not now the labour available for domestic service; there is not the desire to do it; and there is not the money to pay for it.13
For those who did return to service, there were both disadvantages and advantages. The disadvantages were almost always that the senior posts survived but without the support of the traditional young trainees, learning their skills by serving the servants, and essentially doing the heavier and messier work. In an interview given in 1971, Mrs Davidson, cook at Crathorne Hall, Yorkshire, remembered the impact of the Second World War on the life of the house: ‘the men had to go to war, then we had parlour maids . . . After the war there weren’t nearly so many servants. It was the same as it is now, me and Nanny and Mr Jeffreys [the butler], a housemaid, a kitchenmaid and someone else to help.’ The family shut down a part of the house and created a new kitchen nearer the dining room. ‘We worked harder after the war; you just had to fill in all sorts.’14
The advantages were often the relaxation of the rigid class distinctions that had persisted up until the Second World War. Those skilled servants who returned to service were increasingly highly valued and, despite their extended workloads, were also likely to be treated with greater consideration and given greater independence than they had experienced before the war. Mrs Davidson approved of the removal of social barriers: ‘the young people coming now [as guests], compared with those earlier in the century, are nicer. We were servants, I mean we looked to them [the earlier generation] as if they were superhuman beings, and they weren’t . . . The changes that have taken place are for the better, in the old days you worked hard for people and you never saw them.’ Her employer’s grandson, Lord Crathorne, remembers with gratitude the contribution made by the whole household in Mrs Davidson’s day to his family’s life: ‘They took tremendous pride in their work. I recall Mrs Davidson writing a letter about how hard the work was, and then on the next page she said that they were the “happiest days of my life”.’15
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