Life Below Stairs (2 page)

The 6th Marquess of Bath was born in 1905 at Longleat, a vast rolling estate in Wiltshire, and died in 1992. As a child he had his own valet and his parents employed a total of forty-three
indoor staff. In 1973, when he and his wife were making do with
two servants, a resident married couple who performed the duties of butler, cook, housekeeper and maid, he
looked back on the servant age with some nostalgia.

‘I think the more servants one had the better,’ he recalled in
Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of Upstairs, Downstairs Life
. ‘We had two lampboys, two
steward boys and about five footmen. You were looked after in the lap of luxury. If you ask me whether I’d like to go back to those days, of course I would. Obviously one would, because it
was all so much more for us, but I’m not complaining, because times have changed. It’s so different from the old days when people were brought up to be in domestic service.’

Lady Lindsay of Dowhill, otherwise known as Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, was born in 1902 and recalled in her 1961 memoirs,
Grace and Favour
, how they were considered ‘dreadfully
badly off’, despite her father being a respected courtier to Edward VII. The main reason for this ‘shame’ was that the Palace pay only stretched to five maids, a manservant, a boy
and two gardeners. This led to embarrassment in their social circle who were ‘mostly people who had too many servants to count and who owned stately homes’.

So intense was the pressure to keep up with the Joneses in late Victorian and early Edwardian households that many middle-class mistresses deprived themselves of expensive food and basic needs
in order to maintain the illusion of wealth through the number of servants employed. The Victorian
author William Makepeace Thackeray described this phenomenon in his
satirical novel
The Book of Snobs
. The character Lady Susan Scraper feeds herself and her two daughters such meagre rations that they fill up on buns.

Of course, very few mistresses would go as far as starving themselves for the privilege of keeping more servants but Thackeray’s thrifty character illustrates the
importance of staff when it came to keeping up appearances and boosting status.

Equally, in the early 1900s, the more staff you had, the easier it was to employ more as the dwindling number of young men and women willing to go into domestic work preferred the more
well-to-do households. An elevated social position for an employer meant their servants automatically gained respect from the local population, including the tradesmen and shop workers. More staff
also meant companionship below stairs, whereas a lone housemaid, moving away from her family for the first time, would feel isolated and lonely in her new home.

Mrs G. Edwards recalled in
Lost Voices of the Edwardians
leaving her Brixton home at fifteen to become an under-nurse at a house in Wetherby Gardens in
London’s Kensington. ‘I only went back to my home in Brixton about once a fortnight, for an afternoon off. I used to get very homesick. I missed my home but my mother said I must stay
for a year so I could get a character reference.’

In
Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century
by Pamela Horn another teenager, who travelled from Norwich to Beckenham to become a maid, recalled writing to her mother to say, ‘I
wouldn’t mind what I done at home, if only she’d let me come. She wrote back and said be thankful you’ve got a bed to lie on and a good meal.’

Even the more aristocratic homes were beginning to cut back by the turn of the century. Wages were getting higher and taxation on the wealthy, especially the death duties introduced in 1894,
were diminishing the upper-class pot. Education had become free to all from 1890 and the 1902 Balfour Act extended the school leaving age from ten to twelve, leading to a sharp decline in young
children going into service. The suffragette movement was turning the heads of young women, who were choosing secretarial courses or shop positions over a lifetime of servitude, and the First World
War, followed by the Depression, was to change the social order for ever. The Edwardian era was about to see the sun set on the last golden age of the upstairs-downstairs household.

CHAPTER TWO

Household
Structure

UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

T
HE UPPER-CLASS
and upper-middle-class Edwardian household had a very strict hierarchy and each servant was expected
to know their place. The staff, particularly the longest serving members, may well have formed a bond with the family but the line between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ was
never blurred. Domestic staff could not aspire to live the lives of their employers and even the most senior would be aware that over-familiarity or a word out of turn would never do.

Diarist and author Lady Cynthia Asquith wrote that ‘no one from Upstairs was required to lend a hand at the sink – not even once a week. Indeed, no such invasion of the Staff’s
territory would have been tolerated.’

The staff quarters and the family quarters were separated by a large door that was often covered in green baize. Each
servant was aware exactly which rooms past that door
they were allowed to enter and when, and few would have dared to stray outside their given parameters.

DOWNSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

In large houses, the household staff, responsible for the cleaning and laundry, was presided over by the housekeeper. The serving staff would be under the butler and the
kitchen staff would answer to the cook. However, there was some crossover between the housekeeper and the cook, as the former was generally in charge of jams, pickles and confectionery while the
latter presided over the meals.

Although the Edwardian era saw the rise of the suffragettes, and women servants outnumbered men by three to one, life below stairs was still a male-dominated hierarchy with a butler or
manservant given greater authority, and therefore higher pay, than a housekeeper. This also meant that the ability to maintain a manservant or butler was looked upon as an enviable badge of
wealth.

In
What the Butler Saw
E.S. Turner writes, ‘As often as not, he was kept for ostentation and sometimes for intimidation. He was expected to be deferential to his superiors and
haughty towards his inferiors, which included his master’s inferiors.’

In smaller households, where no butler was employed, the housekeeper was the undisputed ruler of the ‘downstairs’ staff. She was the link between the mistress
of the house and the lowliest of maids. In her
Book of Household Management
Mrs Beeton explains:

As well as the indoor staff, there would be a head gardener with, in larger houses, four or five groundsmen under him, and possibly a coachman, who would take charge of the
stables and supervise the grooms. However, as more households splashed out on newfangled motor cars throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, many coachmen were replaced with chauffeurs
who also acted as car mechanics.

For wealthier families, this pattern would be repeated in more than one house, with many boasting a London home, a country seat and often a sporting estate, used for the
shooting season and weekend parties, in Scotland or Ireland.

THE HIERARCHY OF A HOUSE

Bottom of the ladder

The maid-of-all-work was the lowliest of all the servants and was often a child of twelve or thirteen. She could be the sole servant of a middle-class family or at the
bottom rung of a larger ladder in a big household. Up with the lark, she would be rushed off her feet until bedtime and her endless lists of tasks would be menial and fairly degrading. The
children, who came from very poor families or straight from the workhouse, were often mistreated by mistresses or superior staff and, more often than not, would have nowhere to turn to seek
solace.

Even Mrs Beeton had a pang of sympathy for the downtrodden ‘general maid’.

And Mrs Beeton added that, while she might make her way up to better households when she became a ‘tolerable servant’, many a general maid
started her working life under the wife of a small tradesman, barely a step above her ‘on the social scale’:

Knowing Your Place

The snobbery in the ranks below stairs was perpetuated as much by the staff themselves as by their employers. ‘Knowing your place’ was as important, if not
more so, when talking to a fellow member of staff as when addressing the family. As the titular butler in J.M. Barrie’s 1902 play,
The Admirable Crichton
, states, ‘His Lordship
may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants’ hall.’

It may seem unbelievable to us today but the domestic servants’ position was jealously guarded to the point of cruelty. Even the lowly parlourmaid would refuse to speak to anyone who
worked in the kitchen, seeing the cook’s underlings as beneath her. In
Not in Front of the Servants
, fourteen-year-old
scullery maid Beatrice Gardner remembered a
particularly nasty trick played on her by one such ‘superior’.

The Nursery

As well as these basic staff, the presence of children in the household would require still further staffing. A nanny would preside over the care of youngsters and under
her were a few junior nurses or nursemaids, often children themselves, to take on the everyday care of babies and infants.

In the 1871 census, almost 20 per cent of nurses in full-time domestic service were under the age of fifteen. In fact, 710 girls in the job were under the age of ten.

A fully fledged nanny, who ran the nursery, was ranked high enough on the social scale to have another member of staff waiting on her, usually called a nursery maid. Nanny
was not expected to wash up a plate or cup or tidy the nursery, and the menial tasks, such as warming milk, were left to the nurse. Even though the youngsters saw no one but the nanny and the
children all day, they were not permitted to mix with the ordinary domestic staff.