Up and Down Stairs (49 page)

There were some compensations: ‘When we used to land in Dublin, we would have to wait two hours in a square there to get a can of oil before we could set off for Lismore. The cook, Mrs Canning, loved picnics, so we always used to have to stop en route for one of her picnics; they were good, mind you.’
⁹³

As in so many great country houses with long-serving staff, there is considerable interconnection between the families of the estate and the house staff. Mr Coleman’s wife has also worked for the family; his brother-in-law is the butler and house manager at Lismore Castle; and one of his sons is the silver steward for the public side of Chatsworth. Alan Shimwell is related to two former comptrollers of the house. Mr Shimwell’s uncle Walter began as a bell boy in 1908, aged twelve, sitting by the bells to fetch the relevant visiting valet when called, and became the much-admired comptroller in 1921 at the young age of twenty-six and later clerk of works, overseeing the restoration of the house in the 1950s and ’60s. Jim Link is the son of a former head gardener who also worked for fifty years in the gardens and is brother-in-law to Mr Shimwell.
⁹⁴

How would they all describe working in a great country-house environment to those who have never experienced it? Mr Link, born and raised at Chatsworth, instantly replies: ‘It’s little community, we were brought up together.’ At eighteen he went off to do National Service: ‘You do have comradeship in the army, but when you came back, you really appreciated everything at home.

‘We were really a family and we looked up to the duke and
duchess. We knew they were always behind us, and if we ever had any trouble you had a big ally there. They would bend over backwards to look after you; and you wanted to give them something in return for all that.’ Mr Shimwell adds: ‘The duke would always talk about how staff loyalty was very important: no argument.’ He valued the fact that his work was recognised: ‘When we went down to London, which made a long day, once we were back home, whatever time it was, there would always be a thank you and a goodnight. Always.’

Helen Marchant, the duchess’s long-term secretary, agrees with Mr Shimwell: ‘It was completely reciprocated. The duke was always trying to improve “the social wage”, with the pool, gym and golf course for people who worked on the house and estate; he was always trying to pay the staff back for the loyalty they showed. He was duke for such a long time, and many people started with him in the 1950s and 1960s. You have to remember the challenge of the 80 per cent death duties that they had to face.’ Mr Shimwell added: ‘We didn’t know whether we would have jobs at the end of it all, but the duke gave you confidence that he would pull through.’
⁹⁵
And they did.

As we come to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the privately owned country house is run more and more by people far removed from pre-war patterns and traditions. Country-house owners today expect to live in greater privacy than their parents and grandparents, but while they may cook and drive themselves, most of them still have to rely on some staff, such as secretaries, nannies, cleaners and especially gardeners, possibly bringing in regular agency staff for bigger social events.
⁹⁶

As we have seen, some of the bigger country houses, whilst also drawing on agency staff when necessary, are dependent on permanent teams of staff, calling on the services of their own estate departments where they continue to be maintained. Few, whether security men, drivers, cleaners or cooks, few are likely to live in the actual house, and all operate in a world that is in many ways different from that of their forebears. What is so surprising is that the complex world of domestic service has persisted so vigorously in the
middle of the twentieth century and beyond, even if in rapidly changing guise.

The word servant may well have disappeared from everyday discourse, and there may be no obvious pattern of employment of domestic staff today, but country houses require assistance to make them work, just as they did five hundred years ago, even with modern technology to regulate heat, light and alarms from a distant laptop. In the end, one factor has remained the same through the centuries: that whatever the work involved, there must also, crucially, be some degree of human companionship, involving loyalty and trust.

In writing on such a subject, any writer will be indebted to the scholarship and publications of others. In this area, the most important and helpful were those by Peter Brears, J.T. Cliffe, Mark Girouard, Adeline Hartcup, Jean Hecht, Pamela Horn, Pamela Sambrook, Giles Waterfield and Merlin Waterson. I would like to acknowledge my profound gratitude and debt to those authors, particularly Pamela Horn and Pamela Sambrook, as well as to all those cited in the notes and bibliography.

I would also like to thank the many scholars, authors, curators, archivists and friends who have helped guide and encourage my researches for this book. I would like to mention especially Clive Aslet, Charles Bain-Smith, Sir David Cannadine, Nicholas Cooper, Warren Davis, Ptolemy Dean, Trevor Dooley, Liz and Martin Drury, Gareth Edwards, Julian Fellowes, Leslie Geddes-Brown, Philippa Glanville, John Goodall, Emily Gowers, David Griffin, Michael Hall, Andrew Hann, John Hardy, Bevis Hillier, Maurice Howard, Tim Knox, Lucinda Lambton, Helen Lloyd, Patricia Macarthy, Edward MacParland, the late Hugh Massingberd, Mary Miers, Tessa Murdoch, William Palin, Jeremy Pearson, John Martin Robinson, Pippa Shirley, Peter Sinclair, Julian Spicer, Sarah Staniforth, Hew Stevenson, Nino Strachey, Sir Keith Thomas, Geoffrey Tyack, Hugo Vickers, Giles Waterfield, Sue Wilson, Lucy Worsley and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Edward Town spared me his time to show me round Knole, and Jane Troughton of York University identified and transcribed relevant letters in the Wynn archive. Especial thanks to Lydia Lebus for her invaluable support as a researcher, particularly in contacting the owners and archivists of so many country houses around the British Isles.

Many archivists, curators and librarians at country houses and other collections have been immensely helpful with guidance and direction, tours and access to documents and buildings, including Rosemary Baird at Goodwood House, Sussex; Jean Bray at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire; Dai Evans at Petworth House, Sussex; Robin Harcourt-Williams at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire; Kale Harris at Longleat; Christine Hiskey at Holkham Hall, Norfolk; Paul Holden at Llanhydrock, Cornwall; Christopher Hunwick at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland; Charles Lister at Boughton House, Northampton-shire, Anne MacVeigh at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Basil Morgan at Rockingham Castle; Christopher Ridgway at Castle Howard; Sara Rodger at Arundel Castle, Sussex; Jennifer Thorp at Highclere Castle; Collette Warbrick and her colleagues Rachel Boak and Diana Stone at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; and Richard Williams, archivist of Mapledurham House, Berkshire. Also to Andre Gailani of the Punch Library, Justin Hobson and Helen Carey at the Country Life Picture Library, and Jonathan Smith, archivist, of Trinity College, Cambridge.

There are also many country-house owners and those have who lived in and worked in country houses, all of whom gave me time for interviews, tours and advice, especially: David Bateman, Sir John Becher, Charles Berkeley, the Hon Mary Birkbeck, Lady Mairi Bury, the Earl and Countess of Carnavon, James Cartland, Henry Coleman, the Hon. Hugh Crossley, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, Peter Frost-Pennington, Martin Gee, the Earl of Glasgow, the Knight of Glin, the Hon. Desmond Guinness, Edward Harley, James Hervey-Bathurst, Laura Hurrell, Lord Inglewood, Sir John Leslie, Bt, Sammy Leslie, Jim Link, Auriol, Marchioness of Linlithgow, David and Rhona Lowsley-Williams, Ian MacNab, Maureen Magee, Sir David and Lady Mary Mansell-Lewis, Lord Neidpath, Della Robins, the Earl and Countess of Rosebery, Stephanie Rough, Lord Sackville-West, the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, Alan Shimwell, Sir Reresby and Lady Sitwell, David Stacey, Christopher Simon Sykes, Sir Tatton Sykes, and Rosalinde Tebbut.

I have to thank my colleagues on
Country Life
magazine, not least for giving me the wonderful opportunity to visit so many country
houses over the past fourteen years, and to the BBC and the National Trust for the same great privilege. Also all the owners of country houses I have visited, all those who work in them and, indeed, all those who work to maintain and open such houses to an interested public. I am continually humbled by the dedication, devotion and hard work of country-house servants in history, as well as their staffs in modern times, and I hope that this book does some justice to the skills and dedication that I have encountered and perhaps understood only now for the first time.

I am immensely grateful to Clare Alexander, of Aitken Alexander, my literary agent, for all her wisdom and kind encouragement and to Roland Philipps of John Murray Publishers for his faith in the project and his wise editorial insight and helpful guidance, also to Helen Hawksfield of John Murray for all her hard work, kind support and enthusiasm, and to Celia Levett for her masterly copy-edit that helped improve the text so much, and to Sara Marafini for her design work and to Anna Kenny-Ginard for her work on promoting the book, and to all those who make it possible to produce a book in the twenty-first century.

A special thanks to my family, my wife Sophie, my daughters Georgia and Miranda, and our dog Archie, who all support me in everything I do.

For the following permissions to quote from copyright material, I am immensely grateful to:

To the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire for permission to quote from her book
The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth
; Mrs Gill Joyce for permission to quote from the memoirs of her father Stanley Ager, and to Fiona St Aubyn his co-author, and to James St Aubyn of St Michael’s Mount; the trustees of the Goodwood Estates for permission to quote from the memoirs of Mrs Jean Hibbert; to Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, Bt, for permission to quote from the Thomas Kilgallon memoir; to Mr Ian McCorquodale for permission to quote from the
Etiquette Handbook
written by Dame Barbara Cartland, first published in 1952 and re-issued in 2008 by Random House; to the Duke of Northumberland Estates for permission to quote from manuscripts held in Alnwick Castle relating to the 1st Duke and
Duchess’s Household Regulations and the Kildare Household Regulations; to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for access to, and permission to quote from, the diaries of Hannah Cullwick; to Lord Sackville for permission to quote from the Knole Household Catalogue; to Christopher Simon Sykes for permission to quote from his memoir,
The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family
, published by HarperCollins in 2005; to Taylor & Francis for permission to quote from the memoirs of maidservants published in John Burnett’s
Useful Toil
; to A.P. Watt and the literary estate of H.G. Wells for permission to quote from H.G. Wells’
Experiments in Autobiography
, published in 1934, and
Tono Bungay
, published in 1909; to Frances Lincoln Ltd for permission to quote from
The English House
, 2007, by Hermann Muthesius, translated by Dennis Sharp.

Attempts to trace the copyright holders of Frederick Gorst,
Of Carriages and Kings
, published in 1956 by W.T. Allen (now a title of Random House, and of Rosina Harrison,
Rose: My Life in Service
, published in 1975 and
Gentleman’s Gentleman
edited by Rosina Harrison, by Cassell plc (now a division of Orion Publishing Group), were unsuccessful.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, John Murray (Publishers) will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition.

1
. Samuel Johnson,
A Dictionary of the English Language
, London 1755 reprinted in facsimile (Times Books), London 1979.

2
. For surveys that include discussions of urban and middle-class households at this time, see Pamela Horn,
Flunkeys and Scullions
:
Life Below Stairs in Georgian England
(2004),
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant
(1991), and
Life Below Stairs in the 20th Century
(2004).

3
. Horn,
Flunkeys
, pp. 16–19, and example dated 27 January 1922 (ten male servants £7 10s and 4 dogs £1 10s) in the Highclere archives, thanks to Lydia Lebus and by kind permission of the Earl of Carnarvon.