Life Below Stairs (5 page)
Authors: Alison Maloney
In
The Life and Labour of the People of London,
published at the turn of the century, Charles Booth recorded the sliding scale of a footman’s wages thus:
2nd footman, 5 ft 6 in.: £20–£22; 5 ft 10 in. to 6 ft: £28–£30
1st footman, 5 ft 6 in.: Up to £30; 5 ft 10 in. to 6 ft:
£32–£40.
This height-conscious attitude was by no means confined to the footmen, although they bore the brunt of it.
Butler Eric Horne, author of
What the Butler Winked
, bemoaned the fact that he would never ‘hope to attain the top of the tree’ because he was only 5 ft 9 in., and in some
houses even the maids were passed over for promotion to parlourmaid because they weren’t tall enough.
FOOD AND BEER ALLOWANCE
As well as their wages, each employee was granted meat and sugar rations and a daily beer allowance according to their gender and rank in the household. In the majority of
houses the food portions were generous with a typical allowance being 1½ lb of meat a day plus 1 lb of tea and 4 lb of sugar per month. Supper was usually comprised of the family’s
leftovers and dinner parties meant more delicacies to feast on ‘below stairs’.
The etiquette manual
Cassell’s Household Guide
, issued in 1880 and still used by the mistresses of the Edwardian era,
advised employers that the provision of
food and beer was more satisfactory than cash payments to cover food and drink:
For some reason or other, which it is difficult to account for, many housekeepers do not undertake to find grocery and beer, but allow money for those articles of
consumption. Either such things are necessary to the diet of servants, or they are not. If they are necessary, it is better by far to provide tea, sugar, and beer, than to give money,
which may not be applied to its proper use. In point of economy, the money payment is a losing one, because a housekeeper having to feed a certain number of persons daily, the better all
the meals are supplied, the more regular is the consumption likely to be. A girl that goes without a good tea is more likely to prove an inordinate supper-eater than one who has
previously enjoyed a good meal.
With regard to beer money. If beer be a necessary, the money ought to be spent in buying the required nourishment; if not, there is no sense in giving wages in lieu of it.
In a household where the family was away a lot, perhaps at a second home used for the hunting season, the staff packed up the house for long periods and enjoyed a little more
time to themselves. In this instance, they were given an extra bonus to make up for the lack of dinner scraps, known as a ‘board wage’, to spend on food.
Coming from households where lack of money had meant a steady diet of bread and potatoes, the majority of the servants were better fed than they had ever been. Canterbury
lad Frank Honey, employed as a houseboy while still at the local school, found the food a considerable perk in one house. ‘The beauty of that job as far as I was concerned was that I had a
jolly good breakfast,’ he said. ‘Prior to that I might have taken a piece of bread and butter to school with me when I went out, but I used to get eggs and bacon there – something
I never got at home.’
Below is the list of beer allowances for servants at Leighton Hall, the Lancashire home of the wealthy furniture-making family the Gillows, as recorded on 17 June 1893.
1893 Beer Allowance for Staff at Meals Only | Pints |
Butler | 3 |
Coachman | 3 |
Groom | 3 |
Cook | 2 |
Lady’s Maid | 2 |
First Housemaid | 2 |
Second Housemaid | 2 |
Laundry Maid | 1 |
Kitchen Maid | 2 |
Extra man | 2 |
Total Allowance | 22 |
1893 June 17: At present three servants do not take beer.
Extra Allowances of Beer | |
[For] sweeping kitchen and other chimneys 4 times a year and cleaning back – two men each | 1 |
For cleaning [garden walkway] Ash Path once a year – each man | 1 |
For cleaning house and washhouse cisterns once a year – two men each | 1 |
General coal loading day when they work all day. Each man. At dinner | 1 |
During rest of day | 2 |
Man going to Lancaster on return if [he is] sober | 1 |
Postman on Sunday bringing and taking back [post]bag | 1 |
Man staying at home on Sunday morning if not a servant getting beer in house | 1 |
Beer was weaker than today’s pub brands and the quantities allowed were unlikely to result in inebriated servants. As there was no time to go to the pubs or clubs more
than once a week, it was considered sensible to allow the servants to enjoy a pint with a meal and, for the upper staff, there would be wine as well.
PERKS AND EXTRAS
As well as the day-to-day sustenance, there were many perks to be had below stairs, especially for the more senior servants and
those who waited on
guests. For the lady’s maids and valets they came in the form of gifts from the master and mistress and cast-off clothes that could be worn or sold on. Housemaids who were lucky enough to
become temporary ladies’ maids may also have received a financial boost for their trouble.
The footmen would pick up the odd shilling as a tip for attending to guests in the hallway or helping them into carriages and, while accompanying employers on a trip to a wealthier
establishment, would be invited to participate in the fine cuisine in the kitchen.
Alfred West, a groom and valet for an old gentleman in the Edwardian era, remembered taking him on shooting and hunting trips to Hertfordshire, where he was allowed to taste his share of the
spoils. ‘The game was wonderful,’ he said in
Lost Voices of the Edwardians.
‘I used to be treated very well. When I was working in the stables, washing down the horses
after the hunt, I was able to go into the servants’ quarters in the “Big House” and I was given the same food the toffs had had, after they’d finished with it. There was
pheasant, duck and venison. It built me up no end.’
Being in charge of the wine cellar, the butler was expected to sample the goods before serving them at the table and one or two were known to overindulge from time to time. He may also have been
given the occasional bottle as a perk for overseeing the cellar, the usual tariff being one bottle to every six opened, and was able to take the odd nip of the stronger tipples in his
care, such as brandy and port. A shrewd butler could make a few bob selling candle ends, corks and the like and, in addition, visiting guests would also dig deep to cross his palm with
silver.
A contemporary etiquette guide called
The Manners of Modern Society
examines the thorny subject of gratuities and concludes:
Servants, like railway porters, look after the douceurs [sweeteners]. All those who have rendered a guest any assistance look for acknowledgement and their
hands are always on the alert when the moment of your departure arrives, to receive and close upon the gold or silver deposited therein.
A lady gives to the maid who has assisted with her toilette and the housemaid. A gentleman remembers the valet, the butler, coachman, gamekeeper – all or any who have
rendered him any service.
Down in the basement, the extras depended on the opportunity and honesty of the staff. Cooks were given rabbit skins and offcuts to keep or sell and could raise a few
shillings for the animal fats produced from roasting tins. Some sent a little of the food that arrived at the back door home to their families. Margaret Thomas remembers working with one cook who
dispatched her with a parcel of groceries to send home each
week, as soon as the orders arrived. ‘As well she had commission from the tradesmen every month when the
books were paid, and woe betide them if they didn’t turn up with it, because there were complaints about their goods until they did. Because of these extras perhaps it didn’t matter
that the cook’s wages were only £45 per year.’
The housekeeper, being in charge of daily expenditure, had plenty of opportunity to line her own pockets, honestly or otherwise. Like cook, she might receive a sweetener from the traders she
used to provide linen, cleaning goods and food or even made money by showing interested tourists round the grand house. One fortunate lady, Mrs Hume, was housekeeper at Warwick Castle in the
nineteenth century and, by showing interested visitors around the property, she managed to pile up a fortune of £30,000, now worth £1.3 million, in wages and gratuities.
ACCOMMODATION
In her 1905 children’s novel
A Little Princess
, Frances Hodgson Burnett describes a servant’s attic bedroom, from the point of view of a child used to a
more privileged existence. Although a fictional room, it is undoubtedly similar to those found in almost any upper-class home:
Yes, this was another world. The room had a slanting roof and was whitewashed. The whitewash was dingy and had fallen off in places. There was
a rusty grate, an old iron bedstead, and a hard bed covered with a faded coverlet. Some pieces of furniture too much worn to be used downstairs had been sent up. Under the skylight in the
roof, which showed nothing but an oblong piece of dull grey sky, there stood an old battered red footstool.
Maids were invariably placed in the attic, partly because there were rooms there that the family didn’t use and partly to keep them as far away as possible from the male
staff, to deter ‘fraternization’. For this reason the maids’ corridor, often guarded by a formidable housekeeper or head housemaid, was known as the ‘Virgin’s
wing’.
Bare Necessities
The basic furniture in the attic rooms varied little from house to house. There was a mattress on a small iron bedstead for each maid, a washstand with a jug for water, as
very few had running water, and a basin, soap dish and toothbrush holder which rarely matched, having been passed down from the ‘best bedrooms’ when a companion piece had been broken.
Some would have chairs and all would have bare floorboards, unlike the thick rugs and carpets of the family rooms. Servants’ beds, which measured 2 ft 6 in. across rather than the usual
single width of 3 ft, were sold in furniture shops and a junior maid would usually share her room, if not the same bed, with others. One scullery maid recalled sharing ‘a bare-boarded room
with the kitchen maid, quite separate from the other nine staff. A single iron bedstead with a lumpy mattress, a large chest of drawers and spotted glass, washstand, jug and basin and chamber pot.
Considered to be well-furnished.’
Established in 1810, Heal’s bed-making firm provided
‘
Simple Bedroom Furniture
’
suitable for a servant’s room, as well as more luxury
products
Private Utilities
Ornaments and pictures were strictly forbidden in most servants’ bedrooms and the attics were bitterly cold in the winter, with the poor incumbent usually waking to
a frozen flannel and ice in the washing jug. Even when electricity and gas became common in society homes, employers trying to save on their budget usually left the attic out of the expensive
installation. Similarly, while the dawning of the twentieth century saw an increasing trend towards fitted bathrooms with running water, the privilege rarely extended to the lowly staff. They
usually took a tin bath in the room once a week on their afternoon off, or were allowed to bath in the wash house, using the water that had washed the linen.
One former maid said they had been banned from the family’s two bathrooms. ‘We had a tin bath in our bedroom which was in the attic and we had a lot of stairs to take our hot water
up.’ As they had no gas lamps in their rooms, they carried candles to bed with them at night. Dorothy Shaw, a tweeny in Newbury, told author Frank Dawes that she once asked her mistress for a
candle to light her room, prompting the harsh lady to cut a candle in half with the comment, ‘I don’t encourage my servants to read in bed.’
Behind the Green Baize Door
In order that the frenzied activity of the servants didn’t impinge on the peace and quiet of the household, there was a second staircase, unlit, between the attic
where the maids lived and the basement where they worked. The servants’ stairs were behind the aforementioned green baize door, and led to a network of tunnels and passages few from the other
side would ever need to see. The servants’ entrance was around the back of the house and, in town houses, was below ground level. It was considered a heinous impertinence for anyone of
servant or tradesman class to call at the front door.