Up and Down Stairs (18 page)

The female indoor staff were by this time very much under the leadership of the housekeeper. This increasingly essential figure managed the linen, the cleaning of rooms and, if there were no clerk of the kitchen or male cook, the kitchen. Below her would be the female cook, followed by a number of chambermaids, housemaids, laundrymaids, and kitchen and scullery maids. Those housekeeping duties that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been managed by the mistresses of the household were by now largely handed over to a trusted housekeeper. Many of them seem to have done long service, as did Mrs Garnett at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, who ran the house for over forty years.
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One former housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald, who had worked for Lady Elizabeth Warburton, put together over 800 recipes for pickling, potting, wines, vinegars, ‘catchups’, and distilling, which were published as
The Experienced English Housewife
in 1769. This entrepreneurial lady also set up an early registry for servants in Manchester, before running an inn, a profession to which many retired senior servants devoted their savings and energies.
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At the beginning of the century, in gentry households at least, housekeepers might well be a family relative of some sort. In 1792, Francis Grose, looking back in time, wrote: ‘When I was a young man there existed in the families of . . . the rank of gentlemen, a certain antiquated female, either maiden or widow, commonly an aunt or cousin.’ He recalled: ‘By the side of this good old lady jingled a bunch of keys, securing in different closets and corner cupboards all sorts of cordial waters’ as well as: ‘washes for the complexion . . . a rich, seed cake, a number of pots of currant jelly and raspberry jam.’
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As the housekeeper’s room became a place where expensive foodstuffs would be stored under lock and key, the individuals themselves
were often depicted in paintings with a large bunch of keys at their waists.

They were more likely to have been a senior indoor maid, cook, or nurse. In the mid eighteenth century, one dairymaid, Sarah Staniforth, unusually managed to work her way up the ladder. After joining the staff of Holkham Hall in 1731, she became housemaid in 1741 and housekeeper in 1750. In this post she was paid £20 a year and remained there until her death in 1772. In her will she left over £1,000.
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In grander country houses, a female might be an under-cook to a chef, but in many houses the sole and chief cook might be a woman. While (male) French chefs were popular with the aristocracy, there were many, like Hannah Glasse, who thought their worth exaggerated. She observed in
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy
(1747) that ‘if gentlemen will have French cooks they must pay for French tricks’. Her book was intended to instruct kitchenmaids in basic cookery, thus reducing the need for the lady of the house to instruct them herself.
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Recruiting a cook could obviously be a challenge. Lady Grisell Baillie’s household accounts for 1717 show that one cook arrived on 1 February and stayed just two weeks, whilst the next candidate spent only one night in the house. It was not until July that Lady Grisell found a cook who was content with the situation. Anne Griffith was to get ‘£7 a year’ and ‘£8 if she does well’.
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Mrs Delaney, looking for a cook for her country house, regretted the one that got away: ‘the cook I gave an account of who was a most desirable servant, said she could not live in the country it was so melancholy.’
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In
The Housekeeping Book of Susannah Whatman
(1776), the author stresses how important it was for the mistress, or her housekeeper, to lay down the rules of the house and the kitchen to any new cook: ‘When a new Cook comes, much attention is necessary till she is got into all the common rules and observances . . . filling the hog pails, washing up the butter dish, salad bowl etc.: giving an eye to the scowering of saucepans by the Dairy-maid, preserving the water in which the meat is boiled for broth: keeping all her places clean: managing her fire and her kitchen linen.’
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Mrs Purefoy, a gentry lady running her small country house, wrote to one candidate cook, Betty Hows, offering to train her in the finer points of her duties, which in her house also meant some cleaning and milking: ‘If you can roast & boyll & help clean an House, & make up Butter, & milk two or three cows . . . & you help iron & get up ye Cloaths. If you can do these things wee will endeavour to teach you the rest of the Cookery.’
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During the course of the eighteenth century, it appears that the roles of the traditional ‘waiting gentlewomen’ and the chambermaid gradually merged to become the familiar ‘lady’s maid’, a well-presented servant who would be always in attendance on a great lady. In many cases such a personal maid would sleep in the same room, an adjoining room or even in the passage outside, and travel with her mistress from place to place.

In another book,
The Servants Directory, Improved
, published in 1761, Hannah Glasse outlined the duties of the traditional chambermaid, who is encouraged to ‘Take great care to know all your mistress’s method and time of doing her business; and be very punctual and acute in your attendance . . . and be sure to have all her linen well air’d and when dress’d or undress’d, fold up everything very neat.’ She focuses on cleaning the fine textiles of the day, such as silks, satins and damasks, with special instructions for cleaning flowered silks with ‘bread and power-blue . . . and if any silver or gold flowers be in it, take a piece of crimson velvet and rub the flowers’.
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The housemaid was essentially the cleaner, doing everything from making beds and mending linen to cleaning floors, doors, windows, carpets and furniture, as well as the scrubbing, cleaning and preparation of fireplaces. A housemaid’s day was gruelling. In Hannah Glasse’s book she is told to:

Be up very early in a morning, as indeed you are first wanted; lace on your stays, and pin your things very tight about you, or you never can do work well . . .

Be sure always to have very clean feet, that you may not dirty your rooms, and learn to walk softly, that you may not disturb the family. The first thing, if in winter, is to light your fires, and clean your hearths; if in summer, the stove rubbed and the dirt in your hearth swept out.

These directions continue for over a page, before the housemaid is advised to move on to locks, then carpets, curtains, windows and shutters, dusting the pictures, frames and plasterwork, before sweeping the room out.
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Hannah Glasse includes many accepted techniques for cleaning and is clearly a great believer in fresh air:

For sweeping the stairs a little wet sand is recommended on the top stair, to help keep the dust down. All this you are to get done before your mistress rises. When the family is up, go into every bed chamber, throw open all the windows to air the rooms, and uncovering the beds to sweeten and air them; besides it is good for the health to air the bedding, and sweet to sleep in when the fresh air has had access to them, and a great help against bugs and fleas.
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Whilst scouring the house from top to bottom, housemaids were also expected to be properly modest in deportment and dress, and to be subservient, as is made clear by a note in the 1768 household book of the Duchess of Northumberland: ‘They are always to keep themselves clean & neat but not to dress above their station.’
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By the eighteenth century, the number of women servants in great country houses had swelled, and many had the most humble jobs. The former scullion, now a female scullery-maid, had to clean the kitchen and wash the cooking utensils used in the preparation of the meals – some of the most unforgiving work in the country house – as well as cleaning and preparing various foodstuffs, especially vegetables.

Hannah Glasse’s book gives the scullery-maid a messy and labour-intensive recipe for cleaning pewter, tin and copper: ‘Take a pail of wood ashes (either from the baker’s dyers or hot pressers, the latter is the best) half a pail of unslack’d lime, and four pails of soft water; boil them all in a copper together, stirring them; when they have boiled about half an hour, take it all together out of the copper into a tub, and let it stand cold, then pour off clear and bottle for use.’
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The laundrymaids too had a physically demanding job that was carried out in a series of outhouses, such as a washhouse and a dry laundry (with a range suitable to heat irons), often connected to the
main service courtyard. They worked with their hands in very hot water, handling wet clothes such as shirts and neckcloths, bedlinen and towels, which then had to be starched, bleached, dried, pressed and ironed.
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The proper care of household linen was reckoned one of the most important demonstrations of good housekeeping and there were massive quantities of it. The inventory at Blenheim in 1740 lists ‘Damask and Diaper Napkins Sixty Seven Dozen and five, Table Cloths of the best Sort Ninety three, Stewards Table Cloths twenty Fine Sheets Eighteen pair, Servants Sheets Forty Five pair,’ and so on.
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At Shugborough in staffordshire in 1792, the inventory included ‘85 Damask tablecloths, 92 dozen damask table napkins, Damask breakfast cloths, 23, Damask tea napkins, 29 dozen,’ to which should be added seventeen pairs of ‘Holland sheets & pillowcases’, nineteen pairs of ‘second sheets’, and eighteen pairs of ‘second pillowcases’.
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Laundry work was largely done by hand. Sometimes washing was pounded with wooden bats, but it might also need steeping in a liquid such as urine or lye (an alkali cleansing agent made by soaking wood ash in water to extract potassium salts), as well as soap-washing and boiling. Bleaching was a regular event, and up until the early twentieth century most country houses had specially dedicated bleaching or drying grounds, where linen, which could easily yellow, was laid out on long grass to dry and bleach in the sun – preferably a midwinter sun.
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The dairymaid separated cream, churned butter and made cheese for consumption in the house. The dairy was usually specially designed to remain cold and was sometimes an ornamental feature of the grounds of a great house. It had to be kept very clean, as the author Thomas Hale observed in the
Compleat Book of Husbandry
(1765): ‘First thing, and the most important of all in a Dairy is Cleanliness. Not only the vessels and utensils but the very Floor, walls and ceiling, everything that is in it and everything that is about it, must be thus managed with the utmost nicety of Cleanliness or there will be continual Damage and Losse.’
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The country-house nursery was of prime importance as the birth and upbringing of a healthy male heir were central to the aristocratic
mindset. Thus great efforts were made to ensure that babies were kept safe at a period when infant mortality was high among all classes; the mortality rate among upper-class children did not improve dramatically until the later eighteenth century.
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Hannah Glasse in
The Servants Directory
takes an unusual view of the nurserymaid’s duties: ‘A child when it comes into the world, is almost a round ball; it is the nurse’s part to assist nature, in bringing it to a proper shape.’
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Nurses often travelled with their charges. Among the Blount family letters is one in 1787 making preparations for a visit by the son and heir with his family. He writes saying that he will be travelling ‘with my wife’s maid, two nursery maids, & two men. The children may all be in the great Room . . . we will bring a little bed & bedding for the youngest . . . & the two maids may sleep in the large bed.’
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Infants would be cared for by a nurse and a nurserymaid, with additional help when required, and would often be breast-fed in their early months by a specially employed wet-nurse. The eighteenth-century beauty, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, famously defied convention and nursed her children herself, dispensing with a wet-nurse, although she did employ a ‘rocker’, literally a menial who rocked the cradle but was also expected to clean up the baby’s mess. The duchess had to dismiss her for drunkenness: ‘I perceived that she made the bed stink of wine and strong drink when she came near it . . . This morning I learnt she had been so drunk as to fall down and vomit.’
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Later on there would be tutors for the boys and governesses for the girls, who would attempt to provide a rounded education, always assuming that the boys were not sent away to school. It was a commonly held belief that private education by a tutor produced a more virtuous child.
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Daniel Defoe, in his book
The Compleat English Gentleman
(published around 1725), noted that aristocratic mothers were unwilling to let their boys go to school to be taught by a social inferior.
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The daily round of teaching a child was not necessarily unpleasant. In 1705, Lady Grisell Baillie wrote a note to her daughter’s governess on how she should spend her day: ‘To rise by seven o’clock and goe
about her duty of reading, etc. etc., and to be drest to come to Breckfast at nine, to play on the spinnet till eleven, from eleven till twelve to write and read French. At two o’clock sow her seam till four, at four learn arithmetic, after that dance and play on the spinet again till six and play [by] herself til supper and to bed at nine.’
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