Up and Down Stairs (40 page)

The economic equation for a landowner could be compared in his mind, a wage bill for one employee equating to the value of one farm rental. In 1917, on 2 June, he is beside himself as an employee had asked for a pay increase from 25 shillings to 34 a week: ‘but as I can’t lay my hand on another man I had to give it . . . Lapsley’s wage comes to within a few pounds of the rent at Bushilhead farm [a farm on his estate he rented out]. The lower orders are having the time of their lives just now.’
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In 1924 he made a furious entry in his diary on 6 March, on the subject of the departure of a cook; ‘the woman in the kitchen has made up her mind to leave tomorrow at only a week’s notice – quite illegal but I will let her go. The lower orders are beginning to think that they are not bound by any law. I don’t much regret her, as she is stupid, fat & no great cook – but it is difficult to put anyone in her place at a moment’s notice.’
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Some shrewd individuals were quick to recognise the impact the war would have on the whole world of service. In 1920, the architect Randal Phillips observed in
The Servantless House
: ‘girls who formerly accepted the shackles of what was little better than domestic drudgery came into a new liberty. They got good wages for what they did and they got far more time of their own than they ever had before in domestic service.’
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On the other hand, some of the households that had been run by women during the war found they could dispense with the services of men. It was in this period that the parlourmaid began to feature on the staffs of smaller country establishments and London houses, although less so in the great country houses.
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William Lanceley, a house steward in the 1920s, commented in his memoir
From Hall-Boy to House-Steward
(1925):

The Great War undoubtedly upset service and this is not to be wondered at by those who know the servant question. The war called for hands to help, and many servants responded to the call. The work they were asked to do was a novelty to them, the pay was big and they had short hours, hundreds being spoilt for service through it. It made those who returned to service unsettled. They had money to spend and time to spend it when on war work, and to come back to [having liberty on] one or two evenings a week was to them a hardship.
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By the 1920s, ‘Service had no attraction for the fairly educated young man or woman. It is looked down upon – they want to do something better, and often school friendships are broken through sheer snobbishness.’ He illustrated this with the example of a young person saying, ‘I like Lettie better than any girl, but you know I cannot introduce her to my new friends as she is a servant.’
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Lanceley himself felt that there were still great attractions to life in service, especially in the big house, with good food, opportunities to move up the ladder, the variety of being in a rural situation with an annual period in London. In his view, no servant was really overworked, and the differences in servility between domestic staff and office workers were exaggerated: ‘the head of a firm, the manager
and foreman are held in far greater awe than my Lord or Lady.’ Perhaps he was influenced here by the fact that, owing to his experience and seniority, he was by then not in awe of his employers, but their close confidant.
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Eric Horne, a former footman, valet and butler, whose racy memoirs were published in 1923, turned a more cynical eye on the life of the aristocracy, but could not disguise a certain dismay at the decline of the world in which he had spent so much of his working life, which he attributed to the immediate post-war years: ‘Now that England is cracking up as far as the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their estates, castles, and large houses . . . it seems a pity that the old usages and traditions of gentleman’s service should die with the old places.’ The new rich, in his opinion, made fat by the profits of war, were a poor substitute: ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a souced [sic] mackerel.’
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Horne’s affection and respect for some of his employers is evident, just as he is driven by others to despair and fury. He wrote that he had ‘lived in the service of a noble family who were ruined by the war; they were such nice people to their servants that, could I have afforded to do it, I would have worked for them for nothing’. These enlightened aristocrats had to reduce their indoor servants from twenty-five to just three. The bleak economic climate brought about the collapse of the social whirl that had once centred on the London house. In leaner times, Horne missed the pageantry of pre-war Belgravia, with ‘pairs of horses and carriages, with footmen powdered and breeched, silk stockings, and a lot of pomp and show’. In contrast to these happier experiences, he had worked in some places where it required ‘the temper of an angel to take some of the insults of the gentry’.
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He certainly felt that the deep social gulf between the classes could not be sustained indefinitely and recalled with irritation how servants were treated like chattels and loaned between employers for big events, ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’.
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His bitterness at the behaviour of some of his employers, although by no means all, was sharpened by the death of his wife in the 1919 flu epidemic. He had been obliged to live separately from her for much of his working life by the accepted conditions of service
that compelled many domestic staff to be (or behave as if they were) single and live separately from their families.
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In the period directly after the First World War, the struggle to recruit new servants prompted the Ministry of Reconstruction to set up a government commission that revealed, if nothing else, what people already in service disliked at the time.
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This turned out to be not so much the work but the social stratification and deference demanded of them, as well as the lack of personal freedom. Despite much contrary assertion in the letters pages of newspapers, domestic servants were not being tempted away from service by the newly established ‘dole’, as they were not included in the scheme until 1946.
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Ironically unemployment created by the Great Depression forced many women back into domestic service in the late 1920s, when it is estimated that there were 1.1 million of them in service. By the late 1930s this figure had risen to nearly 1.5 million, although a greater proportion were non-residential or day workers.
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However, this did not necessarily mean that the numbers of those in country-house service increased, since at that time rising taxes, combined with falling land values and rentals, forced many aristocrats and gentry to reduce their households, while selling off their secondary estates and London houses to concentrate their resources on their principal seats.
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As this led to the traditional hierarchies being thrown open to greater challenges, it also increased resentment among some in domestic service.
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Gordon Grimmett, in his memoir published in
Gentlemen’s Gentlemen
and edited by Rosina Harrison, evokes one of the humblest jobs in a country house. He joined the staff at Longleat in Wiltshire at the age of fifteen as a lamp boy, going on to become a footman and working for the Astors at Cliveden before leaving service. Lamp boys were common in country-house service until the 1920s. He slept in a dormitory with six beds, which he shared with the two under footmen, one of the odd men, the pantry boy and the steward’s boy: ‘there was also a dressing-table and about four rickety chairs: that was the sum total of the furniture.’
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He would get up at six, collect sixty shoes for cleaning and distribute hot-water jugs. At eight o’clock he would have breakfast, after
which he cleaned knives in a special machine. At 8.45 he would light the 140 candles in the chapel for the morning service attended by all the staff, during which he would be on organ duty. After chapel he would be responsible for gathering up all 400 of the lamps at Longleat, which, as we have seen, was still lit by oil lamps and candles because the marquess was loth to disfigure the old house with electricity. Each one had to be cleaned, trimmed and refilled. He had some help from the odd men and other boys, and many lamps were delivered to him by other housemaids and footmen although ‘collecting and replacing them itself meant a few miles walk every day’. He would trim the wicks and then ‘fill the lamps from the large oil tanks, paraffin for the corridor and staff lamps, and colsa oil for the house.’ Then he polished the funnels, globes and stands. ‘The sheer monotony of the job took some beating.’

Mr Grimmett would tackle twenty at a time, which would be collected and replaced by others. He would also replace all the candles. After tea, he would light all the lamps in the corridors, basement and cellars, while the footmen lit those in the main rooms, also helping him to put the shutters up. Despite the dullness of this drudgery, he thought his job easier than the housemaids.’
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In the early afternoon, he would have to move outside the day bed of the young Viscount Weymouth, who had a weak lung for which a daily dose of fresh air was recommended; often the two boys would walk the dogs together afterwards. ‘I learnt a lot from him and I think perhaps he did from me. I didn’t envy him, nor have I ever been jealous of my employers.’ After a year, Mr Grimmett became third footman, perhaps because the older men had gone to war.

His colleague Rosina Harrison remembered him as ‘an excellent footman. He was like an actor; he’d be playing the fool in the wings but from the moment he went on stage he was straight into his part. It was the theatre of service which appealed to him, the dressing up in livery with almost period movement and big gestures that fitted the Louis Quinze dining-room at Cliveden.’
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Charles Smith, born in 1908, served Lord Louis Mountbatten for fifty years. He too went into service at the age of fifteen after a serious illness prevented him continuing to work in a coal mine. The idea of
an alternative occupation came to him while he recuperated on an uncle’s farm: ‘Four miles away, commanding the horizon and always the focal point of my eyes, was the seventeenth-century grey-stoned Welbeck Abbey, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Portland. It held considerable fascination for me, and one morning I put on my jacket and breeches – hand-me-downs from the village Squire’s son – and cycled to the Abbey.’
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He rang the front door bell, which was answered by a liveried footman who sent him round to the tradesman’s entrance:

A reassuring glimmer appeared in his eye as he closed the door on me and by the time I got to the rear he had alerted the steward of the house whose task it was to employ the servants . . . [He was engaged as hall boy for £25 a year.] As hall boy I had very little contact with the Duke and Duchess; I attended to the whims and needs of the fifty senior servants.

[He was later promoted to steward’s room footman literally the footman who attended to the upper servants’ meals, the yearly increment for which was £10.] There were also peripheral benefits, including two free suits of clothing a year, special allowances for laundry and beer, the provision of meals, and a comfortable room of my own in the house.’
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He moved on to work as a ‘schoolroom footman’ for the Earl and Countess of Derby, attending to their orphaned grandchildren.

Most colourfully, he assisted at the Derby House ball, given the day after the Epsom Derby, dressed in full footman’s livery of a gold and silver embroidered red tail cut-away coat and a stiff-fronted wing-collared shirt and white bow tie; blue velvet knickerbockers; pink silk stockings; and silver-buckled black pumps. ‘My hair was waved and powdered white.’
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In 1930, he was recruited as a travelling footman to Lady Louis Mountbatten, from which he progressed to being valet to Lord Louis, then butler, as described with great gusto in his book,
Fifty Years with Mountbatten
(1980).

In the great landowners’ houses, the staff numbers in the early years of the century stayed at a similar, or only slightly reduced, level between the wars. In the interwar period, Chatsworth in Derbsyhire
employed a comptroller, who ran all the Cavendish houses, whilst the staff of Chatsworth itself comprised a butler, the duke’s valet, an under butler, a groom of the chambers, two footmen, a steward’s room footman, a housekeeper, the duchess’s maid, a head housemaid, two second housemaids, two third housemaids, two sewing women, a cook, a first kitchenmaid, a second kitchenmaid, a vegetable maid, two to three scullery-maids, two still-room maids, a dairymaid, six laundrymaids and the duchess’s secretary, all of whom lived in the house.

The Chatsworth footmen still powdered their hair until the 1920s, and until 1938 always wore livery if there were more than six for dinner. Some staff, many living in estate cottages, came in daily, including the odd man, an upholsterer, a scullery man, two scrubbing women, a laundry porter, a steam boiler man, a coal man, two porter’s lodge attendants, two night firemen, a night porter and two window cleaners.
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In the 1920s and 30s, when all the families of the children of the 9th Duke came to stay for Christmas, they each bought with them a nanny, a nursery maid, a lady’s maid, a valet and sometimes a chauffeur and a groom. This swelled the numbers of resident servants over the festive period, so on Christmas Day itself ‘there were about a hundred and fifty people to feed – thirty to forty in the dining-room, twenty in the nursery, up to thirty in the steward’s room, up to fifty in the servants’ hall, and some meals in the house-maids’ room.’
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