Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Although the country-house servant might be seen as belonging to a separate and elite group, with modest relevance to the rest of the world, they were the same staff who moved back and forth between the country house and the London town house where so much political entertaining went on, thus playing their role in that arena.20 The servants of aristocracy were the scene shifters and wardrobe mistresses of the pageantry of British politics.

  Moreover, country-house servants are ever present in many of the best novels and stories that define our sense of national identity, both in our own eyes and in those from other countries. When I began this project, I asked Professor Cannadine, then the head of the Institute of Historical Research in London, for advice. His first words to me were: ‘You must look very carefully at P.G. Wodehouse.’ And he was right; Wodehouse has helped to form the image of the servant in the modern imagination. His stories are a study in upper-class life, of course, but, for all their humour, it is the well-observed detail that makes them so effective: in the mixture of formality and intimacy, the potency of the emotional dependence of the upper class on those who worked for them. Jeeves was a manservant – a valet, a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ – rather than a butler proper, but valets often become butlers and certainly travelled to countless country houses in their roles, as Jeeves does in the stories.21

  If Jeeves is compared to Wodehouse’s other fictional butler character, Beach, the long-suffering attendant to the Earl of Emsworth at Blandings Castle, it is clear that they are cut from the same cloth. But remember, too, the delicious tug of war that goes on between the earl and his head gardener, the tough no-nonsense Scot McAllister. Their subtle battle of wits must have been played out time and time again in the English country house, between the specialist servant and his or her employer.

  The artful servant, in the service of a not quite so bright master or mistress, has a long history and was a familiar theme in the drama of classical Rome, where servants or slaves were depicted as either cunning or foolish. The heroic figure of Figaro in Mozart’s famous opera is a classic example of a smart servant outwitting his master. Napoleon described the original character as depicted in Beaumarchais’ play, on which Mozart based his opera, as ‘revolution in action’.22

  The struggles of servants, their right to be respected as distinct individuals, and their dependent and often vulnerable status, were a particular focus for the eighteenth-century English novelist – even if sometimes viewed as tragicomic. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) begins with a pretty young woman taken into service as a companion, prior to her seduction by one of the sons of the house, which leads to her extraordinary and picaresque career.

  Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741) describes the efforts of an attractive maid to resist being compromised by her young master after the death of his mother; she holds out for marriage and in the end succeeds. Henry Fielding considered this tale so pious, and its outcome so unlikely, that he wrote a parody, Shamela, and the perhaps better known sequel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), about her fictional and equally virtuous brother.

  The hero of Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) is a worthy young man who is taken on as a footman and serves his master faithfully until he finds eventually that he is his employer’s long-overlooked natural son. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8) hums with the curious intimacy of the lives of both servants and employers. One of the central figures, the clever but flirtatious governess, Becky Sharp, is contrasted with the more traditional, long-serving, country-house servants of her baronet master, Sir Rawdon Crawley, whose younger son she successfully marries.

  Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) offers another vivid portrayal of the path of the educated single woman in the role of a governess, this time in a remote country house, working alongside a housekeeper and a staff, often in the absence of their master. The same is true of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), although he can hardly have had the first-hand insight that Charlotte Brontë brought to her novel.

  John Galsworthy’s The Country House, set in 1891 and published in 1907, opens with a description of the coachman, first footman and second groom, the latter two in ‘in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top hats’, waiting for a train bringing guests for a house party,23 a defining feature of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century country-house life.

  How realistic were these portrayals? We cannot be sure. In 1894 the novelist George Moore published the fictional – and improbable – account of a maidservant, Esther Waters, seduced and made pregnant by another servant. She is disgraced and cast out, but later returns to marry her seducer and even to care for her original, pious mistress who has been financially nearly ruined and is living in a few rooms of her once-opulent country house.

  Despite his own upbringing in an Irish country house, making him familiar with being waited on by servants, George Moore is said to have paid his London charlady to fill him in on a maidservant’s life while he was writing the book.24 Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930) paints a brilliant portrait of country-house life, in which the young duke derives considerable emotional security from the servants who have brought him up, is an essential part of his character, based on her own memories of a childhood at a very well-staffed Knole.

  It is perhaps the novels of the interwar years that contribute most to our imagined version of a servant-supported lifestyle. Think of Daphne du Maurier’s chilling portrayal of a sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca, or Evelyn Waugh’s mysterious butler Phibrick in Decline and Fall (1928), or his depiction of Lord Sebastian Flyte’s touching pre-war visit to his nanny in Brideshead Revisited (1945). In contrast, whilst Agatha Christie’s novels teem with companions, secretaries, maids, cooks, butlers and gardeners, they are rarely more than cut-out characters.

  Famously, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960) focused on the relationship between a gamekeeper and his employer’s wife. It is ironic to note that, in the court case prompted by the furore over its graphic descriptions of sex, the charge of obscenity foundered, in part at least, due to the prosecuting barrister’s remark: ‘Is this a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ This became a cause célèbre, illustrating the disconnection between the world of the privileged, servant-employing Establishment, and the essential freedoms of everyone else. The whole case seemed to turn on this remark and the prosecution dwindled into a joke. Penguin won the case and went on to sell 2 million copies. Why, in the late twentieth century, should any adult not choose their own books?25

  In the 1970s, the popular television series Upstairs, Downstairs re-created life in an MP’s London home, following the parallel stories of the servants and the employer’s family. Although first proposed as a comedy, it was made as a drama series. A more recent example, a fruit of the imagination rather than observation, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), filmed in 1993. This evocative account of the personal tensions and professional pressures on senior country-house servants in the middle of the twentieth century interweaves their lives with the political events of the day.

  The film of Gosford Park (2001), directed by Robert Altman, with a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, made a particular virture of creating the servants’-eye view of the action above stairs. Mr Fellowes told me in a recent conversation: ‘What I was trying to express was that in these great houses there were two different worlds all operating within feet of each other.’ Fascinated by the complex world of the country house and every detail that a servant would be expected to know, he also warned of the dangers of imagining that every house was the same in all respects: ‘We had a great debate about whether menus for the day were sent up to the mistress on a silver tray or not. A number of former servants with memories of the 1930s were advising us, each of whom recalled an entirely different way of doing it.’26 As for contemporary domestic staff, Mr Fellowes observes: ‘Money is alwa
ys spent on comfort and part of being comfortable is being looked after well. Every generation evolves its own version of what that means, and what we have in our age is often an “impermanent” staff, where cooks are regularly hired for house parties but are not permanent members of staff, bringing something of the fluidity of service as it was known in the eighteenth century.’27

  Country houses on the bigger estates that are still in private hands have staff to take care of family, house, garden and park. When country houses began opening to the public in the 1970s or 1980s, their staff numbers often swelled, restoring the kind of working community of the pre-war years. Large numbers no longer ‘live in’, but it is still usual to find at least one member of staff living in a flat, or an attached residence, for reasons of security. Some country-house staff today may be housed on the estate or locally and come in daily. As the Countess of Rosebery observed on a tour of her family’s home in 2008: ‘We – and they – all have our own private lives now.’28

  With the reduction in staff has also come a change in dynamics. At Bryngwyn, a compact Georgian house owned by the Marchioness of Linlithgow, the household is looked after by Christine Horton. Twenty-five years ago she had come to be nanny to the marchioness’s son; now she is not only PA, cook and housekeeper, but a close friend. She said: ‘I suppose that my relationship with the family has lasted a lot longer than many marriages.’29

  At Chavenage, a manor house in Gloucestershire, the Lowsley-Williams are devoted to their daily, Della Robins, who had also originally arrived over forty-eight years ago to help with the children, and is now their cleaner. Mrs Robins recalled in an interview: ‘When I came there was a butler, housekeeper, cook and nanny, and two or three cleaners – and now there’s only me.’30

  At Stradey Castle in South Wales in 2006, Sir David and Lady Mary Mansell-Lewis still lived in traditional style, but with many fewer staff than there had been only a few decades earlier. When I interviewed Sir David (d. 2009) with his former chauffeur, Ken Bardsley, perhaps the most touching moment was when Sir David recalled how he picked him out of a line-up to be his soldier-servant while serving in the Welsh Guards: ‘Little did I know I was picking a man who would be a friend for the rest of my life.’31

  Holkham Hall in Norfolk is a great country house still in private hands and still operating as the heart of a great country estate. Before the First World War the house had fifty indoor staff, while in 2006 the present earl employed just an administrator, a butler, a cook and three cleaners who came in daily, to help look after the family and the house, ‘much aided by technology’ and with secretarial help from the estate office. There are three full-time gardeners, and the house and estate were also supported by an estate buildings department, a woods department and a farms department.32

  So much of the vanished pre-war and immediate post-war world of large staffs still survives in living memory. The final chapter draws on the recollections of a number of people who work or have worked in country houses, offering insight into the historic country house, of lives devoted wholly to others.

  Landowners who spent their childhoods in pre-war country houses have equally sharp recollections. When I was shown around the complex of back rooms and attics at Dalmeny in Scotland by the Earl and Countess of Rosebery, I found that the service quarters had been used for largely the same purposes from the early nineteenth century right up to the 1960s. The present earl, born in 1929, could remember those rooms being occupied by a traditional staff when he was small, with gardeners still using yokes to carry buckets of coal.

  As we walked around, he was able to describe, almost as if commentating on a reel of film, his own vivid memories of the staff who had worked for his father – a son of the great Victorian prime minister; his mother was a Rothschild.33 Not untypically, the Roseberys themselves now live in a comfortable private apartment on the first floor of the house, while the richly furnished state rooms are opened to the public and used only on occasion.

  In the butler’s pantry (now a store room), there was once a big basin under the window, a plate warmer and a table, as well as some comfortable chairs. Lord Rosebery recalled: ‘The butler had an office elsewhere but spent most of his time here.’ In his parents’ day there was usually a butler, two footmen and a boy. ‘The footman slept in the small room off the pantry, so that he could be beside the room where the silver was locked up.’34

  Beyond the pantry is a series of offices and the now busy estate office occupies what was once the housekeeper’s room. Lord Rosebery says: ‘The housekeeper and the odd man were here permanently, but all the other staff really travelled between my parents’ other houses with them.’ He points out the original still room: ‘Here they prepared breakfast and afternoon tea, leaving the kitchen free for the bigger meals.’

  The former servants’ hall has a spacious area at the end, which was where they used to wash up after the servants’ meals: ‘No one was allowed into the kitchen except the kitchen staff.’ The ground floor of the old kitchen is now a lecture hall; you can still see the roasting oven, but the main range was removed during electrification in the 1930s. ‘There was also a room for kindling and a room for the “odd man”. This room was shown as the oast house in the original plans, but I can remember it being used to trim and refill oil lamps.’

  What staff does he employ today? ‘In the 1970s we had around four live-in staff, a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a nurserymaid for the children. Now we have two cleaners who clean our flat, as well as the rooms opened to the public and the estate office, but no cook. The cleaners come in nine to five and we don’t have any live-in staff.’

  As there have been many detailed studies of servants in different periods, this book is an intentionally broad sweep of history, bringing together the world of the medieval page with that of the Edwardian footboy, and the buttery and pantry of the Tudor mansion with the butler’s pantry of the nineteenth-century house. The subject has much to teach us about the human condition as well as about the nature, form and atmosphere of country houses. For many servants, their employment might have been just a job; some were hard pressed and discontented; others found their work so rewarding that they spent their whole working lives with the same family, perhaps advancing from menial roles to ones of considerable responsibility.

  The below-stairs community, with its inevitable tensions and interactions, seems often to have been one of warmth and colour. Henry Moat, the famous butler at Renishaw Hall, whose role in the life of Osbert Sitwell has brought him his own entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, once wrote to his former employer, Lady Ida Sitwell, looking back fondly on his arrival in service in 1893: ‘You were a fine young lady then full of high spirits and fun. I would not have missed the career for the earth . . . I never felt lonely when I think of my past life, the cinema is not in it.’35

  1

  The Visible and Glorious Household

  From the later Middle Ages to the end of the Sixteenth Century

  BETWEEN 1400 AND 1600, the households of great landowners were many-layered and complex. Records of the lives of the servants responsible for all the manual work and the careful administration of these castles, abbeys and manor houses are varied and patchy, but one or two characters catch our eye. Some are more senior and long-serving, such as those servants kindly remembered with in legacies by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell; or those who moved on to greater things, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, who started life as a young page to the Countess of Ulster; or such figures as John Russell, usher to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who wrote a treatise on the duties of servants in the 1460s, or Penne, the butler at Wollaton, cited in the household regulations of the 1570s, required to keep his buttery ‘sweet and clear’.

  Like supporting characters in a Shakespeare play, these attendants carry verbal messages and money, provide trusted intimacy, receive confidences, act as bodyguards or bear food and wine in ceremony to their lord’s table. Among them are henchmen or young gentlemen attendants, puffing
up their chests and defending the honour of their respective households, just as in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They are the absent figures for whom Petruchio calls in The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, scene I:

  ‘Where be these knaves? What! no man at door

  To hold my stirrup nor to take my horse?

  Where is Nathaniel, Gregory, Philip?’

  In this period the whole household, from the top to the bottom, gave attendance, physical help, safety and, most importantly, dignity to their lord and master. Their presence and activity ensured the display that underlined the position and power of their employer. In return they received, food, clothing and wages, security, and often not a little influence and opportunity of their own. In medieval English the term ‘servant’ was apparently used to describe someone employed to provide labour for a family and given lodging within the household; thus it was their accommodation within the (often peripatetic) household that defined their role.1

  The households of the great landowners were slickly managed with some sophistication, far from the grungy chaos so beloved of film-makers. From the 1300s it is apparent that today they would be more akin to the running of a smart military regiment or a very grand hotel, with great emphasis laid on etiquette, discipline and carefully kept accounts. The aristocratic household was certainly complex, serving many functions at once.2