Up and Down Stairs (34 page)

One candidate was an Italian, Bernardo Giannienetti, who was forty, and single; valets were unlikely to be married, given the burdens of the job. He had worked not only for General Fox for eight years, describing the general as a ‘good friend’, but also for the general’s uncle, Lord Lilford, for whom he had been valet and groom of the chambers. He was, however, ‘not accustomed to hunting clothes’, although he did speak five languages, a useful attribute in a valet who accompained his masters on their travels.

Another candidate was George Copsey, aged thirty, who for nine years had been valet to a Mr Stephen Tower of 70 Grosvenor Street and, according to the notes, had worked as a footman but not as a groom of the chambers. He spoke French and a little German, and his last post had been in a commercial situation, for the notes record that he ‘left because not comfortable at hotel’. A last note in red pencil states rather bluntly, in a phrase that echoes down the centuries, ‘Won’t do.’

More promising was William Pratt, who had been a valet and groom of the chambers to the Duke of Montrose, for six years a footman to the Earl of Mount Edgecumbe, and for three years a valet and butler to Lord March (heir to the Duke of Richmond). Although less of a linguist, he could ‘get anything in French but not converse’. He was, however, ‘used to Hunting and Shooting clothes’, which frequently needed brushing and cleaning overnight. Pratt came from Northamptonshire and was thirty-one. Additional notes remark that he was ‘steady with horses’. A reference or ‘character’ was supplied by Lord March, written direct to Lord Carnavon and dated 11 May 1873: ‘Dear Lord Carnavon, Pratt left me last July since which time he has been living with a lady in Brighton [in service as a footman] and left her to go to Germany but for some reason or other has not gone and came to ask me if I would give him another character. I believe him to be honest, sober and steady, a very good valet and attentive to his master’s needs.’
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The Benyons of Englefield House in Berkshire kept a detailed servants’ book, where every detail of interest was recorded about their recruitment and training. In a parallel to the Carnarvon papers, it includes a list of questions to be put to applicants. For the butler:
‘Where did you live last, and for how long? Why did you leave, and when? What was the establishment, and what were you? This is a regular Family – prayers each morning – punctual – the Plate is under your charge, and you will help clean it – You will lay the Breakfast things, & answer the Drawing Room Bell before 12 o’clock.’
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The master here was unusually involved in the detail of administering the cellar, for he wrote somewhat peremptorily: ‘I keep the key of my own Cellar, & give you out Wine as it is wanted, of w[hi]ch. you keep an account. I order everything, and pay for everything – you order nothing except by my direction. Can you brew? You give out the Ale yourself in a fixed allowance. Can you read and write? Are you married? A Protestant – Healthy – no Apothecaries’ Bills [for bought medicines] no perquisites – how old are you? You will valet me.’
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Many valets had genuinely interesting experiences as valets and travelling companions. William Henry Clifton, who joined the 13th Duke of Norfolk’s service at the age of sixteen in 1851, had become the porter by 1885, and by 1890 was the personal valet to the 15th Duke, whom he accompanied to the Holy Land. His wage, at £80 per annum, was second only to that of the butler. He kept a diary account of his travels in the Middle East with his employer sharing an experience that would have been very unusual for a working-class man in the nineteenth century.

‘We saw the house of Nicodemus it is part now of the monastery. A building was pointed out to us as the house of Tabitha . . . April 20 . . . We stopped at Sarris where we found some tents and lunch all ready laid out on the ground. Some chicken, some mutton and two hard boiled eggs on each plate and some bread and an orange. The place was pointed out where the Ark remained for some 20 years’.
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He also left a memoir of a visit to Spa in eastern Belgium, which includes a reference to his purchase of a French grammar so that he could learn French.
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Great households required careful management, for the very practical reason that security was paramount where expensive commodities and valuable objects were concerned. In a community dedicated to the comfort of the landowning family, it was not unreasonable to
regulate the noise generated by comings and goings. Myriad examples can be found in country houses of household regulations, often printed, which read like school or college rules. Perhaps the rule existed because the system was regularly abused, illustrating normal rather than proscribed behaviour.

One example of a typically structured set of household regulations in the nineteenth century can be found at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, giving duties, times of meals, rules about access and entertaining in the servants’ hall:

The porter is always to be in livery, and never to be called away to discharge other duties than those which strictly belong to his office. Outer doors are to be kept constantly fastened, and their bells to be answered by the Porter only, except when he is otherwise indispensably engaged, when the Assistant by his authority shall take his place.

Every servant is expected to be punctually in his/her place at the time of meals. Breakfast: 8 a.m. Dinner 12.45. Tea 5 p.m. Supper 9 p.m. No Servant is to take any knives or forks or other article, nor on any account to remove any provisions, nor ale or beer out of the Hall. No Gambling of any description, nor Oaths, nor abusive language are on any account to be allowed.

No Servant is to receive any Visitor, Friend or Relative into the house except by written order from the Housekeeper, which must be dated, and will be preserved by the Porter and shown with his monthly accounts; nor to introduce any person into the Servants’ Hall, without the consent of the Porter. No Tradesmen, nor any other persons having business in the house, are to be admitted except between the hours of 9 am and 3 pm, and in all cases the Porter must be satisfied that the person he admits has business there. The Hall door is to be finally closed at Half past Ten o’clock every night, after which time no person will be admitted into the house except those on special leave . . .
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This focus on regulation of servants’ lives was also expressed in architecture, with some landowners continually updating their service quaters. The servants’ hall was central to the working areas and staff accommodation at the back of the house, all of which continued throughout the century to be subject to adjustments of architectural
thinking. One typical example of early-nineteenth-century planning is Dalmeny in Scotland, designed in 1819 by William Wilkins in a neo-Tudor style, and resembling the famous Norfolk manor house at East Barsham. According to J.P. Neale in
Views of Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen
(1825), this comfortable, picturesque house was ‘calculated more for comfort and convenience than show’.

Dalmeny is divided into essentially three ranges, with the private family apartments at one end; the main reception rooms, library, drawing room and dining room in the main portion; and the service rooms and double-height kitchen in the corresponding wing. The pivot of the service wing is the butler’s pantry and plate store with the butler’s bedroom beside it, a common security measure. After that came the steward’s office, a small sitting room for female servants and the housekeeper’s room, leading to the still room and kitchen, with sleeping accommodation, possibly in dormitories, above. Beyond that were further household offices and the laundry with its own walled drying yard.
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For ease of access, the countess’s lady’s maid had sleeping quarters in the family wing – so she could be on call – while the nursery wing was always above the butler’s pantry. In one large bedroom in the tower, which is thought to have been used for visiting ladies’ maids because it gave easy access to the bedrooms just below it on the first floor, there is evidence that it was once separated into private areas by hanging curtains, as in a modern hospital.
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Even in country houses on a grander scale, it was common in the nineteenth century to add or remodel sizeable areas of service accommodation. When the 6th Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858), the only son of the famous Georgiana, inherited Chatsworth in 1811, he employed Sir Jeffry Wyatville to extend the house to the north with an extensive new wing, incorporating a grand dining room. At the same time Wyatville substantially remodelled the servants’ accommodation.

Unusually, the duke himself wrote what was effectively a guidebook,
Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick
, privately printed in 1845, telling the story of the house in his own words. Under ‘The Offices’, he remarked that the East Lobby ‘used to be the servants’ hall, and a
very bad one: it is now used chiefly as a passage in which you must be skilful to avoid falling over all those trunks’.
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On the left hand were

the Housekeepers’ private apartments, consisting of three rooms that were the tea-room and the footmen’s rooms. The sitting-room is very good, though not quite so much so as a friend thought, when he said to me, ‘You know your mother had not such a room as this.’ It is, however, convenient and light, and overlooks all arrivals; . . . Next to these, towards the North, comes the servants’ hall, a beautiful example of Sir Jeffry’s stone-work, arched, as the Offices chiefly are, with great solidity and strength.’
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He was also clearly proud of the new kitchen although he had reservations about some of the other service areas:

The kitchen itself is handsome and spacious, and contains steam-cupboards, and a hot steam-table; and wood is the sole fuel employed in the high grate as well as coke for the steam contrivances, which, diminishing the quantity of blacks [smuts], must add greatly to the cleanliness of the place . . . The pastry [cook’s preparation room] convenient, the scullery awful, and the larder atrocious; for, although it may be airy, and highly convenient for salting, it looks into the abysses of a dusty coal-yard. . . . I spare you bakehouse, washhouse, and laundry: neither will we boast of the poultry-yard; but the dairy, of good architecture, is not bad. You pass under a building that contains the Clerk of works’ office and lodging-rooms, and by a gun-room [count] to the Porter’s lodge.
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Given the ever more complex arrangement of rooms, it is not surprising that the technology of bells continued to develop throughout the nineteenth century, during which period many late-eighteenth-century wire-systems were updated wires. Many early-nineteenth century systems are still visible, if now unused, in the staff corridors of country houses. But the constant ringing of bells could be the source of some contention with staff, some servants walking great distances to find out what was required, before covering the same distance twice to return with the required object. Such
strains, indeed, lay at the core of one of the most famous murder trials, when in 1840, a Swiss valet, François Courvoisier, murdered Lord William Russell, uncle of the Duke of Bedford. He was said to have been discovered as a thief and murdered his elderly master, and hanged. But in his defence, he said his master was always finding fault with him.
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At midnight on the dreadful day, his master rang the bell for attention and Courvoisier went up holding a warming pan to be at the ready. Lord William was furious that his servant should had seen fit to prejudge his request and sent him down. He rang the bell a little later and when the valet arrived asked him to fetch a warming pan. Later he came down, found his valet in the dining room and sacked him; shortly after this, the valet claimed he snapped and killed his master in a fury.
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No doubt to avoid such possible irritations some houses installed speaking tubes from the 1840s, although they were also thought to be a risk to privacy (by both parties) and, at the end of the century, internal telephone systems, sometimes routed through the butler’s pantry. Better systems were continually being explored, including pneumatic systems and eventually electrical systems, with the little flags in the windows of a glass box that moved to show which room had called.
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One of the great bones of contention about servants’ accommodation was the potential dampness of subterranean bedrooms, an issue highlighted by a comparison of two great Irish country houses: Lissadell, where Thomas Kilgallon worked, which was constructed in the 1830s and little changed thereafter; and Humewood, built some three decades later.

Lissadell, with its neoclassical style and characterful, late-Georgian design, enjoys a dramatic position near the coast in County Sligo. The English architect, Francis Goodwin, published his designs for the house in
Rural Architecture
(1835), explaining in detail why the service quarters had to be placed below ground: ‘The offices, together with the sleeping rooms for the servants, are in the basement, yet, as may be seen by the view of the house, partly above ground. One advantage, if no other, gained by this system is that it raises the floor above them, and therefore contributes to the cheerfulness of the
principal rooms, which thus being a little elevated, enjoy a better prospect.’
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Goodwin acknowledged that ‘many, we are aware, object to offices being at all sunk below the house in a country residence where there is generally ample space for building them above ground, either as wings to the house itself or otherwise.’ This was a customary solution in Palladian country houses, including the rebuilt Carton in County Kildare, but Goodwin listed the pitfalls of siting servants’ wings above ground: ‘If erected as wings, unless consistent with the architecture of the rest of the design, they will rather impair than improve the general effect.’ Moreover, it was undoubtedly more expensive, because the architectural quality of the exterior appearance of the servants’ wing would have to match that of the central range. Goodwin was adamant, in what was probably a topic of hot debate among architects and landlords at the time, that if ‘thus situated, the offices in one wing are at an inconvenient distance from those in the other. Besides which they must more or less interrupt the view from the apartments of the main building.’
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