Up and Down Stairs (3 page)

In the 1970s, the popular television series
Upstairs, Downstairs
re-created life in an MP’s London home, following the parallel stories of the servants and the employer’s family. Although first proposed as a comedy, it was made as a drama series. A more recent example, a fruit of the imagination rather than observation, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel,
The Remains of the Day
(1989), filmed in 1993. This evocative account of the personal tensions and professional pressures on senior country-house servants in the middle of the twentieth century interweaves their lives with the political events of the day.

The film of
Gosford Park
(2001), directed by Robert Altman, with a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, made a particular virture of creating the servants’-eye view of the action above stairs. Mr Fellowes told me in a recent conversation: ‘What I was trying to express was that in these great houses there were two different worlds all operating within feet of each other.’ Fascinated by the complex world of the country house and every detail that a servant would be expected to know, he also warned of the dangers of imagining that every house was the same in all respects: ‘We had a great debate about whether menus for the day were sent up to the mistress on a silver tray or not. A number of former servants with memories of the 1930s were advising us, each of whom recalled an entirely different way of doing it.’
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As for contemporary domestic staff, Mr Fellowes observes: ‘Money is always spent on comfort and part of being comfortable is being
looked after well. Every generation evolves its own version of what that means, and what we have in our age is often an “impermanent” staff, where cooks are regularly hired for house parties but are not permanent members of staff, bringing something of the fluidity of service as it was known in the eighteenth century.’
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Country houses on the bigger estates that are still in private hands have staff to take care of family, house, garden and park. When country houses began opening to the public in the 1970s or 1980s, their staff numbers often swelled, restoring the kind of working community of the pre-war years. Large numbers no longer ‘live in’, but it is still usual to find at least one member of staff living in a flat, or an attached residence, for reasons of security. Some country-house staff today may be housed on the estate or locally and come in daily. As the Countess of Rosebery observed on a tour of her family’s home in 2008: ‘We – and they – all have our own private lives now.’
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With the reduction in staff has also come a change in dynamics. At Bryngwyn, a compact Georgian house owned by the Marchioness of Linlithgow, the household is looked after by Christine Horton. Twenty-five years ago she had come to be nanny to the marchioness’s son; now she is not only PA, cook and housekeeper, but a close friend. She said: ‘I suppose that my relationship with the family has lasted a lot longer than many marriages.’
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At Chavenage, a manor house in Gloucestershire, the Lowsley-Williams are devoted to their daily, Della Robins, who had also originally arrived over forty-eight years ago to help with the children, and is now their cleaner. Mrs Robins recalled in an interview: ‘When I came there was a butler, housekeeper, cook and nanny, and two or three cleaners – and now there’s only me.’
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At Stradey Castle in South Wales in 2006, Sir David and Lady Mary Mansell-Lewis still lived in traditional style, but with many fewer staff than there had been only a few decades earlier. When I interviewed Sir David (d. 2009) with his former chauffeur, Ken Bardsley, perhaps the most touching moment was when Sir David recalled how he picked him out of a line-up to be his soldier-servant while serving in the Welsh Guards: ‘Little did I know I was picking a man who would be a friend for the rest of my life.’
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Holkham Hall in Norfolk is a great country house still in private hands and still operating as the heart of a great country estate. Before the First World War the house had fifty indoor staff, while in 2006 the present earl employed just an administrator, a butler, a cook and three cleaners who came in daily, to help look after the family and the house, ‘much aided by technology’ and with secretarial help from the estate office. There are three full-time gardeners, and the house and estate were also supported by an estate buildings department, a woods department and a farms department.
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So much of the vanished pre-war and immediate post-war world of large staffs still survives in living memory. The final chapter draws on the recollections of a number of people who work or have worked in country houses, offering insight into the historic country house, of lives devoted wholly to others.

Landowners who spent their childhoods in pre-war country houses have equally sharp recollections. When I was shown around the complex of back rooms and attics at Dalmeny in Scotland by the Earl and Countess of Rosebery, I found that the service quarters had been used for largely the same purposes from the early nineteenth century right up to the 1960s. The present earl, born in 1929, could remember those rooms being occupied by a traditional staff when he was small, with gardeners still using yokes to carry buckets of coal.

As we walked around, he was able to describe, almost as if commentating on a reel of film, his own vivid memories of the staff who had worked for his father – a son of the great Victorian prime minister; his mother was a Rothschild.
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Not untypically, the Roseberys themselves now live in a comfortable private apartment on the first floor of the house, while the richly furnished state rooms are opened to the public and used only on occasion.

In the butler’s pantry (now a store room), there was once a big basin under the window, a plate warmer and a table, as well as some comfortable chairs. Lord Rosebery recalled: ‘The butler had an office elsewhere but spent most of his time here.’ In his parents’ day there was usually a butler, two footmen and a boy. ‘The footman slept in the small room off the pantry, so that he could be beside the room where the silver was locked up.’
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Beyond the pantry is a series of offices and the now busy estate office occupies what was once the housekeeper’s room. Lord Rosebery says: ‘The housekeeper and the odd man were here permanently, but all the other staff really travelled between my parents’ other houses with them.’ He points out the original still room: ‘Here they prepared breakfast and afternoon tea, leaving the kitchen free for the bigger meals.’

The former servants’ hall has a spacious area at the end, which was where they used to wash up after the servants’ meals: ‘No one was allowed into the kitchen except the kitchen staff.’ The ground floor of the old kitchen is now a lecture hall; you can still see the roasting oven, but the main range was removed during electrification in the 1930s. ‘There was also a room for kindling and a room for the “odd man”. This room was shown as the oast house in the original plans, but I can remember it being used to trim and refill oil lamps.’

What staff does he employ today? ‘In the 1970s we had around four live-in staff, a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a nurserymaid for the children. Now we have two cleaners who clean our flat, as well as the rooms opened to the public and the estate office, but no cook. The cleaners come in nine to five and we don’t have any live-in staff.’

As there have been many detailed studies of servants in different periods, this book is an intentionally broad sweep of history, bringing together the world of the medieval page with that of the Edwardian footboy, and the buttery and pantry of the Tudor mansion with the butler’s pantry of the nineteenth-century house. The subject has much to teach us about the human condition as well as about the nature, form and atmosphere of country houses. For many servants, their employment might have been just a job; some were hard pressed and discontented; others found their work so rewarding that they spent their whole working lives with the same family, perhaps advancing from menial roles to ones of considerable responsibility.

The below-stairs community, with its inevitable tensions and interactions, seems often to have been one of warmth and colour. Henry Moat, the famous butler at Renishaw Hall, whose role in the life of Osbert Sitwell has brought him his own entry in the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, once wrote to his former employer, Lady Ida Sitwell, looking back fondly on his arrival in service in 1893: ‘You were a fine young lady then full of high spirits and fun. I would not have missed the career for the earth . . . I never felt lonely when I think of my past life, the cinema is not in it.’
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B
ETWEEN 1400 AND 1600
, the households of great landowners were many-layered and complex. Records of the lives of the servants responsible for all the manual work and the careful administration of these castles, abbeys and manor houses are varied and patchy, but one or two characters catch our eye. Some are more senior and long-serving, such as those servants kindly remembered with in legacies by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell; or those who moved on to greater things, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, who started life as a young page to the Countess of Ulster; or such figures as John Russell, usher to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who wrote a treatise on the duties of servants in the 1460s, or Penne, the butler at Wollaton, cited in the household regulations of the 1570s, required to keep his buttery ‘sweet and clear’.

Like supporting characters in a Shakespeare play, these attendants carry verbal messages and money, provide trusted intimacy, receive confidences, act as bodyguards or bear food and wine in ceremony to their lord’s table. Among them are henchmen or young gentlemen attendants, puffing up their chests and defending the honour of their respective households, just as in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
. They are the absent figures for whom Petruchio calls in
The Taming of the Shrew
, Act IV, scene I:

‘Where be these knaves? What! no man at door
To hold my stirrup nor to take my horse?
Where is Nathaniel, Gregory, Philip?’

In this period the whole household, from the top to the bottom, gave attendance, physical help, safety and, most importantly, dignity
to their lord and master. Their presence and activity ensured the display that underlined the position and power of their employer. In return they received, food, clothing and wages, security, and often not a little influence and opportunity of their own. In medieval English the term ‘servant’ was apparently used to describe someone employed to provide labour for a family and given lodging within the household; thus it was their accommodation within the (often peripatetic) household that defined their role.
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The households of the great landowners were slickly managed with some sophistication, far from the grungy chaos so beloved of film-makers. From the 1300s it is apparent that today they would be more akin to the running of a smart military regiment or a very grand hotel, with great emphasis laid on etiquette, discipline and carefully kept accounts. The aristocratic household was certainly complex, serving many functions at once.
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Lordly magnificence was not created merely by the presence and costliness of rich materials, and the consumption of fine food and drink, but by servants, and the semi-ritual nature of their behaviour and deference: whether keeping their lord company, dressing him, or serving his food and wine. His reputation derived from the quality of their service and the richness of their dress.

The numbers involved in these households right up into the late sixteenth century could be breath-taking – although the household itself could shrink or swell as necessary. The Earl of Warwick travelled to London in the mid-fifteenth century with 600 liveried servants; William Cecil, Baron Burghley, employed 120 in 1587; while at the end of the sixteenth century 144 served the Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham Castle. Royal households, which set the standards, held the largest numbers. The 1318
Ordinance
lists 363 servants in Edward II’s household, with 129 in the stables alone, whereas Henry VII’s is thought to have comprised over 800.
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In the thirteenth century around ninety great magnates ran what we would describe as ‘great households’, with roughly another forty-five bishops, abbots and priors living in similar style. And despite our modern view that this was a dangerous and insecure time, the numbers of these households apparently continued to
grow, so that by the end of the fifteenth century it is now thought that there were perhaps as many as 1,500 landed individuals maintaining an aristocratic lifestyle.
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The Earl of Derby’s household in the mid-sixteenth century numbered between 115 and 140, only six of whom were women. The preponderance of males was probably, as suggested above, a reflection of the need for physical security, as the servants of a great household could still in theory be called on to act almost as a private army. In the household of courtier Sir Thomas Lovell in 1522–3, there were still only five female servants out of a total of at least ninety.
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The medieval and Tudor aristocrat expected a life of comfort, protection and elegance for himself and his immediate family, provided by tolerably well-mannered, cleanly dressed, deferential and dutiful attendants, who would in turn need trusted, more manual assistants. They, too, needed to be well cared for, to ensure their loyalty, trust and obedience, and in order to carry out their duties effectively. In such a household even the most menial servants would expect a greater degree of comfort and permanence than they would as an agricultural labourer.
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