Up and Down Stairs (36 page)

In the very grandest houses, Kerr wrote: ‘a house-steward is employed as the chief officer of all, assisted perhaps by a kitchen-clerk.’ This individual would have an office and a steward’s room, which was usually ‘a Dining-room for the upper servants, and incidentally a common room for them during the day, and a sitting-room for them in the evening’ – effectively an upper servants’ hall. He added, ‘an incidental purpose of the Steward’s-room is to receive visitors of the rank of the upper servants, and superior tradesman-people and others coming on business.’
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Furthermore, ‘there ought to be a comfortable fireside, and a prospect which shall be at least not disagreeable; the outlook however ought not to be towards the walks of the family.’
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Often overlooked today, the housemaid’s closet was the principal store for the brooms, dusters, pails and brushes used to clean the house. J.C. Loudon wrote in 1846 that it should be

light and roomy with a plaster floor, with an inner closet for the bedroom night lights, or rush light cases etc, with drawers underneath for
cloths and dusters. There should be pegs and shelves, on which to put anything out of the way . . .

As warm water is very much used by the housemaid, their closet, in a large house, should contain a small copper, for heating water, and, if possible, it should be supplied with water by a leaden pipe, [which] . . . would also be great convenience. In large establishments, the labour of carrying up and down the stairs clean and dirty water is very great, so that a pipe supplying soft water and a sink for [emptying] the slops is necessary in a place of this kind, which should also contain a large box in one corner, for a supply of coals to be used in the upper part of the house.’
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A brushing room, for the wet- and dry-brushing of hunting clothes, was frequently encountered in Victorian country-house plans. In the eighteenth century, brushing was often done in the servants’ hall. Early brushing rooms seem to have opened off the hall, but later were usually separate. Westonbirt House in Gloucestershire had two brushing rooms, one for the household and the other to be used by visiting valets.
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In the early nineteenth century, lamp rooms were common, as the cleaning and refuelling of lamps required considerably more space than replacing candles in candlesticks. However, after the 1890s, the lamp room was gradually superseded by a switch room or generating room providing electricity, with Cragside in Northumberland being one of the first to have electric light throughout. Before the 1870s, new houses always had their own brewhouse, although after this point they were rarer.
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Servants’ sleeping quarters naturally varied depending on the age and scale of the house. During the nineteenth century, there was an increasing emphasis on separating them from those of the family, whereas up until the eighteenth century close personal servants often slept close to their employers, to be on call. From the mid nineteenth century, the pattern was to remove servants as far as possible from the principal bedroom floor.

For largely moral reasons, as well as practical – in order to avoid unwanted pregnancies – the separation of menservants and female servants was taken increasingly seriously. In the nineteenth century
the maids often lived in attics, often accessed only by walking past the housekeeper’s bedroom, while the men occupied basement rooms or rooms over the other offices.
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Up until the 1840s, menservants often slept in dormitory accommodation, sometimes called the ‘barracks’. Later on, senior menservants usually had a single room each, whilst their juniors shared. Housemaids and kitchenmaids would also be expected to share, in twos or fours, while the housekeeper, cook and lady’s maid would expect a room of their own, as would the head housemaid and head kitchenmaid.
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Some of the best-preserved service quarters laid out in the last half of the century can be found at Lanhydrock in Cornwall. After a fire, it was rebuilt for Lord Robartes by Richard Coad, who had worked on an earlier remodelling of the house. The attention given to the service areas and accommodation reflects the preoccupations discussed in Kerr’s book, adapted to the needs of an older house.

The plans illustrate perfectly the multiplicity of service rooms that exemplified the High Victorian country house. In the centre of the south range on the ground floor were the butler’s sitting room, bedroom and pantry with a strong room, which had a safe for the plate (silver) and the pantry boy by the door for security. The housekeeper’s quarters were near by, on the other side of the pantry court, with the maids’ sitting room adjoining. As usual, the still room was beside the housekeeper’s room and the substantial servants’ hall completed the courtyard.
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Beyond the servants’ hall, to the west, were the lamp room and gun room, wine and beer cellars. The huge kitchen ‘was built like a college hall with great wooden roof trusses supporting a high roof over.
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It lay close, but not adjacent, to the dining room. A series of associated rooms were close at hand, with a large scullery to one side, plus a bakehouse, dry larder, fish larder, meat larder, dairy scullery and dairy, which had its own external access. Between the kitchen and the dining hall were a servery and a china closet. The male and female servants’ bedrooms were approached via different staircases. The nursery accommodation for the Robarteses’ large family was arranged above the servants’ hall, still room and housekeeper’s rooms.
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These areas survived remarkably unaltered and are much cherished. Today they are presented convincingly by the National Trust, which was given the house by the 7th Lord Clifden, who continued to live there until 1966. He would little have imagined the interest that the service quarters would ignite in modern visitors.

Not all nineteenth-century architects revelled in the excessive elaboration of service quarters. In 1880, the architect J.J. Stevenson wrote in
House Architecture
of the need to simplify the intricacies that had become the norm: ‘Keeping pace with our more complicated ways of living, we have not only increased the number of rooms, in ordinary houses, but have assigned to each a special use. Instead of the hall and single chamber of the middle ages, with which even kings were content, every ordinary house must have a number of separate bedrooms, at least three public rooms, and a complicated arrangement of servants’ offices.’ Stevenson sensibly went on to point out how this complexity itself demanded extra labour: ‘All these places, with the interminable passages connecting them, have to be kept in order; and, if they increase the facility of doing the work, they increase the labour of the house, and necessitate a greater number of servants.’
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As the century drew to a close, there was a growing awareness of the social disparities between master and servant as a matter of political principle. In some households, more thought was given to the continuing welfare and education of servants, although, bizarre as it may seem, a serious concern of this kind could rebound on the reputation of the employer, and not always in a positive way.

But you cannot always please everyone and giving servants too comfortable quarters alarmed some social observers. The diarist Augustus Hare famously always used the word ‘luxurious’ to describe the houses of the newly rich in a tone of disapproval, and could hardly credit the comfort of the servants at Worth Park, in Sussex, the home of the Montefiore family: ‘I went to Worth, the ultra-luxurious house of the Montefiores, where the servants have their own billiard tables, ballroom, theatre and pianofortes, and are arrogant and presumptious in proportion.’
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And not only comfortable rooms were criticised, general benevolence could be a problem, too. In the last years of the century, the
Countess of Aberdeen was somewhat taken aback to find herself notorious for her supposedly radical views; indeed, such was the credibility given to the idea that she used to dine once a week with her servants, while Lord Aberdeen was serving as Governor, that Queen Victoria asked Lord Rosebery to look into it: ‘we gave our good friend Lord Rosebery the necessary information as to the strictly orthodox character of our household arrangements.’
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The same rumour reached Edward VII shortly after he ascended to the throne: ‘[it was] only very recently that an intimate friend of ours, who was staying at an Alpine resort, was solemnly told by another guest at the hotel when visitors came to Viceregal lodge [that] they were liable to be taken to dinner [i.e. on the arm of] by the butler or the housekeeper.’
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In their affectionate, co-written memoir,
‘We Twa’: Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen
(Vol. II, 1925), Lady Aberdeen mentioned a newspaper article, warning the people of Canada that

they would have to put up with a lady with a bee in her bonnet with regard to the servant question, one who would never allow her servants to wear caps, and who was in the habit of playing hide-and-seek and other such games with the housemaids and footmen, at all sorts of odd hours of the day. Moreover, it was stated as a fact that Lord Aberdeen and I dined habitually in the servants’ hall on certain days of the week.
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The real origin of these stories was that Lady Aberdeen had founded ‘The Onward and Upward Association’ for the benefit of farm servant girls working on Lord Aberdeen’s estates, as well as a Household Club for their immediate staff. The first association was intended to give the girls ‘an occupation and recreation outside their daily work, and assistance with keeping up their education’. There were also social occasions intended to encourage a common purpose between girls and their mistresses.

The Household Club was ‘really the outcome of an uneasy feeling on our part that whilst sharing in various philanthropic movements . . . we were doing nothing in the same direction for the members of our own household . . . nothing to bring all into human relations with each
other and ourselves, beyond our daily gathering in the Haddo House Chapel for family worship day by day, and on Sunday evenings’ – daily prayers were commonplace in country houses throughout the nineteenth century.
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The committee, formed in 1889, was elected annually from the heads of department, both indoor and outdoor. ‘Before a fortnight had passed we had a singing class of twenty members . . . and a carving class of twelve members, led by our governess; a drawing class of thirteen members, led by our butler, who attained no mean proficiency as an artist; a sewing class, led by our nurse’ and so on. There were social evenings with entertainment provided ‘by home talent’.
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Lady Aberdeen wrote: ‘there is no doubt but that the classes and social gatherings drew all the household very closely together’, noting with pleasure that a ‘branch of our club was formed, with our butler as secretary’, when Lord and Lady Aberdeen were in Government House in Ottawa. She felt that she depended on her servants for everything they did in terms of hospitality and entertainment and that the Household Club introduced ‘the element of deep, mutual regard and understanding and sympathy for one another’s lives, and a basis on which to build a common fellowship for all true and noble purposes, which should surely be the aim and desire of every thoughtful householder’.
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Lord Aberdeen even included a letter from J.M. Barrie, refuting the widely circulated rumour that the Aberdeens’ relationship with their servants had inspired his 1902 play,
The Admirable Crichton,
about an aristocratic family who are shipwrecked with their butler. It is Crichton’s physical dexterity, intelligence and ingenuity that save them and which lead to his becoming effectively their chief. When they are all eventually rescued, he returns without batting an eye to his former subservient role.

It was rather the servants’ skills and intelligence, observed by Barrie in the great houses of the aristocracy, that had prompted his teasing allegory, rather than the socially minded projects of a well-meaning countess. Even then, however, the world was already shifting. The glory days of the Edwardian country house, the subject of the next chapter, marked a definitive turning point. The structured
world of the country-house servant that had seemed, as H.G. Wells suggested in his autobiography, such an assured and confident feature of British achievement and of British life would change out of all recognition in the twentieth century, even if it did not quite disappear altogether.
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W
E HAVE NOW
traced the story of the country-house servant from the 1300s to the beginning of the twentieth century, a time that is only just out of reach of living memory and is often looked on as the Indian summer of the country-house world. While the great rural households of the time might have seemed foreign to the sixteenth-century servant, used to a more public form of service, they would have been recognisable in daily routine to an eighteenth-century time traveller. In 1900, most major landed estates continued to support large regiments of staff but their days were numbered.

As so often in history, change came in waves. After the great earthquake of the First World War, nothing was ever quite the same. Although many houses continued to employ staff in the same numbers as before (nationally more than 1.4 million people were still employed in domestic service
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), gradually these numbers were eroded, with new shocks following taxation, inflation and the effects of the Great Depression of the 1920s. After the massive upheaval of the Second World War, the landscape was unimaginably different, as will be shown in the final chapter.