Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Mrs Wells certainly looks the part as can be seen from her photograph: a dignified, dowager-like lady, dressed in black, her demeanour giving away none of the anxiety that was evidently always there. At Uppark, a large number of staff sustained the life of just one old lady. It was, as many country houses seemed – particularly to the young growing up in their shadow – the centre of its own universe, although not without its trials and crises.

  Many years before her appointment, Mrs Wells had been the beloved lady’s maid of Miss Fetherstonhaugh, effectively the adopted daughter of the elderly Sussex landowner and baronet, Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh. In fact Miss Fetherstonhaugh was born Miss Bullock and was the younger sister of Mary Ann Bullock, a particularly good-looking dairymaid, whom Sir Harry took to wife in his old age, in 1825. We shall revisit her story in Chapter 6. By 1880, when Mrs Wells returned to Uppark, Miss Fetherstonhaugh had been given life tenure.

  Sarah Neal (as Mrs Wells was before marriage) had first joined the household in 1850, pleased because it was close to her parents. She later wrote: ‘this being a convenient distance from home I frequently go in to see d[ea]r Mother and Father.’ She left in 1853 to nurse her mother, and her parents both died later that year. She married Joseph Wells, a gardener from Uppark and the son of the head gardener at Penshurst Place in Kent. Tired of gardening, Joseph became a rather unsuccessful cricket coach and shopkeeper. His inability to support the family drove Sarah back into service aged fifty-eight, as a housekeeper to her old friend.

  Wells admitted in Experiments in Autobiography (1934) that the change in his family’s circumstances probably altered his own destiny in some important ways. His mother’s deficiencies were obvious to the family’s agent, Sir William King, and to the competent head housemaid, Old Ann, ‘who gave herself her own orders more and more. The kitchen, the laundry, the pantry, with varying kindliness, apprehended this inefficiency in the housekeeper’s room.’8

  Wells observed:

  She was frightened, perhaps, but resolute and she believed that with prayer and effort anything can be achieved. She knew at least how a housekeeper should look, and assumed a lace cap, lace apron, black silk dress and all the rest of it, and she knew how a housekeeper should drive down to the tradespeople in Petersfield and take a glass of sherry when the account was settled. She marched down to the church every Sunday morning; the whole downstairs streamed down the Warren and Harting Hill to church.9

  Sarah Wells may have had a good grasp of the outward details, as evidenced by a footman describing a very different housekeeper in his memoirs of service in the late nineteenth century: ‘The housekeepers in those days wore a black silk dress, a little silk apron trimmed with beads, a lace collar, a small apology for a cap, made of white lace, and a black velvet bow on top. The under-maids were more afraid of her than they were of her Ladyship.’10 Sarah Wells, however, commanded no such respect.

  As a boy staying with his mother, Wells was allowed to rummage in the attic next door to his bedroom, to look at engravings, an old telescope, and to borrow books from Uppark’s library. His days at Uppark provided the narrative for the early chapters of his novel Tono-Bungay, first published in 1909, describing a childhood spent at Bladesover House, a barely concealed version of Uppark. This is how a child in such a household might see the world:

  The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops, marketing places for the tenantry . . . I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentle folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen, the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order . . . There are times when I doubt whether any but a very considerable minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible order has even now passed away.11

  In his biography he recounted a vivid detail of the stratified attitudes ‘below stairs’ life at Uppark: when the house had received a visit from a real prince who had, however, given a modest tip, the butler Rabbits nearly cried with fury and indignation. He showed the coin to his colleague the housekeeper: ‘My mother was speechless with horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you might get from any commoner!’12

  In Tono-Bungay, Wells’s narrator recalls of his mother: ‘I can see and hear her saying now, “No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom.” She had much exercise in placing people’s servants about her tea-table, where etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of housekeepers’ rooms is as strict today, and what my mother would have made of a chauffeur.’13

  Beyond the literary parody, the reality was more painful. Sarah Wells’s own diary chronicles her miserable struggles, right up to her dismissal at the age of seventy. On 30 January: ‘Busy all day – Wrote to Mrs Holmes hoping she will come and suit. What a worry this house is!!’ On 29 February: ‘Dairy Woman most disagreeable. What a party!’ On 6 September: ‘Worried with the Cook leaving, how unsettled this house is.’ On 27 October: ‘No walk how dull in these under ground rooms!’ On 6 December: ‘Today the Duke of Connaught arrived, Oh such fuss and work. How I wish I was out of it, what ignorant people as a rule servants are!’14

  The following January she was given a month’s notice, apparently having indulged in some indiscreet gossip about her mistress. Fortunately, by then her son had begun to make money from his writing and as a result she lived in comfort until her death in 1905 at the age of eighty-three.15

  Housekeepers such as Sarah Wells may well have had several household management books on the shelves of their snug, well-furnished sitting rooms (Sarah’s was so described by Wells in his autobiography). One can imagine her tremulously flicking through them in an attempt to solve the problem of the day, just as we in moments of crisis reach for the self-help manual. Two stand out, through whose pages can be discerned the carefully drawn portraits of the key roles of a servant of the period, and the compass of their responsibilities and duties. Even if in somewhat idealised form, they are intended as practical guides. One, published in 1825, was The Complete Servant being a Practical Guide to the Peculiar Duties of all descriptions of servants . . . with Useful Receipts and Tables, by Sarah and Samuel Adams.16

  The other is, of course, the world-famous Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, first published in 1861, which ran into many later editions. It is less well known that its subtitle first read: ‘Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Nurse and Nurse-maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc etc – also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with the Home Life and Comfort.’17 Thus the reader was always the responsible senior servant as much as the mistress of a household. This celebrated volume began life as articles for various publications, especially The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1859–61. A comparison of the subtle variations between different editions over the next fifty years would be a fascinating study in itself.

  Together these two books are a useful guide today to the shape of the larger households over the central decades of the nineteenth century, throwing light on the duties and daily lives of country-house servants as they developed from their counterparts in the previous century – if in a somewhat idealised form.

  Clearly, there had come to be an accepted pattern into which servants could fit when moving between houses and jobs, although there would be wide variations depending on the scale and wealth of the household, the age of the principals and the size of the nursery (as well as the character and general behaviour of the employers).<
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  Whilst thick the Adamses’ book was small enough to put in your pocket if you were an ambitious young footman who wanted to improve your understanding for future advancement, and had an unobserved moment when on duty. It is immensely thorough in setting out the duties of servants, scales of pay, advice on recipes for cooking or cleaning, and tables for dealing with traders. According to the authors at least, it was the first book which ‘addresses itself to the actual personal practice of [servants’] duties’, rather than the many works ‘on the moral obligations of masters and servants, and many books of religious advice . . . all good in their way’.18

  The Adamses speak with some authority because they had both worked as servants from an early age. Mr Adams had been ‘educated in a foundation school, entered service as a footboy, in 1770, and during fifty years he served successively as groom, footman, valet, butler and house-steward. His Wife began [in] the world as maid of all work, then served as house-maid, laundry-maid, under-cook, housekeeper and lady’s maid, and finally, for above twenty years, as housekeeper in a very large establishment.’ The authors add that they had also sought the advice of ‘a lady of high rank in whose family Mrs Adams resided’.19 It seems possible that Sarah, the co-author, might be the same Mrs Adams who is mentioned in papers relating to Wilton in Wiltshire, around 1800, and who had an unusual position of trust there.20

  At the very end of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Pembroke drew up a series of household regulations for the servants at Wilton, which refer to a maître d’hôtel or head servant, working under a Mrs Adams. For the management of the menservants, this individual’s attention was drawn to ‘a journal in Mrs Adams’ possession of housekeeping proceedings in a House very remarkable for being well kept & served with comparatively few hands by the means of a faithfull & excellent housekeeper, who is consequently well hated by a proportion of the servants under her direction’.21

  A flavour of the size and character of an aristocratic household in the 1820s and 1830s, at the time of the Adamses’ work, can be gained from Petworth House in Sussex, which had always been famous for the scale of its entertainments. The aristocratic diarist Charles Greville described a house party given by the 6th Duke in 1829, where forty people sat down to dinner every day and there were about 150 servants in the steward’s room and servants’ hall: ‘All the resources of the house – horses, carriages, keepers, etc., are placed at the disposal of the guests, and everybody does what they like best.’22

  In 1819 there were fifty-two indoor servants at Petworth, nineteen of them upper servants who dined in the steward’s room, with twenty in the servants’ hall and thirteen in the parlour. In 1831 this had risen to ninety-seven, with eighteen dedicated especially to the nursery. In 1834 there were seventy-three in the servants’ hall and the total staff of the house was calculated to be 135.23 The Petworth servants were well known for their loyalty and long service.

  Thomas Creevey recorded of a visit in 1828 that the servants were ‘very numerous, tho’ most of them very advanced in years and tottered, and comical in their looks’. A member of the family explained to him that there were more servants at Petworth ‘of both sexes, and in all departments, than in any house in England, that they were all very good in their way, but they could not stand being put out of it, and were never interfered with, that they were all bred upon the spot, and all related to each other’.24

  The familiar intimacy of the kind hinted at by Creevey is also reflected in the album of photographs put together in 1860 by Lord Leconfield’s daughter-in-law, Mrs Percy Wyndham. It contains thirty photographs of ‘the dear Servants at Petworth’, annotated with a handwritten commentary. The photographs, carefully posed, show the staff in formal wear, and many of them were advanced in years even then. The best paid of them was the man cook at £120 per annum; the least paid were the housemaids at £8 per annum.25

  The servants’ quarters, which are neatly contained in one freestanding range along with the kitchens and associated offices, were built in the mid eighteenth century and were used fully throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth. They are presented to the public by the National Trust, which now owns the house, as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.26

  While it can be misleading to compare monetary values over the centuries, it is interesting to dwell on the sample of a more mid-sized country-house household in the early nineteenth century as given in the table of wages in The Complete Servant. The budget recorded by Samuel Adams for the ‘Household establishment of a respectable country gentleman with a young family’, with a net income £16,000 to £18,000, and ‘whose expenses do not exceed £7,000’, sets out the wages for twenty-seven servants in guineas ranging from the French cook, paid 80 guineas, and the butler, paid 50 guineas, down to the assistant gardener, who received only 12 shillings a week.27 This last sum was probably a good indication of the average agricultural labourer’s wage at the time, in a job that did not include the accommodation or food provided to a domestic servant in a country house.28

  Not surprisingly, the housekeeper is held up in the Adamses’ book of 1825, and in Mrs Beeton’s 1861 successor, as the key to a well-run household, after the mistress herself. The Adamses saw her as having ‘the control and direction of the servants, particularly of the female servants’. As well as having the care of the furniture and linen, the housekeeper has also inherited at least part of the role previously held by the clerk of the kitchen, namely of ‘the grocery – dried and other fruits, spices, condiments, soap, candles, and stores of all kinds, for culinary and other domestic uses. She makes all the pickles, preserves, and sometimes the best pastry – She generally distils and prepares the compound and simple waters, and spirits, essential and other oils, perfumery, cosmetics, and similar articles that are prepared at home, for domestic purposes.’

  A housekeeper always oversaw the china closet and the still room, which according to the Adamses was used for preserving fruits and making distilled waters, jam and home-made wines, as well as for the preparation of breakfast and afternoon tea.29 These duties remained remarkably consistent over the centuries until the later twentieth century and reflect the varied use that could be made of the resources of an agricultural estate.

  An idea of the country-house housekeepers of the period can be gleaned from well-known novels, ranging from the kindly ones, such as Mrs Fairfax at Thornfield who receives Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to such fierce dragons as Mrs Medlock in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. In real life, as sometimes in fiction, many housekeepers stayed with individual families for many years, becoming almost part of the family, and were certainly often treated as close confidantes.30 Susan Clarke was housekeeper to the Benyons at Englefield House in Berkshire for over twenty years from 1854.31 A housekeeper might even be buried beside her employer’s family, as was Mary Carryll, the woman who served the ladies of Llangollen.32 In the churchyard at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, there is a headstone to Anne Goymore, who died in 1831 having served twenty-six years as housekeeper to the Earl of Carnavon.33

  At Erddig, near Wrexham, Mary Webster, formerly the cook, was promoted to housekeeper and stayed with the family for thirty years until her death in 1875. A ditty written by Philip Yorke about Mary is worth quoting because it stresses storekeeping as a central duty:

  Upon the portly frame we look

  Of one who was our former Cook.

  No better keeper of our Store,

  Did ever enter at our door.

  She knew and pandered to our taste,

  Allowed no want and yet no waste;

  And for some thirty years and more

  The cares of Office here she bore.

  Mary did indeed prove to be very frugal; she was found to have left over £1,300 in her will. She was replaced by Harriet Rogers, a former lady’s maid and daughter of the family’s trusted estate carpenter.34

  Another long-term housekeeper was shown consideration by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, a
ccording to his privately printed Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick (1845): ‘From unwillingness to disturb Hannah Gregory, the house-keeper who dwelt here for a half a century, there had been no attempt made to alter the distribution of these the most agreeable rooms at Chatsworth.’ He later converted them into a Grotto Room.35

  Whilst some housekeepers were married and others were widowed, many seem to have been unmarried but were given the title of ‘Mrs’ as a mark of respect.36 They characteristically carried large bunches of keys on a ring attached to their waists (known as a ‘chatelaine’), as everything from the linen to the spices had to be kept locked up.37 By long tradition, no doubt to reinforce a sense of hierarchy below stairs, in some households the upper servants took their meals, or at least the pudding course, in the housekeeper’s room, which the junior servants often dubbed ‘the Pug’s Parlour’, whilst in larger country houses this was the function of the house steward’s room.38 Why upper servants were known as ‘pugs’ is uncertain; it is possible that it referred to the haughty upturned nose and downturned mouth of an upper servant of caricature being compared to those of the pug dog.