The wealthy middle classes had almost as many servants as the upper: Henry Thrale, the brewer, kept about twenty servants at Streatham; while in the 1770s, John Baker, a lawyer, employed a valet, a coachman, a postilion, a gardener, a boy, a housekeeper, a housemaid, a laundry-maid, a dairymaid and a general maid. By then ordinary tradesmen were taking pride in the number of servants they employed. ‘About five and twenty years ago,’ remarks the father of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, whose Expedition was published in 1771, ‘very few even of the most opulent citizens of London kept any equipage, or even any servants in livery … At present, every trader in any degree of credit, every broker and attorney, maintains a couple of footmen, a coachman and a postillion.’
In the eighteenth century there were more people working as domestic servants than were employed in any other occupation, except agriculture. In 1851 this still held true; and there were by then almost a million of them, as compared with about 700,000 twenty years before.5 This represented 13 per cent of the working population. By 1891 the proportion had risen to a peak of nearly 16 per cent, as compared with a far smaller proportion, and a total of no more than 103,000 resident domestic servants, mostly women, in 1961.6 Commenting on the figures in the census of 1881, the Registrar-General wrote:
Of females above five years of age, one in nine was a domestic servant … and of girls between fifteen and twenty years of age no less than one in three was a domestic servant. Such, at least, was the case according to the returns; but … there is reason to believe that a considerable number of servant girls who are not yet fifteen years old represent themselves as having reached that age, so as to be more readily taken into service.7
As the total number of servants rose in the late nineteenth century, so did the households of the larger country houses: the Duke of Westminster had a staff of over 300 at Eaton Hall.8 And between the loftiest of the upper servants and the humblest of the lower there were as many grades and ranks as there were in the hierarchy of aristocracy itself. At the annual mop fairs in the country the various grades of lower servants could still be seen advertising themselves by distinctive utensils – cooks with basting ladles, housemaids with brooms or mops, milkmaids with pails – while in the registry offices in towns upper servants provided particulars of their rank and past experience. At the London Society for the Encouragement of Faithful Servants an applicant’s name was never placed on the books unless evidence of two years’ service in one place could be produced.9
Among the upper servants were included the house steward and his female counterpart, the housekeeper. The house steward was usually a most impressive figure quite capable of keeping a large staff in order as well as looking after the household accounts and ordering the supplies. Lord Ernest Hamilton always remembered the steward at his family home, Chesterfield House, Mayfair, a stately figure in a short frock-coat and with a pointed grey beard. ‘Good morning, Burgh,’ Lord Ernest would say when he met this imposing servant in the passage or on the stairs; and the steward would flatten himself against the wall and reply: ‘Your most obedient, my lord.’10
Housekeepers, who presided over the store-room, kept the housekeeping accounts, made the drawing-room tea, and wore no uniform, were usually quite as imposing. Basing the character upon recollections of his own grandmother, who had been appointed housekeeper at Crewe Hall, Cheshire, in 1785 at a salary of eight guineas a year, Dickens described Mrs Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold:
Mrs Rouncewell is rather deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe. She is a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a back, and such a stomacher, that if her stays should turn out when she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised.11
Next in rank below the house steward in the male hierarchy was the groom of the chambers whose many duties at Burley, country house of the Earl of Nottingham, were listed as follows:
You must be careful of the furniture, brushing and cleaning every morning that which is in constant use, and the rest also once in the week or oftener if need be.
You must make fires in the hall, parlour, etc., where required, keeping clean the hearths and often coming in to repair them, and at night to snuff ye candles.
You are to attend in the Hall when there is Company) and also at other times, but in this last you shall be relieved by ye footmen irt turns.
You must take care of all keys in your custody, not to break them, but especially yt they be not lost.
You must bar all the windows, lock all the outward doors every night when the family is in bed, and rise so early as to open them in time for such as have occasion to come into the house, and to take care to put out all fires and candles at night.
When any strangers lodge here you must diligently attend ym. taking care that there be fires, candles, etc., in good order, and that nothing be wanting.
You are to ring the bell for prayers and lay the cushens and take them away when done, and to keep them and all the furniture of the chappell (when ready) clean.12
After the groom of the chambers came the butler who looked after the wine, presided over the dining-room and made regular rounds of the reception rooms, ensuring that all was in order, the blinds drawn if necessary, the fires burning satisfactorily and the newspapers well aired, neatly cut and folded, and, in some houses, ironed.13 The butler’s day was long; but not as long as the valet’s who had to wake his master in the morning with his shaving water and to wait up until he saw fit to go to bed, helping him undress and taking clothes and shoes away for washing, brushing and polishing. The valet’s counterpart was the lady’s-maid who had not only to look after her mistress’s clothes but also brush her hair, tie it in curling papers at night, and apply lotions and ointments to her skin.
Last of the upper servants were the cooks and chef, well-rewarded specialists, the most talented of whom were the envy of all their masters’ friends and neighbours. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the richer households had confectioners and bakers as well as male roasting cooks, female assistant cooks, kitchen maids and kitchen boys. Some had French chefs as well. Antonin Carême was for a time employed at Carlton House by the Prince Regent who offered him the enormous salary of £500 a year and a pension of £250 a year to persuade him to return to London after he had left to enter the service of Baron Rothschild. Alexis Soyer was chef to the Duke of Sutherland and the Marquess of Waterford before his appointment to the Reform Club. The extravagant Duke of Buckingham also had a French chef as well as an English roasting cook and an Italian confectioner, and, when advised to get rid of the confectioner on the grounds of economy, was said to have plaintively remonstrated: ‘Good God! Mayn’t a man have a biscuit with his glass of sherry?’
Leading the ranks of the under servants were the footmen. It was their duty to take coals into the reception rooms, clean the boots and plate, trim lamps, lay the breakfast and, in livery of knee breeches, silk stockings and powdered hair, to wait at table; and, in the afternoons, to answer the front door; or, if on carriage duty, to attend their masters or mistresses, standing on the platform at the back of the coach, ready to jump down to lower folding steps as soon as the horses were brought to a halt by the coachman. When their employers went out walking, the footmen would follow them at a respectful distance, hurrying ahead to knock on a door when a call was to be made. In the days of sedan chairs they walked in front of the chairmen, clearing a path. On Sundays they walked behind their mistresses to church carrying the prayer books.
In his journal, William Tayler, footman to the widow of a rich East India Company merchant who had become Member of Parliament for Queensborough, gave an account of a Sunday in his ‘very buisy’ life in the 1830s:
I got up at half past seven, cleaned the clothes and knives [and] lamps, got the parlour breakfast, lit my pantry fire, cleared breakfast and washed it away, dressed myself, went to church, came back, got parlour lunch, had my own dinner, sit
by the fire and red the Penny Magazine and opnd the door when any visitors came. At 4 o’clock had my tea, took the lamps and candles up into the drawing room, shut the shutters, took glass, knives, plate and settera into the dining, room, layed the cloth for dinner, took the dinner up at six o’clock, waited at dinner, brought the things down again at seven, washed them up, brought down the desert, got ready the tea, took it up at eight o’clock, brought it down at half past, washed up, had my supper at nine, took down the lamps and candles at half past ten and went to bed at eleven.14
Usually on Sundays, Tayler went to see his wife and children; and this was the only day in the week on which he did see them. There were three maidservants in the house but he was the sole footman, and he consequently had to perform many duties which in other households would have been done by the second or third footman or by the under-butler. As well as footmen and under-butlers, larger households would also employ watchmen and grooms, postilions, lamp-men and candle-men, odd-men, and steward’s-room-men, pages and ushers of the hall, office clerks and plate burnishers, hall-boys, servant’s-hall-boys, boot-boys, messenger-boys and, of course, gardeners and garden-boys. Some households could still boast of musicians, chaplains, librarians and tutors, others of birdkeepers and apiarists; one even had an old man living in a hermitage instead of the stuffed hermits to be seen peering lugubriously out of grottoes elsewhere.15 At Chatsworth, and at Belvoir, there was a resident upholsterer; at Longleat there was a chimney-sweep as well as a courier who made all arrangements for the family’s journeys; at Belvoir there was a watchman who went about the terraces and battlements and along the paths, and if a guest woke in the night in the castle he ‘would hear a padded foot on the gravel outside and a voice, not loud enough to waken but strong enough to reassure, saying “Past twelve o’clock. All’s well.”’
In her memoirs Lady Diana Cooper, third daughter of the eighth Duke of Rutland, remembered how at Belvoir in the 1890s ‘the gong rang for dressing-time, getting louder and louder, as it approached down the unending passage’:
The gong man was 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. Three times a day he rang the gong – for luncheon, for dressing-time, for dinner. He would walk down the interminable passages, his livery hanging a little loosely on his bent old bones, clutching his gong with one hand and with the other feebly brandishing the padded-knobbed stick with which he struck it. Every corridor had to be warned and the towers too, so I suppose he banged on and off for ten minutes, thrice daily.
Then there were the lamp-and-candle men, at least three of them, for there was no other form of lighting. Gas was despised, I forget why – vulgar I think. They polished and scraped the wax off the candelabra, cut wicks, poured paraffin oil and unblackened glass chimneys all day long. After dark they were busy turning wicks up and down, snuffing candles, and de-waxing extinguishers. It was not a department we liked much to visit. It smelt disgusting and the lamp-men were too busy. But the upholsterer’s room was a great treat. He was exactly like a Hans Andersen tailor. Crosslegged he sat in a tremendous confusion of curtains and covers, fringes, buttons, rags and carpets, bolsters, scraps (that could be begged off him), huge curved needles like scimitars, bodkins, hunks of beeswax to strengthen thread, and hundreds of flags. The flags on the tower-top, I suppose, got punished by the winds and were constantly in need of repair. I never saw him actually at work on anything else. There were slim flags for wind, little ones for rain, huge ones for sunshine, hunting flags, and many others.
The water-men are difficult to believe in today. They seemed to me to belong to another clay. They were the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than any of the men of the family, who were remarkable for their height. They had stubbly beards and a general Bill Sikes appearance. They wore brown clothes, no collars and thick green baize aprons from chin to knee. On their shoulders they carried a wooden yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water. They moved on a perpetual round. Above the ground floor there was not a drop of hot water and not one bath, so their job was to keep all jugs, cans and kettles full in the bedrooms, and morning or evening to bring the hot water for the hip-baths. We were always a little frightened of the water-men. They seemed of another element and never spoke but one word, ‘Water-man,’ to account for themselves.16
At Belvoir, in addition to these innumerable menservants, there was ‘a regiment of maids’ under the control of Lena, the head housemaid, and Mrs Smith, the housekeeper, ‘sparkling with jet arabesques’. There were also, as there were in all other large country houses, ladies’-maids and house-maids, still-room maids and scullery-maids, kitchen-maids, laundry-maids and dairymaids. At Holkham in 1851 there were, as well as a housekeeper, a female cook and a female baker, five housemaids, three nursery-maids, three kitchen-maids, four laundry-maids, two charwomen, a lady’s-maid, a dairymaid, a nurse and a governess.
The domestic offices in which the maids and menservants performed their various duties were as numerous as their own ranks. There were housemaids’ pantries on the upper floors, butlers’ pantries and sculleries below; there were linen-rooms and knife-rooms and lamp-rooms, leather-rooms and boot-rooms, gun-rooms and brushing-rooms, wash-houses and mangling-rooms, ironing-rooms, folding-rooms and airing-rooms. And in many of these rooms lists of strict rules were displayed instructing servants in the correct methods to be employed in carrying out their duties, and warning them against the improper use of materials and of such tools as knife-cleaning machines. At Longleat in the 1830s there was a list of materials which included over 600 towels, all of them marked and each designated for a particular use; there were also nearly as many cloths – special china cloths and dusters for the housemaids, glass cloths for the butler, pocket cloths for the footmen, rubbers for the kitchen-maids, lamp cloths for the porter, horn cloths for the servants’-hall-boy.17 The dustpans were all numbered: each housemaid had her own and had to learn how to hold it, together with a candle, in one hand so that she could use the brush with the other. She also had to learn how to polish the metal fittings on furniture with fine sand, how to polish paintwork with cream dressing, how to sweep carpets with damp tea leaves, how to take off old polish with vinegar and put on new with beeswax and turpentine; how to wash high ceilings with soda and water while standing on the top of step-ladders; how to dust down brocaded walls and rub them over with tissue paper and then with silk dusters; how to unstring and scrub Venetian blinds; how to take up carpets; how to whiten corridors with pipe-clay and spread French chalk on a floor before a ball; how to make a bed and black a bedroom grate with a mixture of ivory black, treacle, oil, small beer and sulphuric acid. She also had to remember at what time the sunlight came into various rooms so that the blinds could be drawn to protect the furniture. And she was very poorly paid.
The wages of domestic servants had never been high. In the eighteenth century they varied widely from place to place and much depended upon a servant’s experience and upon the perquisites which might be expected. The rates recommended in books such as John Mordaunt’s Complete Steward of 1761 and advertisements in newspapers both indicate that wages in themselves were rarely an inducement to those seeking work in domestic service. Mordaunt’s list of recommended wages gives £4 a year for an under-housemaid, £5 for a head housemaid, £5 for an under-footman, £7 for a head footman, and only £3 for a postilion. In 1740 a footman was engaged for no more than £2 15s a year by a gentleman in Sussex; while in 1770 a Lancashire baronet was able to employ a cook for as little as £5 a year. Some advertisements offered higher rates: one, for a footman-gardener in 1762, gave notice that the would-be employer was willing to pay between £10 and £12 a year; another, for a porter in 1792, offered up to £16.18 Wages certainly improved as the century progressed. James Woodforde was paying his footman £3 a year in 1766; but in the 1780s he felt obliged to increase this to five guineas and by 1787 h
e was paying £8.19 In the nineteenth century wages continued to rise, but they did so very slowly and women’s much more slowly than men’s. In the course of the 1850s and 1860s housemaids’ wages went up from about £11 to £14 a year; and cooks’ from about £11 to £17. Yet there were still some poor maids-of-all-work who were paid no more than 2s a week, though skilled and pretty lady’s-maids could earn more than cooks, and the wages of nursemaids increased to about £17 a year.20 At Holkham in 1865 a young lady’s-maid was getting £18 a year, the scullery-maids £12 a year, the cook £50, the coachmen £40 each, the valet £60, the gardener £90, the German governess £80 and the French governess £105 (which was £5 more than the Rev. Alex Napier, Lord Leicester’s librarian). By 1894 the valets’ wages had gone up to £70 a year; the kitchen-maids were being paid between £16 and £24; and the housemaids between £12 and £22.21
In the eighteenth century servants had generally been compensated for low wages by ample food, by the provision of clothes and by various other allowances. Those who did not want beer were often supplied with beer money; and when the family was away they were given extra board money to cater for themselves. In large eighteenth-century houses, according to the duc de La Rochefoucauld, there was ‘a supply of cold meat, tea and punch’ on the servants’ tables ‘from morning to night’.22 Another observer considered that ‘servants in great families wantonly’ ate five times as much meat as nature really required. Jonas Hanway said that in some houses the domestic staff had meat three times a day; and certainly at Canons, the Duke of Chandos’s servants had one and a half pounds of beef every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, the same amounts of mutton on Monday and Friday and of pork on Wednesday and Saturday. They also had ‘pastries, jellies and tarts’ and fruit ‘in the greatest profusion’.23
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