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

by Jacky Hyams

  Yet despite all the drawbacks, even a low-ranking post in a big country house is regarded as a better job prospect than being a live-in servant for a middle-class family in the city. First of all, working for the upper-crust rich families in their country residences is seen as being of a higher social status, rather than working for comfortable but less-affluent middle-class families in a smaller house in town.

  Then there’s the practical consideration: more space. Town or city servants don’t always get much of a deal in terms of accommodation because their work in smaller homes frequently means they have to sleep in very cramped conditions, often right next to their place of work. In a London house, for instance, an under butler might sleep in the butler’s pantry. Or a footman will sleep in a basement.

  Since country-house servants already come from pokey and overcrowded homes housing many children – where even having a bed to yourself is a luxury only to be dreamed of – sleeping conditions in big country houses can sometimes be better. A young female servant, for instance, starts off in service sleeping in a sparsely furnished attic room, usually a hard-to-reach dormitory at the very top of the house (sometimes known as ‘the convent’), which she shares with six or more other young girls. Sometimes she might have to share a tiny bed with another girl.

  Servants’ sleeping quarters are rigidly segregated. The general idea is to keep the young women away from the attentions of all men; not just the more lecherous employers (the sons and heirs) but the other male servants too. So the servants’ quarters have completely separate staircases and entrances, sometimes overlooked by the butler or housekeeper’s rooms.

  The back stairs of the house and the servants’ entrance at the rear of the property (the place where all household deliveries are made) is only to be used by the servants – at all times. In fact, the only time the domestic staff are allowed anywhere near the main staircase in the house – used only by the family and their guests – is when they are actually doing their job of cleaning or dusting it. And, of course, they must never ever be seen by their bosses, they are an invisible army of manual labour, sweeping and dusting, polishing and cleaning, often while the family are asleep.

  And if they need to clean a room, for any reason at all, they are only permitted to work in it if anyone in the family is not scheduled to use it. What this means is that a lower servant can wind up working in the same country house for years, yet not once will they come into contact with a member of the family they work for.

  Yet despite all these restrictions, a tiny narrow bed in a room shared with many others might well be an improvement on the poverty-stricken environment of their own family home.

  Some country-house archive inventories show that in exceptional cases, live-in servants slept in feather beds – on wool mattresses. But usually the sleeping facilities are very spartan and the dormitory accommodation has very little furnishing, bare wooden floors and not much more. Washing facilities in the dormitory are usually limited to a basin and a jug of water on a stand and, of course, toilets are shared with many others – and are not always close to the chilly dormitories. A zinc or copper hip bath might also be located separately in a servants’ bathroom for their use or, in a few cases, in the communal sleeping quarters – but usually, on rising, it’s just a case of a quick splash from the water jug.

  In the newer, more recently built big country houses, the layout is more thoughtfully planned: many rooms are allocated to specific household tasks in order to make the management of the house easier. (This follows a general trend of grand and wealthy households where the rooms they use often have one function only.) These areas of the household, let’s call them task rooms, might be allocated to side courts in the house, rather than the more traditional basement areas for kitchens, for instance.

  There could even be a second kitchen (sometimes called a still room) as well as separate spacious larders for dry stores, meat, game, milk and butter, plus storerooms or cleaning rooms for lamps and boots. All this means that a twentieth-century country-house servant’s life might be a fraction easier, less smelly – even slightly healthier than it was in the previous century. Throw in the distant prospect of more privacy, like your own bedroom, if you eventually make it to the upper servant ranks, and though the incentive itself of more space may seem small to us, it still counts for something for the young and impoverished.

  Food is another important reason why a country-house servant’s job is desirable. Three – or even two – meals a day is unheard of in very poor homes, where a tiny amount of money has to stretch to several young hungry mouths. Meals in poverty-stricken homes are meagre, even sparse, mainly consisting of bread and jam or dripping, potatoes and a tiny amount of meat or fish, if they’re lucky. As a servant, you get to eat regularly – one big main meal a day – and even though the food itself might consist of your employers’ leftovers or badly prepared dishes, it is usually more substantial, with a bit more variety than at home. Think fairly bland nursery food, basic meat ’n’ potatoes meals and you won’t be far off. And the upper servants sometimes get a really good deal when it comes to food: much depends on how the house is run – and, of course, how considerate the employers are.

  Finally, there’s the proximity to wealth and influence, even if you are an ‘invisible’ helper, with gruelling working hours which start around 6am or earlier and often don’t end until 10 or 11pm. No matter how strict the house rules are – country-house owners issue their own set of rules – and how mean-minded and spiteful the behaviour of your colleagues, being in a beautiful setting, around priceless possessions and sumptuous displays of wealth all the time or even, in a few cases, living in an up-to-date house where electricity, telephones and motorcars are already being used (though it’s more likely to be a house where the old, less labour-saving ways are still in operation) is one more reason to understand why a life in country-house service is still regarded as a good option.

  Though, of course, as part of all the rules and restrictions, even the upper servant will still have to address their employer as ‘master’ or ‘mistress’. Wealthy house guests from across the Atlantic retain servants too – but they tell their hosts they never hear such servile phrases or terms from the mouths of their servants any more – in the US even servants are starting to be more upwardly mobile.

  Yet the English servant, imbued with centuries of disciplined, subservient behaviour, discretion and an awesome level of deference to their betters, still, for now, remains a breed apart. Their expectations are so much lower.

  Some interesting facts about the late nineteenth and early twentieth century:

  THE WAY WE WERE…

  1870: first water closet invented in England (a room with a flush toilet).

  1876: invention of first telephone.

  1896: Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, owned by the wealthy Rothschild family, is completed – with its own internal phone system comprising handsets (for the family) and earpieces (for the servants).

  1900: the 17,000 acre estate at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, owned by the Duke of Portland, employs 320 servants.

  1900: 25 per cent of the population live in poverty; 10 per cent live below subsistence level and cannot afford an adequate diet. Many women can only feed the family by taking in washing or sewing at home – or pawning their own boots for food.

  1900: average working week is 54 hours.

  1901: census lists 100,000 servants whose ages are between 10 and l5.

  1901: 2 million people work as domestic servants – 5 per cent of the total population.

  1901: life expectancy for men: 45 years, for women: 49 years.

  THE MARCH OF PROGRESS…

  1902: Education Act raises school leaving age to 14.

  1906: a Liberal Government is elected in a landslide victory after 10 years of Tory rule.

  1907: free school meals are introduced for Britain’s children.

  1908: the first State pension: over 70s are entitled to a maximum of 5 shill
ings (25p) a week; Labour Exchanges are set up to help people find work.

  1911: 48,000 drivers of motorcars or vans on the road.

  1911: 2,000 cinema venues operating in Britain.

  1918: Servants win the right to vote for the first time; women over 30 are also given the right to vote.

  WHAT IT COST THEN – TYPICAL PRICES IN 1900:

  Pint of beer in a London public bar: 2d

  Pint of fresh milk: 2d

  Newspaper (The Times): 3d

  Inland letter postage: 1d

  WAGES AND COST OF LIVING IN 1900:

  Manchester house servant: 18 pounds, l5 shillings a year

  Bank manager: £400 per annum

  1903: Cost of brand new Napier seven-seater motorcar (Edwardian equivalent to a Rolls-Royce) is £520

  1910: Average London property price is £14,000

  A guest’s chauffeur leaves Welbeck Abbey in 1911.

  Chapter 2

  Money

  There is an enormous disparity in the spending habits and incomes of the two classes. Financially, they inhabit different planets.

  THE TOFFS: HOW TO SPEND IT

  It starts from the top. In many ways, King Edward VII, Queen Victoria’s son who takes the throne following her death in January 1901, is what we’d today probably call a ‘king of bling’, a party animal who loves to indulge himself with huge displays of extravagance and luxury.

  In the long years before he is handed the regal crown, Edward, Prince of Wales, or ‘Bertie’, is a high-spending, gourmandizing, womanising king-in-waiting at the head of a ‘smart set’ of wealthy, highly influential socialites whose social calendar frequently revolves around following his lead. Their pursuits are many. And they usually involve huge expenditure: shooting parties, balls, theatre trips, grand dinners with rich French cuisine, gambling sessions, cards, horse racing – if it’s expensive and exclusive, they’re doing it.

  This is a highly social world. Yet to us it would seem incredibly public. With servants around all the time, taking care of your every need, how can it be otherwise? Yet despite this, within this set some are sexually promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses – who might be aware of this but look away. Maintaining the status quo matters much more.

  As King, Edward VII has half a million pounds a year (think around £8 million a year in today’s money) in his pocket – and his coterie of super-rich friends and acquaintances, include many ‘new’ money millionaires and entrepreneurs whose fortunes frequently dwarf his own, as well as the fortunes of the ‘old’ money aristocrats.

  Someone like the 6th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck (The King’s Master of the Horse), for example, is much richer than his king. The Duke’s vast estate, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, plus his coal-mining interests, give him ‘many millions per annum’.

  So playing host to Edward and his chums for a big entertainment, a country-house weekend (called a ‘Saturday to Monday’ by the toffs because the expression ‘weekend’ is considered vulgar) or a shooting party, or a trip to the South of France, involves a fantastic amount of spending.

  It’s difficult to be a freeloader. Any player in this exclusive world is required to spend just as freely as the next person in their group when it’s their turn – and the extravagances are huge. As King, Edward prefers the self-made entrepreneurs to the old-fashioned aristocrats, for the self-made ‘showing off’ – essentially for its own sake – is part and parcel of the super-toffs’ way of life. Appearances count for everything.

  Yet in some grand aristocratic houses, an announcement that the King plans a visit can sometimes be greeted with consternation: so enormous is the cost of entertaining him and his cronies for just a few days it might involve a year’s worth of economising for the host family – or even tip them into debt.

  It isn’t just the food and booze, the extravagantly displayed eight-course dinners of the finest French cuisine, the crates of the King’s favourite French champagne, it’s the little extras that pad out the bill: the finest cigars he loves to smoke, the heavy gambling sessions into the small hours, the lengthy shooting sessions of game. And, of course, there are the human ‘extras’ required for putting up the royal mistress of the time, in the regal style to which she is accustomed, naturally.

  No detail is overlooked: this is a time when the status-conscious rich will go as far as to measure the height of their footmen – to make sure they’re all the same height. After all, it won’t look good to have two liveried footmen of different heights on either side of a door. Your friends might notice. And comment.

  The King leads the way in this obsession with detail; at one point, he ticks off Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough for having a semi-crescent of diamonds in her hair at dinner instead of a proper tiara. Shameful, eh?

  At the other end of the scale, the working classes of the era frequently struggle to survive and feed large families on a standard wage of £1 a week or less. For the lower live-in servants, pay is sometimes much less than this. Yet the wealthy and slavish followers of the very latest fashion or trend don’t blink an eyelid at forking out today’s equivalent of £20–30,000 for a first-class return ticket, Southampton to New York, on one of the new transatlantic ocean liners going across the Atlantic to the New World.

  At the brand new Ritz hotel in London, opening in 1906 to cater exclusively to the super-rich and their friends, fountains are created which spout only the finest champagne. Ultra-fashionable women think nothing of spending the equivalent of £3,000 on just one hat. It is standard practice to use their husbands’ millions to visit Paris high fashion salons twice a year, ordering dozens of the most exquisite creations of the time from French designer houses like Worth or Doucet and having each dress shipped home, beautifully wrapped, in its own individual trunk (beats a cardboard Tiffany or Gucci box any day, doesn’t it?).

  Make no mistake, following on from the sober restraint of the Victorian years, this is a period of completely over-the-top conspicuous consumption for the wealthy. And the only ordinary people who really have a permanent close-up view of all this sumptuous extravagance are, of course, the servants – without TV and radio, many don’t know much about the indulgences and excesses of the rich – though the newspapers of the time chronicle their travels – and their scandals, should they come to light.

  Yet in some cases, things have been getting a bit tight financially for the aristocrats with the ‘old’ money. Not all estates are managed or run as well as they should be. Once they could do very nicely thank you by living off the agricultural proceeds of the estate. But not any more: many English aristocrats now find themselves in a situation where they might still be asset-rich in terms of jewels, shares and land, yet there’s very little cash. So how do you find large sums of cash fast if you’re juggling ever increasing debt, unwilling to sell off all or part of your huge estates? Where could you get money? Lots of it?

  THE BIG TRADE-OFF: CLASS FOR CASH

  Snobbery reigns supreme among the elite. By tradition, they only really want to stick to each other, and merge their aristocratic, high-born families through marriage to the offspring of other high-born toffs.

  But money is money and while the aristocracy traditionally rely on primogeniture (the passing on of inheritance, land and title from father to eldest son) for hundreds of years, when pushed they have occasionally married for money outside the elite circle – provided the bride’s dowry is tempting enough. When you’ve got a lot of money and can have whatever you want, why not aim higher?

  But with the wind of change blowing through their lives and, in some cases, their fortunes dwindling through higher taxation or poor management, by the late nineteenth century many discover the need to find money to hang on to their estates is becoming quite urgent.

  Borrowing more cash is no longer a good option. Until the late 1800s the aristocrats have always been able to borrow huge sums of money quite easily – at extremely favourable rates of interest. Those who chose this route and
used the cash to improve their estates are now in trouble: their equity or land values have crashed with the big agricultural slump when food prices plummeted. Then, just like today, the days of cheap, easy borrowing dried up. Even for them. So the temptation to hold their noses and marry into the ‘new’ money families making vast fortunes in trade or industry is overwhelming. And this idea becomes even more compelling when they consider the incredible fortunes that have been made in recent years across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Enter the super-wealthy American heiress. The cash-strapped British aristocratic snobs take one look at the enormous dowries of the daughters of families whose millions have been made in the railroads, shipping, land speculation, stock market and banking in America – and buy into the idea of a marriage with an American heiress.

  In turn, the wealthy American mothers of beautiful young daughters are desperately keen to buy into the aristocracy – for them, a title and a grand country house in England is the stuff of dreams, the pinnacle of social achievement.

  And the snobbish tendency of the ‘old’, inherited money looking down at ‘new’ money from trade or business has not been restricted to these shores. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, a handful of grand, wealthy New York families who live in snooty splendour on inherited money form a tight little ‘upper’ American clique, the country’s social elite.