Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (19 page)

A well-known example of one such outspoken servant was Queen Victoria’s Highlander, John Brown. A man of blunt opinions and charmless presence, and frequently drunk, he accompanied the Queen everywhere and came to deal with many of the arrangements for her general comfort. He had no qualms about telling Her Majesty, let alone her officials, what was best for her, and was cordially disliked by almost everyone in her entourage. Brown was an exceptional case, but otherwise to allow a servant such influence or familiarity was considered undignified and in very bad taste, and it was regarded by servants themselves as an insult to put them to such discomfort. The barrier between master and servant was necessary because the system would only work if everyone ‘knew their place’ and remained in it. Those downstairs desired this state of affairs as much as their employers above stairs.

In J. M. Barrie’s
The Admirable Crichton
, the domestic staff hate and resent the efforts of their employer to treat them as equals. They do not feel so, and do not behave as if they are, and, significantly, they do not treat each other as equals. At Lord Loam’s tea parties for his servants, when they enter or leave the drawing room they do so in strict order of seniority, and Fisher, maid to one of the Earl’s daughters, is highly offended when he offers to refill the cup of the ‘Tweenie’ (whom she sneeringly dismisses as ‘that kitchen wench’) before her own, a breach of protocol that would never have happened in the servants’ hall. The Earl, for all his efforts to ingratiate himself with the servants, does not understand this point, and neither do his family, who wonder why the maid is sulking. Meanwhile, the Earl’s family are miserable. Floundering in conversation, one of them asks a servant, ‘What sort of weather have you been having in the kitchen?’

Though it sounds a tired cliché, ‘knowing one’s place’ had considerable advantages. To have strictly defined parameters of duty, behaviour and etiquette made it much easier to run a household smoothly. Servants not only expected but wanted their employers to treat them with aloofness. There is something of a parallel here with the code of conduct in the Army. An officer is expected to take an interest in his men, to know their names and backgrounds, but not to court their popularity or even approval. Though they will be polite to him there will never be overt friendliness, and indeed such a thing is entirely discouraged on the grounds that he may be asking them to risk their lives for him in the near future. Their social pleasures are taken separately, beyond his hearing, so that they can properly relax and criticize him if they wish (just as he can do with them). Though they will be respectful to his face, they do not want his company when off duty. So it was with a servants’ hall.

In an era before there were the machines or the cleaning products that now exist, it required the work of dozens of hands – laborious, dirty, time-consuming toil – simply to keep a house tidy. A comment made by an old farm labourer to the author Ronald Blythe about his profession is equally true of domestic servants: that whereas nowadays an employer will wear out one machine, in those days he would wear out several men. The work needed doing, and there was no other way to do it. Servants, like farm labourers and factory workers, were human machinery, and household jobs were more dirty and difficult than we can imagine. Where coal was the principal fuel, it was necessary to bring large amounts of it into the house, to store it, fetch it when it was needed, burn it and then deal with the considerable mess it left behind, largely in the form of black dust. There was nothing remarkable in this, it was how every household – not to mention entire transport systems of trains and ships – was run. The grates in which it had been used had to be cleaned every day, as did the other surfaces made dirty by it. The same was true of the oil used in lamps. Before the advent of non-stick pans or even piped-in hot water, the clearing up after the cooking and serving of meals could be a formidable undertaking – especially without the detergents we now have for washing dishes. Even the beating of carpets, a practice that is much more uncommon now that so many homes have them fitted, took a great deal of physical strength.

People – servants – got on with these tasks because there was no alternative. Dirt was unavoidable and its presence taken for granted, but it must be kept at bay through unremitting work and ceaseless routine. Clothing and fabrics and furniture were often better maintained than we are accustomed to now, and these, as well as the hard surfaces of floors and walls and stoves, required much attention. It was necessary to put much more effort into cleanliness, and the only way to achieve this was to employ a lot of physical labour. The servant class has largely disappeared not only because a more wealthy and educated population developed which preferred not to go into this profession, but also because the actual need for such a workforce is so much less than it was.

The number of persons in domestic service increased between the 1840s and the end of the century because country houses were being built at such a rate, but the profession remained predominantly female, as it would be until the end of the era of service. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were seven women to every man in service, but by the 1870s the proportion had risen to eleven to one. A parlour maid was higher up the scale than a housemaid, for the latter undertook the heavy, and much dirtier, cleaning while the latter, who in the absence of footmen or butler might answer the door and be seen by visitors, dealt only with dusting and light chores.

Servants were paid only occasionally. They received wages quarterly, or even annually. They therefore might not have money in their hands for long months after starting in a post. They had, of course, no need of ready money during their ordinary working lives. They were not only fed every day but were entitled to supplies of beer, tea, sugar and meat. These, if they did not choose to consume them, could always be sold on. Because many who went into service had lived in poverty or at least noticeable simplicity beforehand, they would have been impressed by the amount of food in the kitchens of a big house. They would have eaten better there than they had ever done before, and were likely to have put on weight and developed a healthy colour despite the long hours and lack of adequate sleep.

There were also benefits in kind in terms of cast-off clothing. This might be especially beneficial to female domestics. Once again, it could be sold if they did not want it themselves.

The wages servants received varied according to where they lived, how wealthy their employers were, and what duties they performed. Those who were in service at a great house could expect not only better living conditions but higher pay than would be offered by suburban households. As domestic staff became rarer, though, the demand for them continued and wages rose. At the end of the nineteenth century they were up by almost 30 per cent, a colossal leap. Yet even with the lower wages of earlier in the century, servants were often paid in kind in a manner that was highly useful. The provision of beer was an important perk. Whether or not there was a brewhouse on the estate, there would be large quantities available at meals. It was weaker than it would be in a later age, so that more of it could be consumed. Because in many places water was not clean enough to drink, beer was used instead. The availability of alcohol negated the need for country footmen or butlers to go to pubs, as they habitually did in towns (the street-corner pubs in Mayfair and Belgravia were entirely for this class of customer, and gentlemen would not visit them). There were also tips left for the senior servants, which formed a significant part of their income. There was an etiquette to tipping, as there was to everything else. Lady guests gave to whichever maid had assisted them with their dressing and hairdressing. Gentlemen tipped the valet, but also the butler, the coachman and – if they had been shooting – the gamekeeper. They had in fact to pay every servant who had rendered them some particular, as opposed to general, service.

Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, domestic service was the country’s second-biggest employer of both men and women. Only agriculture involved more, and industry less. Even agriculture lost its edge as a result of the depression in farming. The aristocracy employed about one-fifth of the servant class. The rest were servants in middle-class families. The priorities for those with money to spend, and the status symbols they sought, were very different from our modern-day perspective. One of them was that any self-respecting family must have at least one person working for them, and that the more staff they employed, the higher was their prestige. Middle-class families would have a maid as a matter of course, though these did not live on the premises (suburban villas did not have servants’ quarters included in their design). The maid to a country doctor’s family, for instance, might arrive by bicycle each morning to serve breakfast, and depart once dinner had been washed up in the evening.

The Census of 1891 showed that more than 2,000,000 people were employed in domestic service. Of these, 100,000 were under the age of fifteen. Ten years later, the number was about the same, and statistics indicated the extent to which female domestic servants outnumbered men. Women numbered over three-quarters of the total: 1,690,686, over 40 per cent of the total female working population. Some of them were as young as ten, and their careers would commonly have begun at twelve or thirteen. They were essential to anyone wishing to live in cleanliness and comfort. Even a modest-sized home could not be kept clean or run efficiently without such help. In the case of a large house, or one in which a good deal of entertaining took place, it would be downright impossible to exist without an army of servants. As middle-class homes became smaller and were designed to be more easily manageable, servants vanished as a feature of domestic life and were to be found only in great households, as they still are. It was the great watershed of the 1914–18 war that finally brought about this change.

Servants gained respect from their own class in direct proportion to the position of their employer. This made sense, because the most important families could by definition afford the best service, the most elaborate liveries and carriages, and the homes in which the servants would be working would be the most splendid.

One surprising thing about servants was that, though many of them wore drab-coloured dresses, they were not blind to changes in fashion, or unable to follow them. During the crinoline craze in the century’s middle decades even housemaids, on the little they earned, would wear those wide skirts whose iron frames could knock down everything in their paths. Cartoons of the time, in magazines such as
Punch
that found their readers among the servant-owning class, depict situations in which a maid is unable to kneel down to clean because of her voluminous skirts. Photographs of housekeepers, who wore ordinary dress rather than uniform, often show them in well-cut dresses with stylish bows, fashionably slim waists and elaborate sleeves (the ‘leg-ofmutton’ variety were especially popular in the 1890s), suggesting that housekeepers saw themselves as what they were: successful career women whose years of application had brought them to the top of a profession in which authority and organizational ability were essential – respected figures without whom an enterprise like a country house could not run smoothly. This was also true of male servants. Photographs of them off duty, or in ordinary clothes, will often show smart and stylish dress that suggests they saw themselves as belonging to a professional class and an honourable occupation.

For those who had domestic staff, there was considerable prestige to be gained from the number they possessed, and corresponding embarrassment if they did not have enough. Some of the grandest families had ‘too many servants to count’, according to one who married into the Grosvenor family, Dukes of Westminster, and it would certainly have been normal for the grandest families to have too many to know all their names. The Duke of Westminster himself would without question have been one such employer, since more than 300 people worked at his Cheshire house, Eaton Hall.

To us, much about a servant’s life seems intolerable. But while there is no denying that it was a harsh and unrewarding life, we must not project into the past our twenty-first-century expectations. We have grown up in an age that encourages us to think we are entitled to personal fulfilment, education, satisfaction, leisure, material comfort, foreign travel and a wealth of entertainment, and that if we are not given these things we are being deprived of our rights. For those who did not have any such expectations, a life in service was often the norm. These people were a great deal tougher than we are now because their upbringing and conditioning and environment made them so. They had no opportunities to travel or to develop their minds. They knew they had to work in order to eat, and that there were worse means of earning a living than being a servant. They would, all of them, have known people – siblings, parents, uncles and aunts, friends – who had been in service already. They would have grown up knowing something of the work and the conditions and the things they would find there. If domestic service is what you expect, if it is what you have always been told you will do, if your whole short life is a preparation for it and if everyone you know is going into it as well, you must be at least a little accustomed to the thought of it.

There was something of a sense of solidarity between servants, if they were on the same level. Since millions were employed in similar tasks, the servant was a stock character in the Victorian world. They had their own set of attitudes, their own customs, even their own magazines. There was, as we have seen, a graded hierarchy, and the world of service encompassed everyone from the steward of a ducal household to the twelve-year-old orphan girl who did the domestic chores in a terraced house. A servant’s experience depended on their position, on the work they did and on the people who employed them.

Some householders were aloof. Some were haughty. (Lord Curzon never bothered to learn names. He would simply call out: ‘You! Footman!’ if he wanted something.) Others could be arrogant, exacting, vindictive, lecherous. Many, however, were kind, thoughtful, solicitous, and loyal to those who served them. Ideally the ethos of the English upper class included a sense of responsibility for the welfare of those in their employ, and the moral obligation to look after them when their active careers were over. Some employers were of this type, but there was no consistency. Being pleasant to servants was not an inherited characteristic. One woman in conversation with the author recalled a family who had employed servants in her local area for generations: ‘The old Earl – the one that died in the fifties – he was hated, absolutely
hated
. He’s still spoken of with hatred around here. Then the son, he was very nice – very kind. But the present one is just – horrible.’