Life Below Stairs (14 page)

This is a small sample of the strict regulations governing the daily lives of servants. Other requirements included being punctual at mealtimes, having all doors locked by a
certain time such as 10.30 p.m., when the servants’ hall also had to be cleared and closed, and paying for breakages out of meagre wages. Gambling, swearing and drinking to excess were banned
and the female staff was forbidden to smoke.

The maids were considered so lowly that should they need to hand a family member or visitor a letter or parcel, they were to do so on a silver platter to minimize the risk of physical contact.
If they were obliged to lift something by hand, they were to lay it on a table nearest the recipient. This was one rule that kitchen maid Margaret Langley, later Powell, fell foul of when
she started out in Hove. One morning, while she was cleaning the front door, the newsboy came by with the papers. As she took them her mistress, Mrs Clydesdale, descended the stairs
and Margaret offered her the papers:

FOLLOWERS

A ban on ‘followers’ was common to the majority of houses. The main reason this rule was put in place was to discourage boyfriends and potential suitors to the
girls from coming to the house but the term also took in relations and friends, who were seen as an unwelcome distraction from daily chores.
Cassell’s Household Guide
declared,
‘Whether “followers” are allowed is a
question often put by a servant on applying for a situation. Except under very rare circumstances, it is better to
disallow the privilege.’ It continued: ‘While speaking on this subject, we may add that the word “followers” has a very elastic meaning, and as it is difficult to draw a
line between those that are unobjectionable and otherwise, no hardship can be felt in refusing to admit visitors to the kitchen save upon express permission.’

With one evening off a week and a chance to go to church on Sunday it was tricky for the domestic staff to see their family, let alone their friends. And finding a potential spouse was
incredibly difficult for some. Even within the household, any servant found ‘fraternizing’ with the opposite sex faced instant dismissal. It’s a wonder any of the young maids ever
found a suitor at all.

Violet Turner recalled to author Frank Dawes, ‘We weren’t allowed a young man near the house, but I always let the cook’s young man in the back door on Friday
evenings.’

Kate Brown revealed she was sacked from her parlourmaid’s job in 1911 for allowing her boyfriend into the house: ‘Of course it was forbidden in those days in case your boyfriend
might be a burglar. They could never imagine a servant choosing someone respectable.’ Her future husband was, actually, a baker from Fulham Road.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Breaking the rules, or being seen to, meant swift and often severe punishment. This could range from a ‘tongue-lashing’, usually enough to put the wind up the
inexperienced maid, to dismissal with no references, or ‘characters’, a terrifying prospect for most domestic servants. The favourite sanction was the denial of the little time off they
had, as there were so few pleasures in life. One servant recalled losing her day off for the heinous crime of feeding lumps of sugar from her own ration to a black horse on the farm where she
worked.

Some were a little more eccentric in their punishments. The 5th Duke of Portland, William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, became a recluse in the late nineteenth century and hated his female
servants to see him. If he passed any of them in the corridors, he sent them outside to skate on a specially constructed ice rink.

While the domestic staff devoted sixteen hours a day to backbreaking chores, mistresses often rewarded their efforts with suspicion of dishonesty and idleness. Some would employ subterfuge to
test the honesty of the staff. The most common method was to slip coins under rugs and down the side of upholstered chairs. If the coin was removed and not declared, the housemaid was deemed to be
a thief and, if the coin was undiscovered, she was a shirker.

RELIGIOUS FERVOUR

Society households often used religion as a tool for keeping their domestic staff in check. By drumming passages from the scriptures about hard work and cleanliness into
them they reinforced the message that the hierarchy that kept the upper-class employers at the top and the work-ravaged servants at the bottom was all part of God’s plan. Employers liked to
believe they were the guardians of their servants’ morals, and that they needed to be taught how to behave by their educated betters. ‘They didn’t worry about the long hours you
put in, the lack of freedom and the poor wages, so long as you worked hard and you knew that God was in Heaven and that He’d arranged for it that you worked down below and laboured, and that
they lived upstairs in comfort and luxury, that was alright with them,’ wrote Margaret Powell.‘I used to think how incongruous it was when the Reverend used to say morning prayers and
just before they were over, he’d say, “Now let us all count our blessings.” I thought, well, it would take a lot longer to count yours than it would mine.’

Religious mantras hung around the servants’ area included such messages as ‘Cleanliness comes next to Godliness’ and, from Ecclesiastes, ‘Whatever your hand finds to do,
do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.’ No doubt they omitted those less convenient to their way of
thinking, such as the famous line from Exodus which commands that Christians should ‘Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,’ and continues, ‘On it you
shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant.’

Christian societies were keen to get in on the act and issued numerous pamphlets for mistresses and maids on the subject of servants’ morals. In 1890 the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge published a booklet which advised staff not to worry about wages as a ‘safe, happy home is of greater consequence’, not to lose their temper if the steps they had just
scrubbed were instantly splattered with mud, not to gossip with tradesmen or servants and not to read ‘silly sensational stories’ in the ‘poisonous publications which are brought
to the back doors of gentlemen’s homes’. Above all, it counselled, a servant must remember to pray carefully and regularly.

In his memoirs, Eric Horne recalled the country house of an unnamed peer where he worked as a footman, and the staff having to sit opposite the family during the Sunday service. ‘One
Sunday the Bold Bad Baron sent for the butler and asked him if we had been drinking too much beer as he noticed several of the men were asleep during the sermon. The parson was brother to the
Baron, the living was in his gift, so of course he preached a sermon to please him; generally about the lower orders being submissive to their betters. No wonder we fell asleep.’

ADDRESSING THE SERVANTS

Those who lived upstairs were also expected to adhere to strict rules of etiquette in their treatment of the staff, particularly in how each member was addressed. The name used by the master and
mistress was part of the rigid hierarchy and it would be an insult to the higher ranks to stray from the usual titles.

The following is a guide on how to address servants adapted from the Channel Four series
An Edwardian Country House.