Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  Even in small households, like that of Lady Colefax, their reputation for a high standard of hospitality depended on the skills of their staff. The Colefaxes relied on three servants, namely the parlourmaid, Norah Fielding, who had been with Sibyl from the age of eighteen, the cook, Mrs Gray, who came in the early 1920s, and the chauffeur, Briance. Like her mistress, Fielding enjoyed entertaining and she took sole charge of Lady Colefax’s visitors’ book. Mrs Gray had a well-earned reputation for being an excellent cook, serving simple dishes but making them from the best and freshest ingredients.18

  Some newly married mistresses found difficulty in carrying out the duties their changed status required. That was true of Gladys Marlborough, the Duke of Marlborough’s second wife, whom he married in 1921. Prior to marriage she had lived mainly in Paris and she soon became disillusioned with her new position, declaring gloomily to a friend, ‘I married a house not a man.’ Life at Blenheim Palace was organised on a grand scale, with forty servants employed inside and around the same number outside. These numbers were boosted when guests arrived with their own staff, who also had to be accommodated. The footmen were all at least 6 feet tall and wore maroon coats decorated with a good deal of silver braid. Their hair was powdered daily with a mixture of violet powder and flour, and they were paid an extra amount to enable them to purchase the violet powder. But, as Gladys confided to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who lived in the nearby Oxfordshire village of Garsington, ‘The mere thought of those huge rooms makes my acheing legs ache more’. Another of Gladys’s friends, who was staying at Blenheim, was struck by the way in which the staff worked so quietly and invisibly that life in the household was conducted in ‘majestic silence’. This she found disquieting:

  I heard the fire crackling in my room without having seen it lighted, the curtains were drawn and breakfast was brought up without my being awakened, and at ten o’clock The Times was insinuated under my eyes … By eight o’clock in the morning the lawn was rolled, the dead leaves removed and the flower stands filled with fresh flowers.19

  Gladys herself found the atmosphere oppressive. As an animal lover, she particularly disliked the regular autumn shooting parties, or, as she put it, the time when the household was ‘murderous with heavy people & talk of guns, game etc’. The contrast between the life she had enjoyed in France and this ‘intellectual wilderness’ was brought home to her, and as a diversion she took up gardening, spending hours pruning the roses and beginning work on a rock garden. Not surprisingly by the late 1920s relations between the duchess and her husband had reached a very low ebb, with frequent rows about the servants. Marlborough accused Gladys of upsetting them and causing them to leave. As the duchess’s biographer notes, a situation soon developed ‘in which neither party could do anything right’. At one dinner party, indeed, ‘she produced a revolver and placed it beside her. A rather startled guest at her side inquired: “Duchess, what are you going to do with that?” to which she replied: “Oh! I don’t know, I might just shoot Marlborough.”’20 By the early 1930s the marriage was virtually over but there was no divorce, as the duke, in the interim, had converted to Roman Catholicism.

  Fortunately, few newly-weds had such an unhappy experience as Gladys Marlborough, but many found problems arising from their sheer lack of knowledge on how to run a home. Helen Hardinge recalled ruefully that a few months before her marriage in 1921, she had begged her mother to allow her to learn how to cope with domestic matters in the family home, but her mother ‘could not bear the idea of anybody else doing it but herself’. The outcome was that almost as soon as she became responsible for her own household Helen ran into debt, and subsequently settled this by selling a small amount of her jewellery. Then, because of her lack of confident leadership, the domestic routine became disturbed by quarrels among her three senior servants. As a result they each insisted on eating their meals separately in different rooms. ‘I was only saved from … disaster by my father-in-law’s old cook, who … had been lent to me for a time. Most of what I learnt about housekeeping, I learnt from her.’21 Yet even after this she continued to rely on her mother for guidance when hiring new staff, as in September 1924 when she informed Lady Milner that she would be needing a cook and a kitchenmaid at the end of the following month. ‘I think your cook would do perfectly’, and a proposed wage of £65 a year ‘would be quite all right’.22

  A number of mistresses in the upper ranks of society, however, unashamedly left the running of the household to their senior servants as a matter of course, despite the risk that such a policy could lead to extravagance and even dishonesty if the staff members concerned were careless of the family’s best interests. Mary, Duchess of Buccleuch, who married in 1921 and moved with her husband and family between the various houses they owned, openly admitted that she relied ‘enormously’ on her staff:

  One had a housekeeper in each house, and a very good head butler, who travelled from house to house, and he nearly always had a second butler, who also travelled with us. Men staff always did, but the housekeeper remained in each house. And one usually had a travelling housemaid …

  I left the menus and the ordering of the food entirely to the cook – I had rather a good cook, luckily, so I left a great deal to her … She had her own department – she never came out of the kitchen. She had her own sitting room and ate there, fed by her own minions.23

  Similarly Patricia, Viscountess Hambleden, a daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, remembered the large retinue of servants at Wilton, her family home. ‘We had an absolutely marvellous butler called Mr Smith … he had everything under control and nothing ever worried him. Everything was done impeccably … and the same for the housekeeper and cook … I think most people had butlers. I can only think of one person who had parlourmaids, and everybody rather noticed it … [It] wasn’t quite the thing to have parlourmaids.’24

  At West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, Lady Dashwood, who married in 1922, remembered the butler ruling everything in the household: ‘He was very very grand – and then the cook considered herself even grander, but wasn’t, I suppose … The butler, the cook and the housekeeper were the king pins.’ One of the cooks, a Mrs McKay, who had trained at the Ritz and obviously took great pride in her skills, firmly refused to allow Lady Dashwood to learn to cook in her kitchen. Presumably she considered that would have undermined her own status.25

  However, other mistresses of stately homes took a much stronger line. Lady Astor, aided by her private secretary, not only kept a firm grip on household expenditure, but insisted on any additional items required receiving her approval before an order was placed. Bills were queried, and any infringement of the rules led to a sharp reprimand. Typical of this attitude was a letter written in the 1930s to the then housekeeper, reproving her for hiring a temporary housemaid for the busy Ascot week. The letter was written by the private secretary and pointed out that the ‘engagement of temporary servants without [Her Ladyship’s] knowledge and consent is something about which [she] is very particular, so do be sure not to make this mistake again.’26 In addition to supervising the housemaids and still-room maids, to ensure they carried out their duties satisfactorily, the Cliveden housekeeper had a number of other responsibilities. These ranged from taking care of the household linen and china to preparing the guest rooms for visitors, making large quantities of jam, bottling fruit, inspecting the three bothies, or hostels, where the Astors’ unmarried gardeners and stable workers lodged, and ensuring that Greenwood Cottage, an estate property often let to family friends, was ready for occupation. Lady Astor also refused to recruit any Roman Catholic servants.

  The head gardeners at Cliveden, too, were soon admonished if they failed to supply sufficient vegetables, fruit and flowers to meet the household’s requirements, and that included despatching produce during the week to London when the Astors were in residence there. Lady Astor also kept a keen eye on the appearance of the gardens, drawing attention to any faults. In 1928, for example, she compared the horticultural ski
lls of her long-standing head gardener, William Camm, adversely to those of her friend Sir Philip Sassoon’s head gardener, telling him that Sir Philip’s tuberoses were ‘much fuller and an altogether better specimen than those grown at Cliveden’. She told Camm to consult the Sassoon gardener to find out how he achieved these results.27 Seemingly this was done, for two months later she was congratulating her head gardener on the ‘beautiful tuberoses’ he had grown.28 Camm was first appointed in 1906, when the Astors moved to Cliveden, and he remained head gardener until his death in February 1929.

  Michael Astor, one of Lady Astor’s younger children, confirmed that his mother was ‘an expert and meticulous housekeeper … nothing escaped her notice’. Scarcely was breakfast over before she was downstairs, dealing with the day’s housekeeping arrangements. ‘Monsieur Gilbert, the chef, in his white jacket and carrying his menu book, would come into her boudoir to discuss the meals. After this it would be Lee, or the housekeeper, or the gardener who had come in to arrange the flowers.’29

  Clementine Churchill, too, had to keep a firm grip on household expenditure during the 1920s since her husband found it impossible to economise, especially after he acquired his country estate of Chartwell Manor in 1922. According to her daughter, Mary, their precarious financial condition ‘had a wearing effect on her nerves, and the perpetual back-log of bills, and the struggle she had to get even the local tradesmen paid, were the cause of gnawing worry and mortification’.30 The lavish hospitality they provided at Chartwell was only possible because of her husband’s prodigious literary output. If that had failed, their financial position would have been dire. Clementine could rarely afford to employ a highly trained cook so she often recruited a talented kitchenmaid, whom she would guide herself. Mary claimed that she never grudged the time or trouble she spent ‘planning and discussing the food with her cook’. In all, to ensure that life at Chartwell was ‘easy and comfortable, eight or nine indoor servants were needed: two in the kitchen; two in the pantry; two housemaids; a personal maid for Clementine (who also did a good deal of family sewing); a nursery-maid; and an ‘‘odd man”’. He was responsible for looking after the boots, boilers, dustbins and similar miscellaneous tasks. In addition, there was a nanny or governess and ‘always two secretaries … Outside they employed a chauffeur, three gardeners, a groom for the polo ponies (until they were sold), and a working bailiff’ on what they called their ‘farm’. The turnover of indoor staff was fairly rapid, partly because of the remoteness of the house from any bus stop. This was a further worry and expense for Clementine, since she had to recruit and instruct a stream of new servants. Her feelings of frustration were scarcely helped by Winston’s cavalier attitude towards these staff changes, as in September 1928, when he told his wife not to ‘worry about household matters. Let them crash if they will. Servants exist to save one trouble, & shd. never be allowed to disturb one’s inner peace … Nothing is worse than worrying about trifles.’31 But Clementine well knew that if things had gone ‘crash’ and the household routine had been seriously disrupted this light-hearted acceptance of the difficulties would not have long survived. Hence her worries over expenditure and her horror of unpaid bills.

  Other mistresses of High Society households, too, spent much time over their accounts. Lady Redesdale, faced with her husband’s periodic financial difficulties and erratic patterns of expenditure, would carefully record every penny she spent. Her youngest daughter, Deborah, claimed that when she totted up the totals at the end of the year, a few pence unaccounted for caused her ‘major anxiety and we knew to keep out of her way.’ She was determined that her children should be as good at managing the finances as she was and to that end started them off with a few pence weekly as pocket money; we ‘graduated at the age of twelve to what was grandly called “an allowance”, eleven shillings a month’. Out of that they had to buy stockings, gloves, sweets, gifts and ‘any other extras’ they needed. The amount was increased until at the age of seventeen they were allowed £100 a year. This had to cover most of their travelling expenses as well as their wardrobe. Lady Redesdale also ordered food over the telephone from ‘“Wicked Old Harrod” (her name for expensive but reliable Harrods), which was delivered a couple of hours later in a silent, electrically driven van’. But she walked to the shops herself to make certain of her purchases, too, something which few fellow members of the social elite were likely to do.32

  Lesley Lewis’s mother was another careful mistress of her household, spending hours at her desk dealing with household orders and bills, or writing out character references for servants. As a child Lesley claimed she was paid three pence a dozen to docket the household receipts, ‘which were kept for seven years … The day-to-day tradesmen’s accounts were entered by hand in leather-covered books.’

  There was a special storeroom in Lesley’s home where were kept various items like soap, floor polish, brushes and broomheads, as well as marmalade in large stoneware jars. These products were ordered in bulk at six-monthly intervals from the Army and Navy Stores in London, after Lesley’s mother had consulted the butler, cook and head housemaid about their requirements. Jam was ordered seasonally from the Tiptree jam factory, and general groceries came from the nearby town.33 As in most well-organised households, the stores were distributed only by the mistress, or with her explicit permission, at certain specific times, usually once a week.

  Even Pamela Cavendish’s mother, who spent relatively little time at her Compton Beauchamp home, took care to organise the distribution of the stores. She also made her daughters share in this. As in Lesley Lewis’s home, many items were ordered in bulk and were distributed once a week, with the staff departmental heads making a list of what they needed. According to Pamela, if they asked for too much, she would say, ‘What have you been doing with it? I think that’s too much.’34 In this way outgoings were curbed.

  As most reminiscences confirm, there was a clear division between the family and their servants, even when the latter were on apparently good terms with their employers. This difference was underlined by cynical servants like Eric Horne, who claimed in 1932 to have spent fifty-seven years in service ‘with the Nobility and Gentry’. He commented on the

  vast abyss between gentry and servants. Servants are looked upon as part of the furniture of the house; live furniture, nothing more. If the live furniture is in the town house and is wanted in the country house, or vice versa, it is simply moved there. If a piece of the live furniture gets broken in body and health, the gentry simply say: ‘Chuck it out and get another. It’s all the same to us.’35

  He drew attention, too, to the backbiting and jealousy that existed among the staff themselves in many large households.

  Ironically the distinctions that existed between family and servants were also reflected in the hierarchy which reigned below stairs. This extended from their daily work routine to their dress and eating arrangements. Lily Milgate remembered that when she was offered a place as under-housemaid by Sir Charles and Lady Wyndham at their Bruton Street home in London, her interview was conducted by Miss Meek, the head housemaid:

  she looked me over without speaking (all these Upper Servants had that habit of looking you up and down as if you was something the cat brought in … ) … She didn’t bother to ask me my name, she simply stated ‘Her Ladyship always likes the under-housemaid to be called Mary’ so Mary I became … That’s a funny thing about the names. The gentry always wanting to change them, even the footmen, if one had the name Horace they would instantly rechristen him James or John.

  Mrs Milgate remembered, too, the snobbery attached to the eating arrangements in most grand houses. For the majority of the meals, the senior staff ate in the housekeeper’s room, waited on by a very junior member of staff. But for the main course of the principal meal of the day they would join their subordinates in the servants’ hall. According to Lily Milgate, in her London household it was supper that was the ‘big event of the day’:

  All the staff assem
bled for this meal except the kitchen people, they always kept to themselves and [ate] in the kitchen.

  First came the butler with the housekeeper. He sat at one end of the long refectory table, she sat at the opposite end. The butler was dressed in full evening dress … The housekeeper wore a black silk dress, sometimes relieved with lace and always jewellery … Next came the lady’s personal maid and dressed much the same as the housekeeper, next came the first footman, his uniform was the same as the butler’s with one exception. All footmen [had] yellow and black striped waistcoats. They sat one side of the table looking like wasps at a feast, at the end of their row came the odd job man, then the Hall boy who waited on us at table under the keen eye of the butler who corrected him if he made a mistake or forgot any small item or spilled water as he filled our glasses. This was … to give him his first training to being a footman and last not least at the end of the row was the boot boy.

  On the other side of the table sat the maids, the head housemaid with her three inches of lace on top of her head (I always thought this rather ridiculous but it showed rank), then the other maids according to position.36

  It was customary for the junior servants to remain silent while their seniors were present, and they were expected to lay down their knives and forks when the butler had finished eating. Then the senior staff would proceed to the housekeeper’s room to eat their pudding and the atmosphere would at once become more relaxed.