Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Mrs Jean Hibbert, who worked at Gordon Castle and then Goodwood House in the interwar years, from the late 1920s until her marriage in 1932, harked back to her time as a housemaid in her detailed, amusing but unpublished memoirs. Her first post was at Gordon Castle in Moray, after which she wanted to move on elsewhere to become a second housemaid. When she sought a reference from the duchess, so that she could take up a post at Wilton House,91 to her surprise the duchess responded with a telegram: ‘You are not to leave my employment. If you want a change come to Goodwood.’ Mrs Hibbert wrote to one gardener she had met to ask his advice about accepting this offer and he encouraged her to do so – they later married. An added incentive was that the first housemaid from Gordon Castle, Annie Cowie, had already moved to Goodwood. So she travelled from Rothes in Scotland, via London, to Sussex.92

  ‘There were seven housemaids and our rooms were in one of the towers of the great house. We were all Scots as the Duchess liked us best, but we did not like the head housemaid who was from Glasgow . . . The maids had a sitting room with a fire on the ground floor but no fires in the bedrooms.’93 Typically the staff ate together in the servants’ hall, except for the butler, the lady’s maid, the housekeeper and the butter cook (a specialist chef), who all ate in the steward’s quarters.

  The maids rose at 5.30 every day to get the public rooms ready before the family came down, yet Mrs Hibbert retained great affection for these apartments and took pride in her work:

  Now that I was second housemaid my duties were largely cleaning in the main part of the house which was much older and more beautifully furnished than Gordon Castle. I particularly loved the fine paintings . . . Goodwood is famous for its Canalettos which I could see every day. When you think of it, people pay to visit such places now but I had those lovely rooms to myself every day in return for some hard work. Dusting, cleaning floors, polishing, laying fires and using the newly-fangled, heavy Hoover sweeping machines were my jobs but the worst part was cleaning steel grates until they shone.94

  She also polished the dining-room table before breakfast at 7.30. When the family were up their bedrooms were cleaned and their beds made. After the maids had had their own lunch, they had to be on hand to help carry food between kitchen and dining room.95 They were given two hours off after lunch, and one afternoon off every week. Also (she thought as a result of economies), Mrs Hibbert had the duties of lady’s maid to Lady March, the duchess’s daughter-in-law.

  She heard some local gossip about the West Dean estate, where ‘the morals of the guests were supposed to be so loose that the garden boy had to ring a bell fixed to the corner of the house wall at 6 a.m. called “the change beds bell”, so that housemaids would find the right husbands and wives together in bed when they delivered their morning tea at 7!’ Even Mrs Hibbert thought that this was probably quite apocryphal but it has echoes of the bed-hopping life of the aristocracy in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.96

  At Goodwood in the 1920s, staff numbers were still high. There were twenty-seven indoor staff: the steward, who looked after the accounts; the butler; the housekeeper; the cook; the duke’s valet; the duchess’s maid; the porter who sat in a cubbyhole by the main door and took in messages and post; five footmen, seven housemaids, two pantry boys, three kitchenmaids, three still-room maids and two scullery-maids. Then there was staff for the laundry, the stables, with both horses and cars, and the garden, where fourteen gardeners worked under the head gardener, his deputy and his foreman, seven of them under Mrs Hibbert’s future husband, Spencer Hibbert. An additional team of gardeners looked after the pleasure grounds and cricket green, not to mention the gamekeepers and woodsmen.97

  Mrs Hibbert looked on the then Duchess of Richmond as ‘an excellent employer’ who threw a good Christmas party and sometimes treated the maids to an afternoon at the theatre with tea at the Grosvenor Hotel. When she and Spencer Hibbert became engaged to be married, they handed in their notice as was usual. However, the duchess, ‘knowing my family was far away and very poor . . . offered to organise and pay for the wedding from Goodwood House’. She even gave Mrs Hibbert furniture for their new home. The wedding breakfast was ‘a magnificent spread and lovely wine which the Duke gave us as his present and a fine three layered wedding cake . . . the kitchens had been working hard and in secret because I knew nothing about it.’98

  Some young women, unable to pursue an expensive higher education during the Great Depression, found careers in service the only option. Lavinia Swainbank began work in 1922, which was ‘not an easy time to be starting out on one’s career. For those were the days of depression on the Tyne.’ Although Miss Swainbank had passed the eleven-plus, a shortage of money hampered all her attempts to go further: ‘Thus at sixteen I entered into a career of drudgery, where long hours and very often inadequate food were accepted standards of a life that was thrust on one out of sheer necessity.’ She was taken on in a hotel as a ‘tweeny’ (or between-stairs maid), then became second housemaid: ‘ultimately I reached my peak as third house-maid in one of the stately homes of England’.99

  When she was a second housemaid in ‘gentleman’s service’ for an elderly lady and two spinster daughters, her daily timetable had echoes of service in a country house during the previous four centuries:

  6.30 Rise. Clean grate [and] lay fire in Dining Room. Sweep carpet and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in Library. Sweep and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in billiard room. Sweep and dust. Polish staircase. Clean grate and lay fire in Drawing Room. Polish floor. Clean grate and lay fire in Morning Room. Sweep and Dust vestibule. Sweep and dust Blue Staircase.

  All that before the 8 am. Breakfast in the Servants’ Hall. 9 am. Start bedrooms. Help with Bedmaking and slops and fill ewers and carafes. Clean grates and lay fires. Fill up coal boxes and wood baskets. Sweep and dust bedrooms. Clean bathrooms. Change into afternoon uniform. 1 pm Lunch in Servants’ Hall. Afternoons, clean silver, brass, water cans, trim lamps. 4 pm Tea in the Servants’ Hall, 5 pm light fires in bedrooms, 6 pm cans of hot water to bedrooms, 7.30 pm, Turn down beds, make up fires, and empty slops. Fill up coal and wood containers. Leave morning trays set in housemaid’s pantry.100

  Some of her other duties were more pleasurable: ‘Early mornings, three times a week, I opened the massive front door, to admit the head and under gardener who used to arrive with masses of fresh blooms and proceed to make exquisite floral arrangements in the hall and public rooms. Later they brought fresh vegetables to the cook.’101 Despite the grind, ‘Time passed pleasantly enough here. The other servants were kind, the food was excellent’ and she even had a bike to get into town.

  Her next position was more enjoyable even if the accommodation was modest: ‘here for the first time I really learned the meaning of gentlemen’s service. For the first time I was treated as a human being by people with heart and consideration for all their staff. We were even granted the then unknown privilege of two hours free in the afternoon, either to rest or sit in the lovely gardens.’ She read books from the library and became interested in the history of the place and the duke’s family, whose ‘ancestors became real characters to me’.102

  She had happy memories of the servants’ ball, when the family waited on their staff. There were frequent house parties when the family returned from London: ‘although this meant more work, to me it was exciting to witness how the other half lived and there was no bitterness in this. I used to love to watch over the banisters the young people in their wonderful dresses.’103

  There was a lot of fun to be had in the servants’ hall too: ‘a gramophone and stacks of up to date records, where the gardeners, grooms and under chauffeur joined the indoor staff of maids and footmen for dances after the day’s duties had ended. We had dart board, cards, and the ever popular Ludo and snakes-and-ladders, in fact everything to make a contented staff.’ Curiously enough, Miss Swainbank observed: ‘I found here that class distinction began and ended in the Servants’ Hall.’104

  Another Sco
ttish maidservant, Jean Rennie, born in 1914, had won a scholarship to university but was unable to take up her place because her father was unemployed. Having lost her own job in a mill, she got another as a housemaid: ‘My greatest horror was the knowledge that I would have to submit to the badge of servitude – a cap and apron.’ One compensation was the beauty of the castle and the gleaming kitchen, but she was appalled by seeing leftover butter and jam at tea in the servants’ hall: ‘I could remember so many hungry children – and here was good food being contemptuously pushed aside.’

  She was quickly initiated into ‘the mysteries of being a house-maid during the day. The beds, the “slops”, the carpet-sweeping, the dusting. I gradually learnt whose job was which, and that one must not do anyone else’s job. Not even to help them. So nobody helped me.’ Her initial impressions of the cook were of ‘a vast mountain of a woman in spotless white. When I came to know her afterwards she was a gem of goodness, honesty and generosity. But first, at work, she was rather frightening.’105 This was no doubt the case with many senior servants and new juniors.

  Of the more senior women in the English country-house household, the lady’s maid retained a primary importance up until the Second World War, and perhaps a little beyond. Rosina Harrison was lady’s maid to one of the liveliest hostesses of the era, the American Lady Astor. Born in 1899, the daughter of a stonemason on the Marquess of Ripon’s estate in Yorkshire, from the first Rosina was determined to travel. Her mother advised her to train in dressmaking and to learn French. She started as a ‘Young Lady’s Maid’ to the young daughters of Lady Irene Tufton, in their house in Mayfair and at Appleby Castle, Cumberland, then worked for Lady Cranborne, daughter-in-law to the Marquess of Salisbury, with whom she first got her proper taste of travel in France and Italy.106

  She arrived at Cliveden in 1928 to be a lady’s maid to Phyllis Astor, Lady Astor’s daughter, at a salary of £60 a year, nearly three times what she had been earning with Lady Cranborne. She was briefed on the Astor family by the famous steward, Mr Edwin Lee, who had been a sergeant major in the First World War. Her working conditions were good: ‘My room at Cliveden was large, well decorated and comfortably furnished with bed, two easy chairs, a couch and two big wardrobes.’107

  Rosina helped Phyllis Astor dress, maintained her clothes and accompanied her on visits: ‘We went together to a few country house parties in Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire . . . and to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palace in Scotland, Drumlanrig Castle. I was of course responsible for looking after riding habits and these weren’t easy to cope with. Some evenings she’d come in soaking wet and spattered with mud, yet the next morning she would have to appear looking spotless.’108 In 1928, Rosina travelled to the United States, after which she became Lady Astor’s personal lady’s maid.

  At first she was overwhelmed by her employer’s fiery temper and exacting demands but a turning point came when she stood up to her: ‘My lady, from now on I intend to speak as I’m spoken to. Common people say please and thank you, ordinary people do not reprimand servants in front of others and ladies are supposed to be an example to all, and that is that.’109 Lady Astor later apologised. In an aside that offers us an insight into how these relationships worked, Rosina Harrison observed: ‘Now all this sounds very trivial, but if you want to know how it was possible for two people to live closely for thirty odd years it is important . . . as the years passed our relationship mellowed and the rows became more like verbal skirmishes.’110

  In many accounts, the relationship of the family children of a country house to the servants attains a surprising pitch of intimacy and trust. It is notable that many people from aristocratic backgrounds growing up in the 1920s to the 1950s are inclined to say today that they ‘were brought up by the servants’. For many twentieth-century biographers of the English country house, the most interesting aspect is the dynamic between children and domestic servants. One of the most memorable butlers of the late Victorian and Edwardian era is Henry Moat, who joined the household of Sir George Sitwell at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire in 1893, first as footman and then butler-valet, where he took on a primary importance in the lives of the Sitwell children.

  Mr Moat’s profile in Sir Osbert’s famous biography, which was written in such detail because of his conviction that his world was vanishing for ever, gives him a special place in English literature. Indeed, it gives him a substantial entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Sir Osbert’s nephew, Sir Reresby, had vivid memories of this remarkable man, whose bedroom at Renishaw Hall had its own staircase to the butler’s pantry, and from which a rod of iron was inserted through the plate-room door, thus securing the house’s silver.

  Mr Moat, together with the beloved nurse Davis ‘who lived for children and their love’, were for Sir George’s three children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, the mainstays of their emotional life during their early years. All three became famous writers. In Cruel Month, the first volume of his famous autobiography, Left Hand! Right Hand!, Sir Osbert examined this bond: ‘Parents were aware that the child would be a nuisance, and a whole hedge of servants, in addition to the complex guardianship of nursery and schoolroom, was necessary, not so much to aid the infant as to screen him off from his father and mother.’111 Thus, he argued, in a subtle way ‘children and servants often found themselves in league against grown-ups, and employers. The female child sought shelter with the nurse and housekeeper and cook, the male in the [butler’s] pantry. Certainly, I learnt more, far more, from talking to Henry and Pare in the pantry from their instinctive wisdom and humour, than from more academic sources.’112

  Henry Moat, whose wonderfully irascible yet devoted relationship with Sir George is detailed in the same book, noted later that Sir Osbert’s Who’s Who entry read: ‘Educated during holidays from Eton’. He was quick to retort: ‘Well, Sir, I make bold to claim some of that, because whether you were at Scarboro’, Renishaw or abroad, if you or Master Sachie wanted to know anything about things on earth, the sea, under the earth or in the air above, you generally came to me, even when you had a tutor, and often the tutor came too.’ This gently bantering relationship between employer and employed, and their long-standing interdependence, are typical of early-twentieth-century memoirs, illustrating that a butler might be looked on as a friend by more than one generation of a family at the same time.113

  In this context it is interesting to note that the great P.G. Wodehouse, inventor of that ultimate symbol of the skilful and dedicated English manservant, Jeeves, grew up – typically for many upper- and upper-middle-class children of his generation – in England while his parents worked abroad. Wodehouse’s biographer Robert McCrum makes clear that this often meant staying with aunts, clergyman and nautical uncles. As they lived on what Wodehouse himself called ‘the fringe of the butler belt’, he observed wryly: ‘There always came a moment when my hostess, smiling one of those smiles, suggested that it would be nice for [me] to go and have tea in the servants’ hall.’ He learnt to laugh there, in the company of footmen and housemaids. ‘I forgot to be shy and kidded back and forth with the best of them.’114 What psychological forces were at work when, while in an internment camp in Germany during the Second World War, he wrote a story in which a peer returns to the stately home he has leased out, disguised as the butler?115 His first story about Blandings Castle has two people disguised as lady’s-maid and valet manoeuvring their way through the complex etiquette of the servants’ hall.

  Lavinia Smiley, one of the daughters of the Hon. Clive Pearson who restored Parham Park in West Sussex, wrote a particularly evocative account of a 1920s country-house childhood, titled A Nice Clean Plate. As with so many memoirs of the early years of the aristocracy, her recollections are interwoven with affectionate memories of servants, from maids to footmen:

  The indoor staff at Parham (until 1939) consisted, with slight variations, of: Mr Cridland, the butler, Mr Hill, the valet, three footmen and the odd man, a hall boy and a nigh
t watchman. There was a housekeeper, Mrs Evans, her mother’s lady’s maid, Miss Metcalfe, the head housemaid (Jane), and three other housemaids, Mrs Dawson the cook, her two kitchen maids, a scullery-maid, and a still-room maid, as well as (a succession of) nannies and a nursery maid. Outside there was a stable staff, headed by Mr Lancaster and a team of gardeners, as well as a house carpenter called Mr Gee, and an electrician called Mr Greenfield. There was another housekeeper, and three maids, who stayed in their London house.116

  Lady Smiley recalled her parents’ staff with affection: ‘we found life there [tea in the housekeeper’s room with the senior staff for company] less of a strain than it often was “through the front”.’ She could recall the family ritual of children descending to the drawing room for ‘Children’s Hour’, when they spent time with their parents, ‘During “Children’s Hour” one of the footmen would come in and put coal on the fire, and possibly dear Mr Cridland the butler would come creaking in with a message for my mother on a silver salver . . . [her father] had a very happy relationship with Mr Cridland, who had been sent to Cambridge with him as a young valet. They had been together ever since . . . My father was much cast down when Cridland died; they were very fond of each other.’