Life Below Stairs (18 page)
Authors: Alison Maloney
Sally Cook recalled she and her sister Gill seeking the company of her aunt’s housemaid and cook in their Greenock house. ‘They lived in the basement which was dominated by a huge
cooking range and upstairs, in the butler’s pantry, Mina made the most beautiful Melba toast – acres of it every week. We loved to go down to see them but we had to wait to be invited
to the basement because it was the servants’ home and it would have been rude just to barge in.’
Gill added, ‘Instead of a servant bell there was a whistle in the butler’s pantry inserted into a tube. You whistled and a maid would speak into the tube from
the kitchen downstairs. We loved this and probably drove Mina mad.’
GOSSIP
Cassell’s Household Guide
cautions against the use of charwomen because ‘the love of gossip is inherent in the class, and the affairs of every one of
the families the charwoman serves become in most cases a common fund of conversation. Domestic matters of the most delicate nature are discussed, and in an unsparing manner.’ It adds:
‘Whatever facts are not accurately known are unhesitatingly surmised, until all privacy of living is out of the question with whatever neighbours may happen to be at the mercy of the same
ignorant tongue.’
The same could be said of many of the staff below stairs, however, and mistresses lived in fear of the family’s business being broadcast through the staff grapevine that ran from one large
house to another. Even without the staff leaving the house, a titbit gleaned by the footman at the dinner table could be carried to the maids, who might well repeat it to the lad delivering milk or
butter, ensuring it would reach every back door in the vicinity. And by the time it had reached the ears of
the mistress’s society friends, Chinese whispers could have
blown it into something truly shocking.
As an innocent young kitchen maid, Margaret Powell heard the most outrageous stories from the visiting driver of a horse-drawn hackney carriage. He would amuse the cook Mrs McIlroy with the
goings-on of the folk in the big house nearby. ‘I listened all agog,’ she wrote. ‘Well, according to this Ambrose Datchett, the most outrageous affairs used to go on in this
household and, strangely enough, not so much among the women servants but between the footman and stewards and the people upstairs; not only the people who owned the house but the visitors too.
Once I heard Mrs McIlroy say, “Not her Ladyship!” Ambrose Datchett said, “I saw it with my own eyes.” So Mrs McIlroy says, “What, with her?” “Her, and with
him too,” he said. “He’s a handsome young man.” I gathered it was one of the footmen having an affair with both the Lady and the Master of the house.’
While working at Goodwood House, Jean Hibbert was told some scandalous tales regarding another big house in the area, called West Dean, where ‘the morals of the guests were supposed to be
so loose that the garden boy had to ring the bell fixed at the corner of the house 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!’
Many of these stories were blown up out of all proportion but there’s no doubt that the Edwardian upper crust had double
standards when it came to their own morals
and those of their servants.
Even in middle-class homes a family’s social status was all-important and mistresses were ever fearful that their maids might expose them as being less than perfect. Rose Trinder
remembered an aunt who lived in Bromley who was desperate to keep her working-class roots from her maid. ‘We were allowed to visit the day the maid was out – to keep class, you see. She
wouldn’t have it known that she knew us people that lived in Deptford or New Cross.’
Conclusion
THE SERVANT PROBLEM
A
TTITUDES TOWARDS SERVITUDE
had already begun to change by the turn of the twentieth century, with women in particular
finding opportunities in shops, factories and offices more attractive and less enslaving. The ‘£20 maid’ was hard to come by. Pay demands had increased and a National Insurance
tax, introduced in 1911, meant both mistress and maid had to contribute 3
d
. a week to cover potential illnesses. Many middle-class homes could no longer afford to keep servants, or were
forced to reduce numbers, and even the big houses felt the need to economize. Writing in his diaries in 1915, Colonel James Stevenson observed:
The lower orders have a great deal of money – more than they ever had before. The landowners are those who suffer
as their rents remain
the same – taxes enormously increased and very much higher wages have to be paid to servants on account of competition of public bodies, county councils, parish councils etc., who
are most extravagant in the wages they give – not having to pay them themselves.
But it was the outbreak of the First World War which really sounded the death knell for domestic service, at least to the extent it had flourished before. Many of the younger
male servants enlisted while the women found themselves jobs filling the vacancies left by men fighting abroad. Throughout the UK, 400, 000 people left service and the government and press urged
employers to let their staff go.
Country Life
magazine ran an article in January 1915 which asked ‘Have you a Butler, Groom, Chauffeur, Gardener or Gamekeeper serving you who, at this
moment, should be serving your king and country? Have you a man preserving your game who should be preserving your country?’
On their return from the front, fewer men were prepared to enter the life of servitude that the ‘lower orders’ had once seen as a privilege. In his memoir
From Hallboy to House
Steward,
Willam Lanceley commented that the war work many 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.’
In 1919, the Women’s Advisory Council presented a report on the ‘Domestic Service Problem’ to Parliament, which concluded that ‘there is amongst
girls a growing distaste for domestic service under its present conditions, and a reluctance on the part of parents to allow them to take up such work’. The report suggested proper training
and the creation of ‘clubs’ that would lead to the formation of trade unions, an idea that even some of its own members found unpalatable. The Marchioness of Londonderry refused to sign
the section because, she felt, ‘any possibility of the introduction into the conditions of domestic service of the type of relations now obtainable between employers and workers in industrial
life is extremely undesirable and liable to react in a disastrous manner on the whole foundation of home life’. Others believed the recommendations didn’t go far enough because, while
they called for reduced hours, fixed breaks for meals and two weeks’ paid annual leave, hours and wages would not be enshrined in law.
Historically, mistresses disliked being told how to treat their servants but committee member Dr Marion Philips argued, ‘I believe that the reason why it is difficult to get servants today
is not lack of training, but because servants are dissatisfied with the wages and hours of work. They are also dissatisfied with many matters which may roughly be classified as questions of social
status.’
From 1920, the government attempted to coax young women back into domestic service by running home craft
courses, with the condition the pupil would then become a servant,
and even offering to pay for the uniforms required to enter a first position. But a life of servitude no longer held any appeal to the majority of women and the days when life below stairs provided
the only way out of crushing poverty were for ever gone.
Sources and
Bibliography
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Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words
(Harper Collins, 2007)
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Edwardian Era
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(Oxford, 1861)
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(Pimlico, 1989)
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(Pryor Publications, 1823)
Jessica Gerard,
Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914
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1986)
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Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century
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Life Below Stairs
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Below Stairs
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Websites