The Gentleman's Daughter (26 page)

Close analysis of the diaries for 1772 reveals another category of female servant. In addition to permanent and emergency live-in staff, Elizabeth Shackleton paid women to come for the day, usually to perform a single service. Thus, in 1772 five women were employed on this basis. Women were paid by the day to work in the kitchen and dairy, coming in to make the butter, to help get the dinner and to bake for both ordinary and special occasions. The duties traditionally associated with a housemaid were regularly discharged by casual workers, engaged to do a day's ironing, heavy washing, or sewing and mending. The intimate services of a chambermaid were fulfilled by local women when necessary, including the ‘getting up’ of personal linen, packing up of clothes, assisting with dressing and undressing, washing feet and even cutting toe-nails. However, day servants represent a complex category. Some day workers were sent for at moments of crisis and are indistinguishable from the emergency labourers discussed above. Other women workers offered particular skills, such as specialist sewing, starching or baking, and could routinely be called upon. In consequence, the tasks performed by specialist day servants were in many cases identical to those performed by local tradeswomen, as in the case of Betty Shaw, who ‘came to make me up two Dress'd & two undress'd Caps – As she's esteemed a Profficient in that way & just arrived Piping Hot from Manchester’. The availability of skilled day labour afforded Mrs Shackleton some flexibility as an employer, although bringing in extra labour could create its own tensions, particularly if the daily worker was seen to trespass upon a permanent worker's domain: ‘sent for Nancy Crooke to make the Butter. She denyed me, said she was Busy & did not like to do it as the Maid might take it amiss – at last she came, very saucy & Sulky.’
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‘Personnel problems’, in the modern euphemism, were not the least of Mrs Shackleton's irritations in her attempts to orchestrate the work of the different categories of female servant under her roof.

What of men's labour in the household? Returning to a close analysis of
one year, the Shackletons may have employed as many as four men-servants in 1772. These four are all referred to by their Christian names only (Isaac, Will, Jack and Matthew) and no titles are given, although evidence from elsewhere in the diaries reveals that Will was William Brigge, her husband John Shackleton's apprentice, while Matthew was probably less of a servant and more of a handymen attached to Shackleton's wool business.
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Mrs Shackleton had little cause to advertise for menservants because they were more static than their female counterparts and this fact alone may account for the absence of any discussion of her theoretical requirements in male household servants. Will, for example, lived with the family for some eleven years and Isaac for at least eight. Of course, the silence in the letter-books on the subject of male servants might also mean that the hiring of men was a gentleman's preserve. Certainly, the majority of the male servants’ contracts which can be found in the diaries were recorded in the early 1760s, when Elizabeth was still a widow. Along with the virtual absence of official titles, such as chaise driver, butler or groom, there is no evidence to suggest rigid specialization among male household servants. If a female employee was a maid of all work, then a male servant was certainly a jack of all trades. Throughout his long career, Isaac was recorded making medicine, brewing, delivering letters, accompanying female servants, driving the wool cart, cleaning the chaise and harness, clearing rubbish, moving stones, spreading soap ashes and farrowing. Moreover, William Brigge's apprenticeship does not seem to have excused him from domestic duties. He delivered presents, accompanied servants, collected provisions, sold medicine and brewed ale. On several occasions, he accompanied Thomas Parker to the Lancashire and Yorkshire races dressed in a new livery, so he could also be called upon to appear as footman/valet for the day. Over and above her permanent staff, Elizabeth Shackleton also paid a gardener to come in twice a week, and the unmarried Tom Parker employed a huntsman.
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In many instances, the tasks performed by menservants blurred into those performed by local tradesmen, craftsmen and agricultural labourers.
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Inside Alkincoats itself, tailors were often employed for heavy sewing, mending upholstery and pack sheets, and cutting stays and petticoats; the barber called to cut hair and alter wigs. Local tradeswomen also made home calls and must have laboured alongside the maids. Seamstresses came in to make up and mend batches of caps, handkerchiefs, ruffles, petticoats, shifts and shirts, and gowns were often fitted at home by the local mantua-makers. Demonstrably, the genteel household was a toiling hive of male and female paid labour, dispatched by permanent live-in staff, emergency live-in staff, emergency day labourers and regular day
labourers. Consequently, in its staffing the household functioned like most eighteenth-century commercial enterprises. In the acquisition, coordination and direction of a range of different workers, the managerial effort of the genteel mistress-housekeeper was akin to that of a putting-out master or gentleman farmer, and far removed from the received picture of the unruffled lady of the manor.

If the logistics of hiring servants were complicated, more knotty yet were the intricacies of daily government. The construction and maintenance of a mistress's authority over her servants could not be taken for granted; a point reinforced by the detailed printed advice on the preservation of supremacy and widespread warnings about a lack of innate deference in the servile. (‘Eye service’, a superficial deference masking a resentful, contemptuous heart, remained a particularly disturbing possibility.) That the modest eminence on which the mistress stood could be deeply undermined was well understood by the genteel. It was a proverbial adage that employers had to decide early whether they were to manage their servants or be managed by them: ‘A Mutiny in the House with Servants’, groaned a weary Elizabeth Shackleton in 1780. Forty-odd years later, a relative of Sarah Tatham's dared not leave her new, but superannuated antiquary of a husband alone with his cantankerous old housekeeper for fear of the ground she would lose: ‘I wish she could have a littel change of scene But she is afraid of Mrs Cooks ascendancy over him if she comes to stay here.’ Joanna Gossip was equally insecure in her power and authority. Mourning the ruination of her vegetable crop in 1814, she regretted ‘had I been able to do superintend my affairs as I used to do this had not happened’. In the frailty of eighty, she had little choice but to delegate to careless servants, ‘yet I dare not stir from ye fireside & my maid [assured] me that they wod be safe. I had no alternite [sic] but believe her report…’
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The upper hand once lost was not easy to regain. The competent government of servants and household required energy and vigilance.

Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century employers went out of their way to obtain ‘sober, steady and industrious’ labour in the first place. (Elizabeth Shackleton and Anne Gossip also specifically sought servants who were not Roman Catholic, and Mrs Gossip also drew the line at Methodists since they went to too many meetings.) Early nineteenth-century employers continued to seek servants who possessed the ‘qualifications of honesty, sobriety and respectable carriage towards [their] superiors’.
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Yet all were constantly disillusioned by domestics who proved pert, drunken and dubious. As an informant of Anne Gossip's put it, ‘good servants are very scarce, bad ones people better be without’. Of course, the ‘servant problem’ was an ageing chestnut even in 1700. Ann Pellet's complaint of
1756 that ‘the times are very bad … on servants’ has a timeless ring to it. Indeed, Jane Scrimshire was as vexed and plagued about maids in the 1750s as Jane Pedder in the 1780s and the Horrocks sisters in the 1810s. Genteel women saw servants as an irretrievable thorn in the flesh – ‘no doing without those necessary Evils.’
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Doubtless their maids returned the compliment.

Elizabeth Shackleton, for her part, attempted to enforce certain standards of behaviour among her workforce. She esteemed and rewarded servants whom she thought ‘civil’, ‘diligent’, ‘labourous’, ‘honest’, ‘sensible’, ‘agreeable’, ‘proper looking’, ‘good like’, ‘clean looking’, ‘handy’ or possessing ‘good hands’.
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Male and female servants alike were censured for being extravagant, dirty, clumsy and dishonest, but men were more likely to be accused of drunkenness and licentiousness and women of impudent language and carriage. But both men and women were denounced for that great sin against hierarchy – taking liberties. Unlike some other employers (such as Parson Woodeforde), Mrs Shackleton made no formal allowance for tea, coffee and sugar in her servants’ contracts, yet they helped themselves to these high-status provisions regardless. Mrs Shackleton was infuriated when she surprised her cook drinking full-cream milk, and was ‘much vexed’ to discover old Luce Smith ‘sciming Milk Bowles & drinking the Cream … sorry there is no more trust to be put in People’. The expropriation of illegitimate perquisites threatened both Elizabeth Shackleton's authority and her economical regime, a dual challenge which is made explicit in a note of 1779: ‘found Betty Crooke Makeing Coffee & breaking white sugar to drink with it – Servants come to a high hand indeed. What will become of poor House Keepers?’
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Mrs Shackleton was equally alarmed by verbal insubordination. The diaries are peppered with complaints that the servants were insufficiently docile and deferential. Black Betty Walton was described as ‘saucy dirty & Ungovernable’; Sally Crooke was thought ‘a beast of a woman’, equipped with the ‘vilest, most brutish tongue’; and Betty Crooke was dubbed ‘a saucy vulgar woman’.
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But for all their vulgarity, Mrs Shackleton was painfully dependent on them – and therein lay the rub.

Genteel households could not function without servants, yet as we have seen lower servants were strikingly independent and mobile; the risk of losing a good character reference seems to have worried them not a whit. Mrs Shackleton attained her full complement of staff for only short-lived idylls and within a matter of days could see her maids dwindle in number from four to one and on desperate occasions to zero. In December 1775 she reported ‘a dark day in great distress for want of proper women servts.
Not one But Nelly now’. In August 1776 she lamented ‘Betty after supper run away to Blakey. No servants all at an end’. In December 1778 she complained ‘[Mary Foulds] went today left me without a servant in her Place’. In June 1780 she wailed, ‘Mary Crooke went to a Wedding. Nobody left as a woman servant in this house. God help me what will become of me.’ In September of that year she despaired, ‘I am now in a pritty plight. Not one woman in this House. God Grant I may be so fortunate as to live and go on better if it be his Blessed Will. No Bread in the House.’ Mrs Shackleton could not have been more conscious of her painful dependence on paid labour. Thus, she was prepared to tolerate a deal of bad behaviour from competent servants. Impudence alone was not enough to merit dismissal, at least not in the last, vulnerable years of Elizabeth Shackleton's life. Even the departure of the insolent Betty Crooke was regretted in March 1780: ‘I am sorry to part with Betty, as I have not yet heard of a person that is proper to serve me. My years and Infirmities require a staid knowing diligent woman.’
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Repeated drunkenness on the part of Isaac and William Brigge, though disagreeable, did not warrant expulsion. The discovery in June 1772. of a ‘Courtship … of the warmest kind’ between William Brigge and Ellin Platt did not result in the sacking of either servant, although Ellin ran away a week later and so removed half the problem. Similarly, Isaac's ‘amour’ with Nanny Driver was tolerated. However, in 1779 Isaac's dalliance with Susy Smith reaped the whirlwind in the guise of Susy's mother. Incensed, Peggy Smith descended on Pasture House ‘like a distracted woman’ and dragged her daughter away, declaring that Susy ‘sho'd not have Isaac. She wo'd be her end before she sho'd bear her Bastard in Barrowford workhouse.’ In the full glare of local publicity, Isaac had to go.
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Yet, Isaac's departure notwithstanding, it is striking how many ‘freedoms’ Mrs Shackleton was prepared to tolerate in her efforts to maintain a full complement of workers. It appears she committed one of the employers' venal sins, tolerating bad men because they were good servants. Immaculate delicacy was a luxury she could not afford.

The mistress–servant relationship was nothing if not complex and paradoxical. Relations with some female servants were characterized by fondness and intimacy, with others by distance and antagonism. The emotional possibilities and limitations inherent in the relationship are amply demonstrated by the three-year career of the adolescent maid, Nanny Nutter, to whom her mistress devoted an entire pocket diary. Nanny Nutter entered the Shackleton household as a girl of twelve, the daughter of a neighbouring tenant farmer, well known to the family. Little commentary exists on her work role; she was noted footing and knitting
stockings, and taking her work home for the day. Yet after three years, she was sufficiently qualified to be engaged as a chambermaid at nearby Carr Hall. There is no evidence that Nanny Nutter was paid a yearly wage, however Elizabeth Shackleton laid out £3 8s. 1d. on clothes for Nanny in 1773, £3 11s. 1d. in 1774 and £4 os. 2d. in 1775. So, at the very least, Nanny received a return for her services worth approximately four pounds per annum, roughly the wage of a housemaid. Formal remuneration apart, Nanny Nutter was indulged with numerous trinkets and accoutrements: a Halifax ribbon, a gauze cap with a spider thread lace border, a black silk laced handkerchief, a pair of old dimity pockets, an old worked muslin apron, a red and white handkerchief, an old mob, a yard of scarlet ribbon, and a pair of single lawn ruffles being but a selection of her mistress's offerings.
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A quasi-parental concern infused Mrs Shackleton's dealings with the maid. Elizabeth Shackleton herself made shirts and shifts for Nanny, as she did for her own sons. Mrs Shackleton recorded Nanny's illnesses and noted what was almost certainly the onset of the menses, in October 1773, when Nanny was fifteen years and four months: ‘29th – on this day Nanny Nutter began to be unwell for the very first time.’
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Relations were sufficiently intimate for mistress and maid to share a bed, and although this practice was far from unusual, it was still meaningful enough to warrant special mention in Elizabeth Shackleton's diary on 9 March 1772: ‘Nanny Nutter lay with me for the first time.’
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The maid was also taken on pleasure outings into Yorkshire and was encouraged to visit her family regularly, often showing off her new clothes in the process (‘on this day Nanny Nutter put on her new stays and strip'd Callimanco gown & went home’), bearing gifts from Mrs Shackleton to the Nutter family.
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From Elizabeth Shackleton's perspective, this appears an affectionate and lenient regime. Doubtless she considered herself a very generous employer.