Up and Down Stairs (30 page)

While outdoor servants such as head gardeners were sometimes given better accommodation on getting married, indoor servants were in most cases expected to leave to marry. One Yorkshire landowner, Sir Clifford Constable, wrote huffily when one servant resigned to marry: ‘You must be aware that you marrying is inconvenient to me besides being a bad precedent to the rest.’
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Another butler recalled how one butler of his acquaintance asked permission to marry and stay in post and received permission only to be give notice shortly afterwards. His employer argued that he
‘wanted his butler always within call; but that since he had got married he was often out, as he went to see his wife.’
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However, this presumption could have its positive side for the younger female servants used their early years in service to save a little money, as the board and food was usually covered, and get a training in household skills before marrying. They would often contribute monies home to the parents, especially if there were younger siblings to provide for. Menservants who married, however, often found themselves living separately from wives and children.
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W
ITH SUCH HEAVING
numbers of young men and women required to staff a great country house, it is impossible for a modern observer not to wonder about the permeability of the class barriers that divided master and servant. Friendship of a kind may have been common, but what about love? The incidence was almost certainly more frequent than records allow. Whilst acknowledged romances were clearly rare, some – such as the one between Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, Bt, and Mary Anne Bullock, his dairymaid – are the stuff of legend.
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A Sussex landowner, Sir Harry in his youth had been a famous rake, a close friend of the Prince Regent and a lover of Lady Emma Hamilton. In his later years he overheard a girl singing on his estate at Uppark, which had been designed for him by Humphrey Repton. His housekeeper, when asked about the singer, told him it was one of the dairymaid’s helpers. When the old dairymaid retired she was replaced by Mary Ann Bullock, supervising his delightful ornamental dairy. With the object of his romantic notions and desire installed in this pretty, temple-like structure, Sir Harry, unable to contain himself any more, proposed marriage, saying to the shocked girl: ‘Don’t answer me now, but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of Mutton that is coming up for my dinner today.’ The mutton arrived with a slice cut out, much to the irritation of the cook but to the delight of the baronet.
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Once she had accepted, Mary Ann was bundled off to Paris for an education, where she learnt to read, write and embroider. They married in the Saloon at Uppark on 12 September 1825; he was seventy-one, she exactly fifty years his junior. Despite the social disparity, not
to mention the scorn of some local landowners and, indeed, some of Uppark’s own servants, the marriage was apparently happy. Sir Harry is said to have remarked to his gamekeeper, ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ but Mary Ann cared for him until his death in 1846 at the age of ninety-two, on which he left her all his possessions. She lived on at Uppark until her death in 1875, after which it remained the home of her younger sister, whom Sir Harry had adopted. It was she who appointed Sarah Wells as her housekeeper, as described in the previous chapter.
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There are other, less well-known stories of genuine affection springing up between employer and servant, such as that of the Earl St Maur, heir to the 12th Duke of Somerset, who had two children, Harold and Ruth, by his kitchenmaid mistress, Rosina Swan. In 1869 he admitted the relationship to his parents, asking his mother on his deathbed to care for his family. The duke provided the children with a house and three servants, and eventually both moved in with their grandparents. Harold was left a property, while Ruth inherited £80,000 and married a member of the Cavendish-Bentinck family.
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Another little-known example occurred at the end of the century. John Chaworth Musters of Annesley Park, Nottinghamshire, who was born in 1860 and had been educated at Eton and Christchurch, fell in love with Mary-Anne Sharp or ‘Polly’, the nursery housemaid in his father’s household and the daughter of a Nottingham miner. They went to live in Norway, where his parents had a fishing lodge and where she bore him three sons. They married when they realised they had to return to England for John to take up his inheritance on his father’s unexpected death in 1887. Four more sons were born to them. A relation later wrote: ‘Close relatives back in England who were aware of the situation were surprised to see how she, the one time nursery house-maid would cope with it all. To their surprise she did so extremely well . . . a truly remarkable woman. Her dress sense and accomplishments were impeccable, and her relatively humble origins were never guessed by many who came to know and love her.’ She lost six of her seven sons in the First World War.
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Perhaps to avoid such romances or, at any rate, any illegitimate children, many houses operated systems to keep staff and family apart for much of the time. This separation could be taken to extremes. One man’s smooth-running household might epitomise his wife’s lonely existence. Testimony to this can be found in an interesting account of life in a Regency country house, as seen through the eyes of a young English bride, Catherine Osborne, arriving at her older husband’s family home, Newtown Anner in County Tipperary. Her letters home were transcribed and published in
Memorials of Lady Osborne
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Given the age difference between husband and wife, it is a fair assumption that the management style of the household represented the values of the previous generation: ‘The moment we arrived, which was early in the morning, Sir Thomas took me to look at the kitchen garden, which is very extensive, and kept in beautiful order. The gardener attended us. The moment he saw me he took off his hat and said, with all the Irish warmth of manner: “Welcome to your home my Lady.” ’
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At first she was not even sure how many servants there were, writing in a letter: ‘My maid tells me that they sat down six-and-twenty to dinner in the servants’ hall yesterday, and some of the people were out. It is the fashion in Ireland for the upper servants to dine with the rest, with the exception of the kitchen-maid, groom and whipper-in, who attend them and dine afterwards.’
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Lady Osborne admitted in the same letter that she used to ask her maid Johnstone to keep her company in her dressing room. ‘I make her sit there that I sometimes see a female face – hear a human voice. I never saw a house so still and solitary as this. It is so very much apart from the servants; no door of communication upstairs with their apartments. My maid and I walk along the long corridor, from room to room, without more fear of interruption from a single being than if we were in the deserts of Arabia.’ How easily might a maid become the close friend and confidante of a chatelaine in a remote country house.
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She also refers to Sir Thomas’s secret of good household management: ‘He says that a lady should delegate all her authority over the
female part of the establishment to the housekeeper and her own maid, and the gentleman to the butler. She should never give any orders to the inferior servants, because that would create confusion.’ Lady Osborne observed humbly: ‘I am sure his method must be the best, for I never saw a house managed with so much order and regularity in my life; every servant understands his particular business so well, that everything goes by clockwork.’ Her mother-in-law may have been casting a long shadow: ‘Sir Thomas thinks that a lady should never show herself in the kitchen, because his mother never was in hers.’
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To the children who had grown up in them, some remoter country households might have seemed like extended families. Elizabeth Smith (née Grant) put down her
Memoirs of a Highland Lady
in old age, recalling memories of Doune, her family home in the early nineteenth century, and its large but by all accounts somewhat unruly household of 1812. It is a vivid vignette of an isolated rural estate, where the staff were a mixture of local families and recruits from England, and a way of life that she felt had changed out of all recognition by the end of the century:

Our family then consisted of my father and mother, we three girls and our governess, and our young French companion, Caroline Favrin, William during the summer holidays, Johnnie and a maid between him and my mother, poor Peggy Davidson. Besides her there were the following servants: Mrs Bird, the coachman’s wife, an Englishwoman, as upper housemaid and plain needlewoman, under her Betty Ross, the gardener’s youngest daughter; Grace Grant, the beauty of the country . . . our schoolroom maid; old Belle Macpherson, a soldier’s widow . . . was the laundry maid.
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The picture she creates, perhaps partly romanticised because of the distance in time, is of a highly interconnected and intertwined microcosm of society.

The cook and housekeeper was an Englishwoman Mrs Carr from Cumberland, an excellent manager; a plain cook under her from Inverness; and old Christie as kitchen maid. The men were Simon Ross, the gardener’s eldest son, as butler, and an impudent English
footman, Richard, with a bottle-nose, who yet turned all the women’s heads; William Bird, the coachman, and George Ross, another son of the gardener’s as groom . . . Old John Mackintosh brought in all the wood and peats for the fires, pumped the water, turned the mangle, lighted the oven, brewed the beer, bottled the whisky, kept the yard tidy, and stood enraptured listening to us playing on the harp, ‘like Daavid’!

At the farm were the grieve [farm bailiff], and as many lads as he required for the work of the farm under him, who all slept in a loft over the stables and ate in the farm kitchen. [There was also George Ross,] turner, joiner, butcher, weaver, lint-dresser, wool-comber, dyer and what not; his old wife was the henwife. [Old Jenny Cameron] . . . was supreme in the farm kitchen; she managed cows, calves, milk, stores, and the spinning, with another girl who also helped in the laundry in which abode of mirth and fun [or so it must have seemed to a bored young girl in the big house] the under housemaid spent her afternoons.
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In addition to a smith, John Fyffe, who came twice a week, there was a ‘bowman’ who looked after the cattle and who, ‘like almost all the rest of them, lived with us till he died’. This is a riveting portrait of a little self-contained world in a remote area, an almost self-sufficient community, which she looks back on with nostalgia, not least perhaps because it located her – the daughter of a landowner who later lost his lands – near its apex.
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To contrast this somewhat romanticised view with one of more gritty reality, a number of first-hand narratives of service offer an insight into the experiences of working servants, even at the most manual level. The most remarkable nineteenth-century memoir of a maidservant was written by one Hannah Cullwick, who was born in 1833 and died in 1909.
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Her recollections of her early life and her diaries provide a window on to what life was like for maids, who bore most of the hardest jobs of country- and town-house life.

Hannah left school at eight years old and entered service shortly afterwards, working in various country houses in fairly junior positions. When she moved to London and became the maid of all work in town houses in London and elsewhere, by her own account it was
because she preferred to be largely her own boss rather than have servants over her or, indeed, below her.
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Hannah was certainly not afraid of hard work, expressing some pride in her strength and achievements. That her diary was written at all makes a curious tale in itself. She had a long and highly clandestine relationship with Arthur Munby, a barrister who worked for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a very Victorian figure. His papers, which are now in Trinity College, Cambridge, include Hannah’s remarkable diaries.

They came about because he had asked her to keep a record, describing her life for him in detail. He cherished a special fascination for images of Hannah in her work clothes, with her arms dirty or raw (I leave readers to judge for themselves the weirdness of this). Although they later married in secret, it was not a success, apparently because he succumbed to the temptation of trying to gentrify her. She resisted this and stuck to her guns, begging him in June 1876, ‘please let me live as your servant and don’t bother me to be any thing else.’
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The account that she wrote of her life in the 1840s and 1850s reveals an industrious and independent-minded woman, forced through circumstance to work for her living from an early age, and yet, as is often surprisingly true of domestic servants, able to move quite easily from job to job.

Hannah worked as a nurserymaid at Ryton in Shropshire:

I stopp’d here through the winter & had a deal of hard work to do, for there was eight children. I’d all their boots to clean & the large nurseries on my hands and knees, & a long passage & stairs, all their meals to get & our own – the nurse only dress’d the baby & look’d over me. I’d all the water to carry up and down for their baths & coal for the fire, put all the children to bed & wash and dress of a morning by eight, & I wasnt in bed after 5.
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