Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  From my perspective, the butler was the duke’s butler, and the housekeeper was the duchess’s housekeeper, that’s how I remember it. The present duke and duchess don’t want the daily interference of a butler in the way that Duke Hugh’s butler used to run his bath in the morning and do everything. They naturally want more privacy. Today they have a household controller, but there are still eight daily ladies, just as in Duke Hugh’s time.

  In the 1960s everyone knew who everyone was. Alnwick estate was more formal and intimidating in some ways but it was more of a family too. Most of the staff employed at that time had some connection with the estate. When I applied for my job, the farmer whom my father worked for knew the under-agent at Alnwick, who gave me a letter of introduction.

  Duke Hugh used to hunt four days a week and as a result he knew every farmer and every shepherd. Each day he would go out around noon and look round the farms, perhaps because he wanted a hunt jump put right, and then he would call in at the farm. It drove the cook mad, because lunch was always planned for one o’clock. In the 1960s during Duke Hugh’s time the stables were hallowed ground. The stud groom was Fred Lister. I think he and Duke Hugh had grown up together and they were certainly good friends. Sometimes the duke would go to the stables and have a whisky with Fred.65

  The servants’ quarters of the past two centuries are no longer in use nor are they part of the highly enjoyable tourist route. The ornate Gothic Revival kitchen is now a refectory for a visiting American college; the old servants’ hall has been turned into a library, although subterranean passages still connect the kitchen to the dining room. The old stables, partly an exhibition site for liveries and carriages, now house the restaurant and shop. Mr Luke’s affection for – and knowledge of – the building that has been so long in his care is evident in every room.66

  There are consistent themes in these stories: of country-house service becoming a life’s work, of association with the estate through marriage or family connections. Martin Gee, the current head gardener at Weston Park in Shropshire, has worked there for forty years and his family has had remarkably long connections with Weston.

  The first member of my family to work here came in the early nineteenth century from Norfolk as a ploughman. There is a painting of him by Weaver in the house. He was recommended to the family by Coke of Norfolk as the owner of Holkham Hall was known because the owner wanted someone to work with Suffolk Punch horses. Since then, my family have all worked in agriculture or as gamekeepers and carpenters on this estate.

  When my father left school he went into agriculture and eventually came to the gardens here. He served in the army during the war and returned to his old job at Weston in peacetime. I came just after leaving school. Weston is my life. Staff numbers went down gradually from the late 1960s because the work wasn’t very well paid and they were probably trying to reduce staff numbers as well. It was still a family home, and the cook and the butler both came from St Helena. You could get a British passport if you spent two years in domestic service. We had one very cold winter and none of them had ever seen ice before. Most of the cleaning staff came from the village.

  My father used to talk about all the characters here when he first came in the 1940s. (Someone said I was a Weston ‘character’ now!) There were still thirty gardeners in those days and there were fifteen when I joined in 1969, but now there are just three, with me as head gardener. We do have other help, volunteers and students, as the house and park are now in a trust, the Weston Park Foundation. Today you can do a lot more work on your own with the aid of technology, but then things have changed in the country generally. At one time most of the village children would have begun working on the estate and gradually moved on. Everyone used to know everyone else who lived here, which isn’t so true now, although there is still a hard core.67

  There is a similar pattern of long service at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, one of the best-known country houses still in private family hands and still at the heart of a substantial landed estate. The present Earl of Leicester – who has recently handed over the house to his son, Viscount Coke – first got involved in the management of the estate in the 1960s, before eventually inheriting from his cousin in the 1970s.

  He has vivid memories of his first visits to Holkham, which contrasted with his own childhood in South Africa: ‘There was Rees, the butler, and Mrs Stubbs, who came in to clean and would sometimes serve meals, when she used to stand behind Lord Leicester’s chair, surveying the scene.’ He remembers asking his cousin, Tommy Leicester, ‘why he did not entertain that much. He said it was because they found it so difficult to get servants and his generation were simply not brought up to make their own beds. Before the First World War, Holkham still had something like fifty indoor servants.’68

  The territorial nature of service life emerges from a story from his mother’s early visits to Holkham in the 1930s: ‘The librarian asked the butler: “Am I to understand that crumbs on the library table are the preserve of the butler?” To which the butler replied, “Yes”, but with a deft pass of his hand sweeping the crumbs to the floor, he added, “And now they are the preserve of the housekeeper.”’

  When the Earl of Leicester moved into the house in 1980, there was a small staff:

  The butler-chauffeur was Peter Fielder, who stayed for a time. There was also a houseman who laid fires, and Tommy Leicester’s carer, who cooked. One cleaning lady, Carol Cox, is still working for us; we later had a couple who looked after the state rooms. In the 1970s, Fred Jolly, a former policeman, became security man, and a flat was made for him and his wife in the house. He was so able that he quickly took on other jobs until he became the administrator. Then we had Norman Smith, as butler-chauffeur, who was ex-army.

  Fred Jolly knew of lists where you could advertise for retiring servicemen. Norman had worked in the officers’ mess in his last years in the army, so he knew what was needed. David Palmer, who came later as butler, had also been in the army and was with us until we retired to the house where we live now. There were usually three gardeners and seven or eight gamekeepers.69

  Still working for the Leicesters today is Maurice Bray, who was born on the estate and started work at Holkham on 1 September 1958 in the estates building department:

  There were different types of trades and everyone had a specific job. There was a man to mend the fences, another to mend the gates, someone to repair the cottages and so on, which worked very well. The workshop was on the first floor, with a great big open fire at one end. The oldest man, Mr Frank Stubbs, had his bench close to the fire, while I, being the youngest, had mine at the other end, near the open door and the draughts.70

  The indoor staff included Mr Upton, ‘a permanent electrician, who also looked after the boilers and was always pushing round a barrowful of coke. He replaced all the light bulbs too.’

  If the buildings department had work to do in the house, ‘we had to report to the butler, Mr Rees, a Scotsman. He was a jovial type, but you would not think of walking about the house without first reporting to him. He retired in the 1970s.’ Mrs Stubbs, the mother of one of Mr Bray’s colleagues, went in daily to do cleaning and washing.

  The buildings department was reduced substantially in the 1960s and Mr Bray later became clerk of works, moving on in 2000 to help run the linseed oil business set up by the estate. He is now still working for the Leicesters, helping them settle into their new home in the grounds. He described working for a great estate as being ‘like being part of a family. People would always assist you. We also used things that were to hand, from flint to timber.’71

  Ian Macnab, the current head forester, joined the estate staff in 1957; his father had worked in the gardens, and his mother had been a laundrymaid. His training was thorough: ‘In those days you looked to spend two years in the nursery, growing trees in plantations, raising, weeding, and planting out. After a couple of years you would start to work in the woods.’ Those he worked for were ‘supportive but ruled with a rod of iro
n; they wouldn’t stand for backchat’.72

  Both men considered their training in the 1950s to be strict and both felt a keen sense of history, in their own jobs and in those of their colleagues. Maurice Bray remarked: ‘I often used to think what a wonderful sight the park was when walking in to work, when all those commuters are shut up in cars or trains.’ Ian Macnab adds: ‘I used to think the view of the hall from the monument must be a hell of a sight for visitors, but to us, it’s just the hall.’

  Lord Leicester commissioned an important series of group portraits by Andrew Festing to record the contribution of all those whose service contributed to the maintenance of the house, both for the family and for the visiting public:

  The main catalyst was that in 1993 I had three heads of departments retiring who had been with me since I was first involved in running the estate in 1973. They were Ken Hume, clerk of the works, the administrator and the chief clerk. Whatever I have achieved here is in large part thanks to them, and I was looking for a way of recording this. I also thought that visitors to the house see plenty of my family and ancestors, but not much of the people who look after us and this estate.

  Then I thought of the servant portraits at Erddig. After that first one, of the heads of department, with the agent and the farm manager, we had others of the office staff, and the house staff, including the administrator, David Palmer the butler, Carol Cox the cleaner, and the house electrician. We have also had ones done of the woods department, the farms department and the building department, but there are still more to do.73

  Whilst Holkham retains a working community, the large service areas of the original, eighteenth-century house are used now mostly for purposes other than their original ones, not least because fewer staff are needed, and most of them live in houses on the estate, rather than at Holkham itself.

  Through the ages, architects have taken different approaches to the problems of accommodating quantities of domestic staff in traditional country houses. With the modern trend for cleaning and maintenance staff to live elsewhere, much was done in the 1960 and 1970s to create more serviceable family apartments within the main house, with smaller kitchens where the families could cook for themselves, with or without help.74 A picture of current attitudes emerges from the views of two architects who specialise in building new country houses or adapting older ones to comfortable modern life. They were asked to comment on what staff their clients tend to have and how much this informs the designs of their houses.

  For Hugh Petter, a partner of Robert Adam Architects, a firm that has built over one hundred new country houses in the past twenty years, it was ‘still quite usual to encounter a housekeeper, a nanny and a personal secretary. The smartest houses might well have a butler, a driver and one or two gardeners, sometimes a groom and a stable lad.’ The firm has often been asked to build a new house on an estate where the old house had been pulled down:

  Then we might well be asked to design a new lodge or staff cottage, but these days more staff live out than in. I think people don’t want a life with hot and cold running staff, while staff themselves need their own private spaces in which to lead their own private lives. Most of our clients have a housekeeper, whose husband might do odd jobs or gardening.

  It is still quite usual to be asked to provide a flat for the housekeeper, either in the main house, or maybe over the garage, so that when the family are away there is someone near by for security reasons. These are likely to be comfortable flats, well proportioned and bigger in scale than historic servants’ accommodation. In old country houses the family itself tends to colonise the old servants’ quarters, but in smarter houses there will be a nice family kitchen as well as a working catering kitchen for entertaining.

  Some features are persistent:

  We are still designing quite large butler’s pantries for new houses, which are requested more than you might think and are effectively serveries. Laundries are often asked for, and these days usually sited on the first floor, so that laundry can be processed on the bedroom floor, saving a lot of carrying up and down stairs. There is still quite a strong desire to have a second staircase for staff, so they don’t have to go through the main rooms, especially when people are entertaining. We have also had requests for staff sitting rooms, often suitable for chauffeurs while waiting, and for offices for personal secretaries.75

  Another architect, Ptolemy Dean, currently working on several new country houses, concurs:

  All country house owners are concerned to have somebody living on site for security. Service accommodation has always been an important part of the architectural expression of a country house, especially when you think of the work of Lutyens. I have recently designed a new house with a powerhouse, garages, and a self-contained staff flat in a new service courtyard. I am often asked to design staff cottages.

  One thing is clear: there is no expectation of a string of servants’ bedrooms in the attics, while basements are generally used only for wine or services such as electrical plant rooms and laundries. The days of the basement servants’ quarters, indeed of the servants’ hall, have really vanished for ever.76

  Domestic staff are still a component in country houses, even if very different from their Edwardian counterparts. That this is still a lively employment market is shown in the advertising pages of The Lady magazine as well as the back pages of Country Life and its ilk, which still sport numerous adverts for domestic and estate jobs. There are several schools for butlers in existence, including those founded by Ivor Spencer, while gardeners will now often be trained at horticultural college, and cooks at catering colleges. Indeed, it has been argued that there has been something of a revival in domestic staff numbers in more recent years.77 On 3 June 2007, the New York Post even ran an article on the international shortage of butlers in which it was observed that butlers were required by newly wealthy families to help them learn how to enjoy their wealth with the polish associated with the old rich. It was calculated in the Post that top butlers were earning $200,000.78 The Guardian had also run an article on the scarcity of trained butlers four days earlier.

  Stephanie Rough, director of the established company Greycoat Placements, deals with placing full-time and temporary staff for many country houses. She argues that, as with country houses through the ages, staffing numbers vary hugely and depend on the family and size of property: ‘People who entertain only a little might have just a housekeeper and two dailies.’ She was asked to imagine the likely staff today of a country house at the centre of a 2,000-acre estate with an owner in his forties working in the City. ‘Probably they would have three or four people working in the house: a couple perhaps, a daily and a cook, with extra staff brought in for events, and a head gardener plus one other. Depending on the estate, there might perhaps be an estate manager of some sort. With a married couple, the wife would usually act as housekeeper while the husband might act as butler, or houseman, or do more general duties, such as driving, security and maintenance.’79

  Is a butler is still something people look for?

  A family who entertain a lot might want a butler, but he might be called a butler-houseman or house manager. Today, a butler is not so much about formal entertaining, but managing staff, sorting out the digital camera, iPod, Blackberry and house technology; liaising with contractors; and being the first port of call for bills and administration. This trend is much more on the management side, but there is still a demand for the very traditional ‘service’ butler. Some people have full-time drivers.

  What sort of person would be a typical contemporary housekeeper?

  Again, a kind of house manager, running the household, sorting out the laundry and making beds, who could cover for the butler. One could be on duty when the other is off, and vice versa. Housekeepers or house managers tend to have a grounding in some related skill, as a chef or a property manager; there is still some sense of working your way up through the ranks, perhaps having come from working on yachts, in ski chalets or in ho
tel management.80

  Where are the many foreign couples drawn from who go into service? ‘There are certainly a number of Asians, Filipinos, Eastern Europeans and St Helenians.’ She too has found that it is not unusual to come across people, often local, who have worked in the same country house for thirty or forty years: ‘In the countryside, bigger estates would certainly be more likely to employ locals. Staff who are treated with respect and valued will stay a long time. Country houses do take a lot of looking after, especially if you have a house party; the laundry alone could take a week to sort out. No two houses are quite the same these days. Managing staff can be quite demanding.’

  Is the word servant still used at all? ‘No, nobody really uses the word servant any more; people do use the word staff, although not everyone likes it. People still use the words butler and housekeeper, although the word maid is used less and less. There are a number of other phrases used, such as confidential aide or personal aide, although some lines are blurred.’

  Modern attitudes can vary enormously. ‘One of our housekeepers was being interviewed and asked whether there would be any cleaning involved. Her potential employer said, “no, you’re the housekeeper”. She asked the same question at another interview and the answer was, “of course, you’re the housekeeper”, which shows that people have different ideas about these job titles.’81