Up and Down Stairs (23 page)

[The other servants] will be placed where they can perform their several offices also unmolested; and we shall lay them open to the inspection of the upper servants continually, and place them in readiness to attend the family, by means of a short open passage of communication between the wing in which they are lodged and the body of the house.

[For the other wing:] As we shall propose to lodge in one wing the lower class of servants, the other will conveniently hold the stables; as the gentleman in the country frequently is fond of horses, and has pleasure in seeing them well managed, the same kind of passage may be opened from the body of the house to that wing as to the other.
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As Ware makes little reference to the actual personal sleeping accommodation of servants, we must assume he imagined these to have been relegated to attic areas, over the main house, or over the kitchen, the stable or other outhouses, as we have already seen. These quarters, often shared, were referred to as ‘garrets’ or sometimes ‘barracks’. Whilst numerous additions were made to houses in the eighteenth century that bore little relationship to Ware’s Palladian-inspired ideals, they nevertheless offer an insight into the architectural thinking, as well as the status and working conditions of country-house servants, of the period.

The increasing separation of the employer’s immediate family from the activity of servants was also expressed by the provision of tunnels to allow servants to approach the basement quarters out of sight of the main house. Examples of this can be seen at houses such as Newhailes, Scotland, and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire.
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Another great signifier of the more emphatically separate zones of the country house as it developed in the 18th century, between that of the employer’s family and that of the household servant, was the gradual evolution of the familiar system of fixed bells to summon servants from the service quarters to the main rooms, as needed. The diaries of Samuel Pepys refer to the fixing of a bell to summon servants from an adjoining ante-room, but by the middle of the eighteenth century more elaborate systems evolved for extending the wires attached to bells, along pipes, often installed by plumbers. The standard method involved bells operated by a wire tension system
between a distant pulley and the bell itself. They sometimes could sound in attic quarters, but usually in the servants’ hall or in the corridor outside (often improved and updated in the 19th century).
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A fine example of well-planned service spaces and service accommodation can be seen at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, one of the finest Palladian mansions of the mid eighteenth century, which certainly had a bell-pull system installed in the 1750s. The patron of the house, Thomas Coke, the Earl of Leicester, sent his executant architect, Mathew Brettingham, on a reconnoitring tour of other houses, asking him in a letter of around 1737 to ‘Pray take notice of those doors cover’d with green bays [baize] and the hinges that make them shut of themselves.’
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Brettingham recorded the original layout of the servants’ areas (largely contained within what read architecturally as a rusticated basement but was in fact a ground floor) and, echoing Ware, he argued that there was a ‘peculiar conveniency’ in ‘having the upper servants’ offices, to which the basement stor[e]y is appropriated, placed under the principal apartments, consequently nearer to the master and his company’.
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The accommodation at Holkham is based on the great state rooms occupying the centre, with four wings housing family, guests, kitchen and chapel. The kitchen, which took up a whole wing, was supported by an extensive and carefully planned kitchen court, with a scullery, a west larder and another larder, having access to the court; in the yard were chicken coops for fattening chicken, a charcoal and ash bin, and a slaughterhouse; the courtyard attached to the chapel wing housed the laundry with a mangle room and a wash-house underneath the chapel.

The kitchen survives as a handsome and model example of its kind from the era of the grand Palladian mansion; the diarist Mrs Lybbe Powys described it in 1756 thus: ‘such an amazing large and good kitchen I never saw, everything in it so nice and clever’.
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In the family wing (to the south-east) were rooms for the maids (who had direct access via a staircase to the room above), as well as others for the valet and the secretary beneath the Long Library, whilst a footman slept in a small room near the staircase.

The butler’s suite, pantry, bedroom and plate room lay close to the family wing, at the west end of the south corridor. The pantry included equipment for washing cutlery and glasses. It is also known that chessboards and backgammon tables were kept here for the use of family and guests. Across the corridor, steps led down to the cellar, and beer was piped directly through from the brewery at the other end of the house.
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The housekeeper was based at the opposite end of the corridor, from which she recorded acquisitions and administered the dessert room, still room, laundry and dairy. There was a separate breakfast room for senior servants. A bedchamber was recorded on this floor, possibly for one or more laundrymaids. Two large rooms in the chapel wing, each containing three beds, were recorded in 1774 as accommodation for the housemaids and were later converted to nurseries.

The house steward had a bedroom and an office in the north-east corner of the basement floor; close by was the senior servants’ dining room, where the steward, the butler, the housekeeper and the senior footmen, as well as visiting servants of the same rank, would take their dinner, waited on by the steward’s room boy. The servants’ hall lay just inside the kitchen wing and was no doubt usually comfortably warm all year round.
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The basement was like a small village.

In the mid-eighteenth century there would probably have been between twenty-five and thirty servants at Holkham, presided over by the house porter, although on special occasions quantities of visitors’ servants could swell these numbers considerably. Bedrooms for their particular use were above the guest wing (which was still known as the Strangers’ Wing) and in the other attic rooms on the east side. Above the kitchen and the servants’ hall lay a suite of rooms that were probably occupied by footmen and other male servants, as inventories record only single beds in each, all four-posters with blue-and-white checked hangings.
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The inventories of these great houses, recording the furnishings throughout and their value, often taken at the death of the owner, can be illuminating.
Noble Households: Eighteenth-Century Inventories of Great English Houses
, edited by Tessa Murdoch, offers numerous
examples of the furnishings of servants’ halls and bedrooms, as well as their working quarters, lending colour and detail to these little-investigated lives.

At Boughton in 1709, amid the damask- and tapestry-hung bedrooms, is a ‘Closet where the footman lyes’, furnished with ‘Bedstead [with] Callico furniture compleat feather bed bolster chequer’d quilt cane chair valued four pounds twelve shillings’. The footmen’s waiting room contained ‘A folding Table six cane chairs two stuft valeur chairs one cloath and one Turkey wrought Chair Two Camp leather Chairs and a wooden chair valued one pound ten shillings’.
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The steward’s hall, where the senior servants dined, had ‘Eleven wooden Chairs four cane elbow Sattees large deal oval Table stone table pair large brass Andirons pair doggs tongs bellows wooden Stool Matt under the Table large wattle mat at the Entrance of the Door Another Table valued five pounds.’
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At Kiveton in Yorkshire, the Duke of Leeds’ house, the steward’s hall, and its adjoining closet, were rather better appointed in 1727, containing ‘I Large foulding Wainscoat Table, I Deel Side board Table’, as well as a number of pictures, including a ‘prospective of Portsmouth’, another of Constantinople and another of Tangier. There were also, among the necessaries for meals, eighteen chairs with leather seats, five drinking mugs and eighteen glasses.
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It was quite common to find the adjective ‘old’ or ‘worn’ to describe the furnishings of servants’ rooms in these inventories, presumably cast-off items from the main family rooms that were being replaced.
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At Blenheim Palace in 1740, there are a number of references to the furnishings of servants’ rooms adjoining the bedrooms of their employers. For instance, in the ‘Appartment over the Dukes Bedchamber’, in ‘the Servants Room to this Appartment: A Bed and all Conveniences proper for that use’ and in the apartment ‘that fronts the grand Parterre’ in the servants’ room ‘A Yellow Bed & all things Convenient for a Servant’ – the servants’ furniture were considered just too humble to list.
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While it is possible to re-create the appearance of servants’ rooms of two centuries past, inevitably none comes down to us in an entirely unaltered state with all its original contents intact. It is only in these
precisely taken lists that we can read the actual evidence of how country-house servants of the period fared, and wonder how much comfort and refuge was actually provided. These inventories illustrate too the extent to which servants’ lives were still physically and functionally embedded in the great country house in the eighteenth century, as they were to remain for the next hundred years.

T
HE WORK OF
the country-house servant in the nineteenth century is especially worthy of attention, not least because of the greater accessibility of records on the subject, but also because it could be argued that this century – and the latter part of it in particular – was the apogee of the servant-supported, country-house way of life. By 1900 the households of landowners, industrialists and bankers, whether they were buying into or marrying into landed society (or even both), had reached a supreme pitch of organisation – prefigured in the eighteenth century. As the
Servant’s Practical Guide
of 1880 noted: ‘Without the constant co-operation of well-trained servants, domestic machinery is completely thrown out of gear, and the best bred of hostesses placed at a disadvantage.’
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At its best, this well-oiled machinery was widely admired by visitors from overseas. In the 1840s, American author Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote appreciatively of the smooth management of English country houses: ‘An arrival in a strange house in England seems to a foreigner almost magical. The absence of all bustle consequent on the same event abroad – the silence, respectfulness and self-possession of the servants – it is like the golden facility of a dream.’
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This was echoed in a remarkable passage in the memoirs of the black American educationalist Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
(1901). Having been born in slavery, and after beginning life as a labourer, Mr Washington managed to receive a good education and became an important voice in the search for African-American rights at the turn of the century. In 1899, a holiday to Europe led to a period in England, of which he wrote:

On various occasions Mrs. Washington and I were guests of Englishmen in their country homes, where I think, one sees the Englishman at his best. The home life of the English seems to me about as perfect as anything can be. Everything moves like clockwork. I was impressed too with the deference that the servants show to their ‘masters’ and ‘mistresses’ – terms which I suppose would not be tolerated in America. The English servant expects, as a rule, to be nothing but a servant, and so perfects himself in the art to a degree that no class of servant in America has yet reached. In our country the servant expects to become, in a few years time, a ‘master’ himself. Which system is preferable? I will not venture an answer.
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The nineteenth century was, of course, the great age of industrialisation and the expansion of towns, up until the 1880s at least (when a serious agricultural depression set in, as a result of competition from North and South American imports of grain and beef). This industrial age concentrated considerable new wealth into the world of the country house, partly because so many established landowners had considerable mineral rights at their command and therefore benefited, both directly and indirectly, from the industrial boom. Others owned land that could be profitably developed as towns expanded.
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Industrialists, bankers and other entrepreneurs also invested in land, partly for economic reasons, but also to enjoy the obvious pleasures and social amenities that their property could bring. Thus between the 1840s and the 1880s, numerous new country houses were built, both for landed families and for what is sometimes called ‘new money’. Both groups used their landed interests to attach themselves to national and local government.

The other defining feature of the century was the vast expansion of domestic servants being employed in professional and middle-class homes, inevitably echoing the household structures of the aristocratic world. This increased the kudos of working for the real thing, a traditional landed and titled family. As the numbers of full-time domestic servants continued to rise, the established and well-trained higher-ranking country-house servant was looked on increasingly as the model, representing the epitome of a growing profession.
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This expansion also offered greater opportunities for the junior servant who wanted to change careers or move upwards. The pool for general servants was much larger, although there is evidence to suggest that life in domestic service in smaller urban households was often more gruelling as well as less companionable. At the same time the burgeoning railways and the better roads of the period made travel easier between country houses, leading to an upsurge of entertaining on a huge scale.