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

by Jacky Hyams

Given the prevailing Christian ethos of the times, prostitution is still very much frowned upon. In the Victorian years, religious reformers, backed by the Church of England, sponsor many groups to help ‘fallen women’ into situations where they might be reformed, but these are mostly unsuccessful: at the start of the Edwardian era in London alone an estimated 80,000 prostitutes are walking the streets.

  Various attempts to close down brothels also fail. And in one notorious episode in 1889, the Cleveland Street scandal, a homosexual male brothel offering rent boys for hire is discovered by police – and the investigation reveals that one of its key clients is Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Prince of Wales and son of the 8th Duke of Beaufort. (Lord Arthur is never charged and spends the rest of his life abroad.)

  Yet the ‘invisible’ but very real trade of sex for cash or a visit to a brothel remains a huge draw for the privileged and moneyed classes. It’s the place where younger men pay to learn about love – and older men get their particular tastes or whims serviced. Wives often understand this, and look away. Discretion is more or less assured when travelling, so the more popular brothels with the English toffs tend to be in Paris, the city of love. A big favourite with the Prince of Wales – in his party years before he takes the throne – is Le Chabanais, a luxurious, lavishly decorated house of pleasure near the Louvre where the Prince’s own room (decorated with his own coat of arms) includes a copper bathtub, decorated with a half-swan, half-woman figure, where he reputedly soaks in champagne with one or two girls. The room also has an interesting chair, called a siege d’amour (a love seat). Here, the Prince cavorts to his heart’s content with his favourite party girls. Yet again, those in his elite circle take their lead from ‘Bertie’ – and continue, through the Edwardian years, to pursue their own pleasures with those of the world’s oldest profession.

  MORALS AND THE DOWNSTAIRS STAFF

  The servants, of course, don’t have the luxury of the hypocritical double-standard morality of their masters. After all, they’re on the premises, all the time, to pick up the evidence of their employers’ bed-hopping – and they may even wind up helping to bring up the illegitimate offspring of their bosses, passed off as one of the family. So some cynicism, particularly among the uppers, is understandable.

  But it’s the younger female servants who have the most to lose if they don’t follow all the rules, given the sexual segregation of the house – and the concerns around ‘followers’ and pregnancy, though some bosses profess not to want servants to get pregnant out of pure self interest but out of deep concern for their moral welfare. They dress it up that way, of course, especially in a country house with its own chapel and prayers twice a day. But the truth is, some people upstairs just don’t want their servants to have any life of their own – it might get in the way of having them at their beck and call.

  As for the girls entering service at 13 or 14, they are often innocent. For some, the Bible may be the only book they’ve ever read; their religious beliefs are quite strong. Yet despite much debate in the early twentieth century about introducing sex education to address ignorance, it remains very much an unresolved issue. Nor is there any contraception – and sexually transmitted diseases are a real problem (see Chapter 12). So the girls, largely ignorant of such things, work for employers who are usually happy to keep them in ignorance. A pregnant servant is an unwanted commodity. And it would not be unknown for an observant housekeeper, concerned about one-too-many pairs of male eyes lingering over a pretty young housemaid, to demand to check the housemaid’s washable sanitary wear, just to make sure she’s not pregnant. If she is, she’s more likely to want to keep it secret as long as possible – or try to do something about it herself.

  It may be difficult now to understand such behaviour, but a hundred years ago, young people of all classes did not really have the opportunity to indulge in pre-marital sex to the same degree as nowadays. For a start, young people, including those not working in service, were much less free to go their own way: folk lived in small areas or neighbourhoods where everyone knew everyone else’s business.

  Locally, small towns and city areas had the ‘monkey walk’, which was effectively a pre-courtship ritual among 14–15 year olds. The youngsters would congregate in a specific part of town and the boys would hang around just watching the girls go past. But that was it. Everything in society, social pressure, beady-eyed employers and lack of education conspires against the unlucky single young woman who finds herself with a dependent child, no husband and little – or no – money. The social stigma that goes with having an illegitimate baby is very strong, the entire responsibility placed with the female; even if the young girl has been raped and falls pregnant, there is little to help her – unless she can find someone to marry her. If not, the best she might hope for is a roof over her head with her family, if they accept her back with a baby. Then, if she’s lucky, she might be able to take in sewing or washing if she’s picked up those skills. It pays a pittance, but it’s what millions of women do at home in order to survive – even if they don’t have illegitimate children.

  Are the servants immoral? Not really. There are always some who might be tempted to steal from their employers – but it’s more likely to be through necessity or foolishness than sheer greed. And if there’s a question mark over the morality of the upper servants who take a ‘cut’ from the tradespeople they deal with all the time, the butlers and housekeepers taking advantage of a discount which they then pocket, this is more of a perk of the job than a lapse in moral standards. Considering the immense wealth around them and the years they’ve already spent in service earning low wages, it would be strange if they didn’t take advantage of these perks.

  So while there’s a certain amount of hanky panky going on upstairs between consenting adults, the morals of the country-house inhabitants, while not exactly squeaky clean, probably aren’t that different to what you’d find in many places nowadays, given the constraints of their society, where men are more or less permitted their sexual freedoms and women remain trapped by class and convention. And it must be remembered, too, that not all country houses are run by despots. They might be run by a very Christian, churchgoing morality – some housekeepers even ask if prospective servants are Church of England at interview stage, and servant-seeking households placing advertisements might even stipulate their religious preference – but it is the human element of this world, not the façade, that determines what it is. There are people in this house, upstairs and down, that are loyal, thoughtful, kind, decent, hardworking and sometimes religious, including some who own these estates. And there are others, including the servants, who will lie or cheat and connive their way through life, though most, rich or poor, have no option but to keep their innermost thoughts to themselves. So both ends of society are hemmed in by impossibly rigid rules. That’s the one thing they do have in common.

  THE KING’S LOOSE BOX

  When Edward VII takes the throne in 1902, a special pew is set aside in Westminster Abbey for the sole use of his current and former lovers, the actress Lillie Langtry, Alice Keppel (Camilla Parker Bowles, the Princess of Wales’s great grandmother), Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, Jennie Jerome (Winston Churchill’s mother), ‘Patsy’ Cornwallis-West and Georgiana, Countess of Dudley.

  Lillie, the first widely acknowledged royal mistress, has been the royal mistress for nine years. A humble clergyman’s daughter with red-gold hair and a flawless complexion, at one stage she appeared in advertisements for Pears soap – one of the first twentieth-century celebrities to do so. Showered with jewels and luxury by Bertie, he is reputed to have complained: ‘I spend enough on you to buy a battleship.’ Lillie’s retort was: ‘And you spend enough in me to float one.’

  WILD ABOUT HARRY

  Over time, the truth about Harry Cust’s many relationships with aristocratic women comes to light. Lady Diana Cooper’s real father is Harry Cust, and there are other illegitimate aristocratic children sired by the priapic
Harry.

  ‘So much of the Cust strain entered England’s peerage, and that from such a number of cradles, there gazed babies with eyes like large sapphires instead of the black boot buttons of their legal fathers,’ says author Anita Leslie in her book, The Marlborough House Set. Yet Harry’s many love affairs are not always quietly condoned by his lovers’ husbands. Theresa, Lady Londonderry, wife of the 6th Marquess of Londonderry, has her love letters to Harry discovered by a rival for his affections, Gladys, Lady Ripon. (Theresa’s motto: ‘I am a Pirate. All is fair in love and war’.) The furious Gladys wraps the letters up, ties them with a bow, and sends them directly to Theresa’s husband, Charles. After reading them he leaves them in his wife’s boudoir with a note: ‘henceforth we do not speak’, and the betrayal is never forgotten. The couple are rumoured to never speak to each other again in private for thirty years. Even when Charles is dying and his wife writes him a note asking for a deathbed reunion, he refuses to see her.

  WHEN SERVANTS TELL…

  The divorce trial of Lady Colin Campbell and Lord Colin Campbell, MP and youngest son of the 8th Duke of Argyll in 1886 is one of the longest divorce trials in the history of the Victorian years – and among its biggest scandals. Married for six years, both parties accuse each other of adultery. Lord Colin claims that his wife has had four lovers: a duke, a general, a doctor and a fire chief. And much to Lady Campbell’s horror, a number of her senior servants appear in court as witnesses for her husband. Their ‘behind the scenes’ reports provide devastating evidence against their former mistress. Although both parties are shunned by polite society after the divorce is granted to her husband, Lady Colin – real name Gertrude Blood – eventually makes a new life for herself as a journalist. One of her favourite topics? Er… etiquette (she is the author of Etiquette of Good Society, as quoted earlier in this chapter).

  ONE FINGER AND YOU’RE OUT…

  Spencer Cavendish, the 8th Duke of Devonshire, and Marquess of Hartington (known as Harty Tarty) is a politician and sportsman with a somewhat rackety love life. As a young man, he is madly in love with a beautiful prostitute, Catherine Walters, known as Skittles. His parents, Lord and Lady Cavendish, do all they can to stop the affair, including packing Harty Tarty off to America for a while. On his return, they present Skittles with a Mayfair house, carriages, servants and £2,000 a year to stay away from their son. After their break-up, Skittles becomes a political hostess, entertaining the likes of Gladstone, Kitchener and the Prince of Wales.

  And Harty Tarty then falls in love with the wife of the Duke of Manchester, Louisa, Duchess of Manchester; the pair conduct a 30-year affair until the Duke of Manchester dies in 1890. Two years later, Harty Tarty and Louisa marry and Louisa, now Duchess of Devonshire, becomes known as the Double Duchess and is renowned for her inimitable style of greeting people at social functions. For her inner circle of intimates, she offers three fingers of her hand. Influential guests receive two fingers in greeting. And the rest get one finger. Nonetheless, after Harty Tarty’s demise in 1908, the Double Duchess continues to pay Skittles her allowance until her husband’s former mistress’s death twelve years later.

  THE SERVANT GIRL’S WORST NIGHTMARE

  Given the attitudes to illegitimacy at the time, a young servant girl who falls pregnant might attempt any number of means to get rid of the baby. A young woman may even throw herself down stairs or off a table, in the hope that she might abort. Or she might offer to move heavy furniture or do anything physically dangerous around the house. Given the sheer physicality of much of their work, such measures are part of the everyday routine of the house – though a beady-eyed colleague or housekeeper might notice and tell others in the house, including the family. Other methods include hot mustard baths or swallowing quinine tablets – or taking penny royal, an ancient herbal folk remedy, used for many ailments including flatulence and gout and reputed to bring on contractions of the uterus and help self-abort.

  An early advertisement for Pears Soap.

  Chapter 11

  How to Wear It

  Teatime. Below, the footmen are precariously balancing the artfully arranged pretty china plates of ginger biscuits, scones, egg sandwiches and chocolate cake on big silver trays as they mount the stairs to the drawing room.

  Above, the lady of the house, with the help of her lady’s maid, is choosing her tea gown: should it be the thick white crêpe de Chine, fringed with a netted silk and interspersed with gold and white cord tassels with a pretty lace bodice in palest gold? Or should she go for the pale grey satin and chiffon floaty gown with the delicate lace underskirt, fringed with chenille and with embroidered sleeves?

  Decisions, decisions. It has to be the grey satin. Neither of these gowns have been worn before; they are the lady’s very latest acquisitions from the first ever couture house, the House of Worth, founded by an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth, in Paris, where many aristocratic wives make an annual pilgrimage to view the latest collections – and order the most exquisite, made-to-measure high-fashion garments money can buy. Every Worth gown is unique: hand-stitched luxurious fabrics with beautiful trims of pearls and jewels, priced at around £7–8,000 each in today’s money.

  When you are required to change outfits and accessories four to six times a day, choosing what to wear is a serious business. The task of looking good at all times involves much shopping and choosing: a month can easily slip by in leisurely, shopping-for-pleasure visits to Worth’s Rue de la Paix salon as each creation is modelled (Worth is the first to use mannequins, rather than shop ‘dummies’ and the first ever designer to have his name sewn into the garments), mulled over, discussed at length, then fitted perfectly to the lady’s form; then it is cut, hand sewn and packed in yards of tissue paper into the enormous trunks which are regularly shipped back home. It’s fashionable to order half a dozen garments from each season’s collection.

  Those who wish to shop in London, flock to the showrooms of Maison Lucile, the elegant fashion house run by the aristocratic Lady Duff Gordon. Or they can spend time shopping in stores like Harrods or the country’s first purpose-built department store, Selfridges.

  Four seasons, four different collections. Day dresses for the morning; tailored day dresses for smart daytime events or even weddings; fragile ankle-length evening dresses in chiffon, satin, silk or velvet, cunningly cut to show off a slender shape; floor-length evening dresses with trains for entertaining; two-piece fine wool costumes with long narrow skirts and embroidered hems for walking, matched with long, narrow straight-cut coats, outlined with braid; brocade embroidered waistcoats; lacy handmade blouses with pretty inserts – accompanied, according to season, by long fur stoles, ostrich or marabou boas and stoles, fur-trimmed muffs and mantles: these women make the average WAG look dowdy. And, of course, there’s also the jewellery, the diamonds and the pearls, the most valuable items locked away below stairs in the butler’s safe; ‘everyday’ jewels are kept in a box on the lady’s dressing table.

  The wealthy Edwardian woman may not be quite as high spending as the super- rich American lady, whose passion for exquisite Paris fashion from couturiers like Worth, Paquin and Doucet exceeds anything ever known before, with hundreds of outfits and gowns being ordered in just one session.

  Yet given how important her appearance is, the English aristocratic lady’s boudoir has very well-stocked wardrobes, one for daywear, one for evening wear, as well as a huge armoire with big drawers beneath which holds pile upon pile of neatly folded garments. As fashion changes – and the major changes in high fashion don’t start until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century – rich women’s clothes, so showy and sweeping, richly adorned with frills, lace, jewels and beads, become leaner and more pared down, but they remain highly decorative. And there are major influences creeping into high fashion: beautiful leading actresses are now dressed extravagantly by the leading couturiers. Their looks attract huge public interest in newspapers and magazines when they appear at fashionable
first nights. Everything about them is admired and copied, their clothes, their hair, even their mannerisms. Society women are still fêted for their style. But these actresses, with their high visibility, are cultivated by everyone, including royalty.

  Every item in the mistress’s wardrobe, each delicate, exquisite creation, must be beautifully looked after by her lady’s maid. There’s no mad dash round the corner to the dry cleaners or a last-minute chuck into the washing machine; everything is painstakingly hand-washed, with Fuller’s Earth the popular method for removing greasy stains. Total responsibility for the care and repair of all these pricey designer items is all down to the lady’s maid: some of the creations are made from such delicate silks, adorned with heavy jet or cut-steel bead trims which weigh down the fabric, that she must fold each one very carefully before storing it in the enormous wardrobe; hanging might tear the fabric. And her sewing machine in her room downstairs is frequently in use for repairs or alterations to the lady’s wardrobe; it’s one of the most valuable tools of her trade.

  A country-house lady’s night attire is ultra feminine: long silk hand-embroidered chemises, pumps (slippers) made of cotton sateen, handmade dressing gowns in silk or fine wool, silk or cotton camisoles, cotton pantaloons (worn as knickers), elegant bed jackets in light quilted silk or silk chiffon. Stockings are very fine silk. Handmade underwear is made from the finest Lyon silks or satins (from the nineteenth century onwards, nuns in European convents make huge amounts of lingerie for society’s wealthiest women).

  Her daytime footwear is often narrowly cut soft kid or patent leather-buttoned boots – narrow feet are believed to be a sign of good breeding – so all women’s shoes, whatever the width of their feet, are both narrow and tight. In the evening, she wears court shoes with a small Louis heel. These are usually quite elaborate, embellished with embroidery, lace or jet beading at the toe. (There are no shoes made with synthetic materials at this time, so even the narrowest cut shoes eventually stretch and mould to the wearer’s feet, sometimes stretching beyond the sole.)