Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (18 page)

The statement recorded by a common soldier, Rifleman Harris, in 1808 while taking part in the Peninsular War, remained true throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is still to be taken seriously today: ‘I know from experience that in our army the men like best to be officered by gentlemen, men whose education has rendered them more kind in manners than your coarse officer, sprung from obscure origins and whose style is brutal and overbearing.’ This is of course a generalization, because there is no guarantee that an officer of good background (and in this context ‘education’ is used in the sense of good manners, not learning) will not be brutal. Nevertheless there is a time-honoured relationship between aristocratic officers and their men.

Women of the middle class had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, been reduced to a largely decorative role. Professions were not open to them, and travel without a male escort was unusual. Ladies did not go to the country or the seaside or, often, even to the shops without a man to accompany them, either a person of their own class, a relative or a male servant. With few outlets for expending their energy and initiative, enterprising women threw themselves into charity work or teaching, for the genteel end of that profession was one of the few that they could enter, and anyone, regardless of qualifications, could open a school or an academy. Ladies whose manners reflected gentility could make a living passing on their own refinement to younger generations, and this was an accepted occupation for the unmarried daughters of gentlemen.

As the century wore on, opportunities increased. Formal education made a slow but definite beginning with the founding of colleges for women at Cambridge and Oxford (Girton, 1869 and Somerville, 1891) and the development of schools that were no longer based in the front parlours of genteel ladies but organized on the same basis as those for boys. Cheltenham Ladies’ College was founded in 1854, St Leonard’s in 1877, Roedean in 1891. While aristocratic girls continued to be educated by governesses, the daughters of the upper bourgeoisie now went away to school in the same way that their brothers did. Nevertheless, the same enforced idleness that had been the lot of almost all well-broughtup women in the middle decades of the century continued for those at the top level of society into the following one. The English upper class, as always, had little respect for intelligence or for academic achievement. Those who pioneered women’s education were seen by society at large as bluestockings, man-haters, not-quite-respectable social and political radicals. They were not people with whom conservative parents wanted their daughters to mix. It took a long time for these schools and colleges to win the trust and the widespread patronage of the aristocracy, but by the 1920s schooling at home with a governess was the exception.

Women in general had by this time a wealth of new employment opportunities. The Great War had meant that many thousands of young females of good background had found useful and satisfying roles in war work and even military service – a thing unheard of in the past. Opportunities for secretarial work of various kinds had expanded, and it was no longer thought beneath the dignity of gentlewomen to work in this sphere. The same was true of shopkeeping, provided the business was discreet and appropriate (such as selling gowns or hats to others of the same class). The Great War, an experience undergone by the entire nation and in which sacrifices had been made more or less equally by all classes, had acted as a leveller and led to the rejection of old attitudes. The position of women had changed drastically. In the following decade they won the right to vote on the same terms as men. They smoked in public as a matter of course, they rode horses astride and drove motor cars of their own, and their clothing underwent the greatest revolution of all – for the first time since the Ancient Greeks and Romans, for the first time in well over a thousand years – women wore dresses that showed their legs. It was a new world.

The shops patronized by the aristocracy were mostly in the West End of London. As in many other spheres, there was often a long-established connection between a family and those who served them. Fathers would, when their sons were old enough to require suitable adult clothes, take them to be introduced to the family tailor, measured up and fitted. Tailors, as all the world knows, were centred on Savile Row, in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly and Bond Street. Shoes might come from Lobb’s in St James’s Street, and hats from Lock’s a few doors farther down. This establishment, founded under another name in 1676, has furnished headgear to generations of gentlemen, aristocrats, and British and foreign royalty. Here in 1850 the Norfolk landowner William Coke put in an order for a type of hat he had designed himself. It was for wear by the gamekeepers on his estate.

Because the top hats worn by his men were constantly being knocked off by low branches, he wanted something that would withstand such accidents. The result was a narrow-brimmed black hat with a rounded crown. A prototype was made and, when he visited the shop, he tested the durability of this by putting it on the floor and stamping on it. The hat passed this test, and he ordered more of them. It has gone down in history as the ‘bowler hat’ because the first ones were made for Lock’s by a family called Bowler. In the United States it is called a Derby (pronounced as spelled) because it was first popularized there by a visiting English aristocrat, Lord Derby. At Lock’s it is still called by the title they gave it after the family name of its inventor: a Coke hat.

As with hats, so with much else. The aristocracy supported a whole range of specialist shops and craftsmen that supplied, bespoke, the things they used and wore. Many of these shops are still flourishing today: Ede & Ravenscroft, makers of robes for officers of state, universities and the legal profession, in 1689. Berry Brothers & Rudd, the wine merchants, was founded in 1698; Fortnum & Mason, the grocer’s store on Piccadilly, first opened in 1707, its legendary hampers, filled with exotic refreshments, were taken by officers to the Crimean War, the Boer War, and the two World Wars; Purdey, makers of shotguns and sporting firearms, in 1814.

Ladies visiting London for a few days, or staying there for the Season, were less likely to visit a dressmaker than their male relatives were to go to a tailor. Many aristocratic ladies had very capable dressmakers at home, and they took their cue in clothing from Paris, not London. Even the most famous ‘dresser’ of women during the nineteenth century, the Englishman Charles Frederick Worth, did business largely in Paris.

Ladies would nevertheless buy hats and gloves and accessories in Bond Street and Piccadilly, and would go to look for reading matter in the great lending libraries that existed in London at that time: Mudie’s, Shoolbred’s and the London Library. They could belong to these as ‘country members’, just as their husbands could have this same attachment to the gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall or St James’s Street. If they were of military background they could belong to the Army and Navy, the United Services or the ‘In and Out’ (the Naval and Military). If they were of an intellectual or ecclesiastical bent it would be the Athenaeum. The Travellers was for diplomats or adventurers, the Reform for those of liberal persuasion, the Garrick for those who liked to mix with writers and actors, the Carlton for conservatives, and the great triumvirate of St James’s clubs, White’s, Brooks’s and Boodle’s, for the top-drawer aristocracy and the old-established families. Among these institutions, which catered to the tastes and foibles of the upper class in the years before the Great War, casualties have been surprisingly light. The United Services Club has left its imposing premises in Pall mall (which are now occupied by the Institute of Directors, though all of its trophies and paintings remain in situ). Two of the lending libraries, Mudie’s and Shoolbred’s, once by-words for Edwardian respectability, have disappeared. Everything else is still there and still flourishing. Such is the continuity of British life.

4

DOWNSTAIRS

‘I am the son of a butler and a lady’s maid – perhaps the happiest of all combinations, and to me the most beautiful thing in the world is a haughty, aristocratic house, with everyone kept in his place. [If] I were equal to your ladyship, where would be the pleasure to me? For it would be counterbalanced by the pain of feeling that [the footmen] Thomas and John were equal to me.’

Crichton the butler in J. M. Barrie’s play
The Admirable Crichton
, 1902

‘His whole time being mine, he is not to leave home without permission, as each man is liable to be called in at night, in case of fire &c.’

Extract from servants’ rules at Santry House, Co. Dublin, 1864, written by the owner, Charles Domville

The ease and opulence of the leisured class was in stark contrast to the pace of life below stairs. The great majority of members of a country-house community were, of course, servants. They could outnumber their employers by as much as ten or twelve to one. The social and cultural attainments of the owners – the perfecting of this enviable lifestyle – were only made possible because there was a large, well-trained staff to clean the houses, feed and dress the occupants, transport them and assist with their sporting pastimes. One aristocrat, Lord Arran, was later to recall with guilt rather than nostalgia that: ‘To live [the] life [of the upstairs folk] demanded that domestic servants should be slaves and contented with their slavery. It was only by slavery that the old regime could be carried on.’ Were these people really the slaves we imagine? Their lives were unarguably hard. They worked very long hours and had little personal freedom, yet many were proud of the positions they held and grateful for the relative security they enjoyed. If they rose through the ranks to some senior position, they could wield a good deal of influence, make a lot of money and experience considerable ‘job satisfaction’.

As the quotation above from J. M. Barrie’s
The Admirable Crichton
suggests, however, domestics were not a single body, united by common tasks, common feeling and common purpose. They were either upper or lower servants. The inhabitants of a country house were therefore not neatly divided into ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. There were three categories, not two. Though the gulf between upper and lower servants was not as wide as that between family and staff – after all, servants were usually of similar background, and those at the top of the hierarchy had earned their way there – there was remarkably little fellow feeling between the two levels. Any resentment on the part of lower servants at the harshness of their lives might well be felt not towards the family upstairs but towards those who actually gave them their orders and who were in a position to bully them.

During the reigns of Queen Victoria and Edward VII almost everyone either had servants or had been one. Service was a system so widespread, so vital and so taken for granted that society seemed unthinkable without it. Even modest suburban homes could not have functioned without them. Clothes would not have been washed, dinners not cooked, parties not given, children not brought up. Things which house-owners, parents, married couples now do for themselves without a thought would have been considered impossible in those days.

Many thousands of servants were far from being the cowed drudges we might expect. Large numbers of them were well read, enterprising, keen to get on in their profession or to graduate to another. They often had musical ability, facility for languages, interest in the wider world. Many young people caught up in service dreamed of emigrating to newer countries in which the social order was less stifling. There were schemes to assist such emigrants, and thus a number of the most enterprising went overseas.

At its best, the relationship between them and their employers was one of mutual respect and interdependence. There was a positive side to being in service, though people’s experiences were as different as the natures of those who employed or supervised them. Some would have been happy, others miserable, and others every shade in between. Few people are happy or contented all of the time in any case, so some servants would have enjoyed parts of their career but not all of it, or been happy in one household but not in others. Much that seems to us draconian, pointless or interference with personal freedom in fact made sense within the context of the place and the time. Even the notice quoted above, directed at those living in cottages on Mr Domville’s estate, refers to the fact that service is a full-time occupation and that those who are in his employ must be available in emergencies, regardless of the hour. Fires were very common in country houses. If his were destroyed in this way, all the indoor servants would have lost their livelihood, if not their lives.

It is suggested in some costume dramas that there was a degree of confidence and warmth between masters and servants – that employers would now and again confide in their staff (who might even venture to ask why they looked troubled), or heed advice from them. These things are accepted by a present-day audience because they would be understandable behaviour today, but they would not have happened in the past. Once again, the makers of such programmes naturally want to play on the interaction between characters and are more concerned with creating drama than with historical accuracy. In reality it would have been profoundly embarrassing for any servant to be confided in, or spoken to with familiarity or friendliness, by a member of the family except in very rare circumstances: if they had recently suffered a bereavement they might receive condolences, but otherwise anything like camaraderie would have been considered highly improper. There were exceptions. Some servants’ outspokenness was tolerated because of services rendered: the nanny who had brought up generations of a family might well be regarded with warmth by her charges once they grew up (as was Nanny Hawkins in
Brideshead Revisited
), and, having been a respected authority figure to her charges, retain their confidence thereafter, getting away with outspoken views that would not be tolerated from anyone else.