The Real Life Downton Abbey: How Life Was Really Lived in Stately Homes a Century Ago

by Jacky Hyams

  Author’s Note

  Before 1971 the pound was divided into twenty shillings (s); one shilling was made up of twelve pennies (d). 240 pennies made up £1. A guinea was worth 21 shillings (or £1 and one shilling).

  I have given many prices and sums of money in the original currency. In order to calculate today’s value of any original price quoted, the National Archives has a very useful website with a currency calculator (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency).

  Acknowledgements

  Sincere thanks for their valuable insights and generosity with their time go to Joy Meir, Laura Mason, Jeremy Musson, David Trevor-Jones, Kerry Bristol and Sarah Tobias.

  For more information on English country houses and domestic service, I can recommend the following: The Country House Servant by Pamela A. Sambrook (Sutton Publishing, 1999); Keeping Their Place by Pamela A. Sambrook (The History Press, 2007); Up and Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson (John Murray, 2010); and Not in Front of the Servants by Frank Victor Dawes (Century, 1991).

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The House

  Chapter 2: Money

  Chapter 3: The Pecking Order

  Chapter 4: The Rules

  Chapter 5: Who Runs this House Anyway?

  Chapter 6: Relationships

  Chapter 7: Food & Drink

  Chapter 8: Entertainment & Sport

  Chapter 9: Getting Around

  Chapter 10: Morals & Manners

  Chapter 11: How to Wear It

  Chapter 12: Health

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The horse-drawn State Landau slowly makes its way from Westminster Abbey towards St James’s Park. Inside the open carriage, the handsome prince in his scarlet tunic and his beautiful new bride wave delightedly at the crowds noisily cheering them on. Colourfully attired footmen ride behind them. Close your eyes briefly and you could be back in 1902, the year the carriage was built for King Edward VII. But we’re here, in the twenty-first century, on a beautiful spring day when British history, ceremonial pomp, brilliant pageantry and a spectacular display of centuries-old tradition briefly capture the whole world’s attention. Royalty and privilege. They may no longer be relevant to our lives in any way, but when they’re put on very public display it’s impossible not to be fascinated by our past.

  The same applies to TV historical or costume drama. We’re fascinated by it because it shows us such different worlds to our twenty-first century lives. Fictional TV series like Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, or the movie, The King’s Speech, are compelling because they tell us so much about our history. With their precise attention to every detail, they give us many tantalising insights into the worlds of royalty, the rich, the privileged of the time – and, of course, those that worked to serve them.

  This bird’s-eye view of the day-to-day lives of the live-in servants, their subservience to the super-rich, their personal dramas and the everyday restrictions of their lives, creates an irresistible blend of history and fiction. And, of course, what makes the sumptuous Downton Abbey world of toffs and servants even more compelling is its very proximity in time to today; we’re not looking at the very distant past here. These lives, so different from our own in every way and lived in an atmosphere of amazing wealth, extreme formality and snobbery, stuffy convention, etiquette – and unbelievable servitude – were lived just over a hundred years ago.

  But why are we so fascinated by the master-servant relationship itself? Part of the reason may be because we now feel that much closer to it because we can access our knowledge of it ourselves. We are continually encouraged to locate our own history, track down our own past. And it’s so easy. Digging into the lives of our families via information published online and websites like Ancestry.com reveals so much to us now at the push of a button. We may not have distant aristocratic relations in our family tree – the aristocrats are very much a minority group – but many of us are now discovering that we have relatives, great grandparents, distant aunts, uncles or cousins, who went into service and lived in the grand house; relatives that scrubbed, cooked and cleaned for the wealthy family with their vast estates and snobbish ways.

  Just before I finished this book, a friend mentioned to me that his eighty-something mother had clear and coherent recollections of her own mother’s life as a cook in a big Scottish country house in the early 1900s. As was typical then, she left the job to get married. Photos of my friend’s grandmother as a beautiful young woman, wearing her servant’s apron, popped into my email inbox. Would she talk to me? Sadly not. She wanted to. But without a letter of permission from the descendants of her mother’s employers, she said, she dare not speak out. It wouldn’t be right. The cap-doffing traditions of servitude still, to this day, linger on in the minds of the living.

  So who were these toffs and servants that hold so much fascination for us? How did they live, what did they wear, what did they eat, how did they play or form relationships – and how much – or how little – did they spend or earn? In this book I answer many of these questions and reveal, too, a lot more about what went on behind those huge front doors to the grand country house.

  It was obvious before I started writing that there was a vast contrast between the two worlds of aristocrats and servants. But as I made my way through the different aspects of their lives, I discovered that the contrast was even starker than I’d imagined. A closer look at the strict social etiquette and the rules of this class-bound period gives you a powerful appreciation of today’s freedoms. Time and again the same question crops up: how could women, in particular, accept all the restriction and regulation of so much of their lives?

  No one would envy the servants their slog and daily lives ruled by their employers’ whims where, for example, a young servant girl could not openly conduct a relationship with a boyfriend or admirer unless she had a very enlightened employer. The ‘No Followers’ rule of the period is unthinkable nowadays. Nor can we envisage a world where marriage spelt the end of a job or any sort of working life. Yet that is how it was for millions of women little more than a century ago. What we take for granted, our unquestionable freedom of choice, didn’t exist for them.

  At the other end of the scale, the wealthy, privileged women who might, at first glance, seem enviably to have it all, with servants running back and forth to satisfy every tiny whim and trunkloads of the finest expensive designer gear shipped in from Paris whenever they wanted, were equally restricted by their class and exalted position in society – but in a very different way. They could only be married. They could not divorce (divorce equalled shame and rejection in their world), and they couldn’t remain single (spinster equalled another kind of social reject). And there were servants around them every minute of their lives. There was no privacy as we know it: they were in a gilded, very beautiful cage.

  This is where the fictional TV version of the era Downton Abbey mirrors the reality of those times so precisely. Many of the older, grand women – the Duchess of Grantham in particular, as recreated so beautifully by Maggie Smith – are determinedly snobbish and class conscious. In the real world outside their gilded backdrop, a major storm is starting to break: society is now rejecting the political supremacy of the ruling class and starting to give the working person a voice. Change is the last thing her generation wishes to contemplate. Yet her granddaughter, Lady Sybil, aware of this impending social storm, attem
pts at least, to get involved and attends a protest meeting – and she helps one of the servants find a less restrictive job in an office.

  Make no mistake, the Edwardian years before World War I broke out were times of real social upheaval: the Suffrage Movement, increasingly violent and dramatic, drew much attention to the fact that women could not vote – although it wasn’t until 1928 that the vote was given to all women.

  Despite the efforts of the reforming Liberal Government and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in the years between 1911 and 1914 there was considerable industrial unrest across the country. Yet the years between 1900 and 1914 were ushering in many reforms and the beginnings of a welfare state: the needs of the ordinary person were no longer going to be ignored.

  Politics aside, there is another reason why we’re so drawn to the lives of the previous century: we’re immersed in the idea that we live in a ‘classless society’ yet somehow, we’re a bit uneasy about it. So we’re intrigued by a world where everyone ‘knows their place’ because everything, for them, is so clearly prescribed or set down. And, of course, we continue to live with them. The evidence of Edwardian life is everywhere. Not only the big department stores, hotels, theatres and seaside resorts where they enjoyed themselves, but our homes too. The Edwardians and Victorians built so much housing that still stands in our country. Servants worked for millions of middle-class families in cities too, not just the super-rich country house dwellers. So anyone living in a house or conversion from the Victorian or Edwardian era inhabits the same space, may see the same view from their window. Climb the many flights of stairs to the tiny bedroom at the very top of the house and there is the servant’s world: the tiny fireplace, the narrow single bed and bare wooden floorboards. We can easily imagine their lives for ourselves. Maybe that’s why they are so real to us.

  More insights to these lives can also be found, of course, in taking time out to visit the grand country houses dotted all over the country, many open to the general public, thanks to their owners and the work of English Heritage and the National Trust. These houses are awesome examples of architectural grandeur, wealth, and the long histories of many aristocratic families. Some houses show, in some detail, the fascinating insights into life below stairs, so that we can see with our own eyes how it was, wander around their vast gardens and estates and gaze at the impressive splendour of their vast interiors.

  Downton Abbey starts in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, two years before World War I erupts. This book covers a wider period, from the late 1800s right up to 1914 when the war started.

  Technically, the Edwardian period starts at the beginning of 1901 when Queen Victoria died and her eldest son, ‘Bertie’, Prince of Wales, took the throne until he too died in 1910. But although Edward VII’s reign is brief, less than ten years before his son George became King George V in 1910, the term Edwardian is used to describe the entire period after Queen Victoria died up to 1914, mainly because it is so closely linked to the opulence, elegance and sophistication of the ruling aristocratic class who surrounded Edward VII – the elite whose waning influence marked the beginning of the end of the rigid class system that dominated millions of lives for hundreds of years.

  We left the world of toffs and servants when the next page of history was turned, the onset of World War I in August 1914. After this, many grand country houses were requisitioned as hospitals to treat the sick and wounded. This war with Germany – ‘a war to end all wars’ – destroyed many lives. Close to a million British men were killed and millions more wounded in combat – yet it eventually sped up the process of the changes in society that were already beginning to be felt before the war. Wealthy, privileged individuals took up arms alongside ordinary working men: unbreakable bonds, irrelevant of class or background, were formed in adversity – and after the war, they remained, helping bring the class barriers down.

  Women too, took on new roles in place of the men away fighting; in peace time, they didn’t want to relinquish their recently- found freedoms and, most importantly, as they came through the disruption and chaos of war, working people started to see that they no longer had to toil away all their lives to support the lifestyle of the rich or privileged.

  Servants didn’t suddenly fade away overnight, of course. But the figures speak for themselves: a life in service no longer appealed to successive generations with other work options. And the decline of aristocratic wealth meant those in servitude themselves were no longer needed in large numbers. By 1931 there were 1.3 million servants in domestic employment in Britain, 700,000 less than at the beginning of the century. In 1951, following World War II, there were just 250,000 such workers in Britain. And a decade on, in 1961, just 100,000 people worked as servants. The wider availability of labour-saving household devices, better job opportunities and wider education options for all, in time, limited the availability or need for servants.

  Today, the well-off continue to hire domestic help around the house and in the garden, to drive them around, look after their children or work in any way that may be needed. Agencies who specialise in supplying experienced butlers on a full- or part-time basis continue to thrive. Housekeepers are still hired to run households for the rich. And some people still opt to have live-in help in their home. But, generally, the relationship between employer and employee tends to be quite different.

  Sometimes, the disgruntled servant will simply sack the master. Only the other day, a friend told me she’d lost her long-term cleaner. ‘She gave me the sack – by text message,’ she wailed.

  That, for me, sums it all up. Today’s domestic servants may need the cash – but essentially they’re free in a way that could never have been imagined a century ago. She or he can sack the boss if they want to. And in this world, thankfully, there are no ‘Servants’ Rules’ to worry about.

  Chapter 1

  The House

  It stands at the end of a long, winding gravel driveway, set in five thousand acres of perfectly landscaped parklands. It’s the grandest of grand houses, built from honey-coloured Bath stone, a monument to the wealth, privilege and history of the titled family that has owned this house and the land around it for centuries.

  Step inside the massive and imposing studded wooden doors into a vast, breathtaking entrance hall with wide, tiled floors, enormous columns and neck-craning vaulted ceilings.

  Climb the equally imposing staircase with their polished oak balustrades and gaze, in awe, at the splendour and opulence of the interiors and the furnishings: the saloon with its towering ceilings, the enormous library displaying thousands of valuable antique books, the stunning drawing room with silk-covered walls and curtains, the vast, gilded huge double doors leading to the beautifully furnished smoking room hung with valuable works of art, the enchanting music room with its baroque painted ceiling and walls decorated with sixteenth-century Italian embroideries, room after room displaying the evidence of a magnificently elegant and sumptuous way of life.

  Venture above these vast State Rooms and you find more than fifty bedrooms, where the rich and privileged owners once played host to the many impeccably attired, equally wealthy house guests that were such an important part of their social life in the early twentieth century.

  This is Highclere Castle in Berkshire. This Victorian gothic pile, home to the Carnarvon family since 1679 and rebuilt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is the stunningly beautiful location for the TV series Downton Abbey, set in the Edwardian era in the early years of the 1900s. Back in 1912, when the story of Downton Abbey starts, Highclere had close to thirty servants working there.

  Across the UK, we can still visit and explore many other examples of Britain’s architectural heritage: grand, vast country houses and estates like this, some with hundreds of rooms, every estate with a proud aristocratic history going back many centuries, each one with a fascinating story to tell.

  But as lovers of the TV series will know, the story of this house is not just about the fabulous setting, the
grand design, our fascination with history and the trappings of immense wealth and great aristocratic privilege. For the story behind this elegantly appointed country home – and others like it – is a very human one about the people, the men and women living behind the imposing doors, their dreams, their disappointments, their hopes and their fears for themselves and their loved ones. Love, lust, deceit, duplicity and sorrow, the all-too-common elements of human experience, can be found within these majestic surrounds, even though the inhabitants of such houses, the masters and their servants, occupied very different roles in the world they lived in – and for convention and tradition’s sake frequently concealed or hid their innermost feelings or emotions.

  The rigid class system that once ruled British society and the lives of the population was about to disintegrate in the ‘Downton era’, the early pre-World War I years of the twentieth century when modern Britain, as we now know it, was born. Yet the social divisions between the occupants of houses like these, bred over centuries of tradition and restriction in ways unimaginable to us, continued to remain in place in this era, as they had always been, frozen in time; attitudes and traditions where stifling restriction and rules of etiquette dominated everything, an unequal world where personal freedoms were still limited by strict social boundaries for rich and poor alike.

  Move away, by design or chance, from these rigidly harsh restrictive lines and you risked everything. For the rich, stepping outside the boundaries primarily meant loss of social status, their closely guarded, highly esteemed place in the highest pecking order – though a very wealthy woman often had most to lose if she fell from social grace and was shunned or ostracised by her peer group. Yet for the servants of the upper classes, male or female, a breach of the rules – and a sacking – in a vastly unequal world could mean total ruin, abject poverty – or even starvation on the streets. That’s how vast the gulf was between them.