Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (28 page)

Many contemporary commentators were conscious that the age of the true aristocracy had ended and the new era of the self-made man had dawned. Frederick Willis, a hatter who had no connection with either the landowning class or the servant one, was to recall more than fifty years later that:

The new plutocracy was making [a] tremendous display of flunkeydom. Footmen were a part of a gentleman’s retinue in the eighteenth century; in the twentieth they were an anachronism. The social climbers knew nothing of this. The old country houses were passing into decay, the old landed gentry passing after their long reign, but the new country houses were springing up and new commercial gentry blossoming. Neither they nor their houses were to last for long.

It is a matter of record that the last occasion on which the old aristocracy appeared in London in numbers, complete with coaches, grooms and footmen, was not at a function just before the outbreak of the Great War, but for the coronation of King Edward VII in August 1902, and only then in response to a specific request from the King that they should do so. While the ceremony went on in Westminster Abbey, the carriages and their gorgeously clad attendants waited in nearby Whitehall, a sight that would never be seen again even though there was another coronation – in 1911, for King George V – before the era came to an end.

In other words, even without the intervention of a major war, the old ways were dying out. As living standards had risen, fewer people wanted to be servants. Emigration, actively being propagated by charitable societies and by colonial governments, offered greater inducements and opportunities. Though it must be remembered that a country-house kitchen was a far cleaner, quieter and less dangerous place than a factory, here too conditions were steadily improving and the wages could be tempting. Also, in 1911 legislation made it necessary for servants as well as their employers to pay threepence a week National Insurance. Though this seems an insignificant sum, it quickly added up when it was paid for each member of staff, fifty-two weeks a year (think of the Duke of Westminster’s 300 or more servants). It meant that some middle-class houses, even with only a few domestics, could no longer afford to keep them all. The owners of country houses too found that keeping up with the higher wages that domestics now expected was increasingly difficult, and made a bigger dent in the household budget. The revenue they derived from their estates remained the same, and thus they felt squeezed at both ends.

As well as the old-age pension, the government had introduced Unemployment Benefit, and this made some men and women, who could have gone into service, prefer to do nothing. The whole of the servant-keeping class was aware that the initiative was being lost – that it was becoming the domestic and not the householder who would henceforth set the terms. Old-fashioned, willing servants seemed to become rarer all the time.

To counter this, more leisure for servants was gradually introduced. Until the 1880s they had had virtually no time off, though some employers had already by then shown the way in terms of improved conditions. The Duke of Portland, by the 1850s, was already holding a ball for the servants on his estate at Welbeck Abbey. (The ballroom was built underground.) He hired an orchestra and a staff of fifty waiters so that his own household would not have to do any work. He led the first dance with the housekeeper while his wife led off with the steward. The ‘upstairs family’ made a point of leaving at midnight so that the servants could let their hair down.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, servants’ conditions had improved to the extent that it was now more or less universally accepted that they were given presents at Christmas that might be worth the equivalent of several weeks’ pay. Male servants were likely to receive cash while females were given dressmaking material.

By 1900 the notion of a half-day off every week had become widely accepted. What was also widely expected, however, was that the servant’s free time could only begin once their set tasks had been completed. If they were required at the last minute to do something, their liberty would simply be postponed, for there was no question of being able to take ‘time off in lieu’. Servants were also subject to a curfew, which was normally eight o’clock for juniors and nine for the older ones. If they failed to return by that time they could expect to be locked out. The housekeeper was nominally in charge of ensuring that the maids returned on time, though she might well delegate the task of letting them in to one of their colleagues. Servants could find themselves – and this is likely to have been very common – too tired to go out on a day off anyway. Given the lack of sleep that many experienced, they might simply have wanted to put their heads down as soon as they had the opportunity.

In addition, servants whose families lived some distance away might be allowed by a sympathetic employer to save up days off until there were enough to cover a visit there. By the early twentieth century it was in any case becoming standard for servants to have a week’s paid holiday, taken at a time of year – usually in the quieter weeks of the summer – that was convenient to the employer. This was something for which servants saved up over the long months beforehand – the train fare, after all, would be expensive even by Third Class if the distance was great.

With the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the trickle away from domestic service rapidly became a flood. The Great War took over 400,000 servants away to various forms of war work, for many thousands of women departed to take up jobs that men had left vacant. The shorter hours and considerably higher pay that went with this vital war work meant that many – probably most – such people were extremely reluctant to re-enter the life of servitude they had once led. The wages young women could earn in factory jobs seemed fantastic by the standards of their class, enabling them to dress like their employers.

It was being brought home to the servant-keeping class that their needs could no longer come first: it was now a question of patriotism.
Country Life
published an advertisement during 1915 that read: ‘Have you a Butler, Groom, Chauffeur, Gardener or Gamekeeper serving you who, at this moment, should be serving your king and country? Have you men preserving your game who should be preserving your country?’

Among young girls, whether they had previously been in service or not, there was an obvious and intense dislike of the very notion of service. It was completely ‘out of fashion’, and the problem of filling the places left vacant would become more and more difficult to solve (in fact, it would prove impossible).

In some respects, however, the experience of war encouraged both masters and servants to see each other differently. Those of the gentry who had served in it were far less inclined afterwards to view their staff as mere automata, and those below stairs had experienced during hostilities an unexpected and previously unknown sense of camaraderie and relative equality with their officers. Even among those who had stayed at home there was a different mindset thanks to the changes wrought by the war. Highclere Castle in Hampshire was used – like numerous other country houses – as a military hospital. It was run in person by the Countess of Carnarvon, assisted by her maids and footmen, who acted as medical orderlies. In this situation too there was a sense of camaraderie – perhaps unacknowledged but definitely there – between employer and servants. This sort of shared experience produced, at the very least, a greater mutual understanding.

Once the war was over, the number of girls considering service was so reduced that training colleges were set up to try and develop a sense of pride and efficiency in household work. These attracted applicants, but they did not succeed in stemming the tide of sheer disinclination to practise these skills as a servant. Nothing about such a prospect appealed to them, even if (especially if!) their family had been in service before. Opportunities in factories, shops, cafés and restaurants were simply too common and too promising to miss, and women especially preferred these because the hours were much shorter and there was far more personal freedom. The wages offered in both the private and public sectors increased sharply. The concessions offered by employers of servants had to become increasingly generous.

Employers, who tended to swallow the myth that servants were happy with their lot and grateful for the positions they held, sometimes felt betrayed that the posts they had held open during the period of hostilities were not wanted when their former staff returned from war service. They resented the fact that servants now made demands on them, expecting privileges that seemed frankly unreasonable. When Rose Plummer went to be interviewed for a new position, she stated that she wanted not only higher wages than the prospective mistress was willing to pay, but a regular amount of time off that was seen as outrageous. The employer’s reaction was to exclaim that if Miss Plummer had such privileges, all the other staff would want them – the clear implication being that anarchy would result. (Nevertheless she granted both requests.)

Not since the Black Death in the fourteenth century had wiped out thousands of labourers and made the survivors a sought-after rarity had the servant class been able to exert such dominance. Their would-be employers, who had grown up in households filled with domestic staff and had never had to cook or clean for themselves, often lacked the most basic notions of how to do these things. Where they were dependent upon servants to run their household and could not rely on family retainers who stayed with them out of sentiment, they had to sacrifice both money and dignity in order to keep them.

As the general disinclination to work in service gathered pace, good servants became scarcer, better appreciated, ever-more demanding. For a further generation, until the coming of the next war, the country houses managed to keep at least the appearance that they were continuing their way of life largely unchanged. The economic slump of the twenties and the ensuing scarcity of manufacturing work would have helped to repopulate the servants’ halls to some extent, though there was nothing like a return to the pre-1914 numbers. After the Second World War, of course, there could no longer be any such pretence. The era of the country house was over.

A passage in Evelyn Waugh’s novel
Decline and Fall
, published in 1928, gives a glimpse of the new social climate in great houses. King’s Thursday is the family home of the Beste-Chetwyndes, Earls of Pastmaster. Built in Tudor times, it has never been altered or added to since – there is no plumbing or electricity, and its unspoiled quaintness is much admired by visitors. However, the family discover that the charms of Tudor interiors are not appreciated by their staff, who do not choose to remain, for:

[T]he bedrooms obtained for them among the rafters were unsuited to modern requirements, and only the dirtiest and most tipsy of cooks could be induced to inhabit the kitchen. Housemaids tended to melt away under the strain of trotting before breakfast up the narrow servants’ staircases and along the interminable passages with jugs of warm water. Modern democracy called for lifts and labour-saving devices, for hot-water taps and cold-water taps, gas-rings and electric ovens.

This provides a fitting epitaph for the age of the servant – they were still there, and they would remain for a few further years, but their new conditions of work bore little resemblance to those of their forelock-tugging predecessors. Within a few more years they would, for most householders, be an unaffordable and unattainable luxury.

EPILOGUE: THE PEOPLE

The life lived by the ‘upstairs’ folk – insofar as it was a formal, codified way of giving and receiving visits – came to an end as soon as the Second World War began. It had been increasingly obvious since Hitler came to power in 1933 that another European conflict was likely. By 1938, when Britain and France gave in to the dictator’s demands over the subjugation of Czechoslovakia, it was a certainty. That act of appeasement gave British Society the breathing space to enjoy a final round of aristocratic pleasures in the summer of 1939, but there was a sort of desperate gaiety, a last-days-of-Pompeii atmosphere about the balls and parties. The young men who attended them-knew they would soon be in uniform.

It is difficult, from a later perspective, to appreciate the sense of Armageddon that pervaded the late summer of that year. As war began at the beginning of September, the Season was ending and the great houses were shut for what could well have been the last time. It was widely expected, based on recent memory of the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, that massive air-raids could follow in a matter of days. Some people touched the walls or fingered the curtains, taking leave, assuming that within the week the town houses of the aristocracy, and much of London, might literally no longer exist.

There were to be two ‘blitzes’ rather than one. The first, in 1940–41, was delivered by bombers, the second, in the last year of the war, by unmanned rockets. Damage, though grievous in both town and country, was not as apocalyptic as had been anticipated. Nevertheless the conflict delivered the
coup de grace
to the world of Edwardian hedonism. It brought shortages not only of staff but of food, clothing, petrol and almost everything that made for comfort. Young people, always the mainstay of a country house weekend, would henceforth be in the armed forces and scattered all over the world. Every citizen had at least some nominal duty to perform, and there could not be any pretence of uninterrupted, full-time leisure. All classes shared anxiety about the conduct of the war, whether this meant preparing for enemy invasion or worrying about friends and relatives in danger. Flippancy was out of fashion. Unlike the previous conflict, it was not only the sons of great houses that might become victims, but the very fabric of their homes. Commandeered for official purposes, scores of houses were damaged, if not destroyed, by neglect and by military or official occupation. Once the conflict had ended the specialist labour necessary to repair, replaster or re-roof was hard to find in a country dominated by a severe housing shortage. Gardens that had been dug up for the growing of vegetables could not be returned to lawn overnight. The staff required to keep the household running was perhaps the most difficult thing to obtain. As industry set out to recover, the manufacturing sector was working at full stretch and wages were escalating. Both men and women were even less inclined to go into service than their predecessors had been after the last war. Though some of the very grandest houses could carry on, in most cases the servants’ halls were virtually empty. There were too few left to perform the tasks that a country house required, even with the aid of labour-saving technology.