Up and Down Stairs (25 page)

While it can be misleading to compare monetary values over the centuries, it is interesting to dwell on the sample of a more mid-sized country-house household in the early nineteenth century as given in the table of wages in
The Complete Servant
. The budget recorded by Samuel Adams for the ‘Household establishment of a respectable country gentleman with a young family’, with a net income £16,000 to £18,000, and ‘whose expenses do not exceed £7,000’, sets out the wages for twenty-seven servants in guineas ranging from the French cook, paid 80 guineas, and the butler, paid 50 guineas, down to the assistant gardener, who received only 12 shillings a week.
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This last sum was probably a good indication of the average agricultural labourer’s wage at the time, in a job that did not include the accommodation or food provided to a domestic servant in a country house.
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Not surprisingly, the housekeeper is held up in the Adamses’ book of 1825, and in Mrs Beeton’s 1861 successor, as the key to a well-run household, after the mistress herself. The Adamses saw her as having ‘the control and direction of the servants, particularly of the female servants’. As well as having the care of the furniture and linen, the housekeeper has also inherited at least part of the role previously held by the clerk of the kitchen, namely of ‘the grocery – dried and other fruits, spices, condiments, soap, candles, and stores of all kinds, for culinary and other domestic uses. She makes all the pickles, preserves, and sometimes the best pastry – She generally distils and prepares the compound and simple waters, and spirits, essential and other oils,
perfumery, cosmetics, and similar articles that are prepared at home, for domestic purposes.’

A housekeeper always oversaw the china closet and the still room, which according to the Adamses was used for preserving fruits and making distilled waters, jam and home-made wines, as well as for the preparation of breakfast and afternoon tea.
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These duties remained remarkably consistent over the centuries until the later twentieth century and reflect the varied use that could be made of the resources of an agricultural estate.

An idea of the country-house housekeepers of the period can be gleaned from well-known novels, ranging from the kindly ones, such as Mrs Fairfax at Thornfield who receives Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to such fierce dragons as Mrs Medlock in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden
. In real life, as sometimes in fiction, many housekeepers stayed with individual families for many years, becoming almost part of the family, and were certainly often treated as close confidantes.
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Susan Clarke was housekeeper to the Benyons at Englefield House in Berkshire for over twenty years from 1854.
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A housekeeper might even be buried beside her employer’s family, as was Mary Carryll, the woman who served the ladies of Llangollen.
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In the churchyard at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, there is a headstone to Anne Goymore, who died in 1831 having served twenty-six years as housekeeper to the Earl of Carnavon.
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At Erddig, near Wrexham, Mary Webster, formerly the cook, was promoted to housekeeper and stayed with the family for thirty years until her death in 1875. A ditty written by Philip Yorke about Mary is worth quoting because it stresses storekeeping as a central duty:

Upon the portly frame we look
Of one who was our former Cook.
No better keeper of our Store,
Did ever enter at our door.
She knew and pandered to our taste,
Allowed no want and yet no waste;
And for some thirty years and more
The cares of Office here she bore.

Mary did indeed prove to be very frugal; she was found to have left over £1,300 in her will. She was replaced by Harriet Rogers, a former lady’s maid and daughter of the family’s trusted estate carpenter.
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Another long-term housekeeper was shown consideration by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, according to his privately printed
Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick
(1845): ‘From unwillingness to disturb Hannah Gregory, the house-keeper who dwelt here for a half a century, there had been no attempt made to alter the distribution of these the most agreeable rooms at Chatsworth.’ He later converted them into a Grotto Room.
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Whilst some housekeepers were married and others were widowed, many seem to have been unmarried but were given the title of ‘Mrs’ as a mark of respect.
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They characteristically carried large bunches of keys on a ring attached to their waists (known as a ‘chatelaine’), as everything from the linen to the spices had to be kept locked up.
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By long tradition, no doubt to reinforce a sense of hierarchy below stairs, in some households the upper servants took their meals, or at least the pudding course, in the housekeeper’s room, which the junior servants often dubbed ‘the Pug’s Parlour’, whilst in larger country houses this was the function of the house steward’s room.
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Why upper servants were known as ‘pugs’ is uncertain; it is possible that it referred to the haughty upturned nose and downturned mouth of an upper servant of caricature being compared to those of the pug dog.

As in the eighteenth century, housekeepers were generally delegated the task of conducting passing visitors around the house, usually when the family were away – but not always, as fans of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
will remember from Lizzie Bennet’s unexpected encounter with Mr Darcy whilst paying a tourist’s visit to his country seat Pemberley. There is a portrait of Mrs Garnett, the housekeeper at Kedleston, painted by Thomas Barber around 1800, showing her with the catalogue of the Kedleston pictures in her hand. She impressed Dr Johnson with her knowledge, and another visitor recorded that, of all the housekeepers of a noblemen’s houses, ‘this was the most obliging and intelligent . . . she seem’d to take a delight
in her business’. Senior servants were expected to be enthusiastic in their knowledge of family history and their oral transmission of the stories of both house and family.
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In 1832, the artist Mary Ellen Best, renowned for her precise interior scenes, visited Castle Howard in Yorkshire and painted the famous Orleans Room (later the Turquoise Drawing Room). Her exact watercolour depicts the ample and dignified figure of the housekeeper in her bonnet, with her bunch of keys, much as she must have seemed when accompanying visitors. This individual was Mrs Flynn, whose conduct came under scrutiny in the winter of 1826–7 when it was noticed that the consumption of tea among the servants was excessive. John Henderson, the resident agent, and James Loch, superintendent of Lord Carlisle’s estates, enquired into the matter in minute detail to see whether any theft had occurred, calculating the rate of tea consumption per person and the price of ‘Servant’s Tea’ (a cheaper brand than that served to family and guests).

Today it seems incredible that such a senior management figure would concern themselves with such a trivial matter, but a tea allowance was considered a valuable commodity (tea itself being an expensive, imported item) and was often a separate part of the wages. Mrs Flynn was acquitted of any wrongdoing, and it is now thought that suspicion fell on her as a result of her feud with the cook, Samuel Damant.
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Housekeepers were required to keep exact accounts of provisions and this incident illustrates the emphasis placed on the accounting and management of those valuable supplies, especially if bought in.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the housekeeper, along with the steward and butler, would be key in the preparation of the house for the reception of important guests, not least because she commanded the linen and supervised the housemaids who would clean and maintain bedrooms. Famously, when preparing for a visit from Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington found it hard to persuade his housekeeper that his home was up to scratch. He wrote to a friend: ‘I thought that she would have burst out crying while I was talking to Her of the Honour intended and the preparations to be made. She said to me, very nearly in the Words which I had used two
nights before to Her Majesty, “My Lord, Your House is a very comfortable Residence for yourself, your Family and your friends; But it is not fit for the Reception of the Sovereign and her Court.”’ Apart from anything else, she felt that the housekeeper’s room was much too small for the Queen’s dressers and the steward’s room too cramped for the principal attendants to dine in. Improvements were put in hand.
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A housekeeper ought, the Adamses wrote, to be ‘a steady middle-aged woman, of great experience in her profession, and a tolerable knowledge of the world’. The prudent housekeeper ‘will carefully avoid all approaches to familiarity; as that destroys subordination, and ultimately induces contempt.’
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Mrs Beeton, echoing the writings of Hannah Wolley and Mary Evelyn in the seventeenth century, as well as Elizabeth Raffald in the eighteenth, thought that the housekeeper ‘must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring, to the management of the household, all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance, in the same degree as if she were at the head of
her own
family.’
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The housekeeper’s role was therefore almost that of a mistress by proxy, and many junior female servants would have certainly looked to the housekeeper as their boss. Mrs Beeton asked housekeepers to be ‘Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any of the domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house, and will see that every department is thoroughly attended to, and that the servants are comfortable, at the same time that their various duties are properly performed.’
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In most houses there was also a still-room maid, who worked under the housekeeper and in whose steps she might well hope to tread. This maid would usually help look after the china kept in the housekeeper’s room, lay out the breakfast for the upper staff in the housekeeper’s room and prepare the trays for early-morning tea in the bedrooms as well as afternoon tea in the drawing room, thus relieving the pressure on the main kitchen. Scones, sandwiches and cakes were made in the still room, not in the main kitchen, and the still-room maid might also help with the preparation of meals in the servants’ hall.
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In households with children, especially with the dramatic decrease in infant mortality rates over the century, several members of staff might be devoted solely to the care of the family’s children. It would be headed by a nurse for the younger ones, a role that had turned into that of ‘nanny’ by the end of the nineteenth century; although the origins of the word are obscure, it can be traced back to the eighteenth.
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The nurse, or nanny, had a nurserymaid to assist her in serving meals and looking after the infants, whilst the older children would have a governess to give them lessons at home, and sometimes a male tutor, although boys would probably go away to school after a certain age.

Clearly the correct nursing of children was critical in landowning families where inheritance was so crucial an issue. As Samuel and Sarah Adams wrote in 1825, ‘as the hopes of families, and the comfort and happiness of parents are confided to the charge of females who superintend nurseries of children, no duties are more important, and none require more incessant and unremitting care and anxiety.’ Personality had to be taken into consideration: ‘This important Servant ought to be of a lively and cheerful disposition, perfectly good tempered and clean and neat in her habits.’
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Mrs Beeton had her own contribution to make: ‘The responsible duties of the upper nursemaid commence with the weaning of the child: it must now be separated from the mother or wet-nurse, at least for a time, and the cares of the nursemaid . . . are now to be entirely devoted to the infant.’ The nurse ‘washes, dresses, and feeds it; walks out with it, and regulates all its little wants’. She had further views on character and attributes: ‘Patience and good temper are indispensable qualities . . . She ought also to be acquainted with the art of ironing and trimming little caps, and be handy with her needle.’ Below her would be an under nursemaid to clean, dust, make beds, bring up and remove meals, although sometimes a nursery footman or a nurserymaid would help with some of these tasks.
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Whilst some nurses might be marvels of forbearance and selflessness on rare occasions they could be monsters. The great politician Lord Curzon left a chilling remembrance of his nanny, a Miss
Paraman: ‘She persecuted and beat us in the most cruel way and established over us a system of terrorism so complete that not one of us ever mustered up the courage to walk upstairs and tell our father or mother.’ More alarmingly: ‘She spanked us with the sole of her slipper on the bare back, beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs in uncomfortable positions with our hands holding a pole or blackboard behind our back.’
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The torture could take yet stranger forms: ‘She made me write a letter to the butler asking him to make a birch for me with which I was to be punished for lying, and requesting him to read it out in the servants’ hall.’
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This was the man later given the responsibility of running India as Viceroy.

Stories of the devotion and kindness of nurses and nannies were perhaps more common, with one of the most famous of the period deserving a mention here. Mrs Everest, the beloved nanny of Sir Winston Churchill, joined the family in 1874 within six weeks of his birth and remained with them, eventually becoming housekeeper, until her death in 1895, when Winston was twenty. For this lonely boy this calm, warm, loving character became his closest confidante and emotional ally.
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Until he was eight he slept in her room, and was fed, washed and changed by her. It was due to her devoted care that he survived pneumonia at the age of twelve. He was distraught when his parents abruptly ‘retired’ her without pay in 1893, writing to them in protest, and he later paid her doctor’s bills himself when he was at Sandhurst. In
My Early Life
, he described how, when he visited her when she was mortally ill with peritonitis, her chief concern was that he has wearing a wet jacket: ‘She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years that I had lived.’
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