by Jacky Hyams
Padding outside in her long nightgown, down the long, chilly corridor, she reaches a servants’ bathroom. She and the other girls line up to fill their jugs with cold water, then hurry back to their room for a speedy wash, hands, face, underarms, private parts, before struggling into their underwear – knickers, pantaloons, corset – then the housemaid’s workwear, a printed dress. Downstairs in the kitchen, the scullery maid has already been up since 5am, cleaning the grates in the vast kitchen, laying out the fire to heat the kitchen range, dusting and sweeping the kitchen in readiness for Cook’s arrival, making sure everything from the night before has been cleaned.
By 6.30am the housemaids have climbed the several flights of stairs down to the backstairs basement kitchen area, running the entire length of the house, to start their first task of the day, preparing tea and toast for the housekeeper and the lady’s maid.
Once they’ve delivered this, the housemaid’s cleaning duties begin in earnest. They are busy opening the big shutters in all the ground floor areas, dusting and polishing the furniture, tidying up from the night before, sweeping the carpets in the big dining room, morning room and drawing room. (The general idea is that many of the rooms are cleaned and tidied while the family is still sleeping so that they don’t run into the servants.)
At the same time, another housemaid is getting the fires going around the house, the coal from the coal room delivered by a footman, the wood or logs chopped the day before by the odd-job man.
7am. Cook is in her domain and the kitchen staff, including the scullery maid, are busily getting ready for breakfast, a main meal, which involves a lot of work. One kitchen maid is designated the task of getting the servants’ breakfast ready. Supervised by Cook, all manner of dishes are being prepared for the family: eggs, sausages, kippers, kedgeree, kidneys, bread, rolls – anything and everything the family might wish to eat. It’s a busy time in the kitchen. And this is only the beginning…
8.15am. The servants get their hurried breakfast in the servants’ hall: porridge, tea and bread and butter. The lady’s maid, who has already taken her mistress’s tea to her in her bedroom, must rush back upstairs again to run the bath, help her mistress dress and arrange her upswept hair. The butler, too, has already woken his master and will now be helping him shave, dress and prepare for the day. The brief breakfast over, the footmen start to lay the table out for the family breakfast. Upstairs, in the nursery, small children are already taking their breakfast with the nursery staff. A nursery maid has been up since 6am, cleaning and polishing the brass fireguard rails and bars before making the fires in the rooms. No one who works in this house gets a lie-in. Ever.
9.15am. Family prayers. The downstairs staff gather, either in the main hall of the house or, in some cases, where the house has its own chapel, they file into this room, for prayers to be read, first by the master of the house, then a prayer might be read by the butler. This is the only time the lowers get a glimpse of their masters, though they must adhere to the rules and not attempt to stare, make eye contact or initiate any communication with them.
9.30am. The family enter the dining room for their breakfast, the silver chafing dishes with their lids on already laid out on the huge sideboard. Breakfast is always overseen by the butler and footmen – though this is a meal where custom permits the family to serve themselves if they wish. The lowers carry on with their work in the kitchen and around the house while the family chomp their way through the big breakfast.
10–11am. Cook has embarked on organising the family’s lunch, issuing instructions to the kitchen staff, overseeing a huge roast on the cooking range, baking bread.
This is an important time of day for her: Cook and Housekeeper must, in turn, have their daily meeting upstairs with the mistress of the house; first the housekeeper goes into her parlour to tidy up and ventures upstairs. When she’s finished, the mistress will see Cook to discuss menus. There’s a lot for Cook to discuss – today’s menu to be ‘passed’ by the mistress and what about tomorrow, how many dinner guests and what sort of meals will be required? (Menus are sometimes written in French, so staff have to know or learn the names of dishes in this language, as well as how to cook them perfectly.) And does Cook already have fresh produce from the estate and the kitchen garden? The housekeeper too has her daily directives; she must go through the accounts with her mistress. And there are questions she might have to answer: are the staff working properly? Is the new housemaid settling in?
Around the same time, the butler has his second meeting with the master of the house to discuss various arrangements: a meeting with the Estate Manager is scheduled today, the chauffeur is needed to take family members on a visit and there’s a sensitive matter on the butler’s agenda. The butler thinks a footman might be stealing food from the household. But he’s not sure. He must be subtle; he can’t exactly come out and approach his boss directly. But in judging his uncommunicative master’s mood, he gleans that now is not the time to bring it up. He must wait and see what happens.
In the meantime, the lady’s maid, having completed her mistress’s toilette, is now in her own room, washing some silk underwear for her mistress. Then she must start trimming a big hat with feathers: the mistress wants to wear it to a local fête tomorrow.
Above, the cleaning activity continues. Now the first-floor bedrooms are being cleaned by the housemaids: as soon as the family leave a room, the servants are free to go in to make sure that everything is as neat and tidy as possible. The housekeeper’s standards are high but they need to be fast. Fortunately, today there are no guests staying overnight; this can make getting all the bedrooms clean in time tricky. Guests who stay mean extra work and if there are any late risers, getting all the work done is difficult – though everyone upstairs, guests or family, is expected to present themselves at the breakfast table.
It’s an endless routine for which you need an army of working ants to get through: laundry to be collected and dispatched (to either the internal laundry area or an outside firm), carpets swept, with brush or sweeper, a daily battle with dust, paintwork washed, beds carefully made, mattresses turned; the bathrooms and toilets must also be rendered spotless.
Some items in the bedrooms must not be touched at any time. The dressing table in the mistress’s bedroom is sacrosanct; it can only be cleaned and tidied by her lady’s maid. And in the reception rooms below, expensive mahogany writing desks are only to be dusted by the butler.
This cleaning and tidying operation goes on every day. But given the size of the house, major super-cleaning sessions can only really take place when the family are away, during ‘The Season’. Then the staff can clean thoroughly: windows can be left wide open for airing, the curtains, wallpaper and paintwork super-cleaned, all furniture polished to gleaming point – and there’s enough of it to make this job a major exercise, hundreds of valuable items in expensive woods and fabrics, each armrest or leg to be rendered dust-free and spotless. Wall hangings, paintings, enormous mirrors have to be taken down and carefully cleaned, all drawers and cupboards tidied and lined with scented paper.
Downstairs in the butler’s pantry, meanwhile, the first footman is busy polishing silver, the housekeeper has passed her food orders through to the suppliers and a local shopkeeper has already been and gone, delivering the previous day’s orders at the tradesmen’s entrance. Two housemaids are now taking the food deliveries for storage in the kitchen’s huge larders. The head gardener has already organised supplies of fresh vegetables from the house’s kitchen garden; an under gardener has also arrived with huge arrangements of fresh blooms from the garden – these will be placed in the hall and the public rooms by a footman or the butler. (If the mistress of the house is so inclined, she might indulge in some flower arrangement herself.)
Back in the kitchen, things are really starting to heat up. The scullery maid is frantically washing up all the breakfast pots and pans as Cook juggles the not inconsiderable task of supervising her staff to prepare lunch whi
le she plans tonight’s dinner and makes the next day’s soup. In between her other duties, cooking vegetables, making savouries, sieving, chopping, pounding, a kitchen maid is also cooking the servants’ main meal of the day, served at noon (and sometimes, confusingly, called dinner).
11am. Briefly, the servants have morning tea in the servants’ hall. It’s hardly a break because the housekeeper and butler, their meetings with their bosses over, are issuing yet more orders to the lower servants, before they scamper off to complete their various tasks. By now, the footmen are embarked on the table-laying process for the family’s lunch. The kitchen staff are a whirl of activity: peeling, chopping, organising pans of boiling water; the scullery maid, too, is peeling a mountain of potatoes in the brief lull before the next lot of washing-up arrives.
12–2pm. The servants have their main meal in the servants’ hall, then the butler, kitchen staff and footmen must be ready to serve the family lunch at 1pm sharp.
Today there are no guests, so lunch – a minor meal in the toffs’ daily calendar – takes about an hour. The minute their bosses have finished and left the dining room, the entire to-ing and fro-ing process starts again in reverse: the table is cleared, the dishes and cutlery are taken, on trays, back downstairs. Today, the family’s washing-up is being done in the butler’s pantry, while the scullery maid must wash the servants’ pots, pans and crockery, putting everything back in its right place – until the next meal.
For the fourth time today, the lady’s maid is summoned away from her sewing to her mistress’s side upstairs because she needs to change; she is going riding this afternoon. Out in the stables, a groom saddles the horse in readiness.
3pm-4pm. Cook and her team are preparing scones and cakes for the family’s tea; Cook has also been bottling fruit and making jam from fruit collected from the estate. This is the one time of day when activity slows down somewhat for the lower servants. In theory they should get an hour to themselves in the servants’ hall. Mostly they will chat, exchange gossip and sew, repair items of clothing or embroider. There might be time to write a letter home if they choose to go up to their rooms. But today, they stay put. They know there’s every chance the upstairs bell will ring and there’s something to be done for the family before tea is served to them at 4pm in the drawing room. Taken up by the footmen, the pretty plates, teacups, saucers and decorated cake stands are all neatly placed on small tables dotted around the room, where the tea-takers will perch on spindly chairs, as is the fashion. Then, once tea is finished, the footmen are back to clear everything away, an irritating task because there are so many small plates and dishes containing the cream, jam and butter precariously balanced on the tiny tables.
5–6pm. The kitchen basement area is a whirl of activity yet again: the servants get their evening meal at 6pm and dinner upstairs is scheduled for 8pm. The kitchen maid readies the servants’ meal while Cook and her team run around busily getting the family’s dinner ready.
The upstairs meal consists of up to six courses if the family is not entertaining, nearly double that number if there are guests in the house. Despite all the careful planning with the mistress, there are mishaps sometimes and sharp orders and raised voices from Cook if there are unexpected changes to the dinner arrangements. And the footmen need to know in advance how many places to lay out for dinner. Even one unexpected guest can be a problem because etiquette dictates there must be no unused settings at the table.
As the servants finish their final meal of the day in the servants’ hall and the upper servants’ quarters, Cook is supervising the presentation of a series of perfectly cooked and beautifully presented courses. Everything that goes on the dinner table must look beautiful as well as taste good. And the final presentation of the dishes is Cook’s role and hers alone: the toffs and their elite group are very keen on garnish, so Cook must dress virtually everything they serve, even at breakfast, with a paper ruffle, a sprig of green, a time-consuming perfect glaze (a reduced stock that leaves an intensely flavoured, syrupy liquid used to decorate dishes) or another elaborate garnish.
7pm. The footman sounds the gong, the family must dress for dinner. The lady’s maid attends her mistress upstairs – the fifth time today – helping her into her evening finery and redoing her hair – the riding session means it has to be redone accordingly.
8pm. The dinner is ready to be served. The footmen carry the huge trays of food upstairs into the dining room and the butler, after checking everything carefully before the dinner gong can be struck, oversees the ritual. The footmen carefully serve the wine (from the right) and the food (from the left). As the family dine, the housemaids are busy again, clearing up the bedrooms in the family’s absence, picking up clothes, laying out nightwear, drawing the heavy brocade curtains, putting a stone hot-water bottle in the bed in winter. If there are guests staying in the house, both male and female staff must carry out this routine for each guest, another time-consuming task when the guest list runs into double figures – which it often does.
9–10pm. The scullery maid, exhausted, up to her neck in dirty crockery and suds, starts to tackle the final big washing-up session of the day. The kitchen maid is tackling the copper cooking pans and moulds (the moulds are frequently used for the dessert jellies), which must be cleaned thoroughly with a mixture of sand, salt, flour and vinegar. The copper utensils must be spotless. The housekeeper has a nasty habit of inspecting the copper pans set out on the huge kitchen dresser – and if they’re less than perfect, there will be hell to pay.
The footmen, once they’ve cleared the dining room, can embark on cleaning the glass and cutlery once all the scullery maid’s washing up is finished (even at this late hour, males and females must work separately). The butler cleans all the silver. And it’s still not over for the scullery maid. She has to clean the flues, black-lead the cooking range, and clean the hearthstone, kitchen scullery and larder for tomorrow.
By now, the lady’s maid and the butler have retired to the housekeeper’s room for their nightly gossip. The lady’s maid listens to the others, says little, and concentrates on her sewing. They are still, officially, on duty until their bosses have left the drawing room to retire for the night. Then, the lady’s maid will go upstairs again to help her mistress prepare for bed. The butler too will be summoned to his master to make sure he has everything he needs before sleeping.
10.30pm–midnight. Finally, the long day draws to a close. The servants’ door is locked and bolted by the butler. Every weary soul can retire to their sleeping quarters. Yet it’s never really over, this non-stop attendance to their boss’s every whim. Should any member of the family need anything at all once they’re in their bedrooms, they can still, if they wish, ring the bell for a servant to rush to their side…
THE SETTING
The activity in the house is only one part of the story; the gardens and the estate that surround it must be run on equally ordered lines, so that the setting is equally awe-inspiring to the guests. And the country-house garden, by long tradition, supplies both the flowers that are used throughout the house (decorating the rooms and the dining table) and most of the fruit and vegetables prepared by Cook and her team. The kitchen garden, therefore, is an economically important part of the regular supply of foodstuffs to the house, as is the game the family regularly consume (the quail, venison, pigeon and hare) shot on the estate – sometimes in very large numbers, if a shooting party is organised.
Traditionally, the grand country house has a large stabling area, particularly in the years before the motorcar when transport was a horse-drawn carriage. Back then, a very large estate employed a head coachman, a second coachman and up to ten grooms, and maybe a dozen helpers and stable-hands. But in a house where a car and chauffeur had already been introduced, there are less horses in the stables – but grooms and stable boys are still needed because the family continue to ride – and, in some cases, horses are bred here for racing.
There are dogs, too, noisily making their p
resence felt. In country houses pointers, setters, Labrador retrievers or spaniels are best suited to the world of shooting and hunting. And huge mastiffs might be guarding stabling areas.
For the servants, of course, dogs wandering around the house itself can mean extra work, clearing up their mess or replacing torn items, small details which the housekeeper and her team must be up to speed to spot. And the important outdoor activities like the big shooting parties involve all the indoor staff, too: preparing for these is a big part of the organisational pre-planning that goes on all the time.
The gardeners and outdoor servants, however, have a slightly different deal to the indoor servants. They are paid wages. But they do not sleep or eat in the house. Their accommodation tends to be on the estate, in cottages. As a general rule, the younger staff – the under gardeners – live together in shared accommodation, sometimes with a maid or housekeeper who cooks or cleans for them. The head gardeners, stablemen, farmers and estate manager have their own cottages on the employer’s land, in which they can live with their families. Their deal is far less restrictive.
But while they may be free from the day-to-day hierarchical rule within the house, their hours remain long, from 6.30am until it gets dark. And the work is endless and physically demanding.
In some big houses, the gardeners are divided up into separate teams, headed up by a supervisor or foreman. As well as a head gardener and six under-gardeners there may be a kitchen garden team, a fruit-tending team, a specialist plant team, another for bedding plants and a team exclusively devoted to cultivating flowers for the house. The gardener in charge of this gang will be cutting and arranging blooms to decorate the house and dining-room table every day.
When dinner parties are being organised, the head gardener is informed, via an upper servant, which colour flowers are required. Then he, or a gardener-cum-expert in creating flower arrangements, will make up the big arrangements in the greenhouse, securing the flowers with small bundles of rosemary twigs with raffia, so they can be fitted vertically into a container.
