Up and Down Stairs (42 page)

Her next position was more enjoyable even if the accommodation was modest: ‘here for the first time I really learned the meaning of gentlemen’s service. For the first time I was treated as a human being by people with heart and consideration for all their staff. We were even granted the then unknown privilege of two hours free in the afternoon, either to rest or sit in the lovely gardens.’ She read books from the library and became interested in the history of the place and the duke’s family, whose ‘ancestors became real characters to me’.
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She had happy memories of the servants’ ball, when the family waited on their staff. There were frequent house parties when the
family returned from London: ‘although this meant more work, to me it was exciting to witness how the other half lived and there was no bitterness in this. I used to love to watch over the banisters the young people in their wonderful dresses.’
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There was a lot of fun to be had in the servants’ hall too: ‘a gramophone and stacks of up to date records, where the gardeners, grooms and under chauffeur joined the indoor staff of maids and footmen for dances after the day’s duties had ended. We had dart board, cards, and the ever popular Ludo and snakes-and-ladders, in fact everything to make a contented staff.’ Curiously enough, Miss Swainbank observed: ‘I found here that class distinction began and ended in the Servants’ Hall.’
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Another Scottish maidservant, Jean Rennie, born in 1914, had won a scholarship to university but was unable to take up her place because her father was unemployed. Having lost her own job in a mill, she got another as a housemaid: ‘My greatest horror was the knowledge that I would have to submit to the badge of servitude – a cap and apron.’ One compensation was the beauty of the castle and the gleaming kitchen, but she was appalled by seeing leftover butter and jam at tea in the servants’ hall: ‘I could remember so many hungry children – and here was good food being contemptuously pushed aside.’

She was quickly initiated into ‘the mysteries of being a house-maid during the day. The beds, the “slops”, the carpet-sweeping, the dusting. I gradually learnt whose job was which, and that one must not do anyone else’s job. Not even to help them. So nobody helped me.’ Her initial impressions of the cook were of ‘a vast mountain of a woman in spotless white. When I came to know her afterwards she was a gem of goodness, honesty and generosity. But first, at work, she was rather frightening.’
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This was no doubt the case with many senior servants and new juniors.

Of the more senior women in the English country-house household, the lady’s maid retained a primary importance up until the Second World War, and perhaps a little beyond. Rosina Harrison was lady’s maid to one of the liveliest hostesses of the era, the American Lady Astor. Born in 1899, the daughter of a stonemason on
the Marquess of Ripon’s estate in Yorkshire, from the first Rosina was determined to travel. Her mother advised her to train in dressmaking and to learn French. She started as a ‘Young Lady’s Maid’ to the young daughters of Lady Irene Tufton, in their house in Mayfair and at Appleby Castle, Cumberland, then worked for Lady Cranborne, daughter-in-law to the Marquess of Salisbury, with whom she first got her proper taste of travel in France and Italy.
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She arrived at Cliveden in 1928 to be a lady’s maid to Phyllis Astor, Lady Astor’s daughter, at a salary of £60 a year, nearly three times what she had been earning with Lady Cranborne. She was briefed on the Astor family by the famous steward, Mr Edwin Lee, who had been a sergeant major in the First World War. Her working conditions were good: ‘My room at Cliveden was large, well decorated and comfortably furnished with bed, two easy chairs, a couch and two big wardrobes.’
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Rosina helped Phyllis Astor dress, maintained her clothes and accompanied her on visits: ‘We went together to a few country house parties in Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire . . . and to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palace in Scotland, Drumlanrig Castle. I was of course responsible for looking after riding habits and these weren’t easy to cope with. Some evenings she’d come in soaking wet and spattered with mud, yet the next morning she would have to appear looking spotless.’
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In 1928, Rosina travelled to the United States, after which she became Lady Astor’s personal lady’s maid.

At first she was overwhelmed by her employer’s fiery temper and exacting demands but a turning point came when she stood up to her: ‘My lady, from now on I intend to speak as I’m spoken to. Common people say please and thank you, ordinary people do not reprimand servants in front of others and ladies are supposed to be an example to all, and that is that.’
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Lady Astor later apologised. In an aside that offers us an insight into how these relationships worked, Rosina Harrison observed: ‘Now all this sounds very trivial, but if you want to know how it was possible for two people to live closely for thirty odd years it is important . . . as the years passed our relationship mellowed and the rows became more like verbal skirmishes.’
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In many accounts, the relationship of the family children of a country house to the servants attains a surprising pitch of intimacy and trust. It is notable that many people from aristocratic backgrounds growing up in the 1920s to the 1950s are inclined to say today that they ‘were brought up by the servants’. For many twentieth-century biographers of the English country house, the most interesting aspect is the dynamic between children and domestic servants. One of the most memorable butlers of the late Victorian and Edwardian era is Henry Moat, who joined the household of Sir George Sitwell at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire in 1893, first as footman and then butler-valet, where he took on a primary importance in the lives of the Sitwell children.

Mr Moat’s profile in Sir Osbert’s famous biography, which was written in such detail because of his conviction that his world was vanishing for ever, gives him a special place in English literature. Indeed, it gives him a substantial entry in the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
. Sir Osbert’s nephew, Sir Reresby, had vivid memories of this remarkable man, whose bedroom at Renishaw Hall had its own staircase to the butler’s pantry, and from which a rod of iron was inserted through the plate-room door, thus securing the house’s silver.

Mr Moat, together with the beloved nurse Davis ‘who lived for children and their love’, were for Sir George’s three children, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, the mainstays of their emotional life during their early years. All three became famous writers. In
Cruel Month
, the first volume of his famous autobiography,
Left Hand! Right Hand!
, Sir Osbert examined this bond: ‘Parents were aware that the child would be a nuisance, and a whole hedge of servants, in addition to the complex guardianship of nursery and schoolroom, was necessary, not so much to aid the infant as to screen him off from his father and mother.’
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Thus, he argued, in a subtle way ‘children and servants often found themselves in league against grown-ups, and employers. The female child sought shelter with the nurse and housekeeper and cook, the male in the [butler’s] pantry. Certainly, I learnt more, far more, from talking to Henry and Pare in the pantry from their instinctive wisdom and humour, than from more academic sources.’
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Henry Moat, whose wonderfully irascible yet devoted relationship with Sir George is detailed in the same book, noted later that Sir Osbert’s
Who’s Who
entry read: ‘Educated during holidays from Eton’. He was quick to retort: ‘Well, Sir, I make bold to claim some of that, because whether you were at Scarboro’, Renishaw or abroad, if you or Master Sachie wanted to know anything about things on earth, the sea, under the earth or in the air above, you generally came to me, even when you had a tutor, and often the tutor came too.’ This gently bantering relationship between employer and employed, and their long-standing interdependence, are typical of early-twentieth-century memoirs, illustrating that a butler might be looked on as a friend by more than one generation of a family at the same time.
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In this context it is interesting to note that the great P.G. Wodehouse, inventor of that ultimate symbol of the skilful and dedicated English manservant, Jeeves, grew up – typically for many upper- and upper-middle-class children of his generation – in England while his parents worked abroad. Wodehouse’s biographer Robert McCrum makes clear that this often meant staying with aunts, clergyman and nautical uncles. As they lived on what Wodehouse himself called ‘the fringe of the butler belt’, he observed wryly: ‘There always came a moment when my hostess, smiling one of those smiles, suggested that it would be nice for [me] to go and have tea in the servants’ hall.’ He learnt to laugh there, in the company of footmen and housemaids. ‘I forgot to be shy and kidded back and forth with the best of them.’
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What psychological forces were at work when, while in an internment camp in Germany during the Second World War, he wrote a story in which a peer returns to the stately home he has leased out, disguised as the butler?
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His first story about Blandings Castle has two people disguised as lady’s-maid and valet manoeuvring their way through the complex etiquette of the servants’ hall.

Lavinia Smiley, one of the daughters of the Hon. Clive Pearson who restored Parham Park in West Sussex, wrote a particularly evocative account of a 1920s country-house childhood, titled
A Nice Clean Plate
. As with so many memoirs of the early years of the
aristocracy, her recollections are interwoven with affectionate memories of servants, from maids to footmen:

The indoor staff at Parham (until 1939) consisted, with slight variations, of: Mr Cridland, the butler, Mr Hill, the valet, three footmen and the odd man, a hall boy and a night watchman. There was a housekeeper, Mrs Evans, her mother’s lady’s maid, Miss Metcalfe, the head housemaid (Jane), and three other housemaids, Mrs Dawson the cook, her two kitchen maids, a scullery-maid, and a still-room maid, as well as (a succession of) nannies and a nursery maid. Outside there was a stable staff, headed by Mr Lancaster and a team of gardeners, as well as a house carpenter called Mr Gee, and an electrician called Mr Greenfield. There was another housekeeper, and three maids, who stayed in their London house.
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Lady Smiley recalled her parents’ staff with affection: ‘we found life there [tea in the housekeeper’s room with the senior staff for company] less of a strain than it often was “through the front”.’ She could recall the family ritual of children descending to the drawing room for ‘Children’s Hour’, when they spent time with their parents, ‘During “Children’s Hour” one of the footmen would come in and put coal on the fire, and possibly dear Mr Cridland the butler would come creaking in with a message for my mother on a silver salver . . . [her father] had a very happy relationship with Mr Cridland, who had been sent to Cambridge with him as a young valet. They had been together ever since . . . My father was much cast down when Cridland died; they were very fond of each other.’

Some relationships were more strained: ‘The first nanny I can remember was a horror. She was ugly and a bully and was eventually dispatched, taking with her a great deal of our gloom. She beat us with a hairbrush, and threatened to put sticking plaster on our mouths if we committed the unspeakable crime of Answering Back. And burnt our hands on the tea pot.’

Typically for memoirs of an interwar, country-house life, ‘Nanny was permanently at war with the cook and would send insulting messages inside the vegetable dishes: “The children cannot be expected to eat this.”’
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Mrs Richard Cavendish, looking back on her childhood at
Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire, recollected that her parents would never be there during the week: ‘Nanny Abbott took charge of us and during the week we did exactly what Nanny said. We had walks, and then we rode our ponies . . . we messed about and had a few lessons.’ She had warm memories of one family retainer: ‘the butler, Frederick, was the nicest fellow that ever walked. When my parents were away, we were allowed to fish from his pantry window into the moat.’ Not unusually in those days, their governesses ‘never stayed, because we were so nasty to them.’
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In 2008, Sir John (‘Jack’) Leslie, Baronet, explained the make-up of the household of Castle Leslie, County Monaghan, in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time of writing, he lives there still and has recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, although the house is now run in part as a hotel by his niece, Sammy Leslie.

Mr Wells, our last butler, who was English, was here through the war, and for a while afterwards we had Mr Murray, although he was more like a senior footman. The butler in the early part of the century was Mr Adams, with two footmen under him; at that time maids slept in rooms accessible only by passing through the housekeeper’s room. I think most of our junior servants tended to come from the estate or local village. My grandmother lived here until she died in 1944, and [between the 1920s and 1930s] she certainly gave the orders for the meals for the day to our cook, then Annie Simpson.

My father was a bit of a revolutionary and a Roman Catholic convert, more interested in forestry and writing, and I think he just took the servants and the smooth running of the house as a natural part of life.

His father was, in his youth, very influenced by the Castle Leslie forester, Mr Vogan, who, according to his sister, was described by their grandmother as the boys’ ‘real governess’, even though they had two, one French and one German.