by Jacky Hyams
But servant socialising isn’t always as limited as we might imagine. The valets and lady’s maids travel with the job, all over the country, to London and abroad. It’s a chance to experience very different environments, some of them scenically stunning, some exciting – think the South of France or Derby Day – or very grand settings like the poshest town houses in the London Season. Mostly, they’re working. And they might have to sleep in the smallest or lowliest room in the house. But the experience itself in different surroundings is stimulating, and there are always other servants around, working for other families, to network with.
THE OFFICE PARTY
In some country houses, the toffs encourage the servants and estate staff to organise their own entertainment, with regular staff dances every month in the servants’ hall. If the outdoor staff joins in, there are no shortages of male partners for the housemaids to dance with. Or flirt with (discreetly). And a celebratory tenants’ dinner is traditionally thrown by the bosses if a new male heir is born, simultaneously raising employment hopes on the estate, a job in the baby’s nursery, for example, or as a wet nurse.
Mostly, though, the bosses organise formal once-a-year staff dances for the servants which they attend as benevolent masters. Everyone has to dress up. It’s a big date on the calendar – though in some houses, where servant-master relationships are not exactly warm, they’re viewed with a mixture of anticipation and scepticism, similar to the feelings we sometimes have about annual office parties, if you like. If you don’t like the boss and his missus, how can you fully relax when they’re around?
It’s even harder to relax and let your hair down if your working life is controlled by so many different rules and regulations. These big formal occasions are thrown open to everyone on the estate; the tenants, their families, even local tradesmen are invited by the toffs – and everyone wears their best party or ball dresses to enjoy the food and drink and perhaps dance the night away. Whatever their feelings about the bosses or the uppers, most have a good time. And there’s bound to be plenty of fodder for gossip the next day.
PRESENTS FOR THE SERVANTS
The other big day on the calendar, of course, is Christmas. This is usually celebrated by a huge dinner in the servants’ hall for all the indoor and outdoor servants. The hall is decked with bows of holly and there is a generous supply of punch, ale and beer to wash down the splendid meal: a roast, usually beef, with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings followed by plum pudding and mince pies. Later, according to the custom of the family who usually organise a gift-giving session with the servants after they’ve exchanged gifts with each other, the servants line up – in their usual pecking order of seniority – to be handed their Christmas gifts.
Like everything else, the giving of Christmas presents to servants is carefully planned. Housekeepers are in charge of organising and sourcing the gifts – and keeping a detailed record of the costs for their bosses. And the gifts themselves tend to be given strictly in accordance with the status of the servants.
As usual, the men do much better than the women, especially the uppers – a valet or male chef could be the recipient of a handsome present like a Gladstone bag costing three guineas (three pounds and three shillings). Or a head gardener would be given an easy chair of the same value. A first footman might receive a cash gift, as much as £5 if the boss is generous, but ten shillings is more common for a gardener or a housemaid.
Giving gifts of clothing to lower servants is something of an obsession with some country-house bosses, a practical but not very popular – or generous – gift. A lower maid might receive a length of cloth, either black for Sunday or flowered cotton for day wear (to be made up at her own expense) for work-wear. A housemaid is given a petticoat; an under lady’s maid gets a black dress – to work in. As for the female uppers, they too get somewhat practical three-guinea gifts: a black silk dress for the housekeeper and an umbrella and handbag for the lady’s maid.
Sometimes the children of the house are deployed to do the honours, to go down the line of servants, handing each their gift in turn and wishing them a happy Christmas, while the servants try to show gratitude. This is a charming gesture, especially if the children are quite small – and it’s likely the servants will have formed some sort of relationship with the children who run around the kitchen area. But the truth is, anyone who has been working in the household for a few years knows exactly what to expect: yet another reminder of their status and how their employers, mostly, see them in work terms, rather than individuals whose personal qualities are to be valued. It’s a once-a-year opportunity to garner goodwill from those who serve them, to show the staff some genuine appreciation. But it’s usually a missed opportunity which becomes, as usual, yet another formality. Another day, another ritual. ’Twas ever thus…
HANDS OFF, YOU POACHERS
In 1911, so great is the need to employ gamekeepers on country estates, to protect the birds from poachers, that rural areas are employing twice as many gamekeepers as policemen.
LAST WORDS OF A SPORTING KING
On his deathbed in 1910 the King is informed that his horse, Witch of the Air, has won a race at Kempton Park. ‘I am very glad,’ says the King, his last words. Not long after he lapses into a coma and dies.
A FLYING SHOT
Woburn Abbey’s Dame Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, is a keen horsewoman and bird watcher as well as a crack shot when shooting game. In 1918 she finances and built several hospitals in the Woburn area; in the thirties she works as a nurse. She later develops a passion for aviation, flying solo to South Africa in 1930. She dies in 1937, aged 71, when her plane crashes into the North Sea.
‘I THOUGHT I WAS WINNING’
The 5th Earl of Rosslyn, James Erskine, is a war correspondent, actor and legendary gambler. He is also the half brother of the famous royal mistress, Daisy, Countess of Warwick. The Earl inherits £50,000 and an annual income of £17,000 with his titles, as well as an estate of over 3,000 acres – but is eventually declared bankrupt, later admitting that he has squandered his inheritance on horse-racing and cards. ‘I can’t understand it: I always seemed to be winning,’ he says at the time.
As a bankrupt he is unable to take his seat in the House of Lords. Married three times – his second wife, US beauty Anna Robinson, is forced to pay his gambling debts during their two-year marriage – though the incorrigible Earl claims that after two days of marriage they never saw each other again.
LADIES CLUBS
London clubs catering only to women of rank and means – and mirroring the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall, like White’s or Boodle’s – become centres of leisure and relaxation for country-house ladies. These clubs have dining rooms, reading rooms and card rooms where wealthy women can play bridge and socialise with each other, far from the cares of country-house life. Many become addicted to playing bridge for large sums of money. Their exclusivity is demonstrated by the rules of the very first Ladies’ Club in London, the Alexandra. Prospective members must be eligible to attend the Drawing Rooms – of the Court of the Queen.
BIKING FOR EVERYONE
By the 1890s ‘safety’ cycles started to take over from the older penny-farthing bikes, and soon prices of bikes are within the reach of ordinary working people.
Second-hand bikes cost around £2. Or a brand new bike can be purchased (on an instalment plan) for around £10. Cycling to get around then becomes available to both sexes, all ages, which is a huge leap forward for everyone.
OH WHAT A NIGHT…
The Servants’ Ball is a significant date on the rural events calendar. Here’s an extract from a local newspaper report in Fochabers (near Elgin, Moray, Scotland) for 6 November 1913.
The Annual Ball given by the 7th Duke of Richmond and Gordon for the servants in the castle, gamekeepers, ghillies, gardeners, estate employees also shopkeepers and tradespeople of Fochabers and neighbourhood took place on Friday night.
The ball was held in the magn
ificent dining room of the castle, transformed for the evening into a ballroom. In every way the assembly proved a brilliant success. Music was supplied by Barr Cochrane’s band from Elgin, while Pipe Major McKenzie, the Duke’s piper, played for the Highland dances. The Duke opened the ball in person, leading off the Grand March with Mrs Dallas, Housekeeper…
Supper was served at midnight and a lengthy toast list gone through with the health of the host and family being proposed by the House Steward, Mr. Compton.
Although the ducal family retired before supper, dancing was resumed and kept up until an early hour.
Chapter 9
Getting Around
It’s September. A steam train is slowly making its way from Nottingham to Helmsdale, in the Scottish Highlands where the 6th Duke of Portland and his family are heading for the shooting season. The journey takes fourteen hours. But this is a special train: it has four carriages, a caravan of wealth and privilege. Inside the big first carriage – which includes bedrooms, a sitting room and a dining room – sit the owners of Welbeck Abbey, the 6th Duke and Duchess of Portland. In the next carriage, their children William, Francis and Victoria are being supervised by their governess. Inside the third carriage, footmen, the chef, the family’s chauffeurs and the personal servants so necessary to the needs of their masters all travel together. And, true to the rules and strict hierarchy, the fourth passenger car carries the lower servants – the housemaids, kitchen or stillroom maids. The rest of the train is made up of a chain of wagons, each one carrying an automobile. The Portlands are on the move…
Dinner is due to be served to the family by railway staff. The servants are about to tuck in too, although their food comes out of the big wicker baskets they’ve brought with them: sandwiches, fruit, chicken and eggs, packed by the staff at Welbeck Abbey who are already busy with the major spring-cleaning session the housekeeper has organised in the family’s absence. There is even a little stove and a teapot, for the uppers to make their own tea.
This is Toff Travel, Edwardian style. It beats Ryanair. Even if it is slow. Everything they need goes with them. Even if there are other helpers available – and there will be plenty of other servants around when they reach their destination – having their own ‘team’ to hand isn’t seen as an indulgence. Nor is transporting all their motorcars across the country. It’s just necessary to their way of life.
Luxury travel by train or boat is commonplace for aristocrats on the move. Only first-class plane travel is still ahead: the first successful plane flight in England takes place in 1900 and while progress in aviation is made in the following years, flying doesn’t become a fashionable means of upper-crust travel until much later.
CARS & TRAINS
For the super-rich, getting around, at home or abroad, is more exciting than it ever was: the novelty of the motorcar means that the old horse-drawn cabs or carriages that dominated road transport in the previous century are vanishing. King Edward VII is the first British monarch to own a car, a Daimler Phaeton, purchased in 1900. Four years later, car registration is introduced and there are 8,500 cars on British roads. The first ever Rolls-Royce, the epitome of Edwardian style and luxury is unveiled in l906.
Owning a car is only the province of the wealthy and privileged. But it’s making a huge difference to the way they live: another good reason why the ‘Saturday to Monday’ country-house party has become so important: the toffs can now use the chauffeur to drive them there. And the early need for a man to walk and wave a red flag in front of every car on the road has gone. (The Red Flag Act, introduced in mid-Victorian times but withdrawn in 1896, stipulated that all mechanically powered road vehicles must be preceded by a man on foot, waving a red flag to warn the public.) However, this new, exciting innovation has its drawbacks: not all cars have windscreens. And sometimes their engines just… blow up. Or the tyres explode.
There are 303 people involved in fatal accidents involving the new motorcars in London in 1909 (with 3,488 accidents recorded) yet nothing can diminish the wealthy person’s enthusiasm for the motorcar. The switch to motorised vehicles, of course, means staffing changes in some of the country estates; the new chauffeurs are often resented by existing staff – or seen as being a bit too ‘above themselves’, as indeed some are. But the march of progress is relentless: in their travels between town and country, the motorcar, for short journeys, is now becoming essential to the upper crust way of life. And toffs in London now have motorised cabs or taxis which they can hail to take them to and from parliament or their club.
For longer journeys, Britain’s cross-country railway infrastructure is thriving; the very first restaurant cars have been introduced (on the Great Northern line) in 1879, and these start out as luxurious dining options: the kitchens fitted with coke-burning ranges and a scullery boy to peel potatoes and perform other menial chores on an open platform at the rear of the train. Heating’s initially a bit of a problem: early foot warmers are merely oblong boxes filled with hot water, until steam heating is introduced. Yet despite some initial upper-class disapproval when it becomes obvious that railways will give people of all classes greater mobility, by 1900 trains are a way of life for millions. And a complete underground circuit linking the whole of London has already been established by that year: all the more reason for the wealthy, class-bound toffs to travel around in their motorcars or stay cocooned on a train in their ‘bubble’ of extreme luxury; rubbing shoulders while travelling with the rest of the population is unthinkable.
LIFE AT SEA
The travelling toffs can now also take advantage of the huge progress in maritime engineering and shipbuilding: this is the era of the great ocean liner, capable of crossing the Atlantic in a matter of days – and these huge first-class liners are designed specially for the super-rich, usually the wealthy new money industrialists heading for New York and the New World on a business trip.
The ill-fated Titanic is one of these luxury liners, launched by the White Star Line, in direct competition with Cunard, who launch the Mauretania and Lusitania in 1907, the first ever ocean liners to give birth to the phrase ‘floating palace’. Until then, a trip across the Atlantic involved travelling on an early version of a Cross Channel Ferry – not very desirable for those who prefer to travel in luxury and style.
The trip across the Atlantic on one of these new luxury liners is faster too, taking between five and seven days. And everything about these ships has been created with the wealthy passenger in mind. The Mauretania’s interiors are designed by the same design duo (Mewes and Davis) who have created the sumptuous interiors for the Ritz Hotel: the idea is to make their first-class customers believe they are ‘at home’ in an environment resembling a grand hotel like the Ritz, which opened in 1906; it was the King’s favourite haunt and built to resemble a stylish block of Parisian flats. Complete with Escoffier cuisine.
These trips are incredibly expensive. A first-class passage, Southampton to New York, costs the equivalent of the price of an expensive car nowadays, around £20–£30,000 return. And when it comes to the comfort of their pampered guests, no luxury is left out by the designers simply because these ships are designed for the new money no object, ‘go for it’ entrepreneurs, captains of industry whose millions are made in commodities or raw materials. But of course, the old money aristos must travel this way too, to keep up in the style stakes – even if it does go against the grain for them to rub shoulders with the untitled new money, they’ll now grit their teeth and join them at the dinner table.
The interiors of the public rooms are very much in the style of the era: lots of polished wood, stained glass and gleaming brass fittings. Thick Turkey carpets, huge tapestries, enormous oil paintings, very rich furnishings – and elaborate fireplaces with electric fires. The Mauretania is among the first of the ocean liners fitted with electric lighting. The doomed Titanic, which sets sail a few years later, is also one of the new-style electrically-lit liners. Mains electricity is not installed across the UK until afte
r World War I, so this is state-of-the-art innovation. In the bedrooms, there are plug-in electric reading lights by the beds, hyper-luxury – most of the British toffs haven’t yet got round to installing such things at home.
Everything on board ship shrieks luxury and sumptuous living. Liners like the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic boast four ‘parlour’ suites in first class, though the name belies the size: each suite contains a private sitting room, two bedrooms and a private bathroom. All are sumptuously furnished and the cabins have portholes. Yet such is the desire of the designers to give their first-class travellers a consistent illusion that they are not, in fact, crossing the grey choppy Atlantic waters but are ‘at home’ wallowing in the luxury that is their natural habitat, that all the portholes are disguised – with an inner bay of pretty stained glass. This way, it looks like a very grand hotel.
The twelve other first-class suites each have a private bathroom and two rooms. And the toffs’ personal servants, the lady’s maid and valet, are accommodated nearby – on the other side of the corridor, opposite the first-class cabins. The servant’s cabins don’t have portholes or bathrooms; they can use the communal bathrooms nearby. And, of course, the servants must dine in their own quarters; they have a separate dining area on a nearby deck. Technically, the personal servants are travelling first class, but in reality, their accommodation is a cramped, dark room without facilities – just feet away from their lords and masters.
