Life Below Stairs (4 page)

The 6th Marquess of Bath remembered being intimidated by one formidable lady in his father’s employ at Longleat:

‘Everyone, including us, was terrified of the housekeeper, Mrs Parker, dead a long time now I’m afraid,’ he revealed. ‘She would go round the house running her fingers
along the tops of the shelves to see that they were dusted. The housemaids used to tremble.’

Housemaids

In the best houses both chambermaids and parlourmaids would be employed, as well as ‘between-stairs maids’ or ‘tweenies’ who performed tasks in
both the kitchen and the rest of the house, and the lowly maid-of-all-work. Parlourmaids were responsible for the reception rooms of the house, such as the drawing room, dining room, morning room
and library, should there be one. She would dust and sweep each day, clear out the grates and light the fire in each room. She would also wash woodwork, clean lamps and polish tables in the rooms.
The chambermaid had similar duties in the bedrooms, beginning each day by taking buckets of hot water and tea trays to the family and the guests, then lighting the fires, making the bed, cleaning
the bedrooms and dusting under the bed.

As staffs shrunk in the early twentieth century, however, the two jobs were combined in the title ‘housemaid’, so that the duties overlapped. If the family could afford it, there may
have been a first, second and third housemaid, with their ranks made clear in their titles. The lower housemaids would clean the rooms of those above them. Margaret Thomas was employed as a kitchen
maid and, even though she was below the parlourmaids, she still outranked the lowest of the housemaids.

‘I learned there was a footman as well as a butler […] I had their bedroom to keep clean, which was in the basement,’ she recounted in
The Day Before Yesterday
edited
by Noel Streatfeild. ‘My own bedroom was at the top of the house but the under housemaid cleaned it. I only had to make my bed.’

The Cook

There were two types of cook to be found in the kitchen of the grander homes – professed cooks and plain cooks. The professed cook was an expert at creating the fine
dining experience the upper-class employers needed for entertaining but would not turn her hand to general kitchen work or even ‘plain cooking’, and had the ingredients prepared in
advance by a kitchen maid or under-cook. The plain cook was often kept on for the day-to-day meals and for cooking for the servants. For families who could only afford one cook, an all-rounder was
sought but not always found. Margaret Thomas
remembered one household where she was employed as a kitchen maid but was surprised to find her duties included cooking for dinner
parties. ‘This I discovered was because she [the cook] could only do plain cooking and so had always employed a kitchen maid who could cook.’

The cook was absolute ruler in the territory of the kitchen and some were just as tyrannical as many housekeepers. At fourteen, Londoner Beatrice Gardner worked for a cook who made her polish
the kitchen range with a piece of velvet to give it a perfect shine. ‘I used to run and hide in the coalhouse if I upset any milk or gravy. Her rage had to be seen to be believed.’

As well as preparing the main meals, the cook would come up with a daily menu that was then presented to the mistress of the house for approval or alteration. Between mealtimes she would make
jams and preserves, pastries and soups in advance.

Kitchen and Scullery Maids

The kitchen maid was a cook’s closest assistant, and was employed to prepare all the ingredients before she started preparing the meal. She would chop vegetables,
herbs and any meat that needed to be cut. She would also help with cooking, perhaps by boiling vegetables, preparing coffee and easier items such as toast, and she would often be expected to cater
for the servants while the cook concentrated on the many courses to go upstairs. She would
cut sandwiches for tea and, if no scullery maid were employed, would also be
responsible for the washing up.

Even when the family were not entertaining, a large breakfast was followed by a hearty lunch and a dinner of many courses with tea in between. There may also have been soup or snacks at eleven
in the morning and sandwiches in the late evening so there was plenty of work to keep the cook and the kitchen maid busy all day.

While the kitchen maid contributed to the cooking, the scullery maid, where there was one, was charged with cleaning the kitchen and washing up. She would light the kitchen fires in the morning
and sweep the floors, clean the range and the flues and heat the hot water for cooking.

Footmen

In the age of the carriage, footmen had been an essential part of every rich household and many houses employed three or four. Dressed in high livery, a footman would
accompany the mistress on her afternoon outing, holding the carriage door for her, helping her avoid muddy puddles and carrying any parcels and purchases. He would also leave her in the carriage
while he called to see if the lady she wished to visit was in, and if not would leave a calling card. A second would accompany the master as he went about his business and a third, if there was
one, stayed at home to open the door to any callers, or to run errands for the family. A typical task would be to relay messages from one house to another, or to call on another household to ask
after the family within and send his employer’s regards. In the evening he would wait on the table at dinner, under the watchful eye of the butler. As liveried footmen were an indication of
wealth, the grandest homes had many more than four. At Woburn Abbey, the family seat of the Duke of Bedford, a footman would stand behind each chair in the dining room, no matter how big the
occasion. The biography of Mary Du Caurroy, who was Duchess of Bedford in the Edwardian period, observes:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, many of the footman’s functions had become obsolete because of two new inventions. The motor car, increasingly popular
among the upper classes, meant the groom and footman were replaced with a single chauffeur on journeys, and the telephone made the carrying of messages about town unnecessary. Nonetheless some
footmen were still kept on in a more ornamental role, more as an ostentatious show of wealth than a useful addition to the household. They were used to wait on tables as well as performing general
tasks such as carrying coal, cleaning silver, announcing visitors and retrieving coats as dinner guests left. Some were given to the sons of the household to act as a personal assistant, like their
fathers’ valets, or performed the same duties for guests who arrived without their own valet.

Bizarrely, they were often given a generic name, such as William or James, which would be used for every footman employed by the household.

Hallboys

Like the maid-of-all-work, the hallboy came at the bottom of the pecking order and was the servant to the servants. He would not set foot in the main house during the
course of his duties and
would be at the beck and call of the butler and the footmen at all times. In his memoir,
Green Baize Door
, Ernest King said he went into
domestic service at the very bottom, in a well-to-do north Devon house, and he spent all his time there waiting on the other staff. He had ‘the table in the servants’ hall to lay, the
staff cutlery to clean and the staff meals to put on the table. In the butler’s pantry I spent most of my time at the washing up tub.’

Other duties included cleaning the boots of the family’s men as well as those of the butler and footmen and cleaning the kitchen knives.

The position of a hallboy, or houseboy, could be taken by a local lad who still lived with his parents, as Frank Honey recalled in
Lost Voices of the Edwardians
. Working at the house of
an army captain in Canterbury, he was expected to turn up at six in the morning to start his chores. ‘My first job was to groom two big black retrievers they had and then I had to let them
out into the garden. Then I used to have to chop the wood and clean the shoes, the knives and the forks. There was no stainless steel cutlery in those days. We used to use brick dust.’

CHAPTER THREE

Pay and
Conditions

PAY PACKETS AND PERKS

I
N 1899
,
THE
average yearly wage of a housemaid, aged between twenty-one and twenty-five, was
found to be £16. 5
s
., the equivalent of £927 today. A younger maid would earn considerably less, perhaps starting on £10 a year, £570 in current value. While this
seems a remarkably small sum, it must be remembered that servants had little need, and even less time, to spend any money. Every position came with bed and board, so there were no bills to pay, and
unless an employer was exceptionally mean, there was a plentiful supply of food and drink.

With a sixteen-hour day, and only one afternoon off a week, there was little time to spend their hard-earned cash and much of the money they received went back to their often poverty-stricken
families. Many a young girl scrubbed her
fingers to the bone, year in year out, to put food on the table for younger siblings or even just to keep dad in gin!

Servants were paid quarterly, sometimes annually, and rarely was a penny paid in advance, so the youngsters in their first job had a while to wait before they saw the spoils. Despite the meagre
amount, breakages and any items they needed to buy throughout the year, such as stockings and shoes, were deducted on payday.

VITAL STATS

The pay structure wasn’t always straightforward, however, and money was often decided on more than experience. The lady’s maid, for example, was expected to be
young so if she hit her mid-twenties and was still employed, her annual salary began to decrease.

Footmen, on the other hand, increased in value with every inch of height as the liveried uniform was considered to look smarter on the taller man. An extra premium was paid for two who were
similar in stature and appearance. A matching pair of six-footers was considered quite a catch so was worth a few pounds more than the manservant of average proportion. They were often trained to
act in unison, standing either side of a hallway or both accompanying a mistress on her visits.

In 1849 a letter to the magazine
Sidney’s Emigrant Journal
asked for advice on this very issue. ‘I am twenty-four years of age, a native of Scotland, and at present a
gentleman’s servant; but as I am not a six-foot man, nor particularly handsome, I have not the best chance of succeeding here.’ He added that he had a reasonable education, great body
strength and the capacity to withstand any climate, and asked whether he would do well in Australia or America. The magazine’s adviser urged him to try Australia, where he could rise
‘from man to master’ and warned that ‘service is considered rather degrading in America’.