Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (22 page)

Servants, for their part, possessed a whole armoury of weapons for getting back at their masters. They would deliberately work slowly, fail to answer summons, pretend not to have heard requests or the ringing of bells, spill things or knock them over, affect to have misunderstood instructions, tell lies. A great deal of this would be impossible to prove and difficult to punish. A famous cartoon by George Cruikshank depicts four servants lolling by the kitchen fire and smirking as a bell is rung repeatedly to summon them. The caption reads: ‘Oh, ah! Let ‘em ring again!’ The more skilled the servant, the more difficult perhaps to replace, the more they could get away with. It might well be dangerous for a family to annoy those who prepared and served its meals.

It is worth remembering that for some rural girls, service was not a commitment for life but a sort of domestic science training college. They went to work in a house, for a period of two or three years, when they were old enough to do so. This enabled them to perfect the skills of cooking and cleaning, and perhaps child-minding, that would be useful for running their own homes. Their future husbands saw this as a rite of passage, for it qualified them to be housewives. These young women may not have been officially allowed to have ‘followers’, but they often had in mind the young man who represented their future.

Though many servants thought of their work as a lifetime’s career, they knew that their employment could come to an abrupt end. They had no security of employment, could be dismissed without warning for any one of numerous misdemeanours (though they would usually be given notice), and would have very little opportunity to defend themselves. ‘Characters’ – job references from previous employers – were all-important. The notion of the servant ‘dismissed without a character’, or sent away with a very bad one, is among the best-known clichés of the Victorian domestic world, but it need not always have been the disaster we imagine. Characters could easily be forged, in much the same way that resumés are today, and in any case a prospective employer could very often read between the lines and deduce that personal animosity lay behind an unfavourable reference. It actually became illegal to give an unjustified negative reference to a servant (the fine was £20), but malice was hard to prove. It was also against the law for an employer, when writing a character reference, to conceal any misdemeanours. As Mrs Beeton put it with admirable clarity: ‘It is not fair for one lady to recommend to another a servant she would not keep herself.’ We must remember too that it was not always a case of employers dismissing and servants being made destitute. It was perfectly common for a servant to give notice if they heard of better prospects.

It was often difficult to climb the hierarchy within the same household, and therefore servants expected to move from one place to another. Many were constantly on the lookout, as ambitious people tend to be, for better prospects. They might even be ‘headhunted’ by another employer who had been impressed by them while visiting. Though there were of course servants who remained in the same household all their lives, through loyalty, inertia or because their place of work was conveniently situated, it was far more common than we perhaps realize for members of domestic staffs to change their employer and to move around, especially by the Edwardian era when communications were better. The difficulty of keeping good servants is one of the recurring themes in the pages of that middle-class barometer,
Punch
. Employers were often disappointed by the lack of loyalty shown by servants whom they had trained, housed and – in their own view at least – treated like members of the family, only to have them flounce out of the door as soon as they had the chance. But servants, if they were proficient in their jobs, were aware of how much their skills were worth. They met other maids or footmen when visiting houses with their employers, and would constantly be comparing their wages and living conditions with those of their counterparts elsewhere. And they knew perfectly well that the threat of departure would often cause their mistress or master to raise their wages as an inducement for them to stay.

It is important to remember that, however much a Victorian house may have seemed a permanent community in which faces did not change, there was constant coming and going among servants. Though there were of course retainers who stayed for decades in the same post, these might be the exception rather than the rule, and the notion that a young person would enter the kitchens of the local big house at thirteen and still be there at fifty is by no means a valid one. Mobility was of course more limited for those at the bottom of the hierarchy. They had no marketable skills and, because they were not visible to the world of upstairs, would not be lured away by friends or visitors of the family. They might well, however, hear from friends, sisters or brothers who were in service elsewhere that there were advantageous vacancies at another house, and be able to act on those opportunities.

For the lady of the house the replacing of servants was a significant part of her life. She would, in the course of an average year, probably have three or four visits from the housekeeper to announce that: ‘Please, Mum, the under-housemaid (or the scullery maid, or the second chambermaid) begs to give notice,’ and have to go through the process of looking over candidates to replace them. To the exasperation of employers – and the situation is the same today in many places of work – these would no sooner have picked up the skills necessary to do their work efficiently, and to become familiar with the house routines, than they would be off to some other position.

It would be entirely usual for an experienced servant to have worked in five or six houses in the course of a twenty-year career. They would bring valuable experience with them to each new post, for despite the small differences in running each household that were dictated by family tradition or peccadilloes, the basic system would be similar, as would the servants’ tasks and those who carried them out. It was relatively easy to move around from one job to another, and someone – such as a housekeeper – who was going on elsewhere might insist on bringing with her some of her erstwhile colleagues because they worked well as a team.

It was in the big houses that servants were more plentiful, more efficient, more rewarded, more likely to remain. It was here, too, that they stayed a part of the household long after they had vanished from the homes of middle-class people. In many suburban homes a maid, though useful, was a luxury, and to dispense with her, though it might cause inconvenience, would not reduce a house to chaos. In larger establishments servants were, of course, absolutely vital to the functioning of the household as well as to whatever work and leisure pursuits were undertaken by the family. Given the size of their homes, the simple process of keeping the building clean was likely to require a platoon of maids. Those families who had their own coach – it was a rarity to be ‘carriage folk’, and only in the latter part of the twentieth century would most people be able to afford a car – needed a coachman, grooms and stable boys to maintain the vehicle and the horses. Then there was the cooking of their meals and the serving of drinks and the conserving of game and the loading of guns. The receiving of visitors required specialist staff – footmen – and the dressing of both male and female employers in the complicated and elaborate clothing of the time made necessary another type of specialist: the valet and the lady’s maid. It simply would not have been possible for a Victorian or Edwardian lady of the upper class to manage the putting up of her own hair or the putting on of many of the garments (think of the crinoline!) that fashion demanded she wear.

In other words, at the top of the household staff there were dedicated and experienced professionals, whose skills and knowledge were honed to a peak of excellence by years of training. Like any other professionals they would follow a career path, trading up from one household and one position to a better one. Wealthy people of the time could not have imagined doing without such servants, or even the less experienced general ones, in precisely the way that their present-day descendants could not be without electronic gadgets. Both groups would be lost without the things that they took for granted.

Inter-class relations were surprisingly good throughout British history. There was never the same level of smouldering animosity that sometimes emerged in countries with a more authoritarian tradition or a more remote aristocracy – the classic example being that of France before the Revolution. Not since the Middle Ages had there been peasants, let alone serfs, in Britain. The gentry – the class below the aristocracy – was characterized in England by their ability to work informally with their tenants, and in Scotland, where Calvinism was a major social leveller and where the landowning class – proprietors of often unproductive estates – were not necessarily wealthy, the barriers between classes might well be even more blurred.

No doubt there were numerous idle, inefficient or incompetent servants, but the impression given by
Punch
is an exaggerated one. Most were good – or at the least adequate – at their jobs (they had after all been trained for them from childhood), inured to boredom and early rising, and with a physical stamina exhibited in endurance rather than outright strength. Routine can be a great comfort and, provided they kept to the rules laid down by their employer, they often had a level of security that contrasted favourably with that of people of the same class outside the estate walls.

Almost all households had sets of rules for servants. These were not just the large-lettered mottoes (WASTE NOT, WANT NOT!) that can still be seen painted on the walls of kitchens and servants’ halls in great houses, but a detailed list of things that servants must or must not do. Some would be standard practice throughout society, and probably a matter of common sense. Others would be specific to the house. All would have to be learned quickly. These included the notion of always ‘giving room’ – standing aside, perhaps turning your back, but certainly not making eye contact, or verbal contact, with any of the upstairs inhabitants if one appeared in a corridor or on a staircase. A servant must also never sing or whistle while about their work, or indeed make any sort of noise that would draw attention to them. They could not call out to other servants in adjoining rooms. Must not talk to family or visitors unless asked a question, and must walk several paces behind upstairs inhabitants if carrying luggage for them. Very importantly, it was absolutely forbidden for a maid to hand anything to a member of the household without first putting it on a salver. Though largely taken for granted at the time, this custom sometimes caused trouble. Margaret Powell was a very young and inexperienced maid when she was reprimanded for offering something straight to her employer. ‘I thought it was terrible,’ she later recalled, ‘that someone could think you were so low that you couldn’t even hand them anything out of your hands without it first being placed on a silver salver.’ The point was surely less that servants were considered ‘low’ than that, given the dirtiness of much of the cleaning work in which they were engaged, they would be likely to pass on dust or oil from their hands.

Apart from this, there were rules regarding punctuality, especially at mealtimes since these were communal affairs. There were rules about drinking (despite the fact that servants were issued with beer) and about smoking (female servants were forbidden – or at the least expected not to do so). To be fair, some of the people upstairs – the family and guests – might well be subject to very similar rules. In numerous houses there have always been such lists, sometimes dealing with the same issues of drinking or smoking, and laying down rules that were often surprisingly severe. Etiquette books, which the British have always published and read in scores, go into considerable detail about the way to behave while a guest at a country house, including the advice that you ought to go for walks so as to give the hosts a rest from your company. As has already been seen, even those on the right side of the green baize door had to follow a code of conduct that could be very strict.

Like all servants, those employed in a great household were required to be as invisible as they could be when performing their duties. In eighteenth-century town houses it had been remarked upon that visitors might find the front door opened to them by a maid with a full chamber pot in her hand. This would not have happened in any well-run household, of course, and it was virtually impossible in the country houses of the Victorians. An intricate system of stairs and corridors meant that food and fuel could be carried between floors, servants could go to and from their duties, with broom or breakfast tray, without the family or their guests having to see them. Should a servant meet on a main staircase a member of the household, they were usually required to turn their backs, and would certainly not speak. These customs may seem over-formal and unnecessary to modern sensibilities, but like most forms of etiquette they represented a structure that actually made life simpler and less awkward than it would otherwise have been.

The nineteenth-century author Robert Kerr wrote: ‘The family constitute one community: the servants another. Whatever may be to their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other. On both sides this privacy is highly valued.’ Under normal conditions the owner’s family would not venture into the servants’ territory without an invitation.

The eccentric Duke of Portland would have dismissed any housemaid who met him in the corridors of his house, Welbeck Abbey. He was not alone in this. One maid who was fascinated enough to stare at her employer as he sat in his dressing gown in an adjoining room did not realize she had been observed. Later that day, when the servants were assembled, the butler announced that whichever young woman had been spying on the master was to take notice. It was certainly customary that the family would not greet any servant whom they met. To some masters servants were simply machines, going about their work to make the house run smoothly, and one would no more speak to them than to a clock or a carriage horse.