Up and Down Stairs (41 page)

In 1928, Cliveden, whilst smaller in scale as a whole, was certainly run on the model of a great country house, and required a small army of servants. The indoor staff comprised the steward, Edwin Lee, the valet, Arthur Bushell, the under butler, three footmen, a hall boy, two oddmen, a house carpenter, the chef, Monsieur Gilbert, three kitchenmaids, a scullery-maid, a dairymaid, a housekeeper, Mrs Moore, a still-room maid, a head housemaid, three under housemaids, and two daily maids. Lady Astor’s maid, Rosina Harrison, wrote a remarkable memoir of her life in service, from which this list is taken. There was also a maid for the Hon. Phyllis Astor, a head laundress, Emma Gardener, three laundrymaids, a telephonist and a
nightwatchman. A nanny, Miss Gibbons, two nursemaids and a governess made up the nursery staff.

The gardens were in the care of the head gardener, W. Camm, an outside foreman and eight gardeners, looked after by a bothy housekeeper. The greenhouse had its own foreman, six gardeners, and one ‘decorator’, responsible for the flower arrangements. The total outdoor staff for the estates, stables, stud farm and dairy farm totalled fifty-two. They included a gamekeeper, Ben Cooper, assistant gamekeeper, a head groom and three assistants for the stables, a boatman, a head chauffeur, Charlie Hopkins, a stud groom, three foresters, an estate foreman, Ben Emmett, six painters, two carpenters, two general workers, a bricklayer, a plumber and mate, three electricians, and a part-time clockwinder. There was also a home farm.

The London house at no. 4, St James’s Square, had a full-time staff of a housekeeper, a head housemaid, two under housemaids, an odd man, a carpenter and an electrician. Also based there were a controller, Miss Kindersley, who looked after all the Astors’ households, three accountants, and a number of secretaries, as many as seven during Lady Astor’s period as MP. Even though Cliveden was not at the centre of a great agricultural estate, the size of its household as a whole is on a par with the great lists of the Earl of Northumberland in 1511, or the Earl of Dorset in 1613.
⁸⁵

Whilst the Astor’s footman, young Gordon Grimmett, thought the housemaids’ work much harder than his own as a young lamp boy, it was junior maids in the scullery and kitchen who, like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, had the most physically demanding jobs. Rosina Harrison recalls the grand steward at Cliveden, Mr Lee, saying of the young scullery-maids: ‘Poor little devils, washing up and scrubbing away at dozens of pots, pans, saucepans and plates up to their elbows in suds and grease, their hands red raw with the soda which was the only form of detergent in those days. I’ve seen them crying with exhaustion and pain, the degradation too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
⁸⁶

That life was tough is borne out in many other memoirs, although some among them had pleasant memories of the houses where they had been employed, describing as their ‘happiest days’ time spent
working in the company of a large body of servants. As the century progressed they were also permitted more freedoms than had been the lot of their predecessors, although younger servants were still obliged to leave to marry until the 1930s.

In 1971, the present Lord Crathorne recorded an interview with his family’s cook, Mrs Davidson, who had worked at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire from the 1920s, and who had first arrived there in 1910, aged fourteen, through Hunt’s Registry in London. A lot of young people went into domestic service, she recalled, ‘because there was nothing else for us to do’. She was first employed as a scullery-maid, one of twenty-six indoor servants on the staff of one of the great Edwardian country houses, completed only in 1906.

I had to get up at four o’clock. We had to get ready for all the staff and we had to get the kitchen ready for Mrs Dugdale coming down, floor scrubbed and silver sand put down, the table with a cloth and all the knives put neatly on the table. And then she would come in and go through the kitchen and scullery and out into the larder, the game larder, back in and into the inside larder and then came down and sat at the table to look at the menus which were all in a book.

We had breakfast in the kitchen and the housemaids in the Hall and the Housekeeper and valets and butler in the housekeeper’s room. We had ours at 8 o’clock. After breakfast we did more cleaning, and there would be about twenty copper pans we had to clean . . . There were four of us in the kitchen and we did the vegetables. I just did the vegetables and cooked them.

Although they did not get to bed until eleven, the staff ‘used to have fun amongst ourselves’ and there was always ‘good food’ for the servants.
⁸⁷

From the scullery Mrs Davidson was promoted to still-room maid, ‘where you make the cakes and bread, and biscuits, and do the dining room washing up and dessert dishes, and all the morning trays. That was one step up. I was [there] four years.’
⁸⁸
Gradually, she moved up in the hierarchy.

Sometimes, experience might be gained in unorthodox ways. In one place where she was kitchenmaid, ‘the cook used to get drunk, and I used to have it all to do’. She worked at Bramham Hall near
Wetherby, before returning, just after the First World War, to Crathorne Hall, at the request of the housekeeper, to be the principal cook there. There were four in the Dugdale family plus twenty-six servants, whose feeding was her responsibility. On shooting parties there could be seventy to cater for because the beaters were given hot food as well. In 1927, Mrs Davidson married a groom, Albert, who also worked at Crathorne, and left service to devote herself to him, but she soon went back at her employer’s request and with her husband’s blessing, remaining the family cook for the next thirty years.
⁸⁹
Initially, meals were served by a butler and first and second footman, in a pink and fawn livery, but footmen and formality dwindled away after the Second World War.

Mrs Davidson’s observations on the catering responsibilities for a large household of staff as well as family are echoed in many memoirs, as is the pattern of staff meals being served in different rooms, reflecting their stratification, which seems so extraordinary today. Anne, Countess of Rosse, was very conscious of these fine distinctions: ‘There were still when I went to Birr, for each day, six different lunches in six different rooms. The staff could on occasion meet and talk together – Nanny could gossip with the housekeeper in the house-keeper’s room, or Miss Martin the governess could gossip with Nanny either in the schoolroom or the nursery. But eating together – NO.’
⁹⁰

Mrs Jean Hibbert, who worked at Gordon Castle and then Goodwood House in the interwar years, from the late 1920s until her marriage in 1932, harked back to her time as a housemaid in her detailed, amusing but unpublished memoirs. Her first post was at Gordon Castle in Moray, after which she wanted to move on elsewhere to become a second housemaid. When she sought a reference from the duchess, so that she could take up a post at Wilton House,
⁹¹
to her surprise the duchess responded with a telegram: ‘You are not to leave my employment. If you want a change come to Goodwood.’ Mrs Hibbert wrote to one gardener she had met to ask his advice about accepting this offer and he encouraged her to do so – they later married. An added incentive was that the first housemaid from Gordon Castle, Annie Cowie, had already moved to Goodwood. So she travelled from Rothes in Scotland, via London, to Sussex.
⁹²

‘There were seven housemaids and our rooms were in one of the towers of the great house. We were all Scots as the Duchess liked us best, but we did not like the head housemaid who was from Glasgow . . . The maids had a sitting room with a fire on the ground floor but no fires in the bedrooms.’
⁹³
Typically the staff ate together in the servants’ hall, except for the butler, the lady’s maid, the housekeeper and the butter cook (a specialist chef), who all ate in the steward’s quarters.

The maids rose at 5.30 every day to get the public rooms ready before the family came down, yet Mrs Hibbert retained great affection for these apartments and took pride in her work:

Now that I was second housemaid my duties were largely cleaning in the main part of the house which was much older and more beautifully furnished than Gordon Castle. I particularly loved the fine paintings . . . Goodwood is famous for its Canalettos which I could see every day. When you think of it, people pay to visit such places now but I had those lovely rooms to myself every day in return for some hard work. Dusting, cleaning floors, polishing, laying fires and using the newly-fangled, heavy Hoover sweeping machines were my jobs but the worst part was cleaning steel grates until they shone.
⁹⁴

She also polished the dining-room table before breakfast at 7.30. When the family were up their bedrooms were cleaned and their beds made. After the maids had had their own lunch, they had to be on hand to help carry food between kitchen and dining room.
⁹⁵
They were given two hours off after lunch, and one afternoon off every week. Also (she thought as a result of economies), Mrs Hibbert had the duties of lady’s maid to Lady March, the duchess’s daughter-in-law.

She heard some local gossip about the West Dean estate, where ‘the morals of the guests were supposed to be so loose that the garden boy had to ring a bell fixed to the corner of the house wall at 6 a.m. called “the change beds bell”, so that housemaids would find the right husbands and wives together in bed when they delivered their morning tea at 7!’ Even Mrs Hibbert thought that this was probably quite apocryphal but it has echoes of the bed-hopping life of the aristocracy in Vita Sackville-West’s
The Edwardians
.
⁹⁶

At Goodwood in the 1920s, staff numbers were still high. There were twenty-seven indoor staff: the steward, who looked after the accounts; the butler; the housekeeper; the cook; the duke’s valet; the duchess’s maid; the porter who sat in a cubbyhole by the main door and took in messages and post; five footmen, seven housemaids, two pantry boys, three kitchenmaids, three still-room maids and two scullery-maids. Then there was staff for the laundry, the stables, with both horses and cars, and the garden, where fourteen gardeners worked under the head gardener, his deputy and his foreman, seven of them under Mrs Hibbert’s future husband, Spencer Hibbert. An additional team of gardeners looked after the pleasure grounds and cricket green, not to mention the gamekeepers and woodsmen.
⁹⁷

Mrs Hibbert looked on the then Duchess of Richmond as ‘an excellent employer’ who threw a good Christmas party and sometimes treated the maids to an afternoon at the theatre with tea at the Grosvenor Hotel. When she and Spencer Hibbert became engaged to be married, they handed in their notice as was usual. However, the duchess, ‘knowing my family was far away and very poor . . . offered to organise and pay for the wedding from Goodwood House’. She even gave Mrs Hibbert furniture for their new home. The wedding breakfast was ‘a magnificent spread and lovely wine which the Duke gave us as his present and a fine three layered wedding cake . . . the kitchens had been working hard and in secret because I knew nothing about it.’
⁹⁸

Some young women, unable to pursue an expensive higher education during the Great Depression, found careers in service the only option. Lavinia Swainbank began work in 1922, which was ‘not an easy time to be starting out on one’s career. For those were the days of depression on the Tyne.’ Although Miss Swainbank had passed the eleven-plus, a shortage of money hampered all her attempts to go further: ‘Thus at sixteen I entered into a career of drudgery, where long hours and very often inadequate food were accepted standards of a life that was thrust on one out of sheer necessity.’ She was taken on in a hotel as a ‘tweeny’ (or between-stairs maid), then became second housemaid: ‘ultimately I reached my peak as third house-maid in one of the stately homes of England’.
⁹⁹

When she was a second housemaid in ‘gentleman’s service’ for an elderly lady and two spinster daughters, her daily timetable had echoes of service in a country house during the previous four centuries:

6.30 Rise. Clean grate [and] lay fire in Dining Room. Sweep carpet and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in Library. Sweep and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in billiard room. Sweep and dust. Polish staircase. Clean grate and lay fire in Drawing Room. Polish floor. Clean grate and lay fire in Morning Room. Sweep and Dust vestibule. Sweep and dust Blue Staircase.

All that before the 8 am. Breakfast in the Servants’ Hall. 9 am. Start bedrooms. Help with Bedmaking and slops and fill ewers and carafes. Clean grates and lay fires. Fill up coal boxes and wood baskets. Sweep and dust bedrooms. Clean bathrooms. Change into afternoon uniform. 1 pm Lunch in Servants’ Hall. Afternoons, clean silver, brass, water cans, trim lamps. 4 pm Tea in the Servants’ Hall, 5 pm light fires in bedrooms, 6 pm cans of hot water to bedrooms, 7.30 pm, Turn down beds, make up fires, and empty slops. Fill up coal and wood containers. Leave morning trays set in housemaid’s pantry.
¹⁰⁰

Some of her other duties were more pleasurable: ‘Early mornings, three times a week, I opened the massive front door, to admit the head and under gardener who used to arrive with masses of fresh blooms and proceed to make exquisite floral arrangements in the hall and public rooms. Later they brought fresh vegetables to the cook.’
¹⁰¹
Despite the grind, ‘Time passed pleasantly enough here. The other servants were kind, the food was excellent’ and she even had a bike to get into town.