Some domestic servants had remained in service throughout the war and were perhaps in a unique position to consider its impact on their world. When the Second World War broke out, Rosina Harrison, Lady Astor’s lady’s maid, was still a senior figure, if in a much reduced but busy crew: ‘some of the men were called up, others enlisted, and some women went into the Services or industry.’ More time was spent in Plymouth, for which Lady Astor was MP, whilst Lord Astor opened a hospital in the gardens of Cliveden, with a wing given over to nurses and doctors.16
During the war, the house was still managed well by the steward, housekeeper and a skeleton staff, most of them dailies, but Rosina felt that ‘the old order had changed’ before her eyes. It seemed to her a ‘period of stagnation for town and country houses. It was also a time of enlightenment, too, for in many places where for years scant attention had been paid to kitchens and the servants’ quarters below stairs, mistresses were now paying the penalty.’ Before the war they had hardly visited such rooms, but now, ‘They were having to work down there themselves and, suddenly, with the bombing, the basement rooms became the most important in the house – and the most lived in. Yet many of them were damp, dark, poorly heated and their cooking and cleaning facilities were old fashioned.’17
There were other, fundamental changes: ‘no longer did the distinction of servant and master apply. We were family. We’d soldiered together, looked death in the face and suffered the loss of many friends. We’d been shown qualities which no other circumstances would have demonstrated to us, and had shared emotions that would otherwise have remained hidden.’18
The appalled discovery by Miss Harrison’s mistress of how inadequate and uncomfortable kitchens could be was echoed in the charming memoir, The Private Life of a Country House, 1912–39 (1980), by Lesley Lewis, recalling her country-house childhood in Essex: ‘A scullery opened out of the kitchen, its two wide shallow sinks under the window having wooden plate racks on one side. It was not until I washed up here myself, in the 1939 war, that I realised how inconvenient the equipment was. Possibly the sinks had not been too low in the days when most people were shorter, but the width across them to the taps was singularly ill-adapted to any human frame.’19
Some domestic servants found being in the armed forces almost easy by comparison to the discipline and long hours of domestic service. Arthur Inch, the son of a butler and later a butler himself, was first a footman to the Marquess of Londonderry. He served in the RAF during the Second World War, which seemed to him almost a liberation: ‘In fact, the comparatively shorter hours in the forces was a revelation to me. I’d never had so much free time plus all the free passes when going on leave.’20 After the war, he did not return to work in service until the 1950s, after which he became butler to the Kleinworts, remaining with the family for twenty years. One of his co-footmen from Londonderry House, who also went into the RAF, became a civilian pilot after the war rather than re-enter domestic service.21 When he retired, Arthur Inch was adviser both to the National Trust and to the makers of the film Gosford Park.
The plunge in the customary level of household staff must have hit some country-house owners hard. When asked when he thought the fundamental change occurred, Sir John Leslie replied: ‘In most big houses the staffs stayed the same until the 1950s. The Wingfields, Lord and Lady Powerscourt, certainly had footmen in livery at Powerscourt until the early 1950s, and there was a gatekeeper with a top hat and a cockade. Here at Castle Leslie, there were about ten servants in the house before the war, then it fell to five, then one, and finally only people coming in from the village. It happened gradually, and you just acclimatised to the change. However, we probably took them too much for granted.’22
Barbara Cartland, born in 1901, was familiar with the comfort and security represented by the well-staffed country house. A small section on managing staff in her Etiquette Handbook: A Guide to Good Behaviour from the Boudoir to the Boardroom (1962) is testament to how different that world had become: ‘only a few people today are fortunate enough to have living-in servants, who are no longer called servants but “the staff”. . . . It should be obvious that to retain the services and remain in the good graces of these invaluable people the old-fashioned autocratic attitude is as dead as Victorian bustles.’ Above all, she said, ‘it is no longer good manners to keep people “in their place”.’23
Her advice on giving dinner parties in an increasingly servant-less age is interspersed with comments on how to manage ‘Without staff’. At first, she considers the case with staff: ‘For a dinner party of eight or ten I have four courses: Fish or soup/Meat or game/An exciting pudding/Savoury/Dessert/Coffee/Without staff: Three courses will be plenty for your party.’24 Some aspects of her advice, however, have a curious echo of manuals of housekeeping going back to the seventeenth century: ‘Female servants should always receive orders only from the wife; males from the husband. If occasion arises for one or the other to pass on an order then it should be “Mr Brown wants you to . . .” or “Mrs Brown asked me to tell you that . . .” These days it is rarely possible to say “your master” or “your mistress”.’25
She took the view that some rules still persisted when addressing staff, especially if you were fortunate enough to employ any of these fast-vanishing people: ‘Housekeeper (almost an extinct race) is called Mrs by her employers and the staff whether she is married or not. Cook-Housekeeper is called Mrs by her employers and staff whether she is married or not . . . Butler (more usually a manservant these days) is called by his surname only by his employers and “Mr” by the staff.’26
During the 1950s and 1960s, to supply the gaps left in houses, in both town and country, there was a sharp rise in domestic servants brought in from overseas. Mrs Cartland cautiously advised: ‘Foreign Staff. Most people these days employ one or two foreigners in place of the aforementioned staff. These are usually called by whichever name is the more easily pronounced.’27 In the same period, it became more difficult to recruit native domestic staff. Many who entered domestic service, not only from all over Europe but from places as remote as St Helena and Jamaica, were unlikely to have been trained in the traditional country-house system, yet eager to find employment in a difficult economic climate.28
At Chatsworth, the then duchess was unable to recruit new servants prior to opening the house to the public for the first time in 1948. The present Dowager Duchess observes: ‘I imagine because people had been so badly paid in service before the war.’ Her mother-in-law’s path crossed with that of the Hungarian sisters Ilona and Elizabeth Solymossy, cook and housemaid respectively to Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington, the Devonshires’ widowed daughter-in-law, who had died young earlier that same year. The Devonshires invited them to recruit a team of nine of their compatriots to help prepare and clean the house for opening. As the duchess recalls in her book, they ‘immediately made their presence felt by setting about the rooms methodically and thoroughly, dressed like Tabitha Twitchit in cotton kerchiefs against the dust, while delicious smells of goulash in the kitchen passage reminded one that the Hungarian takeover was on’. In their capable hands, the house was made ready for its public opening in Easter 1949.29
There were similar patterns in other great houses. At Weston Park, Shropshire, in the 1960s, the Earls of Bradford employed domestic servants from St Helena, one man recalling spending much of his youth barefoot and then, as a teenager, on his first day in England learning to tie a white tie. At Longleat in the 1970s, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath were looked after by a couple from Portugal (although in his youth there had been forty-three indoor servants); since the late 1950s, the Bromley-Davenports at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, have been taken care of by an Italian, Gilda. For fifty-one years, Gilda Mion has been their cook and housekeeper, catering for shooting parties every weekend in the season, with her husband, Luciano, working as a painter and decorator to the estate and eventually in the house, too.30
Whilst those born and brought up in houses with lar
ge staffs might struggle to manage their own households with a minimum of help, it must have been doubly hard for the generation of staff who had been trained in traditional country-house service and attained senior positions to discover that they had little or none of the support that in their youth they had themselves supplied as junior servants.
Mrs Davidson’s observations on the greater workload of post-war service are echoed again over and over. As former butler Stanley Ager pointed out in his memoirs, those who remained in service, or returned to it, had to combine in one person duties that had once been the preserve of many.
Mr Ager was born when Edward VII was on the throne, and his training dated back to the 1920s. He was a butler for more than three decades, retiring in 1975. His book, The Butler’s Guide to Clothes Care, Managing the Table, Running the Home and Other Graces, published in 1981, includes a short memoir that looks back with warmth on his years of experience of working in beautiful historic houses.31
Retirement seemed strange to him: ‘At first I didn’t feel right being out of uniform and in casual clothes in the morning.’ Otherwise, he said, he was content to cease working. ‘After all, I have travelled the world, lived in some magnificent houses and been lucky with my employers. But I still miss the staff. They fought amongst themselves and they always caused me far more trouble than the Lord and Lady – yet I miss them most of all.’ As this narrative has shown, the community of the staff could be all-important to the enjoyment of being a domestic servant.32
Mr Ager began his life in service in 1922, aged fourteen, as the hall boy at Croome Court, Worcestershire, ‘the lowest servant of all’, in the household of Lord Coventry. ‘On my first day it seemed like a house full of servants; there were some forty people of all ages working there. Everyone was friendly except the housekeeper.’ As for so many young people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his choice seemed made for him: ‘after my parents died, entering service seemed the best way of supporting myself.’
Like many younger or more junior-ranking servants, learning the ropes, he did most of his work ‘in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house. I didn’t go to the front where the family lived except for the dining room, until I had worked at Croome Court for six months. When I did, the flowers in the reception rooms struck me first of all . . . I was awed by the general opulence – the silver candlesticks and inkstands on the writing desks, the tapestries on the walls and the thick rugs.’33
As was usual in the pre-war era, he learnt his trade by waiting on the senior members of staff: ‘most young servants moved to a different house after about a year or so to gain promotion and to experience how various houses were run.’ Mr. Ager worked in several, including St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, returning there in 1930 to become valet to the 2nd Lord St Levan.34 ‘I travelled all around the world with him. Wherever he wanted to go, he just went. If it was cold when he returned to England, we’d pop off again. I made all the arrangements, bought the tickets and more or less made the world smooth for him and his party.’35 In 1933 he married and left to become butler to a Mr Dunkels, then to a Colonel Trotter in Berwickshire.
After serving in the army during the Second World War, he returned to work for the colonel, who died shortly afterwards. Mr Ager was then invited to St Michael’s Mount once more as butler to the 3rd Lord St Levan, who had succeeded his uncle: ‘I said I’d come back for three months, which turned into nearly thirty years.’
Cultural shifts during this period made their impact. In the 1920s, ‘when I was a footman, the senior staff stood very much on their dignity, and the rest of the staff were acutely aware of their status within the house. No one could help out anyone else. We didn’t help the kitchen people, however busy they were, and we certainly wouldn’t help a housemaid.’36 Two decades later, the pattern was very different. ‘After the war most people were unable to afford the same amount of staff. I saw great changes in service as our people’s life-styles became less grand. In my youth the butler was always available if the family needed him; otherwise, he merely supervised the staff. He had worked hard all his life, and he wasn’t going to continue if he could help it!’37
By the 1960s, his role had altered out of all recognition: ‘A butler in the old days would never have dreamed of doing as much day-today work as I did. He wouldn’t have cleaned the silver, laid the table or seen to it that the reception rooms were orderly – those jobs belonged to the first footman. Nor did any of my staff wait on me as they would have done on a butler in the past.’38 He kept his standards high, and was very proud of the many staff he had trained, some of whom had gone on into royal service. He was careful to retain his classic butler’s uniform from the 1930s until his retirement: ‘a butler would wear a black evening tailcoat all day long. In the evening he changed from the gray trousers into a pair of black trousers with a fine silk line running down the side.’39
Although nannies and au pairs are familiar to us today, they cannot replace the sense of absolute safety produced by the English country-house nursery and the classic British nanny. This was very much the experience of the present Lord Crathorne, whose childhood was spent at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire in the 1940s and 1950s.40 He was looked after by Nanny Messenger, who was born in 1891 and came to work for his family in 1939, living at Crathorne Hall until her death in 1976.
During the 1940s and 1950s, she was one of only half a dozen indoor staff. When his parents had first moved into the house, there was also a butler, Mr Jeffreys, a cook, Mrs Davidson, a housekeeper and an assistant cook. ‘The whole family had tea in her room every day for thirty-six years. I have tremendously warm memories of her; she was a perfectly wonderful lady who epitomised all the best things about the English nanny. After my mother died in 1969, she really became the core of family life.’41
Nursery tea, with Nanny and the children, became such an institution that every guest in the house would be expected. As Lord Crathorne’s father was a government minister, over the years this included Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, and Ted Heath. Later there were university friends like John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor. ‘It was always at four o’clock, and Cook prepared cakes, while Nanny made very delicate strawberry jam sandwiches. She heard all sorts of interesting and personal things at the tea table, but never repeated a word, never gossiped about it.’42
When asked whether his nanny was ever a rival to his mother in his affections, he replied:
No, not at all, she would always make it clear that my mother was the most important person in our lives. I remember my mother remarking how, during the war years, Nanny would pack away the clothes we had grown out of, so that they would be there for our children, such was her confidence that the world would go on as before. Actually, Nanny made a lot of our clothes, she was endlessly knitting. I can remember her asking my mother how she liked buttons fixed. She never ever got cross with David and me, but somehow discipline was enforced by the way she treated us; she led by example, I suppose.43
The daily routine
began with breakfast in the nursery, which was on the first floor, and part of the servants’ wing. There was a nursery, a small scullery, bedrooms for my brother and me, and one for Nanny beyond that. We had all our meals with Nanny in the nursery, although we might have lunch with our parents in the dining room if there were no other guests. Nanny would read to us, and spend time with us making things out of paper and pipe cleaners.
In the summer we would often walk down to the river with a picnic and play there. If we were playing outside she had a little horn she would blow to summon us back for meals, like the ones gamekeepers used at the end of a drive. She had a great love of nature and would explain it all to us, birds, trees and fields. It was also wartime and we couldn’t drive anywhere. We were, I think, the focus of her whole life and we couldn’t have been closer or happier. It was a very idyllic life. She really created a very idyllic world for us.44
After the death of the present Lord Crathorne’s fath
er, the huge family home, built for an entirely Edwardian way of life, was turned into a comfortable hotel. Since the 1970s the present Lord Crathorne has lived in a much smaller modern house on the same estate. While nannies are a familiar feature in country houses – as they are still in many thousands of English families today – Miss Messenger belongs to the last era of the career nanny, who would expect to devote her whole working life to one family. It is the end of a long tradition that is centuries old.45
The forced retreats and adaptations of country-house service are amply illustrated by the career of another butler, this time from a younger generation. He began service immediately after the war in a house with a full complement of staff that went through several phases of reduction. Micheal Kenneally, butler to the Sykes family at Sledmere for forty years, occupies a special place in Yorkshire country-house legend. He arrived from Ireland in 1952 to become pantry boy to landowner and baronet, Sir Richard Sykes. As one of Sir Richard’s sons, Christopher Simon Sykes, recalled, Sledmere ‘was still run on an Edwardian scale, with a house staff of at least 10, as well as nannies, governesses and chauffeurs.’46
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