Up and Down Stairs (2 page)

In the post-medieval world, the changing perception of individual liberty led to a continual re-examination of the role and profession of the residential domestic servant, whose regimented lives and dependent positions ensured the existence of the country house. The challenges to landed power, the changes brought by the industrial revolution and a new political idealism all had their impact on the way servants saw their work. By the early nineteenth century, the word itself had begun to take on more negative associations, of subservience to an inflexible class system.

For instance, William Tayler, an experienced footman, wrote in his diary in 1837: ‘The life of a gentleman’s servant is something like that of a bird shut up in cage. The bird is well housed and well fed, but deprived of liberty, and liberty is the dearest and sweetes[t] object of all Englishmen. Therefore I would rather be like the sparrow or lark, have less of housing and feeding and rather more liberty.’
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But elsewhere he reflected that he could not understand how tradesmen and mechanics could sneer at the domestic servant, as, by virtue of his exposure to more variety, richer experience and greater mobility, he saw so much more of the world than they did.

Whatever modern observers feel about the idea of domestic service, there is no doubt that it was defining feature of country-house life for centuries, and these pages will reveal something of the extraordinary range of men and women on their staffs, whose contribution should be valued in its own right.

The story of the country-house servant is a very human one, as varied as any other working career in agriculture and industry. However, they are also unusual in that, unlike the vast majority who worked as single-handed, general domestics in middle-class town
houses, they had more opportunities for career progression and social life.

Above all, the story of a country-house servant on a landed estate of any size was always one of a community of people with closely inter-related careers and lives, often at the centre of a self-sufficient and insulated environment of an agricultural estate.
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The statistician W.T. Lanyon noted in 1908 of one country-house environment: ‘the premises constituted a settlement as large as a small village: carrying coals, making up fires and attending to a vast number of candles and lamps, necessitated the employment of several footmen.’
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The lives of the servants were reflected in the physical form and layout of the country house, a theme that is explored throughout this book.

Moreover, domestic servants made up the largest contingent of the
dramatis personae
of the country house, even if they are less well recorded in the history books than those they served. In the late Middle Ages and the Tudor period, noble households might number hundreds of menials, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such households had reduced to between twenty-five and forty indoor servants. Often there would be an even bigger staff for the gardens and the home farm. Even in living memory, until 1939, a landowning family of just six people could be looked after by a substantial resident indoor staff of around twenty.

There are no simple national statistics for people employed in domestic service in country houses alone. Nationally, larger households in the Tudor era would have accounted for several thousand souls, from higher-ranking gentleman attendants down to the boy turning the spit in the kitchen. There were probably around 1,500 great households with staffs of between 100 and 200.
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, great country houses generally employed in the region of thirty to fifty indoor staff, and if one includes outdoor staff, of gardeners, grooms and gamekeepers, the total might reach many times that figure. The Duke of Westminster employed over 300 servants at Eaton Hall in the 1890s, while the Duke of Bridgewater retained some 500 staff at Ashridge and, indeed, was said never to refuse a request for work from a local man.

At Welbeck Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, where in 1900 the Duke of Portland employed around 320 servants, his rule was recalled as one of ‘almost feudal indisputable power’.
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Moreover, major landowners often had staff spread over two or three estates as well as a London house, although in many cases this would be a skeleton staff only, with the core skilled individuals travelling with their employers from place to place, itself a considerable logistical operation. As a result the staff of the country house was also that of the London house when in use by the landowning family.
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However, even when such households were at a peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the numbers of aristocratic and wealthier gentry country-house servants could not have accounted for more than 15 to 20 per cent of the national total of domestic servants.
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During that period domestic service was one of the major forms of employment. In 1851, for instance, 905,000 women and 134,000 men worked as servants. The total number nationally is thought to have been around 2 million in 1901, out of a total population of 40 million, making domestic service the largest employment for English women, and the second largest employment for all English people, male and female, after agricultural labour.
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In the census of 1911, domestic servants accounted for 1.3 million, outnumbering the 1.2 million in agriculture, and the 971,000 in coal mining (and, incidentally, the same number of those involved in teaching today).
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After the Second World War, the world of the country house changed out of all recognition, and the enclosed, stratified and hierarchical communities of domestic servants evaporated. Houses that must have hummed with activity, at least below stairs and behind the green baize door (invented in the eighteenth century to increase soundproofing), became quieter, emptier places, in a process that had begun back in the 1920s with increased taxation and the effects of the Great Depression.

After 1945, when their wartime use came to an end, many large country houses were not reoccupied because landowners were unable to recruit – and afford – the staff to manage them. As country houses cannot function without help, those that remained in private ownership relied, as some do today, on a loyal and dedicated staff. Whilst
there are still butlers, house-managers, housekeepers and cooks, few are resident. The mid-to-late twentieth century became the era of the daily cleaner – with agency staff brought in, often on a regular basis, for larger-scale hospitality and special events.

According to Fiona Reynolds, Director-General of the National Trust, most of us in Britain – where less than a hundred years ago domestic service was still one of the largest employers – will have ancestors who were in service. This prompts our interest in the whole working of the house, its domestic spaces as well as the grand state rooms. Both have – after all – always been entirely interdependent.
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Although the country-house servant might be seen as belonging to a separate and elite group, with modest relevance to the rest of the world, they were the same staff who moved back and forth between the country house and the London town house where so much political entertaining went on, thus playing their role in that arena.
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The servants of aristocracy were the scene shifters and wardrobe mistresses of the pageantry of British politics.

Moreover, country-house servants are ever present in many of the best novels and stories that define our sense of national identity, both in our own eyes and in those from other countries. When I began this project, I asked Professor Cannadine, then the head of the Institute of Historical Research in London, for advice. His first words to me were: ‘You must look very carefully at P.G. Wodehouse.’ And he was right; Wodehouse has helped to form the image of the servant in the modern imagination. His stories are a study in upper-class life, of course, but, for all their humour, it is the well-observed detail that makes them so effective: in the mixture of formality and intimacy, the potency of the emotional dependence of the upper class on those who worked for them. Jeeves was a manservant – a valet, a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ – rather than a butler proper, but valets often become butlers and certainly travelled to countless country houses in their roles, as Jeeves does in the stories.
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If Jeeves is compared to Wodehouse’s other fictional butler character, Beach, the long-suffering attendant to the Earl of Emsworth at Blandings Castle, it is clear that they are cut from the same cloth. But remember, too, the delicious tug of war that goes on between the
earl and his head gardener, the tough no-nonsense Scot McAllister. Their subtle battle of wits must have been played out time and time again in the English country house, between the specialist servant and his or her employer.

The artful servant, in the service of a not quite so bright master or mistress, has a long history and was a familiar theme in the drama of classical Rome, where servants or slaves were depicted as either cunning or foolish. The heroic figure of Figaro in Mozart’s famous opera is a classic example of a smart servant outwitting his master. Napoleon described the original character as depicted in Beaumarchais’ play, on which Mozart based his opera, as ‘revolution in action’.
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The struggles of servants, their right to be respected as distinct individuals, and their dependent and often vulnerable status, were a particular focus for the eighteenth-century English novelist – even if sometimes viewed as tragicomic. Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
(1722) begins with a pretty young woman taken into service as a companion, prior to her seduction by one of the sons of the house, which leads to her extraordinary and picaresque career.

Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
(1741) describes the efforts of an attractive maid to resist being compromised by her young master after the death of his mother; she holds out for marriage and in the end succeeds. Henry Fielding considered this tale so pious, and its outcome so unlikely, that he wrote a parody,
Shamela
, and the perhaps better known sequel,
The Adventures of Joseph Andrews
(1742), about her fictional and equally virtuous brother.

The hero of Tobias Smollett’s
Humphrey Clinker
(1771) is a worthy young man who is taken on as a footman and serves his master faithfully until he finds eventually that he is his employer’s long-overlooked natural son. William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
(1847–8) hums with the curious intimacy of the lives of both servants and employers. One of the central figures, the clever but flirtatious governess, Becky Sharp, is contrasted with the more traditional, long-serving, country-house servants of her baronet master, Sir Rawdon Crawley, whose younger son she successfully marries.

Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(1847) offers another vivid portrayal of the path of the educated single woman in the role of a governess, this
time in a remote country house, working alongside a housekeeper and a staff, often in the absence of their master. The same is true of Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), although he can hardly have had the first-hand insight that Charlotte Brontë brought to her novel.

John Galsworthy’s
The Country House
, set in 1891 and published in 1907, opens with a description of the coachman, first footman and second groom, the latter two in ‘in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top hats’, waiting for a train bringing guests for a house party,
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a defining feature of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century country-house life.

How realistic were these portrayals? We cannot be sure. In 1894 the novelist George Moore published the fictional – and improbable – account of a maidservant,
Esther Waters
, seduced and made pregnant by another servant. She is disgraced and cast out, but later returns to marry her seducer and even to care for her original, pious mistress who has been financially nearly ruined and is living in a few rooms of her once-opulent country house.

Despite his own upbringing in an Irish country house, making him familiar with being waited on by servants, George Moore is said to have paid his London charlady to fill him in on a maidservant’s life while he was writing the book.
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Vita Sackville-West’s
The Edwardians
(1930) paints a brilliant portrait of country-house life, in which the young duke derives considerable emotional security from the servants who have brought him up, is an essential part of his character, based on her own memories of a childhood at a very well-staffed Knole.

It is perhaps the novels of the interwar years that contribute most to our imagined version of a servant-supported lifestyle. Think of Daphne du Maurier’s chilling portrayal of a sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in
Rebecca
, or Evelyn Waugh’s mysterious butler Phibrick in
Decline and Fall
(1928), or his depiction of Lord Sebastian Flyte’s touching pre-war visit to his nanny in
Brideshead Revisited
(1945). In contrast, whilst Agatha Christie’s novels teem with companions, secretaries, maids, cooks, butlers and gardeners, they are rarely more than cut-out characters.

Famously, D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1960) focused on the relationship between a gamekeeper and his employer’s wife. It is ironic to note that, in the court case prompted by the furore over its graphic descriptions of sex, the charge of obscenity foundered, in part at least, due to the prosecuting barrister’s remark: ‘Is this a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ This became a
cause célèbre
, illustrating the disconnection between the world of the privileged, servant-employing Establishment, and the essential freedoms of everyone else. The whole case seemed to turn on this remark and the prosecution dwindled into a joke. Penguin won the case and went on to sell 2 million copies. Why, in the late twentieth century, should any adult not choose their own books?
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