Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (2 page)

By the time of the fictional garden party at Downton Abbey, French, Belgian, Russian and German soldiers were already dying in heavy and desperate fighting, the first such major outbreak of hostilities in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War more than forty years previously. The whole of Britain was on a knife-edge. The guests would not have been surprised by the news, for they would have been talking of nothing else. But then, the event would have been cancelled in the first place, owing to the international situation.

In the years that would follow, many thousands of men of all social strata would serve in the war and would lose their lives. It is worth remembering that the upper class gave generously of its sons, for the young men who peopled the pre-war garden parties and hunting fields and college boat-races enlisted in droves. A single school – Eton – was to lose 1,157 of its Old Boys in the conflict. Women of this class, with a similar spirit of duty and self-sacrifice, joined a host of medical and charitable organizations, and either served in theatres of conflict or – as happens in the second series of the drama – gave their homes and resources to the war effort. The Edwardian upper class may often have exhibited a rather unconsidered sense of entitlement, but they were to prove a great deal less hedonistic than they seemed.

INTRODUCTION

Let’s imagine that you are visiting a medium-sized, somewhat typical country house, some time in the years just before the First World War. You are to be a guest for the weekend, though that term is not yet in use. At the moment it is still called a ‘Saturday to Monday’.

You do not know your hosts well. They invited you to stay on the basis of some superficial meeting – perhaps after sitting next to you at a dinner and finding you’d never visited their part of the country. You have no notion of what to expect, but the address sounded suitably grand, and you have in your mind’s eye an image of what their home will probably be like.

You would not – as people do today – drive yourself there as a matter of course. In those days the wealthy used public transport without a second thought, for even a small local train would have First Class carriages for them and Third Class for their servants. Upon your arrival at the station, a porter would immediately take your luggage and, on being informed of your destination, would tell you that the house had sent someone to fetch you. You would have let them know by telegram the time of your train’s arrival, and with the efficiency you would take for granted a vehicle would have been dispatched to meet it. A few years earlier you would have been told that the coachman was waiting, and in the station yard would have been an open carriage, in some suitable colour such as dark green, dark blue, burgundy or canary yellow, with the family’s coat of arms painted on the door. There would have been two servants: the coachman himself, in top boots, a top hat with a black cockade and perhaps a caped coat, and also a groom, similarly top-hatted and in livery, whose job was to help you into the carriage, shut the door and step up behind, to sit with arms folded on the dickey-seat throughout the journey. It is a sign of changing times that all this has gone.

Now there is only a motor car, painted black and with its engine spluttering. The only servant is the chauffeur, dressed in drab grey motoring clothes with leather gauntlets and leggings. He too wears a cockade, but it is on the front of a visored cap, above his goggles. You do not quite know how to deal with this unfamiliar type of servant. He deserves some respect for the technical knowledge that enables him not only to drive the thing – that in itself is as difficult as handling horses – but for his ability to understand the engine and to coax the vehicle into doing what he wants, since all motor cars are known to be temperamental. He seems to be a foreigner, for the French and Germans are more advanced in this field than the English, and when motor cars are bought abroad, a driver can be hired to come with them. His aloofness and mysterious knowledge probably make him unpopular among the other servants. Even a few years ago, at the beginning of the century, motoring was simply a hobby and an automobile was a rich man’s toy. Now they are everywhere, and have almost entirely replaced the horse as a means of passenger transport. Streets in both town and country are simply full of them. There are very few horse-drawn cabs left – they are now a quaint curiosity – and the horse bus has almost entirely vanished. You cannot remember when you last saw one.

You are seated behind him with your own separate passenger’s windscreen to keep the dust out of your face. Only you travel with him. Had you brought a servant they would follow with the luggage, which is coming in the station trap. It is pulled by a horse, for there is still a place in the modern world for such humble conveyances.

When you arrive at the entrance to the park that surrounds the house an elderly man will emerge, unsummoned (he has been watching, or perhaps the chauffeur has squeezed the rubber-bag horn to alert him), from the nearby lodge and heave open the big wrought-iron gates. He may greet the driver, whom of course he knows. He will also dip his head to you, and perhaps even make that immemorial gesture of subservience and touch his forelock.

Up the drive, between a double avenue of young trees, the house is visible, growing bigger and more imposing as you draw nearer. It is in the style irreverently known as ‘Tudorbethan’ – all quaint angles and gables. There are spindly, decorative brick chimney stacks, black and white half-timbering, swooping eaves, red tile roofs. Mullioned windows glint in the sunlight. Everything about it appears appropriately English, to the extent that it is almost a caricature. It evokes the world of Drake and Raleigh. You wonder if there is even a priest-hole, one of those hiding places for Catholic clergy that enabled families to practise the old faith in secret during Tudor times. It looks as if it has stood for half a millennium, yet you are to discover that it was built less than ten years ago. On closer examination, you can see that the brick and stone are not weathered and that there is not yet any sense of age to the building – in fact, through the stable-yard there is a glimpse of what looks like a garage, built in the same style. You are by no means disappointed, for you are aware that behind the mock-Tudor façade there is likely to be electricity and running water, and that for this reason it can be more pleasant to stay in a facsimile than in a genuine historic house. It is reassuring that you need expect no draughts, no noisy creaking floorboards, and no ghosts.

Whatever the age of the house, you know the sort of rooms it will contain. There will be a drawing room in which to sit out dances during a ball or to play bridge. There will be a dining room, perhaps hung with hunting scenes, in which a servant will stand behind your chair during meals. There may be a separate breakfast room in which the repast will be laid out on a sideboard under a row of silver dish-covers. There will be a library, either built up over generations and filled with interesting and valuable works or else ‘bought by the yard’, the leather spines being mere wall-covering. It may be the same with the pictures. Indeed the whole house could resemble a stage set in which nothing was actually chosen, inherited or treasured by the family, but simply put together by an interior decorator. It is comforting, however, to know that any self-respecting country-house library will boast two publications: annual runs of
Punch
, probably in matching bindings, and the equally uniform volumes of the Badminton Library – a Victorian-Edwardian series that explained the rules and intricacies of different games and sports. Both of these are old friends, and they will keep you entertained if the other guests prove uninspiring. It may be here that tea takes place each afternoon, unless there is a ‘great hall’ – one of those vast baronial rooms, all panelling and suits of armour, that even modern country houses sometimes have for the sake of appearance. This could well be the place in which the household gathers to hear important news. (Such as, in the yet-to-be written novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, who committed the murder!) If the owners are sufficiently devout, it could also be the setting for daily prayers at which family, guests and servants assemble.

In ironic contrast to this hint of piety there will be a billiard room and a smoking room. This last is a comparatively new feature, having come into vogue only in the last half century. It is an entirely masculine domain, habitually decorated with the trophies of male sporting pursuits: stuffed fish, heads of game, and photographs of sports teams. It is here that men can entirely relax, and tell the kind of stories that are not acceptable in mixed company. These places feature extensively in the novels of John Buchan, as the setting in which his upper-class heroes plan their adventures. Women do not enter this room, and they will not do so even after the Great War, when so many conventions are thrown overboard and it becomes common practice for females to smoke in public. The gentlemen’s smoking room is an institution that will endure for a long time. When one Scottish house was taken over by a new family as recently as the 1970s, it still had a smoking room in which no woman had ever set foot. When the wife of the new owner went into it, the female housekeeper was horrified enough to resign at once.

If you are a single man, you may be fervently hoping that in one sense at least your hosts will not stick too closely to tradition. The rooms occupied by some of the ‘upstairs’ people in a house like this may be little better than the servants’ quarters. Foreign visitors to British houses mention that for unmarried male guests it is not thought necessary to give them anything much in the way of comfort, and that the ‘bachelors’ wing’ of a house can often contain poky, sparsely furnished and unheated rooms that are much the same as those slept in by the maids.

The children, incidentally, are also housed in spartan conditions. When visitors today look into the nurseries of Victorian country houses they may admire the expensive toys – the Noah’s arks and rocking horses and tin soldiers – but they are seldom impressed by the rooms themselves. Once again, it was considered unnecessary to provide beauty or comfort for this category of the house’s inhabitants. Sometimes there are decorative friezes or other touches of colour, but the décor in many pleasant nurseries (the one at Wightwick Manor in Staffordshire is a good example) dates from a later era. The children’s rooms were traditionally also far removed from those of their parents.

But to resume . . . Between the trees you can already see the flashes of white – glimpses of cap and apron – that show the servants are assembled to greet you. Your progress will have been watched as you travelled up the drive.

As the vehicle comes to a halt outside the main doors, its wheels crunching on the gravel, you see the whole household standing in position. They are in two rows, either side of the entrance, and are arranged in order of seniority with the most junior – the page – nearest you. You scarcely notice the latter as you pass, for such small fry are not the servants who will be waiting upon you. He in turn may have little interest in you, for very junior servants are not the ones who will benefit from any tips you give. One of his tasks is to clean the shoes of the household, but you will be assigned a personal servant and they will do this for you. The butler and housekeeper, the highest-ranking staff, are farthest away, and the family themselves are framed in the doorway. The chauffeur climbs down, pulls off goggles and gauntlets, and opens the door, helping you down the single step. As you approach, the maids in their black-and-white uniforms drop a simultaneous curtsy, the male servants in their brass-buttoned tail-coats bow.

It all looks just as you knew it would.

Beyond the doorway, after you have been greeted by your hosts, servants have bustled in to relieve you of your coat, hat and other accoutrements. You have now seen all of the domestics, so their faces will in future be familiar. That was the point of parading them all. You are next introduced to the one who will be tending to your needs during your stay. It will be a lady’s maid, or a footman acting as valet, depending on your gender. They will show you to your room, see to your unpacking, run you a bath, lay out your clothes and dress you for tea or for dinner. They will wait in the passageway outside in order to accompany you downstairs and prevent you from losing your way, and they will serve you whatever you are to eat. They will also acquaint you with any quirks or customs of the house that may be unfamiliar, such as how and when the signal is given to change for dinner. They will awaken you the following morning by gently drawing the curtains of your room, and they will bring you tea on a tray, together with a newspaper that has been ironed.

Those who live here, whether they are members of an ancient family whose roots are sunk deep in the local soil or – as was all too common by the Edwardian era –
arrivistes
like your putative hosts, will conform to a particular style of dress and manners. You knew this the instant you saw them assembled at the entrance to greet you, surrounded by lolling dogs. The husband and the grown-up sons are in tweeds and are smoking pipes. The wife and daughters are also in tweeds, for it is autumn and the costume of country gentlewomen is briskly practical too. These of course will be changed for white tie and décolletage respectively in time for dinner. When this has ended the men will linger in the dining room over port and cigars and discussion of politics before joining the ladies in the drawing room. In mixed company, the talk will be of hunting and shooting – for those who have the facilities for these seldom fail to practise them, and the season for both has now begun – of visits to Cowes or Henley, Homburg and Baden-Baden or Monte Carlo. The sons may be home for the holidays from boarding school or Oxford. The daughters may be preoccupied with thoughts of next year’s London Season. There is a code of behaviour, a series of expectations, amounting to a complete lifestyle that goes with life in an English country house, and everyone, from the scullery maids to the owner, knows what is involved. Often those who are new to wealth and gentility will be the most punctilious in keeping up standards, partly because they wish to endorse a world they have worked so hard to enter, and partly because they are afraid of making mistakes or showing that they do not ‘know the form’.