Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  As in the eighteenth century, housekeepers were generally delegated the task of conducting passing visitors around the house, usually when the family were away – but not always, as fans of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice will remember from Lizzie Bennet’s unexpected encounter with Mr Darcy whilst paying a tourist’s visit to his country seat Pemberley. There is a portrait of Mrs Garnett, the housekeeper at Kedleston, painted by Thomas Barber around 1800, showing her with the catalogue of the Kedleston pictures in her hand. She impressed Dr Johnson with her knowledge, and another visitor recorded that, of all the housekeepers of a noblemen’s houses, ‘this was the most obliging and intelligent . . . she seem’d to take a delight in her business’. Senior servants were expected to be enthusiastic in their knowledge of family history and their oral transmission of the stories of both house and family.39

  In 1832, the artist Mary Ellen Best, renowned for her precise interior scenes, visited Castle Howard in Yorkshire and painted the famous Orleans Room (later the Turquoise Drawing Room). Her exact watercolour depicts the ample and dignified figure of the housekeeper in her bonnet, with her bunch of keys, much as she must have seemed when accompanying visitors. This individual was Mrs Flynn, whose conduct came under scrutiny in the winter of 1826–7 when it was noticed that the consumption of tea among the servants was excessive. John Henderson, the resident agent, and James Loch, superintendent of Lord Carlisle’s estates, enquired into the matter in minute detail to see whether any theft had occurred, calculating the rate of tea consumption per person and the price of ‘Servant’s Tea’ (a cheaper brand than that served to family and guests).

  Today it seems incredible that such a senior management figure would concern themselves with such a trivial matter, but a tea allowance was considered a valuable commodity (tea itself being an expensive, imported item) and was often a separate part of the wages. Mrs Flynn was acquitted of any wrongdoing, and it is now thought that suspicion fell on her as a result of her feud with the cook, Samuel Damant.40 Housekeepers were required to keep exact accounts of provisions and this incident illustrates the emphasis placed on the accounting and management of those valuable supplies, especially if bought in.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the housekeeper, along with the steward and butler, would be key in the preparation of the house for the reception of important guests, not least because she commanded the linen and supervised the housemaids who would clean and maintain bedrooms. Famously, when preparing for a visit from Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington found it hard to persuade his housekeeper that his home was up to scratch. He wrote to a friend: ‘I thought that she would have burst out crying while I was talking to Her of the Honour intended and the preparations to be made. She said to me, very nearly in the Words which I had used two nights before to Her Majesty, “My Lord, Your House is a very comfortable Residence for yourself, your Family and your friends; But it is not fit for the Reception of the Sovereign and her Court.”’ Apart from anything else, she felt that the housekeeper’s room was much too small for the Queen’s dressers and the steward’s room too cramped for the principal attendants to dine in. Improvements were put in hand.41

  A housekeeper ought, the Adamses wrote, to be ‘a steady middle-aged woman, of great experience in her profession, and a tolerable knowledge of the world’. The prudent housekeeper ‘will carefully avoid all approaches to familiarity; as that destroys subordination, and ultimately induces contempt.’42 Mrs Beeton, echoing the writings of Hannah Wolley and Mary Evelyn in the seventeenth century, as well as Elizabeth Raffald in the eighteenth, thought that the housekeeper ‘must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring, to the management of the household, all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance, in the same degree as if she were at the head of her own family.’43

  The housekeeper’s role was therefore almost that of a mistress by proxy, and many junior female servants would have certainly looked to the housekeeper as their boss. Mrs Beeton asked housekeepers to be ‘Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any of the domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house, and will see that every department is thoroughly attended to, and that the servants are comfortable, at the same time that their various duties are properly performed.’44

  In most houses there was also a still-room maid, who worked under the housekeeper and in whose steps she might well hope to tread. This maid would usually help look after the china kept in the housekeeper’s room, lay out the breakfast for the upper staff in the housekeeper’s room and prepare the trays for early-morning tea in the bedrooms as well as afternoon tea in the drawing room, thus relieving the pressure on the main kitchen. Scones, sandwiches and cakes were made in the still room, not in the main kitchen, and the still-room maid might also help with the preparation of meals in the servants’ hall.45

  In households with children, especially with the dramatic decrease in infant mortality rates over the century, several members of staff might be devoted solely to the care of the family’s children. It would be headed by a nurse for the younger ones, a role that had turned into that of ‘nanny’ by the end of the nineteenth century; although the origins of the word are obscure, it can be traced back to the eighteenth.46 The nurse, or nanny, had a nurserymaid to assist her in serving meals and looking after the infants, whilst the older children would have a governess to give them lessons at home, and sometimes a male tutor, although boys would probably go away to school after a certain age.

  Clearly the correct nursing of children was critical in landowning families where inheritance was so crucial an issue. As Samuel and Sarah Adams wrote in 1825, ‘as the hopes of families, and the comfort and happiness of parents are confided to the charge of females who superintend nurseries of children, no duties are more important, and none require more incessant and unremitting care and anxiety.’ Personality had to be taken into consideration: ‘This important Servant ought to be of a lively and cheerful disposition, perfectly good tempered and clean and neat in her habits.’47

  Mrs Beeton had her own contribution to make: ‘The responsible duties of the upper nursemaid commence with the weaning of the child: it must now be separated from the mother or wet-nurse, at least for a time, and the cares of the nursemaid . . . are now to be entirely devoted to the infant.’ The nurse ‘washes, dresses, and feeds it; walks out with it, and regulates all its little wants’. She had further views on character and attributes: ‘Patience and good temper are indispensable qualities . . . She ought also to be acquainted with the art of ironing and trimming little caps, and be handy with her needle.’ Below her would be an under nursemaid to clean, dust, make beds, bring up and remove meals, although sometimes a nursery footman or a nurserymaid would help with some of these tasks.48

  Whilst some nurses might be marvels of forbearance and selflessness on rare occasions they could be monsters. The great politician Lord Curzon left a chilling remembrance of his nanny, a Miss Paraman: ‘She persecuted and beat us in the most cruel way and established over us a system of terrorism so complete that not one of us ever mustered up the courage to walk upstairs and tell our father or mother.’ More alarmingly: ‘She spanked us with the sole of her slipper on the bare back, beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs in uncomfortable positions with our hands holding a pole or blackboard behind our back.’49 The torture could take yet stranger forms: ‘She made me write a letter to the butler asking him to make a birch for me with which I was to be punished for lying, and requesting him to read it out in the servants’ hall.’50 This was the man later given the responsibility of running India as Viceroy.

  Stories of the devotion and kindness of nurses and nannies were perhaps more common, with one of the most famous of the period deserving a mention here. Mrs Everest, the beloved nanny of Sir Winston Churchill, joined the family in 1874 within six weeks of his birth and remained with them, eventually becoming housekeeper, until her death in 1895, when Winston was twenty.
For this lonely boy this calm, warm, loving character became his closest confidante and emotional ally.51 Until he was eight he slept in her room, and was fed, washed and changed by her. It was due to her devoted care that he survived pneumonia at the age of twelve. He was distraught when his parents abruptly ‘retired’ her without pay in 1893, writing to them in protest, and he later paid her doctor’s bills himself when he was at Sandhurst. In My Early Life, he described how, when he visited her when she was mortally ill with peritonitis, her chief concern was that he has wearing a wet jacket: ‘She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years that I had lived.’52

  This degree of affection is sometimes demonstrated in memorials. In the Cecil graveyard at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, there are only three monuments to people who were not direct members of the family. Two were sisters who were nurse and wetnurse at Hatfield for thirty-six and twenty-nine years respectively; the other was Caroline Hodges, the children’s nurse, whose tombstone tells that she ‘lived in their house for 43 years, a loved and trusted friend’.53

  A similar series of monuments to beloved, long-serving servants can be found at Highclere in Hampshire. One individual is poignantly remembered on a wall plaque and on a headstone in the churchyard: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Mary Morton who died on the 10th of April, 1869, in the Garden Lodge of Highclere Castle, having nearly completed her 96th year. 37 years of that time were spent in the Carnarvon family. This Memorial Tablet is erected by Henrietta Countess of Carnarvon and Lady Gwendolen Herbert, her first friend in the family and her last, to whom she was nurse.’54

  In January 1820, the Irish novelist Maria Edgworth, who had so celebrated the roles of faithful steward and nurse in her fiction, recorded in her diary the death of the family nurse: ‘Poor Kitty Billamore breathed her last this morning at one o’clock. A more faithful, warm-hearted excellent creature never existed. How many successions of children of this family she has nursed, and how many she has attended in illness and death, regardless of health! Lovell intends that she should be buried in the family vault, as she deserves, for she was more a friend than a servant.’55

  The governess, another female figure associated with the nursery, especially for the education of girls, was made familiar by nineteenth-century writers. Jane Austen is sympathetic to the plight of the governess in Emma, whilst Charlotte Brontë created the plucky but sensitive figure of Jane Eyre in her eponymous novel. (Jane’s unexpected legacy and subsequent marriage with her former employer would in real life have been a very great rarity.) The governess was in a delicate position, as well as an awkward one, being expected to come from a ‘genteel’ background yet to be in need of a paid job in a stranger’s family. As the Adamses wrote in 1825 – in what reads like a job description for Jane Eyre’s fictional post at Thornfield Hall – ‘there is a constant demand for females of genteel manners, and finished education, at salaries which vary according to qualifications and duties between 25 and 120 pounds per annum.’56 As they observed:

  Teachers in seminaries, half-boarders, educated for the purpose, and the unsettled daughters of respectable families of moderate fortune, who have received a finished education are usually selected for this important duty . . . Good temper, and good manners, with a genteel exterior, are indispensable: for more is learnt by example than precept. Besides the governess who desires to be on a footing with the family, ought to be able to conduct herself in such manner, as never to render an apology necessary for her presence at family parties.

  Governesses would be required to teach English, French and Italian, arithemetic, geography and the popular sciences.57

  Their situation was often made worse by the remoteness of many country houses. Mrs Smith, an archly aristocratic Scot, recalled in Memoirs of a Highland Lady her disdain for her own governess, Miss Elphick, in the early nineteenth century: ‘I was pert enough, I daresay, for the education we had received had given us an extreme contempt for such ignorance, but what girl of fifteen, brought up as I had been, could be expected to show respect for an illiterate woman of very ungovernable temper, whose ideas had been gathered from a class lower than we could have possible been acquainted with, and whose habits were those of a servant.’58

  Charlotte Brontë wrote bitingly of a profession she loathed: ‘A private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil,’ a sentiment that must have been shared by countless other servants of all ranks over the ages. Her own experiences had disillusioned her: ‘I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society; but I have had enough of it – it is dreary work to look on and listen.’59

  However, there were many aristocrats who looked back on those who taught them with affection and gratitude. Lady Dorothy Nevill recalled her governess, Elizabeth Redgrave, the sister of the famous painter Richard Redgrave, as having ‘great cultivation, besides being possessed of a certain distinction of mind . . . Her tender care and companionship – in childhood a preceptress, in after-life a much-loved friend – I have always felt to have been an inestimable boon, for thus was implanted in my mind the love of the artistic and the beautiful which during my life has proved a certain and ever-present source of delight.’60

  Male tutors might be resident or brought in as required. The Hon. Grantley Berkeley in his Life and Recollections (1865) reflected on his patchy education, and that of his siblings:

  The arrangements made for our education did not promise much – a very gentleman like young man, a Mr Benson, came to us from a school near Brentford three times a week to hear us boys repeat our lessons; and an absurd, fat old fellow, named Second, possessing as little pretension to agility as to grace, arrived once a week to teach us dancing . . . the man who taught us most was a man engaged . . . to look after the game. His lessons were readily acquired partly because we were not expected to learn them. [By this he meant, of course, fishing, shooting and hunting, under the guidance of a footman named Reece.]61

  After the housekeeper, one of the most senior and trusted household figures was the cook. It is the female cook that will be considered here, together with the other female servants, whilst the male cook, or chef, will be addressed later in the chapter, in conjunction with the menservants.

  Mr and Mrs Adams’s advice to the female cook is: ‘On her first going into a family [she] will do well to inform herself of the rules and regulations of the house – the customs of the kitchen – the peculiarities of her master and mistress – and above all, she must study, most sedulously, to acquire a perfect knowledge of their taste.’62

  After breakfast, she would receive orders from the mistress for that day’s meals. Her chief duties were the cooking of the evening dinner where, Mrs Beeton observes, ‘she must take upon herself all the dressing and serving of principal dishes, which her skill and ingenuity have mostly prepared’.63 Her morning would be occupied by the pastry, jellies, creams and entrées required for that evening’s dinner, and only then would she prepare the luncheon, which would be served after she herself had eaten at midday. A dinner party or house party would be especially demanding, and in the Victorian era would mean many frantic hours of work.

  Country-house cooks were often considered rather daunting figures, as the Servants’ Practical Guide (1880) observed: ‘Some ladies stand very much in awe of their cooks, knowing that those who consider themselves to be thoroughly experienced will not brook fault-finding, or interference with their manner of cooking, and give notice to leave on the smallest pretext. Thus when ladies obtain a really good cook, they deal with serving the dinner.’64 Cooks usually expected certain perquisites, such as leftover dripping, rabbit skins or old tea leaves which they could sell for profit.

  The cooks usually managed a kitchenmaid or two, who in turn might rise to t
he position of cook.65 Their responsibility, according to the Adamses, was usually ‘to take nearly the whole management for roasting and boiling, and otherwise dressing plain joints and dishes, and all the fish and vegetables.’ As the cleanliness of the kitchen was one of her foremost duties, the kitchenmaid’s first task was to scour the dressers, shelves and kitchen tables with soap, sand and hot water. Then she was to clean up the kitchen and prepare the breakfast to be served ‘in the house-keeper’s room, and the servants’-hall’. For the rest of the day the kitchenmaid would be ‘preparing for the servants’ dinner, the dinner in the nursery . . . and the lunch in the parlour’, the family dinner and the servants’ supper.66

  Because kitchenmaids often did slightly more skilled jobs such as making sauces, baking bread and preparing vegetables, they were frequently paid considerably more than the unskilled scullery-maid, or scullion. According to the Adamses, her unenviable duties might include lighting ‘fires in the kitchen range and under the coppers or boilers, and stew holes’, and then to ‘wash up all the plates and dishes, sauce-pans, stew-pans, kettles, pots and all kitchen utensils’.67 She would also assist the kitchenmaid in the messier food preparation, such as ‘picking, trimming, washing and boiling the vegetables, cleaning the kitchen and offices, the servants’-hall, housekeeper’s room, and stewards’ room . . . and otherwise assist in all the laborious part of the kitchen business’. The scullery-maid, often little older than thirteen or fourteen, would be kept up until the early hours, cleaning and washing up after a major event.68