Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (25 page)

I see in Monday’s
Scarborough News
a bit . . . saying your education was not got at school or college but during your holidays. Well, sir, I make bold to claim some of that, because if you wanted to know anything about things on the earth, the sea, under the earth or in the air above you generally came to me, even when you had a tutor, and often the tutors came too.

The butler’s female counterpart was the housekeeper. Like him, she had reached the top of the tree in domestic service. She was one of the ‘Pugs’ or senior servants. She ran the still room, in which preserves were made and bottled, as well as keeping the linen cupboard and the china cabinets in order. She was not required to wear uniform, and her everyday dress was a badge of rank, as was the immense bunch of keys that she inevitably carried. She supervised the maids, inspecting their dress each day, and liaised with the mistress to discuss the day’s business each morning. If her employers went on a journey, it was her responsibility to welcome them back by standing at the front door or at the top of the entrance steps. It was also her task to greet visitors and show them to their rooms. She was responsible for ordering provisions and for dealing with tradesmen, and these individuals would have thought it well worth the trouble of keeping on her good side, perhaps with bribes or presents, to ensure that business continued to come their way. To those under her authority, and sometimes even to members of the upstairs family, she could be terrifying.

Besides her commission from local tradesmen, she often received tips from guests, and had the right to sell off-cuts of meat and other edible odds and ends from the kitchen. She might also smuggle food out of the house to send home to her family. Hers was a lucrative post, and sometimes astonishingly so if the house were sufficiently historic or interesting. There was good money to be made from showing visitors around. Mrs Hume, housekeeper at Warwick Castle in the early years of the nineteenth century, left at her death a fortune in tips and wages totalling many thousands of pounds. Enough in fact to have built a country house of her own!

In very grand houses the cook might be a man, for a foreign chef was a prestigious thing to have, but mostly this task was carried out by women. The cook was next in importance to the housekeeper, for she had the only slightly less onerous responsibility of feeding a community that might well number hundreds of people. The kitchen was often at some distance from the dining room – a deliberate ploy to prevent the smells of cooking, and perhaps the noise, from reaching the polite part of the house. If female she was always addressed as ‘Mrs’, whether or not she was married, as a sign of respect. There were two types of cook, differentiated by title: a plain cook and a trained cook. The former dealt with feeding the other servants on basic fare. The latter was able to cope with multiple courses and more exotic fare for the employer and his family. Because the feeding of a community so large, both upstairs and downstairs, was a major undertaking, the authority of the cook was correspondingly great. She had absolute authority over the kitchen maids, and no one would fail to show her appropriate respect, or enter her territory without permission. A sign in the Victorian kitchens at Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire makes clear that this is the cook’s domain: ‘No person Whether belonging to the Family or Not is ever under any pretext to enter the Kitchen without obtaining leave. RING the BELL.’

The youngest members of the culinary staff were the kitchen and scullery maids, who would start work there at fourteen years old or even younger. The scullery maids were the ones who did the washing of dishes and the peeling of vegetables, while the kitchen maids helped the cook by preparing the less important parts of a dish. The cook could be as great a tyrant as the housekeeper. She would supervise not only the cooking but the washing of pots and dishes and the cleaning of ovens, stoves, floors and surfaces; even with the lesser knowledge of food hygiene that there was at the time, these kitchen areas had to be kept spotless. Mice were a constant nuisance and, apart from setting traps, were got rid of by organizing periodic hunts using the gardeners’ dogs.

Eating was something that went on all day in a wealthy Victorian or Edwardian household. The notion of eating sparingly, or even sensibly, did not seriously occur to the middle and upper classes. They would overindulge and then take periodic curative treatment, perhaps once a year at a foreign spa. Cereal and toast would not have been regarded as a nearly adequate start to the day, and cereal was, in any case, only for invalids. Instead they ate very large breakfasts of numerous dishes – kedgeree, bacon and eggs, and game. There would then be mid-morning snacks prepared for them, such as boiled eggs and toast. Luncheon, a much heavier repast than we would expect today, would follow within two hours or so, and afternoon tea would be a substantial meal in itself, with sandwiches and cake and jams that the cook would have made. Dinner would be of four or five courses, and later in the evening there would be more sandwiches laid out for anyone who was feeling peckish. All of this food not only shortened the life expectancy of those who ate it but considerably lengthened the day of those who prepared it. The kitchen would be kept working throughout every waking hour to keep up with the demands made on it, and the dishes produced were not only numerous but very complicated. The cook might well be preparing half a dozen sauces at once.

As shown, the vast majority of children who went into service came from backgrounds of extreme poverty. Their parents had numerous other offspring, and needed them out of the house and earning a wage as soon as possible. Becoming a servant was considered a respectable, and even prestigious, move. And for a few of these impoverished children it turned out to be the passport to a life they could never have imagined living.

Rosa Ovenden (1867–1952), who would become known by her married surname of Lewis, had a background typical of girls who went into service. The daughter of an undertaker, she was born at Leyton in Essex and left school at the age of twelve to become a maid-of-all-work. After four years she happened to be employed by exiled royalty, for she joined the domestic staff of the French Pretender, Philippe, Count of Paris. Here she was able to learn French cookery – allegedly from the great chef Escoffier himself – at a time when the Paris-led culinary fashion was changing towards a lighter cuisine than the heavy fare on which the mid-Victorians had lived. She was therefore in a house hold that was not only in the forefront of culinary innovation but at the very top of Society. Clearly hard-working and intelligent, she quickly developed her cookery skills and became Head Kitchen Maid. Maids did not normally do the cooking, but Rosa possessed enough ability, and confidence, to be allowed to do so even for very important visitors. The most sought-after of all Victorian dinner guests – the Prince of Wales – was so impressed with the results that he asked to meet her. They were to become friends (and possibly lovers) and he would keep a benevolent eye on her career.

She moved to the home of another French émigré, the Duke of Orleans, but also branched out into what would now be called ‘freelance’ work, travelling to the homes of the wealthy to provide splendid dinners for their guests. Among her first clients was Lady Randolph Churchill, daughter-in-law of the Duke of Marlborough, mother of Winston, and – through her beauty and wit – one of the leaders of Society. Rosa Lewis’s reputation was made, and for a time – until the outbreak of war put paid to lavish entertaining – she was responsible for a large proportion of the private dinners given by London’s
beaumonde
. In 1902 she was able, without interrupting her culinary career, to buy the Cavendish Hotel in London’s Jermyn Street. She would remain its
chatelaine
until her death, indomitably surviving both wartime bombing and at least one stroke.

Rosa hobnobbed with aristocracy, counted royalty among her admirers (she was sent a signed photograph by the Kaiser, which she contemptuously hung in the lavatory when war broke out in 1914), and lived on a social plane that would have been unthinkable for those with whom she had started in service. She did this, moreover, without any attempt at remaking herself in the image of the upper class. Though she dressed well and could look like a lady, she made no effort to speak, or to behave, like one. She was brash, noisy and outspoken enough to strike fear in a duke or a general, but showed frequent kindness both to employees and to impecunious guests. She is an object lesson for anyone believing English Society to be a tight-knit club from which incomers will always be excluded by virtue of their accent, or lack of wealth, or gender. Rosa Lewis proved that powerful friends, originality, personality and outstanding ability can help anyone bridge the gap between a lowly birth and a celebrated life.

She even found a place in English literature when she was used as the model for the character Lottie Crump in Evelyn Waugh’s novel
Vile Bodies
. Given the appellation ‘the queen of cooks’, she was also known as the Duchess of Jermyn Street. In the 1970s, a quarter-century after she died, her life became the subject of a BBC drama series, though given a thin coating of fiction (the central character, Louisa Trotter, becomes proprietress of the Bentinck Hotel and is dubbed eponymously
The Duchess of Duke Street
).

Though actresses and singers could and did become the toast of fashionable London, and though marrying chorus girls was not unheard of among aristocratic sons (who were known as ‘stage-door Johnnies’), Rosa Lewis was the only former domestic to scale the social heights through doing what servants do. She represented, of course, a case so rare as to be unique, and perhaps any other woman would have lacked her novelty value. Nevertheless she proved what could be accomplished, given luck and talent and perseverance.

There were other members of a household staff who were neither one thing nor the other. They did not take their meals with the family, but neither would they have considered dining in the servants’ hall. They were as educated – and quite possibly more so – than their employers, and might have pretensions to gentility themselves. Grand country houses would, if the owners had sufficient spirituality or concern for respectability, employ a chaplain. There would also be a librarian, who perhaps acted as curator of other collections too (given the quantities of stuffed birds and butterflies, fossils and minerals, prints and etchings, that many upper-class households accumulated). There might also be a tutor to teach the sons of the household until they went away to school. He was responsible not only for giving them sufficient command of Classical languages for admission to a public school but might even, in isolated cases, teach them how to box. It was usually this hapless individual whose task it was to tell his charges the facts of life when they reached a suitable age. If the family was sufficiently sporting, there might even be a cricket professional or a swimming instructor, though these would not be resident servants and would appear only when their skills were required.

It might well have been the case that three positions were filled by the same man. A chaplain would have nothing much to do on weekdays, and looking after the library and collections would be a suitably dignified pastime for him. He was by definition a man of respectability and learning – he would be a university graduate – and therefore qualified to teach young people. To be chaplain in such a household would be a useful start to a young man’s clerical career, for if he gave satisfaction he might perhaps be granted a lucrative living that was in the gift of his employer.

For the daughters of the house, for whom going away to school was not a custom or even a possibility until the end of the nineteenth century, there would be a governess. This latter figure is among the most poignant members of the country-house population. Usually a gentlewoman of straitened means – and sometimes a poor relation of the family – she lacked the means or connections to marry and was obliged to devote her life to educating more fortunate girls whose background was often similar to her own. She was not treated as part of the family but as an employee who could be got rid of when her work was done. She was not accepted by the servants because she was from a class above their own. Governesses often existed in a sad limbo between upstairs and downstairs, and were in many cases foreigners and thus doubly suspect. They might be French or German or perhaps Swiss, for part of their function was to teach one or more languages to their charges. Generations of girls grew up in the shadow of these spinsters, caricatured – or remembered – as strict and humourless and exacting, who supervised their lessons and piano practice, and marched them round the park in all weathers for their daily walk.

The lady’s maid ranked below the housekeeper and the cook in the hierarchy of female servants. She was probably by background a more respectable, well-spoken servant – perhaps lower-middle-class in origin – than those who were recruited for the kitchen, and she was the equivalent of the gentleman’s valet. This meant that she waited upon the mistress of the house, or some other lady member of the family, but worked for no one else. She brought tea in the mornings and drew back the curtains, ran baths, collected cast-off clothing and took it to be washed or mended. She dressed her mistress’s hair – an operation that could take up a considerable amount of her time – and dressed her for all the events that would fill her day, providing day dresses, outdoor clothes, tennis dresses, dinner dresses, ballgowns, on cue. At night she would warm her employer’s nightgown and lay it out on the bed. Storing, selecting, preparing and fitting all of these garments was a considerable responsibility, given the number of times in a day that a lady would change clothes under the strict rules of Victorian etiquette.

The lady’s maid wore a black or grey dress to look appropriately sober. She may have been qualified to assist and advise her mistress on her wardrobe – and indeed was expected to be aware of new styles and fashions – but she was not allowed to display any sartorial flair of her own.