At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Servants were more than a help and convenience; they were a vital indicator of status. Guests at dinner parties might find that they had been seated according to the number of servants they kept. People held on to their servants almost for dear life. Even on the American frontier and even after she had lost almost everything in a doomed business venture, Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, kept a liveried footman. Karl Marx, living in chronic indebtedness in Soho and often barely able to put food on the table, employed a housekeeper and a personal secretary. The household was so crowded that the secretary—a man named Pieper—had to share a bed with Marx. (Somehow, even so, Marx managed to put together enough private moments to seduce and impregnate the housekeeper, who bore him a son in the year of the Great Exhibition.)

  So servitude was a big part of life for a great many people. By 1851, one-third of all the young women in London—those aged from about fifteen to twenty-five—were servants. Another one in three was a prostitute. For many, that was about all the choice there was. The total number of servants in London, male and female, was greater than the total populations of all but the six largest English cities. Service was very much a female world. Females in service in 1851 outnumbered males by ten to one. For women, however, seldom was it a job for life. Most left the profession by the age of thirty-five, usually to get married, and very few stayed in any one job for more than a year or so. That is little wonder, as we shall see. Being a servant was generally hard and thankless work.

  Staff sizes, as you would expect, varied enormously, but at the upper end of the scale they were usually substantial. A large country house typically had forty indoor staff. The bachelor Earl of Lonsdale lived alone but had forty-nine people to look after him. Lord Derby had two dozen just to wait at dinner. The first Duke of Chandos kept a private orchestra for his mealtimes, though he managed to get extra value out of some of his musicians by making them do servants’ work as well; a violinist, for instance, was required to give his son his daily shave.

  Outdoor staff swelled the ranks further, particularly if the owners did a lot of riding or shooting. At Elveden, the Guinness family estate in Suffolk, the household employed sixteen gamekeepers, nine underkeepers, twenty-eight warreners (for culling rabbits), and two dozen miscellaneous hands—seventy-seven people in all—just to make sure they and their guests always had plenty of flustered birds to blow to smithereens. Visitors to Elveden managed to slaughter over a hundred thousand birds every year. The sixth Baron Walsingham once single-handedly shot 1,070 grouse in a day, a toll that has not been bettered and we may reasonably hope never is. (Walsingham would have had a team of loaders providing him with a steady supply of loaded guns, so managing to fire the requisite number of shots was easy. The real challenge would have been in keeping up a steady flow of targets. The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)

  Guests brought their own servants, too, so at weekends it was not unusual for the number of people within a country house to swell by as many as 150. Amid such a mass of bodies, confusion was inevitable. On one occasion in the 1890s Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom and with a lusty cry of “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” leaped into the bed only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. To avoid such confusions, guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes containing personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridors to help find their way back to, or between, rooms.

  Everything tended to be on a grand scale. The kitchen at Saltram, a house in Devon, had six hundred copper pots and pans, and that was pretty typical. The average country house might have as many as six hundred towels, and similarly vast quantities of sheets and linens. Just keeping everything marked, recorded, and correctly shelved was a monumental task.

  Servants at all levels put in long hours and worked hard. Writing in 1925, one retired servant recalled how early in his career he had had to light a fire, polish twenty pairs of boots, and clean and trim thirty-five lamps, all by the time the rest of the household began to stir. As the novelist George Moore wrote from experience in his memoir Confessions of a Young Man, the lot of the servant was to spend seventeen hours a day “drudging in and out of the kitchen, running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water, or down on your knees before a grate.… The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognized you as one of our kin; only the pity that might be extended to a dog.”

  Before the advent of indoor plumbing, water had to be carried to each bedroom and then taken away again once used. As a rule, each active bedroom had to be visited and refreshed five times between breakfast and bedtime. And each visit required a complicated array of receptacles and cloths so that, for instance, fresh water didn’t ever come up in the same receptacle that wastewater went down in. The maid had to carry three cloths—one for drinking glasses, one for commodes, and one for wash basins—and remember (or be sufficiently unpeeved with her mistress) to use the right ones on the right objects. And that of course was just for general light washing. If a guest or family member wished for a bath, the workload rose dramatically. A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and a typical bath held forty-five gallons, all of which had to be heated in the kitchen and brought up in special cans—and there might be two dozen or more baths to fill of an evening. Cooking likewise often required enormous strength and reserves of energy. A full cooking kettle could weigh sixty pounds.

  Furniture, fire grates, drapes, mirrors, windows, marble, brass, glass, and silver—all had to be cleaned and polished regularly, usually with their own particular brand of homemade polish. To keep steel knives and forks gleaming, it wasn’t enough to wash and polish them; they had to be vigorously stropped against a piece of leather on which had been smeared a paste of emery powder, chalk, brick dust, crocus, or hartshorn liberally mixed with lard. Before being put away, knives were greased with mutton fat (to defeat rusting) and wrapped in brown paper, and so had to be unwrapped, washed, and dried before they could be used again. Knife cleaning was such a tedious and heavy process that a knife-cleaning machine—essentially a box with a handle to turn a stiff brush—became one of the very first labor-saving appliances. One was marketed as “The Servant’s Friend.” Doubtless it was.

  It wasn’t just a question of doing the work, but often of doing it to the kind of exacting standards that generally occur only to people who don’t have to do the work themselves. At Manderston, a stately home in Scotland, a team of workers had to devote three full days twice a year to dismantling, polishing, and then reassembling a grand staircase. Some of the extra work was as demeaning as it was pointless. The historian Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett notes one household in which the butler and his staff were required to put down spare stair carpet around the dining room table before setting it so as not to tread on the good carpet. One maid in London complained that her employers made her change out of her work clothes and into something more presentable before being sent out into the street to hail a cab for them.

  The provisioning of households was an enormous preoccupation. Often groceries were brought in just two or three times a year, and stored in bulk. Tea was purchased by the chest, flour by the barrel. Sugar came in large cones called loaves. Servants became adept at preserving and storing items for long periods. They also had to make the materials with which their work could be done. If you needed to starch a collar or polish shoes, you had to concoct your own ingredients. Commercial boot polishes didn’t become available until the 1890s. Before that it was necessary to boil up a supply of polish at home, a process that stained not only boots but also pots, stirring spoons, hands, and anything else the mixture came into contact with. Starch had to be laboriously made from rice or potatoes. Even linens didn’t come in a finished state. One bought bolts
of cloth and had them made up into tablecloths, sheets, shirts, towels, and so on.

  Most large households had a still room for distilling spirits, and here were brewed an exhaustive repertoire of items—inks, weedkillers, soap, toothpaste, candles, waxes, vinegars and pickles, cold creams and cosmetics, rat poisons, flea powders, shampoos, and medicines, as well as solutions for removing stains from marble, for taking the shine off trousers, for stiffening collars, and even for removing freckles. (A combination of borax, lemon juice, and sugar was said to do the trick.) These treasured concoctions could involve any number of ingredients—beeswax, bullock’s gall, alum, vinegar, turpentine, and others even more startling. The author of one mid-nineteenth-century manual recommended that paintings be cleaned annually with a mixture of “salt and stale urine,” though whose urine and how stale were left to the reader to determine.

  Many houses were so filled with pantries, storerooms, and other service areas that the greater part of the house actually belonged to the servants. In The Gentleman’s House (1864), Robert Kerr stated that the typical stately home had two hundred rooms (counting all storage spaces), of which almost exactly half were household offices—which is to say rooms devoted to servants and their tasks, or their bedrooms. When stables and other outbuildings were added in, the property was overwhelmingly in the servants’ control.

  The division of labor behind the scenes could be enormously complicated. Kerr divided the suites of offices into nine categories: kitchen, bakery and brewery, upper servants’ hall, lower servants’ hall, cellars and outhouses, laundry, private rooms, “supplementaries,” and thoroughfares. Other homes used different reckonings. Florence Court in Ireland had more than sixty departments, while Eaton Hall, the Cheshire seat of the Duke of Westminster, got by with just sixteen—quite a modest number bearing in mind that he had more than three hundred servants. It all depended on the organizational predispositions of master, mistress, butler, and housekeeper.

  A large country house was likely to have a gun room, lamp room, still room, pastry room, butler’s pantry, fish store, bake house, coal store, game larder, brewery, knife room, brush room, shoe room, and at least a dozen more. Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans. Another in Wales, according to historian Juliet Gardiner, had a room set aside for ironing newspapers. The grandest or oldest homes might also have a saucery, a spicery, a poultery, a buttery, and other rooms of more exotic provenance, such as a ewery (a room for keeping water jugs, the word somehow derived from aquaria), a chandry (for candles), an avenery (for game beasts), and a napery (for linen).

  Some of the workroom names are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. Buttery has nothing to do with butter. It refers to butts, as in butts of ale. (It is a corruption of boutellerie, the same word from which butler and bottle are derived; looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.) Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.

  In all but the most modest households owners rarely set foot in the kitchen or servants’ area and, as Gardiner puts it, “knew only by report the conditions in which their servants lived.” It was not uncommon for the head of the household to know nothing about his servants beyond their names. Most would have had little idea how to find their way through the darker recesses of the servants’ areas.

  Every aspect of life was rigorously stratified, and these anxious distinctions existed for houseguests and family as much as for servants. Strict protocol dictated into which parts of the house one might venture—which corridors and staircases one might use, which doors one might open—depending on whether one was a guest or close relative, governess or tutor, child or adult, aristocrat or commoner, male or female, upper house servant or lower house servant. Such were the rigidities, Mark Girouard observes in Life in the English Country House, that afternoon tea in one stately home was served in eleven different places to eleven different castes of people. In her history of country house servants, Pamela Sambrook notes how two sisters worked in the same house—one as a housemaid, one as a nursemaid—but were not allowed to speak or indicate acquaintance when they met because they inhabited different social realms.

  Servants were given little time for personal grooming, and then were constantly accused of being dirty, which was decidedly unfair since a typical servant’s day ran from 6:30 in the morning to 10:00 at night—later if an evening social event was involved. The author of one household manual noted wistfully how she would have loved to provide her servants with nice rooms, but sadly they always grew untidy. “The simpler, therefore, a servant’s room is furnished, the better,” she decided. By the Edwardian period servants got off half a day per week and one full day per month—hardly munificent when you consider that that was all the time they had to shop for personal items, get their hair cut, visit family, court, relax, or otherwise enjoy a few hours of precious liberty.

  Perhaps the hardest part of the job was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn’t think much of you. Virginia Woolf’s diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: “She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated … so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.” As a class they were as irritating as “kitchen flies.” Woolf’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.”

  It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm’s reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn’t recharge automatically.

  The servants’ payoff for all this was often to be treated appallingly. It was common for mistresses to test the honesty of servants by leaving some temptation where they were bound to find it—a coin on the floor, say—and then punishing them if they pocketed it. The effect was to instill in servants a slightly paranoid sense that they were in the presence of a superior omniscience. Servants were also suspected of abetting burglars by providing inside information and leaving doors unlocked. It was a perfect recipe for unhappiness on both sides. Servants, especially in smaller households, tended to think of their masters as unreasonable and demanding. Masters saw servants as slothful and untrustworthy.

  Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.*

  One handbook actually gave instructions—in fact, provided a working script—for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant. In this model scenario, the child is summoned to the study, where he finds his mother standing with the shamed servant, who is weeping quietly.

  “Nurse Mary,” the mother begins, “is g
oing to tell you that there are no black men who creep into little boys’ rooms in the dark and carry them off when they are naughty. I want you to listen while Nurse Mary tells you this, for she is going away to-day, and you will probably never see her again.”

  The nurse is then confronted with each of her foolish tales and made to recant them one by one.

  The boy listens carefully, then offers his hand to the departing employee. “Thank you, nurse,” he says crisply. “I ought not to have been afraid, but I believed you, you know.” Then he turns to his mother. “I shall not be afraid, now, Mother,” he reassures her in an appropriately manly fashion, and all return to their normal lives—except of course the nurse, who will probably never find respectable work again.

  Dismissal, especially for females, was the most dreaded calamity, for it meant loss of employment, loss of shelter, loss of prospects, loss of everything. Mrs. Beeton was at particular pains to warn her readers not to allow sentiment or Christian charity or any other consideration of compassion to lead them to write a false or misleading recommendation for a dismissed employee. “In giving a character, it is scarcely necessary to say that the mistress should be guided by a sense of strict justice. It is not fair for one lady to recommend to another a servant she would not keep herself,” Mrs. Beeton wrote, and that was all the reflection anyone needed to give to the matter.

  As the Victorian era progressed, servants increasingly were required to be not just honest, clean, hardworking, sober, dutiful, and circumspect but also, as near as possible, invisible. Jenny Uglow, in her history of gardening, mentions one estate where, when the family was in residence, the gardeners were required to detour a mile when emptying their wheelbarrows in order not to become an irksome presence in the owner’s field of view. At one home in Suffolk, meanwhile, servants were required to press their faces to the wall when members of the family passed by.