Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (20 page)

In a house where the family were good employers, the servants would naturally want to stay, and vacancies seldom came up. In an unhappy environment the opposite would be the case, though it might be difficult to leave for another position without a ‘character’ or reference. While they might spend a lifetime in the service of a family, in other words, the conditions of servants could change drastically, for better or worse, when their employer died and was replaced by an heir, or when their master married and a new mistress came into the household. Sometimes a change in circumstance might be caused by other factors: the servants at Tedworth in Wiltshire were accustomed to an employer, Charles Studd, who lived the life of an archetypal country gentleman, farming and following the Turf. Studd, indeed, was a somewhat raffish specimen of the type. One day in the 1880s, however, he suddenly converted to evangelical Christianity as a result of attending a revival meeting. Within days he had sold his racehorses and converted the stables into a mission hall. He made his staff attend meetings there on Sundays, brought in speakers, and led the hymn-singing himself. When he travelled to London to attend services, he made a point of coming out halfway through to hold the carriage horses himself so that his coachman could go in and hear the rest. One of his servants later recalled that Studd would call out, if he encountered him about the estate: ‘Giles, are you saved?’ However eccentric this sudden change of behaviour may have seemed to some in the servants’ hall, one hopes it made their master a kinder employer.

The house’s owner and his family may have been kind or not, but the more junior servants, at least, would have had very little to do with them – if indeed they ever saw them at all. What would make a far more immediate difference to their morale would be their relationship with the ‘Pugs’ – the senior servants (who gained this nickname from the humourless, serious and self-important expression, characterized by a down-turned mouth like a pug-dog’s, that they supposedly adopted to convey gravitas. It can often be seen in photographs of nineteenth-century servants.) It was these people who ruled the world in which maids and footman lived, and the lowliest servants actually worked for them – cleaning their clothes, making their beds and preparing their meals – rather than for the family upstairs. This was not a case of unearned privilege, for the Pugs had of course worked their way up the profession from bottom to top. Entirely conscious of their own dignity, and demanding considerable deference from those below them, they could be more snobbish than those upstairs, and, if they were bad-tempered or tyrannical, could create an atmosphere of tension and even terror.

Most servants were female because there were far fewer other prospects open to women than to men, and the things for which servants were principally needed – cooking and cleaning – were traditionally female occupations. Domestic service was therefore by far the biggest employer of women right up to the outbreak of the Great War. Recruitment of servants was traditionally by word of mouth. A cartoon of the time by the artist Phil May depicts a young cockney slattern calling upon a middle-class housewife and saying: ‘Please, mum, the lady what washes the steps for that woman which lives opposite ses as you wants a girl’, and this was to a large extent how positions were found. In rural areas there were no agencies for employing domestics, though these came into being in towns in the late Victorian era and assumed increasing importance as servants became more difficult to find. Mostly, young men or girls were sought among the relatives of those already in service, for with the large families that were customary in the nineteenth century it was commonplace to have numerous brothers, sisters or cousins. Any of these who were approaching young adulthood could be recommended for a place, and it was often the mothers of girls who were most assiduous in looking out for opportunities for them. Settling their daughters in a good position was their final parental duty. It was of course necessary to get their children out of the home and into the world of employment as soon as possible. Apart from the need for their earnings it was a question of space. There were frequently other children arriving in the family, and no room at home for all of them. If a girl disliked her job and ran away, she might return home after even a day’s absence and find that her bed had already been promised to a lodger.

Alternatively, girls already in a post would recommend others from their village, their town, their old class at school, who could be summoned to fill other vacancies. Employers and servants were both looking for each other, and it was not too difficult for them to meet. If personal recommendation were not effective, servants, both male and female, would attend the periodic hiring-fairs that were commonplace throughout Britain until a hundred years ago. These were mostly occasions at which agricultural labourers gathered to await offers of employment from farmers. Servants too would stand about the street or market place, conspicuously holding the tools of their trade, such as a broomstick, or the handled wooden boxes in which housemaids kept their brushes and other equipment, and wait to hear the question: ‘Are you hired?’

The best background for servants was thought to be an upbringing in the country, so that even town houses recruited such young women for preference. Country people were seen as more wholesome, perhaps more innocent, more obedient and more hard-working. Although local people were very often employed, outsiders might be preferred. Those recruited from some distance away would have no contacts within the local community, and employers might only want such outsiders to serve them. Families knew full well that servants could be telling their secrets to friends and relations on their afternoon off, so young men and women with no connections nearby were preferable. These girls were also unlikely to have local followers. This phrase did not, as some assume, refer only to male admirers. Any friend or relative who would drop in to see them and sit gossiping in the kitchen was considered a nuisance. Before the advent of universal education, when illiteracy was more widespread, householders would also seek servants who could not read, so that they could leave correspondence or other documents lying around without it attracting curiosity. Most employees, however, were locals, because it was easier and more convenient to recruit them. In a rural area the children at the local school would know that, when they left, the big house was the likeliest source of work. Before the age of mass motor cars, and when transport in the countryside was expensive or infrequent, the option of travelling outside their home area did not exist. If they were taken on by the local landowner they might well be living on the premises or, when in the twentieth century the day servant became much more common, there would be a walk across the fields or a bicycle ride up the drive to get to work. One woman, whose mother went into service at a country house just after the First World War, recalled that: ‘For people in this area there was nothing round here except to work for the Earl, either in his house or on his land.’

The essence of a good servant is a discreet and respectful demeanour, and this was instilled in them from the beginning. In rural areas where there were few other employment opportunities and in which the landowner, his house and his farms, provided the major source of livelihood, it was necessary to learn deference. This was something, in any case, that was ingrained in the rural populace. Until the 1920s – and certainly throughout the years up to the First World War – it was automatic for adults and children to touch their hats or curtsy, according to gender, whenever they saw in the village street the squire or a member of his family, and others who were deemed worthy of this respect received it too: traditionally the parson, the doctor and the schoolmaster.

At a higher level, the stewards and butlers and cooks and housekeepers – as well as the educated servants, the valets and ladies’ maids – were of course drawn from all over the country or beyond. These might be recommended not by other servants but by other employers. They would otherwise either take advertisements in the ‘Situations Wanted’ columns of newspapers or would answer similar appeals for staff placed by employers. They were entitled to advertise in
The Times
on the basis that if they did not find work, they need not pay. Servants at this level would be interviewed not by a senior servant but by the man or woman for whom they would be working.

Ten was the average age at which to start domestic work for a girl, though by the end of Victoria’s reign the school leaving age was raised to twelve, and this affected recruitment. The tasks she would be expected to perform, though numerous and difficult, required no more than basic knowledge and equipment, and therefore she could begin them while still a child. The vast majority of those who went into service worked not in the homes of the aristocracy but in the homes of the middle-and lower-middle class. Their employers would often be from backgrounds little better than their own, but such was the kudos – and the necessity – of having servants that these small households absorbed millions of such youngsters. Here a girl would be expected to clean floors and stoves, to scrub dishes, to look after children scarcely older than herself, to run errands, do washing and ironing. This was the world of the ‘maid-of-allwork’, who was, as her name suggests, a pitiable drudge and general dogsbody. This type of girl, frequently sent from the nearest orphanage or workhouse, was destined for a life that offered little hope of advancement. She had no companions of her own age, no company other than her employers, no time off, no guaranteed or regular wages, no prospect of learning useful skills and rising in her ‘profession’. Her only alternative might well be to run away and go on the streets. To such girls as these, the life of a junior servant in a large and wealthy household would have seemed like paradise.

On the other hand, these girls could go straight into work, for they wore their everyday clothes. Those who sought positions in better households had to provide their own uniforms. This was no easy task, because there would be several of them required. Maids needed clothes for cleaning as well as for serving their employers. They needed caps and aprons, and even the array of brushes and other tools with which they would work. It took an average of two years to save the money to buy all of this, and the funds had to be raised by other work, such as child-minding. It might be that parents or other family members could supply some of the money or that a local lady, keen to help young women get a start in life, would oblige. It was owning this equipment that set a maid in a grand household apart from the thousands of humbler domestics.

A maid needed to have at least two dresses. One should be black, any others print. The former was for what might be termed ‘public duties’ in the afternoon, the latter for household cleaning in the mornings. She also needed several white aprons besides the starched cuffs and collars that adorned these outfits. The ‘morning apron’ was to wear during the heavy and dirty cleaning of floors and grates that occupied the first half of the day, and was made of hessian. The starched white apron that is more often associated with maids was for afternoon wear, and was worn with the black dress. We do not hear of this clothing being passed on second-hand, which would have been an entirely normal thing to do. The fact was that the clothes did not survive because they took such hard wearing, and employers would not have wanted to see a maid in shabby or ill-fitting clothing anyway. In London and every other large city there would be specialist shops for servants that could provide the entire assemblage of clothing – dresses, caps, aprons, shoes and stockings – together with advice on how to maintain them. The little wardrobe would be packed into a tin trunk, for this was the only piece of luggage a maid could take with her.

The aprons, and the caps that were worn with them, had to be spotless even if no one from upstairs was likely to see the girl. Washing and pressing them was therefore a frequent and time-consuming chore. The material given by mistresses to their maids at Christmas for making new dresses was in one sense a saving, but if they had not the necessary skill in dressmaking they would have to pay someone else to create the garment for them, and this would have to be done out of their wages.

Country-house servants were the aristocracy of their class, just as their employers might be in a more literal sense. If you were a girl of twelve or thirteen, employed as a maid-of-all-work by a titled family, away from home and cut off from everything you knew, you would have had good grounds for feeling sorry for yourself. Yet although you would work very long hours, although no one would pay you any attention – except when there was blame to throw around – and although your life was hard and cheerless, there was nevertheless much to look forward to, and to be thankful for. You might sleep in a tiny attic room, but would share it with only one other person instead of the numerous brothers and sisters there were at home. You would never have had so much space or comparative privacy. You would be earning a wage, and have your meals provided. You would be astonished by the quantity of food on offer and appalled by how much was thrown away, but could expect to look and feel healthier on this diet than ever before. In the evenings the food in the servants’ hall would be the same as that eaten by the family upstairs, because it would consist of their leftovers – food that many members of your own class would not have had the chance to taste. Your working conditions would be considerably better than those of your schoolfriends who had gone into other domestic jobs (you at least would have the hallboy to help you carry heavy coal scuttles upstairs) or into more back-breaking labour in agriculture or down mines. Though you were worked hard, you would have precisely delineated tasks and, so long as you carried them out competently, you could look forward to advancing in due course up the service hierarchy.

As soon as you had learned the geography, the personalities and the rules of behaviour in the house, things would have started to get easier for you. The work would have been physically taxing but endurable, and with conditioning it would have been possible to pace yourself. Other servants, some of them recently in the same lowly position, could have offered commiseration, acceptance, comradeship – as well as tips on how to take short cuts with the work or to avoid antagonizing those in authority.