Up and Down Stairs (26 page)

This degree of affection is sometimes demonstrated in memorials. In the Cecil graveyard at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, there are only three monuments to people who were not direct members of the family. Two were sisters who were nurse and wetnurse at Hatfield for thirty-six and twenty-nine years respectively; the other
was Caroline Hodges, the children’s nurse, whose tombstone tells that she ‘lived in their house for 43 years, a loved and trusted friend’.
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A similar series of monuments to beloved, long-serving servants can be found at Highclere in Hampshire. One individual is poignantly remembered on a wall plaque and on a headstone in the churchyard: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Mary Morton who died on the 10th of April, 1869, in the Garden Lodge of Highclere Castle, having nearly completed her 96th year. 37 years of that time were spent in the Carnarvon family. This Memorial Tablet is erected by Henrietta Countess of Carnarvon and Lady Gwendolen Herbert, her first friend in the family and her last, to whom she was nurse.’
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In January 1820, the Irish novelist Maria Edgworth, who had so celebrated the roles of faithful steward and nurse in her fiction, recorded in her diary the death of the family nurse: ‘Poor Kitty Billamore breathed her last this morning at one o’clock. A more faithful, warm-hearted excellent creature never existed. How many successions of children of this family she has nursed, and how many she has attended in illness and death, regardless of health! Lovell intends that she should be buried in the family vault, as she deserves, for she was more a friend than a servant.’
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The governess, another female figure associated with the nursery, especially for the education of girls, was made familiar by nineteenth-century writers. Jane Austen is sympathetic to the plight of the governess in
Emma
, whilst Charlotte Brontë created the plucky but sensitive figure of Jane Eyre in her eponymous novel. (Jane’s unexpected legacy and subsequent marriage with her former employer would in real life have been a very great rarity.) The governess was in a delicate position, as well as an awkward one, being expected to come from a ‘genteel’ background yet to be in need of a paid job in a stranger’s family. As the Adamses wrote in 1825 – in what reads like a job description for Jane Eyre’s fictional post at Thornfield Hall – ‘there is a constant demand for females of genteel manners, and finished education, at salaries which vary according to qualifications and duties between 25 and 120 pounds
per annum.
’
⁵⁶
As they observed:

Teachers in seminaries, half-boarders, educated for the purpose, and the unsettled daughters of respectable families of moderate fortune, who have received a finished education are usually selected for this important duty . . . Good temper, and good manners, with a genteel exterior, are indispensable: for more is learnt by example than precept. Besides the governess who desires to be on a footing with the family, ought to be able to conduct herself in such manner, as never to render an apology necessary for her presence at family parties.

Governesses would be required to teach English, French and Italian, arithemetic, geography and the popular sciences.
⁵⁷

Their situation was often made worse by the remoteness of many country houses. Mrs Smith, an archly aristocratic Scot, recalled in
Memoirs of a Highland Lady
her disdain for her own governess, Miss Elphick, in the early nineteenth century: ‘I was pert enough, I daresay, for the education we had received had given us an extreme contempt for such ignorance, but what girl of fifteen, brought up as I had been, could be expected to show respect for an illiterate woman of very ungovernable temper, whose ideas had been gathered from a class lower than we could have possible been acquainted with, and whose habits were those of a servant.’
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Charlotte Brontë wrote bitingly of a profession she loathed: ‘A private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil,’ a sentiment that must have been shared by countless other servants of all ranks over the ages. Her own experiences had disillusioned her: ‘I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society; but I have had enough of it – it is dreary work to look on and listen.’
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However, there were many aristocrats who looked back on those who taught them with affection and gratitude. Lady Dorothy Nevill recalled her governess, Elizabeth Redgrave, the sister of the famous painter Richard Redgrave, as having ‘great cultivation, besides being possessed of a certain distinction of mind . . . Her tender care and companionship – in childhood a preceptress, in after-life a much-loved friend – I have always felt to have been an inestimable boon, for thus was implanted in my mind the love of the artistic and the
beautiful which during my life has proved a certain and ever-present source of delight.’
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Male tutors might be resident or brought in as required. The Hon. Grantley Berkeley in his
Life and Recollections
(1865) reflected on his patchy education, and that of his siblings:

The arrangements made for our education did not promise much – a very gentleman like young man, a Mr Benson, came to us from a school near Brentford three times a week to hear us boys repeat our lessons; and an absurd, fat old fellow, named Second, possessing as little pretension to agility as to grace, arrived once a week to teach us dancing . . . the man who taught us most was a man engaged . . . to look after the game. His lessons were readily acquired partly because we were not expected to learn them. [By this he meant, of course, fishing, shooting and hunting, under the guidance of a footman named Reece.]
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After the housekeeper, one of the most senior and trusted household figures was the cook. It is the female cook that will be considered here, together with the other female servants, whilst the male cook, or chef, will be addressed later in the chapter, in conjunction with the menservants.

Mr and Mrs Adams’s advice to the female cook is: ‘On her first going into a family [she] will do well to inform herself of the rules and regulations of the house – the customs of the kitchen – the peculiarities of her master and mistress – and above all, she must study, most sedulously, to acquire a perfect knowledge of their taste.’
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After breakfast, she would receive orders from the mistress for that day’s meals. Her chief duties were the cooking of the evening dinner where, Mrs Beeton observes, ‘she must take upon herself all the dressing and serving of principal dishes, which her skill and ingenuity have mostly prepared’.
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Her morning would be occupied by the pastry, jellies, creams and entrées required for that evening’s dinner, and only then would she prepare the luncheon, which would be served after she herself had eaten at midday. A dinner party or house party would be especially demanding, and in the Victorian era would mean many frantic hours of work.

Country-house cooks were often considered rather daunting figures, as the
Servants’ Practical Guide
(1880) observed: ‘Some ladies stand very much in awe of their cooks, knowing that those who consider themselves to be thoroughly experienced will not brook fault-finding, or interference with their manner of cooking, and give notice to leave on the smallest pretext. Thus when ladies obtain a really good cook, they deal with serving the dinner.’
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Cooks usually expected certain perquisites, such as leftover dripping, rabbit skins or old tea leaves which they could sell for profit.

The cooks usually managed a kitchenmaid or two, who in turn might rise to the position of cook.
⁶⁵
Their responsibility, according to the Adamses, was usually ‘to take nearly the whole management for roasting and boiling, and otherwise dressing plain joints and dishes, and all the fish and vegetables.’ As the cleanliness of the kitchen was one of her foremost duties, the kitchenmaid’s first task was to scour the dressers, shelves and kitchen tables with soap, sand and hot water. Then she was to clean up the kitchen and prepare the breakfast to be served ‘in the house-keeper’s room, and the servants’-hall’. For the rest of the day the kitchenmaid would be ‘preparing for the servants’ dinner, the dinner in the nursery . . . and the lunch in the parlour’, the family dinner and the servants’ supper.
⁶⁶

Because kitchenmaids often did slightly more skilled jobs such as making sauces, baking bread and preparing vegetables, they were frequently paid considerably more than the unskilled scullery-maid, or scullion. According to the Adamses, her unenviable duties might include lighting ‘fires in the kitchen range and under the coppers or boilers, and stew holes’, and then to ‘wash up all the plates and dishes, sauce-pans, stew-pans, kettles, pots and all kitchen utensils’.
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She would also assist the kitchenmaid in the messier food preparation, such as ‘picking, trimming, washing and boiling the vegetables, cleaning the kitchen and offices, the servants’-hall, housekeeper’s room, and stewards’ room . . . and otherwise assist in all the laborious part of the kitchen business’. The scullery-maid, often little older than thirteen or fourteen, would be kept up until the early hours, cleaning and washing up after a major event.
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No Victorian mistress of any consequence could function without
her lady’s maid, who ranked under the housekeeper and was usually found only in the wealthier households. Her role seems to have merged those of a waiting woman and a chambermaid. She would be a close confidante of the lady of the house (which might lead to her becoming housekeeper), and would have the added dignity of the title ‘Miss’, unlike the junior maids who were often called just by their surnames. Lady’s maids might have a background in dressmaking or millinery, and sometimes came from more middle-class families than female domestics further down the hierarchy. Those from France or Switzerland were popular, with the French being considered more chic, and the Swiss and German the most practical.
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The Adamses, perhaps prejudiced by having worked their way up from the bottom, wrote slightly sniffily: ‘The business of the lady’s-maid is extremely simple, and but little varied. She is generally to be near the person of her lady . . . In her temper she should be cheerful and submissive, studying her lady’s disposition’. Her principal duties are ‘to
dress
,
re-dress
, and
undress
her lady’, to care for her finer clothes, to attend her in the morning, and to dress and comb her hair.
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On the other hand, Mrs Beeton thought the work of a lady’s maid more onerous than that of the valet, who was not expected to do the work of the tailor or the hatter, whereas ‘the lady’s maid has to originate many parts of the mistress’s dress herself: she should, indeed, be a tolerably expert milliner and dressmaker, a good hairdresser, and possess some chemical knowledge of the cosmetics with which the toilet-table is supplied in order to use them with safety and effect’. As well as dressing her lady, arranging her hair, and having responsibility for maintaining all her clothes, hats and boots, including mending and cleaning the finer elements, according to Mrs Beeton a lady’s maid ‘will study the fashion-books with attention, so as to be able to aid her mistress’s judgement in dressing, according to the prevailing fashion’.
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These paragons were also expected to be smartly dressed, often in the cast-off clothes of their mistress, which habitually set them apart from the other domestic servants, who were generally suspicious of them. Because they would have to stay up late with their mistresses and, indeed, travel with them, packing expertly, they also tended to
be younger, in their twenties, and to hope for a post such as that of a housekeeper when they got older.
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A list of instructions given to the daughter of Thomas Coke of Holkham Hall, Norfolk, in 1822, setting out the ‘essentials for a lady’s maid’, reads almost as a parody:

She
must not
have a will of her own in anything, & be always good-humoured & approve of everything her mistress likes. She
must not
have a gr[ea]t appetite or be the least of a
gourmand
, or care when or how she dines, how often disturbed, or even if she has no dinner at all. She had better not drink anything but water. She must
run quick
the instant she is
called
, whatever she is about. Morning, noon and night she must not mind going without
sleep
if her mistress requires her attendance.
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Many a maid must have been tempted to make free with her mistress’s extensive wardrobe. Lady Dorothy Nevill dismissed her German lady’s maid when she discovered that her ‘love of the stage’ had led to her to take parts at a low theatre ‘or penny gaff’. One particular vexed her exceedingly: ‘The worst part of the business was that being cast for the part of Marie Stuart, this Teutonic Thespian annexed a very handsome black velvet dress of mine in which to impersonate Scotland’s ill-fated Queen.’
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The backbone of the household staff, reporting to the housekeeper, was the housemaid – essentially the cleaner. According to the Adamses, the upper housemaid had the care of ‘all the household linen, bed and table linen, napkins, towels, &c. which she also makes and keeps in repair, and besides cleaning the house and furniture, and making the beds . . . she [usually] washes her own clothes and has sometimes to assist the laundry-maid in getting up the fine linen, washing silk stockings &c.’
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