Up and Down Stairs (33 page)

The hierarchy and the segregation by gender were also manifested in the dining arrangements:

The maidservants only came into the servants’ hall for dinner and supper, their other meals they got in their own appartments [sic], the
kitchen maids never came, except when a dance was on. The laundry maids in the laundry, the housemaids in housemaid’s room; the dairy maid would feed with the stillroom maids; nursemaids in their nursery; butler, valets, groom of chambers, housekeeper, lady’s-maids in the steward’s room. So that there is a lot of one servant waiting on another, the under ones of each department doing it, they in turn being waited on, when promoted.
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Thus even the meals were like minor military operations, but also seen as a way of training junior staff.

The baron liked to impress but had a frugal side: ‘In cases when visitors were staying in the house we wore our dress liveries, with a lot more yellow and black braid plastered up the back and across the front. The butler wore black cloth breeches and black silk stockings. Our silver shoe buckles were on the plate list, and had to be given up when leaving the situation.’
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London visits amused some servants more than others:

As the London season came round, we packed up, and went to town. On going out to dinner, or other functions, the Baron always had two footmen standing up behind his C spring carriage, and the coachman with his curly wig on. The Baron was a big bug at his seat in the country, but when he got to London, among the other big bugs, he was not a big bug after all. A London season is very tiring to servants. There is not only the day work, but the night work as well. They would keep us out regularly till one, two, or three o’clock, but we had to start work at the same time as the other servants. Often during the London season we were kept so short of our hours of sleep that I used to go to sleep on the carriage . . . We were all glad to get back to the country house again after the London season with its dinner parties, tea parties, evening parties and night work.
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At significant moments, Mr Horne felt hemmed in and desperate to leave service, but in the end he stayed the course:

I felt that I was gradually going into a net, and losing all liberty in life: the constraint became almost unbearable, but what could I do? I had no trade in my hands. I knew nothing but gentleman’s service wherewith to get a living. I suppose some men does not feel it, men with no further
ambition than to fritter their lives away from day to day in such a calling; a sort of man-woman existance [sic], at the mercy of the gentry’s whims and fancies; cooped up day and night with out variation.
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The pay too was sometimes barely adequate: ‘All this time I had been away in service I always sent the greater part of my wages home, but in those days a second footman only got £28 a year, and had to pay his own laundry bill out of that. We were allowed £2 per year for hair powder, but always used flour.’
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Horne found a more congenial berth in the service of an employer better tempered than the baron:

It was not long before I met with an under-butler’s place to a Noble Earl, who had a house in London, in the country, and one in Scotland. It requires great strength to polish silver, also great care and endurance . . . Here our livery was very smart. Scarlet breeches and waistcoat, blue coat with scarlet collar and cuffs, trimmed with inch wide silver lace, and one epaulet on the left shoulder, white stockings, and buckles.
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The earl’s household was substantial: ‘There were twenty-five indoor servants at this place, besides housemaids at the other houses. The butler did no manual work, he only superintended the men, the work was all done for him. All he had to do was to walk into the dining room, the boy carrying his wine basket, at the last minute, cast his eye over the table, when all was ready to begin.’
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Mr Horne had more respect for this employer than he did for many of his later ones:

This place was the best regulated situation that I have ever been in . . . When the bell rang to clear breakfast, the butler would answer it. Her Ladyship was the sister of a Duke. She would remain in the breakfast room, give the butler his orders for the day, how many visitors (if any) and which rooms they would occupy, the number that would be at meals, also orders for the carriages.

Then he would come out, and the housekeeper would go in and get her orders, she would come out and the cook would go in. Then the butler would ring the bell twice for the footman to clear away the breakfast. All this took only a few minutes to do. The butler would
come to the pantry and give us our orders. Perhaps he would say to me, Eighteen, or twenty, for dinner, use the silver, or the gilt service, as the case may be . . .

The housekeeper would give her orders to the head housemaid, and stillroom maids. The cook would do the same to her kitchen and scullery maids. Everything went like clockwork, no confusion, no jealousies, no treading on each other’s toes; no occasion for saying I didn’t know this or that; for each department got their orders, and acted up to them.
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Mr Horne was touched, as many servants seemed to have been, by the history, tradition and atmosphere of the house in which he lived and worked:

The Castle was a fine old place, with a wide moat . . . Often I sat up all night with ‘Old Daddy’ as we used to call him. He had brewed the beer for the Castle for over fifty years, and listen to his tales of olden times, of what they used to do in previous lords times. Still, a great many of the old customs were kept up; we still ate our food off pewter plates and dishes, each with the coronet and crest engraved on them, we also drank our beer out of horns. We had the choice of small beer or tea for breakfast (as tea on its first introduction into England was only drunk by the gentry). [Whether these customs were genuinely old or revived, there is no way of telling.]

Also, no conversation was allowed until after the cloth had been removed, and the health drank. The under butler stands up at the bottom of the table, holds a horn of old ale up in his hands, taps the table twice, and says: ‘My Lord and Lady’ [and] the others reply, ‘With all my heart’. This old custom was observed every day.
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In such a well-run and well-cared for house, the turnover of staff might be slower than in many others:

Servants seldom wanted to leave that place, unless they had been there some time and wanted promotion. I think what kept them together to a great extent was [that] we were allowed a dance on the first Tuesday in every month. The mason who worked on the estate, played the ’cello, his son played second fiddle, the tailor played first violin. I played sometimes as well . . . Our programme consisted of
lancers, quadrilles, waltzes, schottisches, polkas, Valse of Vienna, Polka, Mazurka, and country dances . . . I think this sort of thing keeps servants together, makes them just one big happy family.
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Mr Horne enjoyed working here, but as with many junior men-servants he had to move on to find a more senior position. It was during this time that he became more and more disillusioned with his treatment by the upper classes and their unreasonable demands. There was one baronet and MP whom he described memorably as having ‘the brains of a rabbit’. However, he recalled the earl and the castle with unmixed affection.

After going through the daily routine with this Noble family for several years as under butler I thought I would blossom out into a full-blown valet. As I could clean and load a gun, clean a scarlet coat, top boots and leather breeches with the best of them: also I knew about fishing, and what to do on a salmon fishing expedition. Drying the lines, and clothes, etc., ready for the next morning, and dry all the flies that had been used. I felt I wanted to see a bit more of the world before I settled down to the humdrum life of a butler.
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The latter part of his story belongs to another chapter.

Horne’s many-layered career, moving between multiple employers, reminds us of the mobility of the nineteenth-century servant. Whilst staff would usually be recruited by the house steward, or by the housekeeper where there was no steward, the landowner and his wife usually interviewed any prospective personal attendant.
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References or ‘characters’ were all important, but even when the appointment had been made, all might not go to plan.

In the 1840s, Lavinia Jane Watson, the daughter of Lord George Quin, married Richard Watson of Rockingham Castle. Her diaries for the 1840s record just such a case in point. On 1 January 1844, her trusted lady’s maid, Lloyd, was ill, apparently suffering from nerves at having to hand in her notice. ‘Champion [the housekeeper] broke the ice about Lloyd, who wishes to marry Mr Lloyd; and as it incurred her leaving me, she was in low spirits. Had an interview with the bride and comforted her.’
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However, immediately after these affectionate remarks, she expressed her dismay at the character of Lloyd’s replacement, writing on 17 February: ‘My new maid Stephenson arrived on Wednesday, a short old fashioned, mincing body – won’t do.’ By 21 February: ‘Stephenson going.’ On the 23rd: ‘Children well. I with bad cough. Took leave of Stephenson and her humble resigned manner on the occasion almost made me feel a lump, and yet I am sure I have never felt less fascinated by anyone. Champion very good about it altogether.’ This scenario must have been a familiar contest of sensitivity and self-interest.
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Mrs Watson was a close friend of Charles Dickens, who visited Rockingham Castle on several occasions. Old Champion, the housekeeper, is thought by some to have been the model for Mrs Rouncewell, housekeeper in his novel,
Bleak House
, to Sir Leicester Dedlock at his home of Chesney Wold. She is described in Chapter 7 as ‘a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat . . . It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine Chesney Wold without Mrs Rouncewell, but she has only been here fifty years.’ Famously, she gives a tour of the house to the visiting Mr Guppy and his friend Walt, with a young gardener opening and closing the shutters, while the visitors are overwhelmed by the size and gloom of the house.

As in the eighteenth century, the recruitment of domestic servants is often mentioned in letters between landowning families. On 3 May 1804, Lady Blount wrote to Francis Fortescue Turvile at Bosworth Hall, Northamptonshire, to say that ‘if she is not yet provided with a House & Laundry maid there is a very good one to be had who was bred up by Lady Clifford . . . & when she went to Igbrooke took [her] with her as under nursery maid where she lived within these two years’. The maid in question had also worked at two other houses where the servants had been discharged when the household was broken up but ‘had given great satisfaction’.
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Goodwood’s house steward, Robert Smith, wrote on 19 May 1858 to Archibald Hair, secretary to the 5th Duke of Richmond, of his problems in finding a new recruit for the still room, using personal recommendations and, presumably, servants’ registries: ‘I have not left
a thing undone that I could do about getting a Still Room Maid both Publick and Private but I can find nothing Likely to suit at all – Mrs Sanders would like her to be 30 years of Age and to know Something of cooking and Wages [10 shillings] [but] every body tells me there is nothing of the kind to be had in London.’
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Sometimes, as literacy became more widespread, servants themselves would write in pursuit of a position. One young man, who had had the care of five horses, wrote to offer his services to Sir Henry FitzHerbert: ‘I understand that you are or will be shortly in want of a Groom . . . I have this morning been to Tissington and Johnson the Keeper (who knows me very well) said that I might in all probability get the situation if you were not already suited.’
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References could be less than flattering, as illustrated by this letter from a rector’s wife to Lady Alice Packe, dated 18 April 1887: ‘Dear Lady Alice, I am afraid I cannot answer all your questions quite satisfactorily about Mary Anne Millington. She was certainly very dirty but perhaps with a strict servant over her she might improve. She was only here six months as a kitchen maid & it was her first place. She was good tempered & I believe her to be honest & steady . . . [but she] wanted a proper training.’
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The habit of writing over-positive references for servants whom employers wanted to see move on was a subject of lively debate in the letters page of
The Times
in August 1879: ‘too many ladies give unwarrantable characters to servants whom they wish to get clear of’.
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Nevertheless a character reference was clearly essential for any future positions. As one butler tartly observed in a letter to the same publication in the same year: ‘At the whim of the master, the servant starves or he lives.’
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The papers of Henry, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, from the 1870s at Highclere include several notes relating to the recruitment of a valet, who might possibly also undertake the role of groom of the chambers.
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They make moving documents, capturing the life of a manservant in a few lines. They illustrate too how mobile servants’ lives were, for even in houses that were comfortable and well run, usually only senior servants would serve for long periods, while younger servants had to move on to get promotion.
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