Up and Down Stairs (22 page)

As well as illustrating the complexity of running large establishments, it reveals that the duke and duchess set great store by good
household management as a reflection on themselves. It covers the duties of all the servants, the upper servants in particular, down to such obvious minutiae as who tends which fires in the house: ‘The fires, in all the Stranger’s Bed Chambers, and Dressing Rooms, are to be taken care of by the servants of those who inhabit them.’
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Guests would usually be travelling with their own servants or have servants assigned to them.

It is clear from the document’s conclusion that the duke’s household had not always been so well organised:

If any servant of any Degree whatsoever, shall presume not to pay the proper attention to these Orders, and Regulations, the Duke is to be immediately informed thereof, and he shall be highly offended with the house steward or any other of the Upper Servants, who shall connive at the Disobedience of these Orders, and not immediately report such Persons as shall make any Difficulty about obeying them; the[re] being determined to establish that Regularity which used formerly to subsist in this family, and which, he is ashamed to say, has for these few last years been scandalously neglected, to the Disgrace of everybody who had belonged to the Family.
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There is also a transcript of a memorandum to le Moine, his comptroller, relating to the provision of servants’ meals, and trying to confine them to either the steward’s room or the servants’ hall:

I am very sorry to perceive by the list sent me in today that a Custom is again this y[ea]r renewed of having more tables among my Servts than the Stewards Room & Servts Hall – I gave a positive order last year that this custom should be discontinued & that the young Ladies, maids, & People of the Kitchen should always dine in the Servts Hall as they had invariably done in my Family, but within these last two or three years.

I likewise perceive that the Place & Rank of my Secretary seems to be completely misunderstood – He is not to be looked upon as a menial servant as the Law of the Land places him above the Station of a Servt & does not include him in the Tax upon servants – He is always to be looked upon at the head of My Family, except in this Castle, where the Grieve, or Constable of the Castle, is my immediate Representative.
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There is another version in the collection, ‘Regulations and Instructions for the Future Management of the Family, Instructions for the Comptroller’, dated 1808 and equally stringent, which covers the oversight of the management of the household, the checking of accounts, the paying of bills and keeping records of expenses.
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‘You are on no account to pay the least regard to what you may be told about
custom
– if the thing mentioned is proper, it ought to be adopted, whether it is a custom or not in the Family – if it is improper the sooner it is put to an end the better, & its having been a custom makes it the more necessary to abolish it and guard against it in the future.’
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Great attention is paid to entrances and exits, to ‘who is introduced by whom – or who may remain on a visit; you are to endeavour to prevent any Person being introduced into the Family who should not be so’. As in previous centuries, emphasis is placed on monitoring who is in the house at any one time, and the comptroller is asked to keep a general register ‘to include all the Establishments at my different houses with every one’s names and duties.’
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On recruiting servants, the comptroller ‘must specify their age (& Height, if under Servts) – their county – whither married or single. N.B. Single Persons are always to be preferred to married ones for servants.’ The duke was particular about uniforms: ‘When the new liveries come home from the Tailor, you will make the Servants parade with them on (the Tailor attending) to see that they are well made, agreeably to the proper pattern, & fit well.’ They are then to be ‘carefully stored & named’. The comptroller is also responsible for servants’ behaviour, ‘keeping good hours’, and is on ‘no account to suffer any gambling – Drunkenness, or other irregularity and improper conduct’.
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In a 1768 ‘Household Book’ for Alnwick, which includes many of the earlier draft notes towards these regulations, the duchess outlined her preferred management of the servants’ hall, which was ‘to be open’d every morning at 9 and to continue so till 10 & then the Usher of the Hall is to lock it up and keep it so until the dinner Bell rings when it is to be open’d for 2 hours & then lock’d up again till their supper Bell rings, when it is to be kept open till the Duke &
Dutchess ring to go to Bed and no longer.’ Curiously, she adds: ‘All Servants are to find their own knives & forks.’
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Another series of drafts, dated to the 1770s and possibly in the duchess’s own handwriting, set out the rules for behaviour: ‘No swearing or cursing or indecent Language is to be suffered at any of the Tables. If in the Serv[a]nts Hall the person for the first fault to be turned out of the Servants Hall & not re-admitted but on promise of better conduct for the future & if the fault is repeated they are to be turn’d away . . . Maid servants are not to sit gossiping in Servants Hall or even to be near there but at Meal Time & to depart as soon as the Table is clear’d.’
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In the same book there is a note on ‘Rules for Conduct’, relating to her own attendance at church and daily prayers, in which she took herself to task: ‘Not to be severe with my servants for small thoughts [presumably meaning faults] and frequent chiding lessens authority. To instruct my servants as far as I am able to furnish them good Books suited to their Capacity and see they attend regularly at church.’ She further resolved: ‘If any of my Servants are vicious it is my duty to reprove them severely & to employ all sorts of means to reclaim them, but if I find no appearance of success I ought to turn them away.’
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At Alnwick and elsewhere, most servants – especially the upper and liveried servants – expected tips (or ‘vails’) to supplement their annual wages, which were usually given by guests when they came to stay, or to dine, or for other considerations. A servant would sometimes be told how much he might expect in tips before he was hired. One coachman’s place, for example, was advertised in 1760 at ‘£10 per annum with £6 in vails’. In the early eighteenth century, the Earl of Leicester disbursed substantial amounts in vails when on visits to the houses of his friends, giving 10 guineas to Lord Hobart’s staff, and 10 more to the Duke of Grafton’s. On family visits he would hand a lump sum to a senior servant to distribute to the others.
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In
Eight Letters to His Grace the Duke of — on the custom of Vails-Giving in England
(1760), Jonas Hanway railed against the custom of tipping. He imagined the horrors of a country parson invited to stay with a bishop, ‘obliged by the tyranny of this custom to pay more for
one dinner, than will feed his large family for a week!’ He recounted the tale of a colonel staying with a duke who asked his host for the names of the servants. When his host asked him the reason, he replied: ‘Why, says he, My Lord Duke, in plain truth, I cannot afford to pay for such good dinners as your Grace gives me and at the same time support my equipage without which I cannot come here; I therefore intend to remember these gentlemen in a codicil in my will’.
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By ‘pay’, here he meant ‘tip’.

The Duke of Newcastle showed Hanway’s letters to George III, who tried to set an example to the nation by banning the acceptance of vails in his own household. This move was greeted with suppressed fury by the royal servants and the next time the king visited the theatre he was hissed by members of his own staff from the anonymity of the gallery. However, he is said to have sat through it all ‘with the greatest composure’.
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On a more modest scale was this piece of fatherly advice on tipping from the owner of Mapledurham in Berkshire to his son. When Michael Blount went to stay with his uncle at Stonor Park in Oxfordshire in 1761, his father (also Michael) wrote to him, offering hints on what clothes he should take and telling him that

uncle Strickland will tell you the hours and rules of the house, which I dare say you will strictly comply with . . . When you leave Stonor (which will be the following Wednesday or Thursday, when I will order horses and a servant to go again for you) you must give the maid that makes your bed and fires there
half a crown
, the butler
half a crown
, the groom
two shillings
as you get upon your horse, and the man that dresses your hair &c
four shillings
. This will be handsome and sufficient.
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Some houses of the period might be little occupied for much of the year. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lord Fitzwilliam was accustomed to leaving his house at Milton, Oxfordshire, in the care of his steward, housekeeper and chaplain for years at a time. Although he planned to visit Milton every year from 1687, he scarcely set foot there until 1709.
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As intermarriage between landed families often concentrated estates under one name, many of the
wealthiest landowners had more than one country seat and like their medieval forebears would pass the seasons travelling from one to another.

Most major landowners also maintained a London house, or at least spent time in the capital. As the century progressed, they might also visit fashionable places such as Bath, or travel abroad, with the result that many country houses remained principally in the sole care of servants for many months together. Horace Walpole’s father, Sir Robert Walpole, famously spent only a few weeks a year at Houghton, Norfolk, when he became prime minister. In his absence the household servants would show the visiting public around his famous art collection.
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The architects of the great country houses paid increasing attention to the rational planning of the service areas, particularly the kitchens and rooms for the preparation of foodstuffs, ensuring their interconnectedness with the laundry and dairy as well as with the household apartments that they served. Many houses built in the eighteenth century exemplify the symmetrical arrangement of these apartments, with kitchens and stables arranged either side of the main block, perhaps connected by a semi-raised basement level in between.

The Complete Body of Architecture
(1758), by the Palladian architect Isaac Ware, sets out the classical ideals of country-house architecture throughout the century.
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It included a number of options for the classical house, placing the servants’ accommodation in wings. It was in such devices, he argued, that the very nature of architecture is expressed, and his concept certainly expressed the well-established hierarchy of the upper servants. Furthermore, in Book III Ware emphasises the architect’s flair for making an aesthetic virtue out of a social necessity – indeed, suggesting that it takes a real architect to work out the best way to incorporate the services and offices into the whole ensemble.

‘The next [most important] consideration is for offices, and here comes the first principle of elegance and contrivance in the plan. [The architect] is not to put the kitchen under the parlours, or the stables in a corner of a yard: a bricklayer could do that, we are
speaking of the business of an architect . . . here shall arise, with little more expence, a centre, its wings and their communication, the whole regular and uniform.’
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Having dealt with the plan of the main house, he addresses the issue of the two wings:

That on the right hand may contain the kitchen, and offices, belonging to it, and the other the stables. The front of the right hand wing may be occupied by a kitchen entirely . . . To the left of the stairs may be a servants’ hall, sixteen foot square; and behind that a larder, twelve foot ten by fourteen foot six. In the centre of the other wing may be a double coach-house; for which there should be allowed the whole breadth of the wing, with ten foot six inches width in the clear, and on each side of these may be the stables.
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Later, he notes that where kitchens and offices are sited in wings, which is ‘commonplace in the country, where the ground is generally the property of the person who builds’, for practical reasons ‘there must be places of waiting nearer the principal apartments, for those servants whose business it is to be about the person of the master and the lady’.
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Again Ware saw an opportunity to use architectural placing and divisions as a way of protecting the aristocracy from exposure to the lowest ranks in the staff hierarchy. However, by careful manipulation of the design you could, he argued, keep the senior servants close at hand, for convenience of communication.

In this [plan] we shall direct [the architect] to lodge a part of the servants at a distance from the house and a part within it. The upper servants are most wanted about the persons of the master and lady, and these we shall place in a basement stor[e]y under the parlour floor; They can be suffered here because they are cleanly and quiet; therefore there is convenience in having them near, and nothing disagreeable. On the other hand the kitchen is hot, the sculleries are offensive and the servants hall is noisy; these therefore we shall place in one of the wings. This is the conduct of reason; the house-keeper, the clerk of the kitchen, and other domesticks of the like rank, will thus be separated from the rabble of the kitchen; they will be at quiet to discharge their several duties, and they will be ready to attend the master or lady.