The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  In most eighteenth-century houses, however, there seems to have been a marked difference between the food eaten by the lower servants in the servants’ hall and that enjoyed by the upper servants in the steward’s or housekeeper’s room, the ‘Pug’s Parlour’ as it came to be known, a ‘pug’ being an upper servant in a large establishment. The food at the steward’s table at the Duke of Kingston’s house, Thoresby Hall, would not, so it was said, have disgraced ‘a gentleman of ten thousand a year’; but that in the servants’ hall was far less appetising; and, according to Nancy Woodforde, a butler and housekeeper were quite capable of entertaining ‘so much company that the other servants were kept short of everything that they ought to have’.24

  Hungry servants in large houses, however, seem to have been rare; and in the later nineteenth century unknown. At Longleat in the 1890s luncheon was announced by a handbell rung in the servants’ hall where the lower servants took their places standing at the table until the upper servants, led by the housekeeper and butler, arrived from the steward’s room. The butler then indicated that they might all sit down, whereupon, after grace had been said, the meat course was served. After this the upper servants left the servants’ hall to have the rest of the meal in the privileged quiet of the steward’s room. At Welbeck the two classes of servants did not mix except on Twelfth Night when a splendid ball was given for all the servants, tenants and their families as well as the local tradesmen. On this occasion they were attended to by fifty hired waiters, while an orchestra from London played in the huge underground ballroom. On other days the upper servants ate in the steward’s room where their meals, served on fine china and accompanied by wine, were of the highest quality. They had clean napkins every day, and their own silver napkin rings. At supper the men wore smoking jackets and the women dress blouses.25 Toasts were regularly drunk to the duke and duchess and their family.

  The food was of the best and no stint [recalled an upper servant in the household of a Scottish baronet], wine and whiskey were provided in the steward’s room – beer and ale for the servants in the hall. The health of Sir H – and my Lady were drunk every night, in both rooms, the butler proposing it in the steward’s room and the under butler in the servants’ hall. A rap on the table, then in a reverential tone came the toast – ‘Sir H–and my Lady.’

  ‘With all my heart,’ was the response.

  The second toast given in old families is the ‘Young Family’, but as there was no young family’s health to propose, it was substituted by another, ‘Our noble selves.’ It was the custom to nil a half-pint horn and drain it off for each toast. Theale was strong … and two horns were as much as could be taken in safety, which put some of the drinkers in a merry mood for the rest of the evening.26

  Servants in smaller households also usually ate well. Mrs Prinsep’s footman described dinners of roast beef and vegetables, dumplings and damson pie, and ‘very good table ale’ of which ‘everyone could have as much as they liked’. But maids who were the only servants of poorer familes often did go hungry like Elsie, the maid-of-all-work, in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, who for days on end does not eat ‘enough to satisfy a cat’; and one night, in the grip of a tyrannical appetite, she is discovered by her mistress in the light of a candle ‘not merely eating bacon but eating raw bacon’.27

  Lilian Westhall, maid-of-all-work to a dentist and his wife in Chiswick would have sympathized with Elsie. Up at six in the morning, she worked a seventeen-hour day for 5s a week, making sure that the whole house was spotless for her mistress who ‘explained she was very particular’:

  The meals I remember well. For breakfast I had bread and dripping. There were often mice dirts on the dripping to be scraped off first. Dinner was herring, every day; tea was bread and marge. I didn’t have a bath during the month I was there, I wasn’t given the opportunity; no time to comb my hair properly.

  My room was in the attic. There was a little iron bed in the corner, a wooden chair and a washstand. It was a cold, bare, utterly cheerless room. At night I used to climb the dark stairs to the gloomy top of the house, go over to my bed, put the candle on the chair, fall on my knees, say my prayers, and crawl into bed too tired to wash.28

  Maidservants in houses like this were usually relegated to the attics, although in terrace houses in London and other towns they often slept in the basement like the succession of maids employed at between £8 and £12 a year by Thomas and Jane Carlyle at 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea. There were two dark kitchens in the basement of the eight-roomed house; one at the back, which was used as a washhouse, the other at the front, where the cooking was done on an antiquated range. In the back kitchen – a cheerless, stone-paved room where Thomas Carlyle emptied buckets of cold water over himself as he stood in a tin bath – the maid kept her clothes. And in the front kitchen, when her hard day’s work was done at last, she lay down to sleep, but not until the master had finished his pipe, which he liked to smoke by the dying embers of the fire, sitting up late, while beyond the door in the cold back kitchen the maid waited anxiously for the sounds that heralded his departure upstairs to bed. She then could go to her own – which was infested with bugs – after a supper of cold porridge.

  Yet if the maidservants disliked working for a temperamental mistress and a selfish master who, according to his wife, ‘considered it a sin against the Holy Ghost to set a chair or a plate two inches off the spot they have been used to stand on’, the Carlyles were equally dissatisfied with their maidservants, thirty-four of them in thirty-two years. There was Jane, a clumsy, dreamy creature, who poured water over her mistress’s foot instead of into the coffee-pot and who became so absorbed in reading her book that she forgot to light the fire. There was a ‘mutinous Irish savage’ with ‘a face like a Polar Bear’, and a primitive Scottish girl, who loved answering the door but failed to announce the boisterous actress, Fanny Kemble, being ‘entirely in a non-plus whether she had let in a leddy or a gentleman’, and who had a tiresome ‘follower’ in the shape of a soldier, by whom she seems to have become pregnant. There was Helen, who was dirty and drank and whom her mistress discovered one day ‘lying on the floor, dead-drunk, spread out … with a chair upset beside her, and in the midst of a perfect chaos of dirty dishes and fragments of broken crockery’. After her came ‘The Beauty’ who spent her time looking through keyholes and reading Mrs Carlyle’s letters and who left complaining that she could not live in a house that was ‘such a muddle’; an ‘old half dead’ woman with a ‘shocking bad temper’; and ‘a little girl … who could not cook a morsel of food or make a bed, or do any civilised thing’.29

  In households larger and more generous than the Carlyles’, servants enjoyed various allowances and perquisites, other than food and beer money, which made their low wages acceptable. Many could look forward to cast-off clothing. The Duke of Kingston’s valet regularly received ‘his wardrobe before Easter Newmarket meeting and the Saturday before October meeting’.30 Other servants were given old clothes when their conduct was deemed satisfactory. New liveries were not, however, necessarily the property of the servant who wore them. James Woodforde told a newly employed footman in 1785 to remember that his livery and greatcoat were not given to him but only to be worn while employed in his master’s service;31 and at Hatfield, towards the end of the nineteenth century, liveries which had been used for a year belonged to the servants who had worn them; those worn for less than a year were Lord Salisbury’s property and had to be given back to him ‘on leaving service’.32

  Occasionally servants were driven to complain of the threadbare clothes which were provided for them. ‘I humbly beg your ladyship will be pleased to consider my clothing,’ Lady Straf ford’s gamekeeper felt obliged to write to her, ‘for with walking about the park and woods I am got as ragged as a sheep; its upwards of two years since I had any and my lord was pleased to be so good as tell me I should have a frock every year and a plush coat every two years, and a laced hat as other noblemen’s keepers had.’3
3 Most employers however, were anxious to ensure that their servants’ appearance did their masters credit. Indeed, rich employers vied with each other to provide their servants with liveries that were not merely impressive but startling in their richness. Jonas Hanway declared that in the past it had been ‘a rare thing to see any gold or silver lace on the clothes of a domestic servant in livery’; yet now footmen appeared ‘in rich vestments, besilvered and begilded like the servants of sovereign princes’.34 Ten years later Lord Derby’s coachmen were described, ‘with their red feathers and flame coloured silk stockings’, as looking ‘like so many figurantes taken from behind the scenes of the Opera House’.35 Even maidservants, so Carl Moritz said, were turned out in a way that reflected the greatest credit upon the households from which they came:

  The appearance of the female domestics will, perhaps, astonish a foreign visitor more than anything in London. They are in general handsome and well-clothed. They are usually clad in gowns well adjusted to their shapes, and hats adorned with ribbands. There are some who even wear silk and sattin.36

  Such items of clothing as shirts and neckwear and, usually, shoes had to be provided by the servants themselves; and it was often difficult for a man applying for a new appointment to judge how to dress when presenting himself for interview. John Macdonald, who had twenty-eight different masters in thirty-nine years of service, once appeared for an interview in ‘a gold laced vest and other things in form’, only to be informed that he was considered unsuitable for the post since he ‘looked more like a gentleman than a servant’. Determined not to repeat his mistake, he presented himself for his next appointment in the plainest clothes and was again rejected, his prospective employer’s footman explaining, ‘I am sorry I did not tell you to dress yourself finer, for Sir Francis is very nice.’37

  For Macdonald one of the great pleasures of being a footman was the opportunity it gave him of walking about ‘in good clothes with rich vests’, in wearing the ‘genteelest’ livery, ‘richly trimmed with silver’. Another pleasure was that of travelling. With one of his several masters, the Earl of Galloway’s brother, Macdonald went all over the country from hunt to hunt, ‘to Oxfordshire, to Blenheim, to Lord Foley’s, to Lord Thanet’s, Stow-in-the-Wold, Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Bedfordshire’.38 Indeed, many men entered domestic service largely because of the opportunities it offered for wearing fine clothes, for travel, for sexual adventures and for social advancement. It was very rarely, of course, that a footman could rise so far as to marry his employer, like Lady Henrietta Wentworth’s footman; and it was almost as rarely that a female servant married her master like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the cook of Boswell’s attorney acquaintance who was taken as his wife ‘because she dressed a lovely bit of collop’. But servants did expect to take on some of the social standing of their masters and mistresses; and were very happy to be known by their names. It might be considered demeaning for a footman to lose his own name and be referred to as John or Robert or by whatever name footmen were known in a particular household to save the family the trouble of remembering what their real names were; yet there was always the chance that they would one day be promoted to the post of butler and then be known by their proper surname and be addressed by other servants as ‘Mister’; just as one day a maid might become a housekeeper and be known as ‘Mrs’ whether she were married or not. And in the meantime it was quite pleasurable, when their employers were on visits to other houses, to be addressed by noble titles. The Earl of Leicester’s granddaughter was once amused to hear one manservant call out to another, ‘I say, Stanhope, did you clean Rosebery’s boots?’39

  Association with the great was supposed to confer a kind of gentility upon those who worked for them; and the more distinguished the master or mistress the more respect his footmen or maids felt was their due. A lady’s-maid, in referring to a grocer in a copy of the Canton House Magazine, is made to remark, ‘Such low people are beneath our attention, though some have the frontery to put themselves upon a footing with a nobleman’s attendant.’

  We sometimes condescend indeed to talk with them in familiar terms, as if they were our equals [she continues], and this has encouraged them to be arrogant. That enormous mass of a woman, our butcher’s wife in St James’s Market, accosts me with as much freedom and as little embarrassment as if she had belonged to a family of rank as well as myself. But I always discountenance such people and convince them that I know how to support the spear of life to which my stars have elevated me.40

  Servants as socially pretentious as this abounded. The Rev. William Jones, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, described a ‘great mushroom man’ named Rogers who had begun his career in Lord Monson’s stables. Jones could scarcely credit the man’s humble beginnings, for he had risen to be steward and in the discharge of his duties and the collection of the estate rents, he assumed an air of such consequence it seemed ‘that he supposed the house and land to be his own’.41

  This man’s rise through the hierarchy of domestic service – or the move from service in a lesser to a greater house – was what many servants set their hearts upon; and it was an ambition often realized. Messenger-boys became footmen, footmen rose to be butlers, butlers were appointed stewards. William Lanceley, who began his working life as hall-boy to the local squire, rose to be steward to the Duke of Connaught.42 Nancy Bare, who was taken from a Hampshire poorhouse to work as a weeder in the gardens of a local family, later became a kitchen-maid. She performed her duties so well that after she had been ‘carefully instructed in all branches of education’, she was taken on as a lady’s-maid.43

  Also, a career in domestic service frequently led to more profitable careers in other fields. Many domestics became innkeepers: John Macdonald saved enough to open a hotel. Others became landladies of lodging-houses; coachmen and grooms set up as dealers in saddlery; footmen became grocers, like the royal footman, William Fortnum, who opened a shop quite close to the site of the present store that still bears his name. The Duke of Chandos’s valet, having saved money and ‘gained information’ at Canons, became a surgeon.

  These were the fortunate ones. So were the servants in such families as that of William Hogarth, a strict but kindly master and ‘a punctual paymaster’, who painted them all looking remarkably contented, and that of the Yorkes of Erddig in North Wales where their portraits were also painted and where their masters wrote verses about them.

  The low wages of servants were also frequently offset by various traditional perquisites such as candle-ends and empty bottles, the dripping, bones and cinders sold by cooks, by the old carriage wheels sold by coachmen, by commissions and presents from shopkeepers, and, perhaps, by legacies and gifts.

  No perquisites had been more widely resented by those from whom they were exacted than the tips known as vails. The diaries of foreign visitors to England in the eighteenth century are full of complaints about the importunities of servants who expected or demanded vails, who lined up in rows when a guest departed from a house to receive the gratuity appropriate to their calling. In some houses, so Jonas Hanway said, the servants actually adopted a fixed scale of rates for all the various services provided for guests.44 ‘If a Duke gives me a Dinner four Times a Week,’ Baron de Pollnitz complained, ‘his Footmen would pocket as much of my Money as would serve my Expenses at the Tavern for a Week.’45 Johann von Archenholz agreed that it was cheaper to pay for a meal in a tavern than accept an invitation from a man of quality. And César de Saussure recorded:

  If you wish to pay your respects to a nobleman and to visit him, you must give his porter money from time to time, else his master will never be at home for you. If you take a meal with a person of rank, you must give every one of the five or six footmen a coin when leaving. They will be ranged in file in the hall, and the least you can give them is one shilling each, and should you fail to do this, you will be treated insolently the next time. My Lord Southwell stopped me one day in the park, and reproa
ched me most amicably with my having let some time pass before going to his house to take soup with him. ‘In truth, my lord,’ I answered, ‘I am not rich enough to take soup with you often.’ His lordship understood my meaning and smiled. This is an abuse that noblemen and gentlemen have vainly endeavoured to abolish.46

  Englishmen knew only too well that the guest who declined to pay vails was more than likely to regret it. He was ‘a marked man’. If he asked for beer, he would be given a piece of bread; if he asked for wine, he would receive, after a long delay, ‘a mixture of the whole sideboard in a greasy glass’. Nobody would notice his empty plate; and he would be served ‘fish sauce with his mutton and pickles with his apple pye’.47

  The custom had become so widespread that the amount a servant might expect to receive in vails was set out in advertisements, and was an important factor in the computation of wages. In an issue of the Daily Advertiser in 1765 the unusually high remuneration of £17 a year was offered to a footman, but then came the explanation: ‘the vails are small.’ The same newspaper contained an advertisement for a footman’s place at only £8 a year; but in this case the value of the vails was said to double the figure.

  Efforts by employers to stamp out the practice of giving vails met with furious objection from servants, although in some households the master’s command that no vails should be accepted was quickly obeyed. One of William Hogarth’s sitters, a Mr Cole, offered a small tip to a servant who opened the door for him on his departure: ‘But the man very quickly refused it, telling me it would be as much as the loss of his place if his master knew it. This was so uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Mr Hogarth’s profession at that time of day, that it struck me, as nothing of the sort had happened to me before.’48 In Scotland the movement to abolish the custom gained ground rapidly after 1760 when a gallery full of riotous servants in Edinburgh attempted to prevent the performance of Townley’s High Life Below Stairs which presented members of their calling in a particularly unfavourable light. But in England employers who forbade their servants to accept vails often lost them to others who allowed them to do so; and in 1761, so the London Chronicle reported, an admiral’s valet, denied his customary gratuities, cut to pieces the hat of one of his master’s guests and made plans to sprinkle the clothes of others with aqua fortis. Sir Francis Dashwood, a leading opponent of vails-giving, was told in a threatening letter that he would ‘sartenly lose his life if he persisted in denying tips to Sarvants that has but nine Pounds tha cannot ceepe a Wife and Female’.49