Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  to understand his business well, and to be capable of undertaking the management of a gentlemen’s garden and grounds, he should not only be perfect in the ordinary business, and the regular routine of digging, cropping, and managing a kitchen garden, but should be also well versed in the nature of soils, manures, and composts, the best methods of propagating plants, shrubs, and trees, the management of the hot-house, green-house, conservatory, hot-beds; and the culture, not only of indigenous, but also of foreign and exotic productions.142

  The nineteenth-century head gardener usually wielded considerable authority. One such was Sir Joseph Paxton, made famous by designing Crystal Palace. He was born in 1803, the son of a farm labourer, and at the age of fourteen was working with his brother at Battlesden in Bedfordshire, the estate of Sir Gregory Page Turner, and later at the Woodhall estate in Hertfordshire. It was while working for the Royal Horticultural Society at Chiswick that he happened to meet the 6th Duke of Devonshire, who was the ground landlord.143

  Paxton’s good manners, in speaking clearly and carefully to the deaf duke, so impressed the latter that in 1806 he offered Paxton a job at Chatsworth with an annual salary of £70. Besides marrying Sarah Bown, the niece of Chatsworth’s housekeeper, Hannah Gregory, Paxton transformed the gardens there and travelled with the Duke on horticultural tours to Europe.

  He made Chatsworth’s gardens the most famous in England, creating a pinetum and an arboretum, and designing greenhouses and hothouses. There included the largest conservatory ever built, a huge glass construction with a double-curved framework of laminated wood. His assistant gardeners were sent to America and India to collect plants. Paxton eventually became the steward or agent of the Chatsworth estates, a trusted senior servant whom the duke consulted on every matter of importance. As well as designing Crystal Palace, he also rebuilt Lismore Castle in Ireland in the popular picturesque style and served as an MP, receiving a knighthood. In the duke’s words: ‘The creations of his talent are remarkable and conspicuous whichever way you turn. . . . [He was] the most zealous, and the least obtrusive of servants.’144

  Although Paxton was perhaps exceptional, the elite head gardeners of the great country houses were generally influential, often innovators or experts with national reputations. They also edited and contributed to gardening journals, serving on the committees of the Royal Horticultural Society, founded in 1804.145

  In 1886, there were twenty-two gardeners at Hatfield House, plus two women and nine boys who looked after the pleasure grounds and kitchen garden. There were also nine keepers and watchers, assisted by two boys. The stables were staffed by six men and a boy. In addition to the seventeen woodmen, nine parkmen and three boy helpers, Hatfield supported many other estate workers and farm-workers.146 In the late nineteenth century, at Eaton Hall in Cheshire, the Duke of Westminster employed a head gardener and forty under-gardeners. In the 1850s the Benyons at Englefield House in Berkshire employed between fifteen and twenty gardeners.147

  In addition to their regular staff, country estates could also call on the services of a large group of retired farm labourers, retained on a small wage as ‘the gang’ to sweep leaves and paths and weed the gardens. This practice explains why, in photographs of late Victorian and Edwardian gardens, everything looks so extraordinarily immaculate – with not a twig out of place: it is an effect that can only be achieved by many hands.148

  In examining the relationship between servants and their employers, it is interesting to note that it was often said that the quality of the former reflected immediately on the reputation of the latter. The Countess of Fingal recalled Lord Coventry saying: ‘I always judge a house and the people who own it by the servants,’ to which she added her own view that ‘Countries get the governments, and people the servants they deserve.’149 Good management and good working conditions, combined with a degree of humane discipline, usually meant a more loyal and efficient staff.

  Mrs Beeton warned strongly against habitually complaining of servants’ deficiencies:

  It is the custom of ‘Society’ to abuse its servants, – a façon de parler, such as leads their lords and masters to talk of the weather, and, when rurally inclined, of the crops, – leads matronly ladies, and ladies just entering on their probation in that honoured and honourable state, to talk of servants, and, as we are told, wax eloquent over the greatest plague in life while taking a quiet cup of tea. Young men at their clubs, also, we are told, like to abuse their ‘fellows’, perhaps not without a certain pride and pleasure at the opportunity of intimating that they enjoy such appendages to their state. It is another conviction of ‘Society’ that the race of good servants had died out, at least in England.150

  In a delightful piece of well-observed and well-aimed social critique she wrote: ‘When the lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape, and tournure of his calf, it is not surprising that she find a domestic who has no attachment for the family, who considers the figure he cuts behind her carriage, and the late hours he is compelled to keep, a full compensation for the wages he exacts . . . and for the perquisites he can lay his hands on.’151

  Her next point could apply equally to other servants: ‘Nor should the fast young man, who chooses his groom for his knowingness in the ways of the turf and in the tricks of low horse-dealers, be surprised if he is sometimes the victim of these learned ways. But these are the exceptional cases, which prove the existence of a better state of things.’152

  Just as Hannah Wolley’s treatises did in the seventeenth century, she took the view that it was mere common sense to treat servants generously and well.

  The sensible master and the kind mistress know, that if servants depend on them for their means of living, in their turn they are dependent on their servants for very many of the comforts of life; and that, with a proper amount of care in choosing servants, and treating them like reasonable beings, and making slight excuses for the shortcomings of human nature, they will, save in some exceptional cases be tolerably well served, and, in most instances, surround themselves with attached domestics.153

  Mrs Beeton emphasised the importance of the role of the mistress in the household: ‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so her domestics will follow in her path.’154

  Engaging domestics was a duty which required good judgement on behalf of the mistress: ‘There are some respectable registry-offices, where good servants may sometimes be hired; but the plan rather to be recommended is, for the mistress to make inquiry amongst her circle of friends and acquaintances, and her tradespeople.’155 In their turn, servants would look out for potential recruits among their own families and acquaintances. Individuals were recruited young with the intention of training them for life, and whilst junior servants might stay in post with ambitions of moving up, others might have to leave altogether if they wanted to get married.156

  Great landowners seem to have had a longstanding presumption against employing married servants (especially married indoor servants) or allowing servants, and especially indoor servants, to marry while in post. This does seem to have varied between houses, but was probably based on a presumption of their employer’s convenience and a fear of divided loyalty. A servant’s hours were long, and seen therefore as incompatible with running another household, their own, and a married servant with dependent children was considered a liability in terms of additional accommodation and divided loyalty. Whatever the reasons for it, it certainly encouraged an expectation that most junior servants would work for a short time, and the senior skilled servants spend a long time in their posts.157

  While outdoor servants such as head gardeners were sometimes given better accommodation on getting married, indoor servants were in most cases expected to leave to marry. One Yorkshire landowner, Sir Clifford Constable, w
rote huffily when one servant resigned to marry: ‘You must be aware that you marrying is inconvenient to me besides being a bad precedent to the rest.’158 Another butler recalled how one butler of his acquaintance asked permission to marry and stay in post and received permission only to be give notice shortly afterwards. His employer argued that he ‘wanted his butler always within call; but that since he had got married he was often out, as he went to see his wife.’159

  However, this presumption could have its positive side for the younger female servants used their early years in service to save a little money, as the board and food was usually covered, and get a training in household skills before marrying. They would often contribute monies home to the parents, especially if there were younger siblings to provide for. Menservants who married, however, often found themselves living separately from wives and children.160

  6

  Moving Up or Moving On

  The nineteenth century

  WITH SUCH HEAVING numbers of young men and women required to staff a great country house, it is impossible for a modern observer not to wonder about the permeability of the class barriers that divided master and servant. Friendship of a kind may have been common, but what about love? The incidence was almost certainly more frequent than records allow. Whilst acknowledged romances were clearly rare, some – such as the one between Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, Bt, and Mary Anne Bullock, his dairymaid – are the stuff of legend.1

  A Sussex landowner, Sir Harry in his youth had been a famous rake, a close friend of the Prince Regent and a lover of Lady Emma Hamilton. In his later years he overheard a girl singing on his estate at Uppark, which had been designed for him by Humphrey Repton. His housekeeper, when asked about the singer, told him it was one of the dairymaid’s helpers. When the old dairymaid retired she was replaced by Mary Ann Bullock, supervising his delightful ornamental dairy. With the object of his romantic notions and desire installed in this pretty, temple-like structure, Sir Harry, unable to contain himself any more, proposed marriage, saying to the shocked girl: ‘Don’t answer me now, but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of Mutton that is coming up for my dinner today.’ The mutton arrived with a slice cut out, much to the irritation of the cook but to the delight of the baronet.2

  Once she had accepted, Mary Ann was bundled off to Paris for an education, where she learnt to read, write and embroider. They married in the Saloon at Uppark on 12 September 1825; he was seventy-one, she exactly fifty years his junior. Despite the social disparity, not to mention the scorn of some local landowners and, indeed, some of Uppark’s own servants, the marriage was apparently happy. Sir Harry is said to have remarked to his gamekeeper, ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ but Mary Ann cared for him until his death in 1846 at the age of ninety-two, on which he left her all his possessions. She lived on at Uppark until her death in 1875, after which it remained the home of her younger sister, whom Sir Harry had adopted. It was she who appointed Sarah Wells as her housekeeper, as described in the previous chapter.3

  There are other, less well-known stories of genuine affection springing up between employer and servant, such as that of the Earl St Maur, heir to the 12th Duke of Somerset, who had two children, Harold and Ruth, by his kitchenmaid mistress, Rosina Swan. In 1869 he admitted the relationship to his parents, asking his mother on his deathbed to care for his family. The duke provided the children with a house and three servants, and eventually both moved in with their grandparents. Harold was left a property, while Ruth inherited £80,000 and married a member of the Cavendish-Bentinck family.4

  Another little-known example occurred at the end of the century. John Chaworth Musters of Annesley Park, Nottinghamshire, who was born in 1860 and had been educated at Eton and Christchurch, fell in love with Mary-Anne Sharp or ‘Polly’, the nursery housemaid in his father’s household and the daughter of a Nottingham miner. They went to live in Norway, where his parents had a fishing lodge and where she bore him three sons. They married when they realised they had to return to England for John to take up his inheritance on his father’s unexpected death in 1887. Four more sons were born to them. A relation later wrote: ‘Close relatives back in England who were aware of the situation were surprised to see how she, the one time nursery house-maid would cope with it all. To their surprise she did so extremely well . . . a truly remarkable woman. Her dress sense and accomplishments were impeccable, and her relatively humble origins were never guessed by many who came to know and love her.’ She lost six of her seven sons in the First World War.5

  Perhaps to avoid such romances or, at any rate, any illegitimate children, many houses operated systems to keep staff and family apart for much of the time. This separation could be taken to extremes. One man’s smooth-running household might epitomise his wife’s lonely existence. Testimony to this can be found in an interesting account of life in a Regency country house, as seen through the eyes of a young English bride, Catherine Osborne, arriving at her older husband’s family home, Newtown Anner in County Tipperary. Her letters home were transcribed and published in Memorials of Lady Osborne.6

  Given the age difference between husband and wife, it is a fair assumption that the management style of the household represented the values of the previous generation: ‘The moment we arrived, which was early in the morning, Sir Thomas took me to look at the kitchen garden, which is very extensive, and kept in beautiful order. The gardener attended us. The moment he saw me he took off his hat and said, with all the Irish warmth of manner: “Welcome to your home my Lady.” ’7 At first she was not even sure how many servants there were, writing in a letter: ‘My maid tells me that they sat down six-and-twenty to dinner in the servants’ hall yesterday, and some of the people were out. It is the fashion in Ireland for the upper servants to dine with the rest, with the exception of the kitchen-maid, groom and whipper-in, who attend them and dine afterwards.’8

  Lady Osborne admitted in the same letter that she used to ask her maid Johnstone to keep her company in her dressing room. ‘I make her sit there that I sometimes see a female face – hear a human voice. I never saw a house so still and solitary as this. It is so very much apart from the servants; no door of communication upstairs with their apartments. My maid and I walk along the long corridor, from room to room, without more fear of interruption from a single being than if we were in the deserts of Arabia.’ How easily might a maid become the close friend and confidante of a chatelaine in a remote country house.9

  She also refers to Sir Thomas’s secret of good household management: ‘He says that a lady should delegate all her authority over the female part of the establishment to the housekeeper and her own maid, and the gentleman to the butler. She should never give any orders to the inferior servants, because that would create confusion.’ Lady Osborne observed humbly: ‘I am sure his method must be the best, for I never saw a house managed with so much order and regularity in my life; every servant understands his particular business so well, that everything goes by clockwork.’ Her mother-in-law may have been casting a long shadow: ‘Sir Thomas thinks that a lady should never show herself in the kitchen, because his mother never was in hers.’10

  To the children who had grown up in them, some remoter country households might have seemed like extended families. Elizabeth Smith (née Grant) put down her Memoirs of a Highland Lady in old age, recalling memories of Doune, her family home in the early nineteenth century, and its large but by all accounts somewhat unruly household of 1812. It is a vivid vignette of an isolated rural estate, where the staff were a mixture of local families and recruits from England, and a way of life that she felt had changed out of all recognition by the end of the century:

  Our family then consisted of my father and mother, we three girls and our governess, and our young French companion, Caroline Favrin, William during the summer holidays, Johnnie and a maid between him and my mother, poor Peggy Davidson. Besides her there were the following servants: Mrs Bird, the coachman’s wife, an Englishwoman, as upper
housemaid and plain needlewoman, under her Betty Ross, the gardener’s youngest daughter; Grace Grant, the beauty of the country . . . our schoolroom maid; old Belle Macpherson, a soldier’s widow . . . was the laundry maid.11

  The picture she creates, perhaps partly romanticised because of the distance in time, is of a highly interconnected and intertwined microcosm of society.

  The cook and housekeeper was an Englishwoman Mrs Carr from Cumberland, an excellent manager; a plain cook under her from Inverness; and old Christie as kitchen maid. The men were Simon Ross, the gardener’s eldest son, as butler, and an impudent English footman, Richard, with a bottle-nose, who yet turned all the women’s heads; William Bird, the coachman, and George Ross, another son of the gardener’s as groom . . . Old John Mackintosh brought in all the wood and peats for the fires, pumped the water, turned the mangle, lighted the oven, brewed the beer, bottled the whisky, kept the yard tidy, and stood enraptured listening to us playing on the harp, ‘like Daavid’!

  At the farm were the grieve [farm bailiff], and as many lads as he required for the work of the farm under him, who all slept in a loft over the stables and ate in the farm kitchen. [There was also George Ross,] turner, joiner, butcher, weaver, lint-dresser, wool-comber, dyer and what not; his old wife was the henwife. [Old Jenny Cameron] . . . was supreme in the farm kitchen; she managed cows, calves, milk, stores, and the spinning, with another girl who also helped in the laundry in which abode of mirth and fun [or so it must have seemed to a bored young girl in the big house] the under housemaid spent her afternoons.12