This is a flesh and blood tale, in which Macdonald displays his vanity, admits his own faults and forgives those of others with admirable equanimity. Servants were not just items in the account books, any more than the aristocracy and gentry that they worked for were as one-dimensional as their posed portraits might suggest, or as vacuous, haughty and thoughtless as characterisations in period drama would have us believe.
Mr Macdonald’s memoir begins with a childhood pitched into destitution that segues into a long and relatively rewarding career in domestic service. From the lowly position of postilion and footman, he rose to become valet and manservant to numerous gentlemen, particularly when on their travels. He was clearly talented as a barber and a cook, judging by his ability to secure a place when he needed one. In early adulthood he opted for service in households kept by unmarried gentlemen. Because, he said, of his good looks he was considered too much of a risk around young wives or daughters, or in a household with a large number of women servants.6
The ‘affliction’ of his appearance was a source of both pride and vexation for him (he asked a friend: ‘What makes the women take to me so?’), but it became an advantage during his travels to Asia, especially India (these being the real reason for publishing his memoirs), where his bearing and liveried dress often made him admired as a gentleman: ‘They think you are a gentleman because you are dressed in scarlet and that fine gold lace hat.’7 He is thought to have settled finally with a wife and young family near Toledo in Spain, although history does not relate whether there are Macdonalds there still.
It was the country-house service of his youth in which he acquired his skills and adopted the standards that set him on this path. His experiences and observations of that time are a window on the hopes, expectations and perils facing a young boy with few prospects, learning to work with horses and dancing attendance on the gentry and nobility and, by his own account at least, prospering and improving himself by education and travel. It was not unusual for country-house servants to come from equally disadvantaged beginnings, and children left at the famous Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, for instance, were usually trained as domestic servants.8
Mr Macdonald’s father was, he said, a grazier who became a captain in the Jacobite army and was killed at Culloden in 1746. As their mother had died three years earlier, the five children were now left parentless. Macdonald tells a tale of their wanderings that suggests he was lucky to have survived at all. When his sister found work as a servant, this led to his securing a post as a postilion in a livery stable in Edinburgh.9
With his next employer, he immediately moved up in the world. John Hamilton (formerly Dalrymple and a connection of the Earl of Stair) was the owner of the Bargeny estate in south Ayrshire, covering ‘twenty thousand acres of ground’. In 1750, Hamilton had ordered a new coach from Hume’s of Edinburgh. Its delivery required horses from the livery where John worked, so he accompanied them and was promptly engaged as postilion to the family ‘for two pounds a year, all my clothes, and a third part of the vails [tips] . . . I was taken into the parlour, to see if Lady Anne liked her new postilion. I was admired in my livery, for my littleness, being only nine years of age.’10
In his extreme youth and confusion, he forgot his new job after delivering the horses, and it was a month before he returned to Bargeny to take up the post, by which time another postilion (‘a stout lad about sixteen years of age’) had been hired. He describes a tumult of interviews, in whose outcome not only the whole family but the entire phalanx of their servants take an interest: ‘Amongst the servants there was a division: for me, Mr Maglashan, the butler, Alexander Campbell, Lady Anne’s footman, who afterwards kept the Great Inn at Perth, and Mr Macmorlin, the head-gardener; all the rest being low-country people were against me; but all the ladies were for me.’11
There were clearly a great many staff: ‘The family have eight upper- or lady-maids, four chamber-maids, two laundry-maids, two dairy-maids, a plain-worker, a first and second man-cook, a kitchen-maid, a butler, two footmen, a coachman with positilions and helpers.’ Lady Anne’s two sisters often stayed, bringing their own maid and footman. In time John was given a scarlet livery jacket, trimmed with silver and made in Edinburgh.12
Bargeny estate today (now known as Bargany) remains in the possession of the Dalrymple-Hamiltons, an ancient lowland landowning family, and in the mid eighteenth century the house would have been one of the major such establishments of the region. It survives still, although in separate ownership. The rolling hilly landscape in which it sits, with dense woodland bisected by the river Girvan, offers beautiful views. The house, built in the seventeenth century, is largely as John Macdonald would have known it, although somewhat updated and extended in the nineteenth century. In his lifetime it would have been very remote, the county town of Ayr being twenty miles away.13
Shortly after arriving John expressed an interest in learning to read and was encouraged in this, first by the servants, then by Mr Hamilton and his wife, Lady Anne Wemyss, who ‘put me to school, as there was not much to do, only when the coach-and-six was wanted or when any of those young ladies [Lady Polly or Lady Nelly, Lady Anne’s sisters] went home or a visiting . . . In the course of time I got [learnt] reading, writing and arithmetic.’14
As many able and enquiring servants must have done, John observed with interest the details of gentry and aristocratic life, describing entertainments, as well as landscape, agriculture and architecture, with some sophistication. A willing learner, and in exchange for scraps of meat for the pets he kept (foxes, hares, ravens, otters, magpies), John ‘assisted them in the kitchen, particularly in the evening, when I had nothing to do in the stables. By this I learned a little of the art of cookery.’15
In these remote communities, favouritism could create considerable tensions, and discipline, both fair and unfair, was more likely to come from senior servants than from the employer. Young Macdonald got flogged mercilessly by the coachman, who had become jealous of the young postilion’s favoured place. When this was drawn to Hamilton’s attention it placed him in a quandary, for the coachman had a family. Somewhat unusually for the period, but perhaps owing to the isolation of the situation, ‘When Mr Hamilton got a servant that answered his purpose, he desired him to bring his family; and he gave them houses.’16
Country-house staff were expected to be mobile, travelling between the country seat of the family and its town house: in Edinburgh, in Macdonald’s case. Although offering the benefit of introducing some novelty and variety into the lives of the servants, it also required arduous preparation. The Christmas of 1756 was spent in Edinburgh, where Macdonald recorded: ‘we never went out with Lady Anne, even an airing, with less than six horses, with the two footmen on horseback, with pistols and furniture complete.’17 When Mr Hamilton rode alone, Macdonald accompanied him: ‘sometimes the servants asked me to dine where my master dined, and by that means I had it in my power to save a shilling or two.’ This was a common way in which servants might put money aside (a practice that certainly continued into the twentieth century).18
Macdonald went on to work for the Earl of Crawford, but this position soured when the countess took a liking to him, remarking at one point, ‘certainly he is . . . some nobleman or gentleman’s bastard.’ Even though he had rescued the Crawfords from a fire in 1757, he still felt he had to move on. In 1760 he returned to Hamilton’s service as a bodyservant but he remarks: ‘I did not know the value of luck, nor of money. Coming into two such plentiful families, I thought the whole world was the garden of Eden.’
A recurring problem was that he was ‘put out of my latitude by contrary winds – I mean women’.19 Lady Anne ‘turned off [dismissed] the house-keeper, chambermaid, and her own god-daughter, when she thought there was any love between them and Jack’. Mr Hamilton himself began to fear some intrigue, although Macdonald professes his innocence. Yet some understanding could exist between master and servant; there is an illuminating moment when he and Hamilton
are riding near Kilburnie, and Hamilton asks him: ‘Have you not a child in this parish?’ Macdonald replies: ‘Yes, sir, in that village before you.’ Hamilton makes the quiet rejoinder: ‘Well, you may go and see him: I shall ride gently on.’20 It is difficult to imagine such a conversation even a hundred years later.
Macdonald’s life story is instructive on many levels, not least because this was a key period for the establishment of the footman as the conspicuous, gorgeously liveried manservant. Although footmen continued to be a familiar feature of country-house life throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is in the Georgian era that they reach their peak as an item of display in entrance halls and dining rooms – serving at the table where the aristocracy spent such vast sums on entertaining – as well as ornamenting expensively appointed family carriages in town.
It is thought that the word ‘flunkey’ (apparently derived from the word ‘flanker’) was first used early in the eighteenth century as a term for the ostensibly useless and ornately dressed decorative servant, footmen in particular. More than any other such group, they seem to have irritated tradesmen and townsfolk who considered them idle and scornful, possibly because they were (unfairly) seen as superfluous. As we have seen from Macdonald’s earthy memoir, the footman’s role could be multi-layered, to encompass specialist cleaning and manual duties, as well as physical attendance. A footman was chiefly required to attend at table under the supervision of a butler, and to help with the cleaning of glass and silver, but he must also run messages and act as a quasi-bodyguard.21
In his perceptive and mordant work Directions to Servants (published in 1745, but written somewhat earlier), the cleric and satirist Jonathan Swift summed up the characteristic self-possession of footmen of the period, conscious of their fine appearance and gaudy plumage. However, it also revealed the surprising complexity of their duties, for in laying bare the common faults of all servants, he devotes the greatest space to the footman.22
Swift tartly addresses the footman thus: ‘Your employment being of a mixed nature, extends to a great variety of business, and you stand in a fair way of being the favourite of your master or mistresses.’ Therefore, he says, ‘you are the fine gentleman of the family, with whom all the maids are in love’. He pertly notes that footmen learn from observing the lives of the aristocracy at close hand, while other servants were not given such close exposure: ‘You wait at table in all companies, and consequently have the opportunity to see and know the world, and to understand men and manners.’23
Footmen were genuinely chosen for their height – ideally, all being roughly the same in that regard – their good looks and ability to look good dressed in the family livery. John Macdonald’s memoir alone indicates the problems that male beauty could cause. In 1711, Joseph Addison furnished an amusing account in the Spectator of a good-looking footman who worked for a captain of the guard and was in the habit of courting women dressed in his master’s clothes. As he observed: ‘the Fellow had a very good Person, and there are very many women that think no further than the outside of a Gentleman; beside which he was almost as learned a Man as the colonel himself, I say, thus qualified, the Fellow could scrawl Billets doux so well, and furnish a conversation on the common Topicks, that he had, as they call it, a great deal of good Business on His hands.’ It was only when the impostor passed his colonel on the stairs of an inn, when each had a lady on their arms, that the game was up.24
Addison makes mention in the same publication of menservants who wait on mistresses at their toilette: ‘I remember the time when some of our well-bred County Women kept their Valet de Chambre, because, forsooth, a man was much more handy about them than one of their own Sex. I myself have seen one of these male Abigails tripping about the Room with a looking glass in his hand, and combing his Lady’s Hair a whole morning together.’25
How times had changed. From having been among the most insignificant servants in the medieval and Tudor household, employed principally to run ahead of a nobleman and his party to announce their arrival, and to deliver messages, the footman had become an outward sign of status, as well as playing a vital role in the management of a great house, whether in the country or in London. As well as travelling on the back of a coach, footmen would walk before a sedan chair and follow close behind when their master or mistress went out on foot. Some households maintained a special ‘running footman’ to run ahead of the coach and announce their master’s passage.26
Being so valued by the rich and so associated in the public imagination with ostentatiousness, footmen were probably the prime target in the tax raised on male servants in 1777, effectively as a luxury, to help raise funds for the war against the American colonists. Even the hair powder they used was subject to an additional tax.27 The 1780 return for this tax of a ‘guinea a head’ suggests that it was levied on some 50,000 menservants although many of them would have been London based. The return also shows that, on average, dukes employed twenty-six male servants and barons fifteen. In 1785, to considerable outcry, these taxes were extended to female servants. In response to objections, the tax was amended for families with children although the tax on menservants technically lasted until the 1930s.28
Numbers of staff varied; in the 1720s, ninety individuals managed Cannons, seat of the Duke of Chandos. Forty years later, eighty-six were required at Blenheim for the Duke of Marlborough, while the Duke of Leinster (formerly Earl of Kildare), the premier peer in Ireland, could command as many as a hundred at Carton in County Kildare. The typical aristocratic or wealthier gentry household would have been staffed by between thirty and fifty, with, at the bottom, wages at £4 a year for a stable boy to, at the top, £1,000 for the steward at Chatsworth.29
The status of servants was reflected by where and with whom they dined. At Cannons, owned by one of the richest noblemen of the day, the arrangements at the beginning of the century were particularly elaborate. The comptroller, Colonel Watkins, dined with the duke, while the chaplains, house steward and librarian would dine in the chaplain’s room.
The gentleman of the horse, in charge of the stables, had his own room where he dined in company with the gentleman usher, who looked after the main rooms in the house, the two valets, called the duke’s gentlemen, the duchess’s two gentlewomen and the pages. Everyone else, from the butler to the stable boys and odd men, but with the exception of the kitchenmaids, ate in the servants’ hall. In most households, the main division was usually between those who dined with the family, those who dined in the steward’s room or those who ate in the servants’ hall.30
In many country houses, many household servants would be recruited from the families of tenant farmers and estate workers. In 1790, John Trusler recommended recruiting country dwellers of simple tastes and manners, in order to avoid ‘persons who had aspirations to ape the status of their employers.’ Another contemporary writer opined: ‘I have often thought of the great interest a nobleman, or gentleman of large estate, might always secure by only the proper choice of his domestics. Such an one cannot be without a great number of tenants, who might think their children honoured in the service of his lord-ship, and whose tenures would be a sort of security for the honesty and good behaviour of the servant.’31
By the 1730s the large numbers of well-born attendants, whether gentlemen or ladies-in-waiting, who had been such a feature of the aristocratic household in the previous centuries, have dwindled almost to nothing.32 Despite their disappearance, there still remained a distinctive hierarchy of servants, which reflected the divisions expressed by the seventeenth-century household. This fell into two distinct groups. There were the skilled and responsible upper servants, including stewards, male cooks, butlers, housekeepers, male secretaries, and sometimes chaplains and tutors, all of whom certainly wore their own clothes rather than livery, and there were the lower-ranking servants, who came under their management and control. The indoor menservants usually wore livery, while the women did the cleaning, or worked in the kitchens,
looked after the laundry and worked in the dairy.
In this hierarchy, a steward was usually responsible for managing the house, the accounts and the administration. At the beginning of the century the same individual often acted as land steward, with additional responsibility for estate workers, tenants and estate rentals. Many houses also had a bailiff, who managed the home farm that supplied the needs of the house.33
Particularly in the larger houses, however, a separate house steward – in essence a house manager – remained an important fixture right up the end of the nineteenth century, reporting either directly to his master or to the land steward. John Mordant, in his Complete Steward, published in 1761, memorably described the house steward as ‘Domo-fac-totum, or Major Domo’. The house steward (occasionally known as a chamberlain) would have to oversee the complex operation when the family (meaning the whole household, including most of the indoor servants) decamped to London or one of the landowner’s other houses.34 In some households, the job of house steward and butler might be one and the same.
Giles Jacob’s Country Gentleman’s Vademecum, published in 1717, described the steward’s or house steward’s duty thus:
to take and state all Accompts, receive and pay all Monies, buy in the Provision for the Family, hire all Livery-men, buy all Liveries, pay all Wages, direct and keep in order all Livery-men (except the Coachman and the Groom) to be at His Master’s Elbow during Dinner, and receive all Orders from him relating to Government; to oversee and direct the Bailiff, Gardener, &c., in their Business; and also the Clerk of the Kitchen, Cook, & Butler, &c., to whom he delivers the Provision, Wine, Beer, &c., who give an Account of the spending [of] it.35
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