Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  William Lanceley, a house steward in the 1920s, commented in his memoir From Hall-Boy to House-Steward (1925):

  The Great War undoubtedly upset service and this is not to be wondered at by those who know the servant question. The war called for hands to help, and many servants responded to the call. The work they were asked to do was a novelty to them, the pay was big and they had short hours, hundreds being spoilt for service through it. It made those who returned to service unsettled. They had money to spend and time to spend it when on war work, and to come back to [having liberty on] one or two evenings a week was to them a hardship.65

  By the 1920s, ‘Service had no attraction for the fairly educated young man or woman. It is looked down upon – they want to do something better, and often school friendships are broken through sheer snobbishness.’ He illustrated this with the example of a young person saying, ‘I like Lettie better than any girl, but you know I cannot introduce her to my new friends as she is a servant.’66

  Lanceley himself felt that there were still great attractions to life in service, especially in the big house, with good food, opportunities to move up the ladder, the variety of being in a rural situation with an annual period in London. In his view, no servant was really overworked, and the differences in servility between domestic staff and office workers were exaggerated: ‘the head of a firm, the manager and foreman are held in far greater awe than my Lord or Lady.’ Perhaps he was influenced here by the fact that, owing to his experience and seniority, he was by then not in awe of his employers, but their close confidant.67

  Eric Horne, a former footman, valet and butler, whose racy memoirs were published in 1923, turned a more cynical eye on the life of the aristocracy, but could not disguise a certain dismay at the decline of the world in which he had spent so much of his working life, which he attributed to the immediate post-war years: ‘Now that England is cracking up as far as the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their estates, castles, and large houses . . . it seems a pity that the old usages and traditions of gentleman’s service should die with the old places.’ The new rich, in his opinion, made fat by the profits of war, were a poor substitute: ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a souced [sic] mackerel.’68

  Horne’s affection and respect for some of his employers is evident, just as he is driven by others to despair and fury. He wrote that he had ‘lived in the service of a noble family who were ruined by the war; they were such nice people to their servants that, could I have afforded to do it, I would have worked for them for nothing’. These enlightened aristocrats had to reduce their indoor servants from twenty-five to just three. The bleak economic climate brought about the collapse of the social whirl that had once centred on the London house. In leaner times, Horne missed the pageantry of pre-war Belgravia, with ‘pairs of horses and carriages, with footmen powdered and breeched, silk stockings, and a lot of pomp and show’. In contrast to these happier experiences, he had worked in some places where it required ‘the temper of an angel to take some of the insults of the gentry’.69

  He certainly felt that the deep social gulf between the classes could not be sustained indefinitely and recalled with irritation how servants were treated like chattels and loaned between employers for big events, ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’.70 His bitterness at the behaviour of some of his employers, although by no means all, was sharpened by the death of his wife in the 1919 flu epidemic. He had been obliged to live separately from her for much of his working life by the accepted conditions of service that compelled many domestic staff to be (or behave as if they were) single and live separately from their families.71

  In the period directly after the First World War, the struggle to recruit new servants prompted the Ministry of Reconstruction to set up a government commission that revealed, if nothing else, what people already in service disliked at the time.72 This turned out to be not so much the work but the social stratification and deference demanded of them, as well as the lack of personal freedom. Despite much contrary assertion in the letters pages of newspapers, domestic servants were not being tempted away from service by the newly established ‘dole’, as they were not included in the scheme until 1946.73

  Ironically unemployment created by the Great Depression forced many women back into domestic service in the late 1920s, when it is estimated that there were 1.1 million of them in service. By the late 1930s this figure had risen to nearly 1.5 million, although a greater proportion were non-residential or day workers.74 However, this did not necessarily mean that the numbers of those in country-house service increased, since at that time rising taxes, combined with falling land values and rentals, forced many aristocrats and gentry to reduce their households, while selling off their secondary estates and London houses to concentrate their resources on their principal seats.75 As this led to the traditional hierarchies being thrown open to greater challenges, it also increased resentment among some in domestic service.76

  Gordon Grimmett, in his memoir published in Gentlemen’s Gentlemen and edited by Rosina Harrison, evokes one of the humblest jobs in a country house. He joined the staff at Longleat in Wiltshire at the age of fifteen as a lamp boy, going on to become a footman and working for the Astors at Cliveden before leaving service. Lamp boys were common in country-house service until the 1920s. He slept in a dormitory with six beds, which he shared with the two under footmen, one of the odd men, the pantry boy and the steward’s boy: ‘there was also a dressing-table and about four rickety chairs: that was the sum total of the furniture.’77

  He would get up at six, collect sixty shoes for cleaning and distribute hot-water jugs. At eight o’clock he would have breakfast, after which he cleaned knives in a special machine. At 8.45 he would light the 140 candles in the chapel for the morning service attended by all the staff, during which he would be on organ duty. After chapel he would be responsible for gathering up all 400 of the lamps at Longleat, which, as we have seen, was still lit by oil lamps and candles because the marquess was loth to disfigure the old house with electricity. Each one had to be cleaned, trimmed and refilled. He had some help from the odd men and other boys, and many lamps were delivered to him by other housemaids and footmen although ‘collecting and replacing them itself meant a few miles walk every day’. He would trim the wicks and then ‘fill the lamps from the large oil tanks, paraffin for the corridor and staff lamps, and colsa oil for the house.’ Then he polished the funnels, globes and stands. ‘The sheer monotony of the job took some beating.’

  Mr Grimmett would tackle twenty at a time, which would be collected and replaced by others. He would also replace all the candles. After tea, he would light all the lamps in the corridors, basement and cellars, while the footmen lit those in the main rooms, also helping him to put the shutters up. Despite the dullness of this drudgery, he thought his job easier than the housemaids.’78

  In the early afternoon, he would have to move outside the day bed of the young Viscount Weymouth, who had a weak lung for which a daily dose of fresh air was recommended; often the two boys would walk the dogs together afterwards. ‘I learnt a lot from him and I think perhaps he did from me. I didn’t envy him, nor have I ever been jealous of my employers.’ After a year, Mr Grimmett became third footman, perhaps because the older men had gone to war.

  His colleague Rosina Harrison remembered him as ‘an excellent footman. He was like an actor; he’d be playing the fool in the wings but from the moment he went on stage he was straight into his part. It was the theatre of service which appealed to him, the dressing up in livery with almost period movement and big gestures that fitted the Louis Quinze dining-room at Cliveden.’79

  Charles Smith, born in 1908, served Lord Louis Mountbatten for fifty years. He too went into service at the age of fifteen after a serious illness prevented him continuing to work in a coal mine. The idea of an alternative occupation came to him while he recuperated on an uncle’s farm: ‘Four miles away, commanding the horizon and alway
s the focal point of my eyes, was the seventeenth-century grey-stoned Welbeck Abbey, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Portland. It held considerable fascination for me, and one morning I put on my jacket and breeches – hand-me-downs from the village Squire’s son – and cycled to the Abbey.’80

  He rang the front door bell, which was answered by a liveried footman who sent him round to the tradesman’s entrance:

  A reassuring glimmer appeared in his eye as he closed the door on me and by the time I got to the rear he had alerted the steward of the house whose task it was to employ the servants . . . [He was engaged as hall boy for £25 a year.] As hall boy I had very little contact with the Duke and Duchess; I attended to the whims and needs of the fifty senior servants.

  [He was later promoted to steward’s room footman literally the footman who attended to the upper servants’ meals, the yearly increment for which was £10.] There were also peripheral benefits, including two free suits of clothing a year, special allowances for laundry and beer, the provision of meals, and a comfortable room of my own in the house.’81

  He moved on to work as a ‘schoolroom footman’ for the Earl and Countess of Derby, attending to their orphaned grandchildren.

  Most colourfully, he assisted at the Derby House ball, given the day after the Epsom Derby, dressed in full footman’s livery of a gold and silver embroidered red tail cut-away coat and a stiff-fronted wing-collared shirt and white bow tie; blue velvet knickerbockers; pink silk stockings; and silver-buckled black pumps. ‘My hair was waved and powdered white.’82 In 1930, he was recruited as a travelling footman to Lady Louis Mountbatten, from which he progressed to being valet to Lord Louis, then butler, as described with great gusto in his book, Fifty Years with Mountbatten (1980).

  In the great landowners’ houses, the staff numbers in the early years of the century stayed at a similar, or only slightly reduced, level between the wars. In the interwar period, Chatsworth in Derbsyhire employed a comptroller, who ran all the Cavendish houses, whilst the staff of Chatsworth itself comprised a butler, the duke’s valet, an under butler, a groom of the chambers, two footmen, a steward’s room footman, a housekeeper, the duchess’s maid, a head housemaid, two second housemaids, two third housemaids, two sewing women, a cook, a first kitchenmaid, a second kitchenmaid, a vegetable maid, two to three scullery-maids, two still-room maids, a dairymaid, six laundrymaids and the duchess’s secretary, all of whom lived in the house.

  The Chatsworth footmen still powdered their hair until the 1920s, and until 1938 always wore livery if there were more than six for dinner. Some staff, many living in estate cottages, came in daily, including the odd man, an upholsterer, a scullery man, two scrubbing women, a laundry porter, a steam boiler man, a coal man, two porter’s lodge attendants, two night firemen, a night porter and two window cleaners.83

  In the 1920s and 30s, when all the families of the children of the 9th Duke came to stay for Christmas, they each bought with them a nanny, a nursery maid, a lady’s maid, a valet and sometimes a chauffeur and a groom. This swelled the numbers of resident servants over the festive period, so on Christmas Day itself ‘there were about a hundred and fifty people to feed – thirty to forty in the dining-room, twenty in the nursery, up to thirty in the steward’s room, up to fifty in the servants’ hall, and some meals in the house-maids’ room.’84

  In 1928, Cliveden, whilst smaller in scale as a whole, was certainly run on the model of a great country house, and required a small army of servants. The indoor staff comprised the steward, Edwin Lee, the valet, Arthur Bushell, the under butler, three footmen, a hall boy, two oddmen, a house carpenter, the chef, Monsieur Gilbert, three kitchenmaids, a scullery-maid, a dairymaid, a housekeeper, Mrs Moore, a still-room maid, a head housemaid, three under housemaids, and two daily maids. Lady Astor’s maid, Rosina Harrison, wrote a remarkable memoir of her life in service, from which this list is taken. There was also a maid for the Hon. Phyllis Astor, a head laundress, Emma Gardener, three laundrymaids, a telephonist and a nightwatchman. A nanny, Miss Gibbons, two nursemaids and a governess made up the nursery staff.

  The gardens were in the care of the head gardener, W. Camm, an outside foreman and eight gardeners, looked after by a bothy housekeeper. The greenhouse had its own foreman, six gardeners, and one ‘decorator’, responsible for the flower arrangements. The total outdoor staff for the estates, stables, stud farm and dairy farm totalled fifty-two. They included a gamekeeper, Ben Cooper, assistant gamekeeper, a head groom and three assistants for the stables, a boatman, a head chauffeur, Charlie Hopkins, a stud groom, three foresters, an estate foreman, Ben Emmett, six painters, two carpenters, two general workers, a bricklayer, a plumber and mate, three electricians, and a part-time clockwinder. There was also a home farm.

  The London house at no. 4, St James’s Square, had a full-time staff of a housekeeper, a head housemaid, two under housemaids, an odd man, a carpenter and an electrician. Also based there were a controller, Miss Kindersley, who looked after all the Astors’ households, three accountants, and a number of secretaries, as many as seven during Lady Astor’s period as MP. Even though Cliveden was not at the centre of a great agricultural estate, the size of its household as a whole is on a par with the great lists of the Earl of Northumberland in 1511, or the Earl of Dorset in 1613.85

  Whilst the Astor’s footman, young Gordon Grimmett, thought the housemaids’ work much harder than his own as a young lamp boy, it was junior maids in the scullery and kitchen who, like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, had the most physically demanding jobs. Rosina Harrison recalls the grand steward at Cliveden, Mr Lee, saying of the young scullery-maids: ‘Poor little devils, washing up and scrubbing away at dozens of pots, pans, saucepans and plates up to their elbows in suds and grease, their hands red raw with the soda which was the only form of detergent in those days. I’ve seen them crying with exhaustion and pain, the degradation too, I shouldn’t wonder.’86

  That life was tough is borne out in many other memoirs, although some among them had pleasant memories of the houses where they had been employed, describing as their ‘happiest days’ time spent working in the company of a large body of servants. As the century progressed they were also permitted more freedoms than had been the lot of their predecessors, although younger servants were still obliged to leave to marry until the 1930s.

  In 1971, the present Lord Crathorne recorded an interview with his family’s cook, Mrs Davidson, who had worked at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire from the 1920s, and who had first arrived there in 1910, aged fourteen, through Hunt’s Registry in London. A lot of young people went into domestic service, she recalled, ‘because there was nothing else for us to do’. She was first employed as a scullery-maid, one of twenty-six indoor servants on the staff of one of the great Edwardian country houses, completed only in 1906.

  I had to get up at four o’clock. We had to get ready for all the staff and we had to get the kitchen ready for Mrs Dugdale coming down, floor scrubbed and silver sand put down, the table with a cloth and all the knives put neatly on the table. And then she would come in and go through the kitchen and scullery and out into the larder, the game larder, back in and into the inside larder and then came down and sat at the table to look at the menus which were all in a book.

  We had breakfast in the kitchen and the housemaids in the Hall and the Housekeeper and valets and butler in the housekeeper’s room. We had ours at 8 o’clock. After breakfast we did more cleaning, and there would be about twenty copper pans we had to clean . . . There were four of us in the kitchen and we did the vegetables. I just did the vegetables and cooked them.

  Although they did not get to bed until eleven, the staff ‘used to have fun amongst ourselves’ and there was always ‘good food’ for the servants.87

  From the scullery Mrs Davidson was promoted to still-room maid, ‘where you make the cakes and bread, and biscuits, and do the dining room washing up and dessert dishes, and all the morning trays. That was one step up. I was [there]
four years.’88 Gradually, she moved up in the hierarchy.

  Sometimes, experience might be gained in unorthodox ways. In one place where she was kitchenmaid, ‘the cook used to get drunk, and I used to have it all to do’. She worked at Bramham Hall near Wetherby, before returning, just after the First World War, to Crathorne Hall, at the request of the housekeeper, to be the principal cook there. There were four in the Dugdale family plus twenty-six servants, whose feeding was her responsibility. On shooting parties there could be seventy to cater for because the beaters were given hot food as well. In 1927, Mrs Davidson married a groom, Albert, who also worked at Crathorne, and left service to devote herself to him, but she soon went back at her employer’s request and with her husband’s blessing, remaining the family cook for the next thirty years.89 Initially, meals were served by a butler and first and second footman, in a pink and fawn livery, but footmen and formality dwindled away after the Second World War.

  Mrs Davidson’s observations on the catering responsibilities for a large household of staff as well as family are echoed in many memoirs, as is the pattern of staff meals being served in different rooms, reflecting their stratification, which seems so extraordinary today. Anne, Countess of Rosse, was very conscious of these fine distinctions: ‘There were still when I went to Birr, for each day, six different lunches in six different rooms. The staff could on occasion meet and talk together – Nanny could gossip with the housekeeper in the house-keeper’s room, or Miss Martin the governess could gossip with Nanny either in the schoolroom or the nursery. But eating together – NO.’90