Up and Down Stairs (44 page)

In past times, the great houses of this country and their grounds were maintained by their owners mainly from the rent of their estates. The estate and mansion formed a single economic whole; the former provided not only income and produce but also servants to run the house and craftsmen for the upkeep of its fabric. Now owing to economic
and social changes, we are faced with a disaster comparable only to that which the country suffered with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century.
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Whilst he could see that taxation, meaning estate duty and increased income tax, was primarily responsible for this ‘impending catastrophe’, Gowers thought that problems in recruiting staff could prove almost as decisive:

A secondary factor is the growing difficulty of getting, and the expense of paying, the necessary staff, both indoor and outdoor. In the heyday of these houses wages were low and service at the big house, around which the whole social life of the neighbourhood revolved, was much sought after. Those conditions have disappeared. There is not now the labour available for domestic service; there is not the desire to do it; and there is not the money to pay for it.
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For those who did return to service, there were both disadvantages and advantages. The disadvantages were almost always that the senior posts survived but without the support of the traditional young trainees, learning their skills by serving the servants, and essentially doing the heavier and messier work. In an interview given in 1971, Mrs Davidson, cook at Crathorne Hall, Yorkshire, remembered the impact of the Second World War on the life of the house: ‘the men had to go to war, then we had parlour maids . . . After the war there weren’t nearly so many servants. It was the same as it is now, me and Nanny and Mr Jeffreys [the butler], a housemaid, a kitchenmaid and someone else to help.’ The family shut down a part of the house and created a new kitchen nearer the dining room. ‘We worked harder after the war; you just had to fill in all sorts.’
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The advantages were often the relaxation of the rigid class distinctions that had persisted up until the Second World War. Those skilled servants who returned to service were increasingly highly valued and, despite their extended workloads, were also likely to be treated with greater consideration and given greater independence than they had experienced before the war. Mrs Davidson approved of the removal of social barriers: ‘the young people coming now [as guests], compared with those earlier in the century, are nicer. We
were servants, I mean we looked to them [the earlier generation] as if they were superhuman beings, and they weren’t . . . The changes that have taken place are for the better, in the old days you worked hard for people and you never saw them.’ Her employer’s grandson, Lord Crathorne, remembers with gratitude the contribution made by the whole household in Mrs Davidson’s day to his family’s life: ‘They took tremendous pride in their work. I recall Mrs Davidson writing a letter about how hard the work was, and then on the next page she said that they were the “happiest days of my life”.’
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Some domestic servants had remained in service throughout the war and were perhaps in a unique position to consider its impact on their world. When the Second World War broke out, Rosina Harrison, Lady Astor’s lady’s maid, was still a senior figure, if in a much reduced but busy crew: ‘some of the men were called up, others enlisted, and some women went into the Services or industry.’ More time was spent in Plymouth, for which Lady Astor was MP, whilst Lord Astor opened a hospital in the gardens of Cliveden, with a wing given over to nurses and doctors.
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During the war, the house was still managed well by the steward, housekeeper and a skeleton staff, most of them dailies, but Rosina felt that ‘the old order had changed’ before her eyes. It seemed to her a ‘period of stagnation for town and country houses. It was also a time of enlightenment, too, for in many places where for years scant attention had been paid to kitchens and the servants’ quarters below stairs, mistresses were now paying the penalty.’ Before the war they had hardly visited such rooms, but now, ‘They were having to work down there themselves and, suddenly, with the bombing, the basement rooms became the most important in the house – and the most lived in. Yet many of them were damp, dark, poorly heated and their cooking and cleaning facilities were old fashioned.’
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There were other, fundamental changes: ‘no longer did the distinction of servant and master apply. We were family. We’d soldiered together, looked death in the face and suffered the loss of many friends. We’d been shown qualities which no other circumstances would have demonstrated to us, and had shared emotions that would otherwise have remained hidden.’
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The appalled discovery by Miss Harrison’s mistress of how inadequate and uncomfortable kitchens could be was echoed in the charming memoir,
The Private Life of a Country House, 1912–39
(1980), by Lesley Lewis, recalling her country-house childhood in Essex: ‘A scullery opened out of the kitchen, its two wide shallow sinks under the window having wooden plate racks on one side. It was not until I washed up here myself, in the 1939 war, that I realised how inconvenient the equipment was. Possibly the sinks had not been too low in the days when most people were shorter, but the width across them to the taps was singularly ill-adapted to any human frame.’
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Some domestic servants found being in the armed forces almost easy by comparison to the discipline and long hours of domestic service. Arthur Inch, the son of a butler and later a butler himself, was first a footman to the Marquess of Londonderry. He served in the RAF during the Second World War, which seemed to him almost a liberation: ‘In fact, the comparatively shorter hours in the forces was a revelation to me. I’d never had so much free time plus all the free passes when going on leave.’
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After the war, he did not return to work in service until the 1950s, after which he became butler to the Kleinworts, remaining with the family for twenty years. One of his co-footmen from Londonderry House, who also went into the RAF, became a civilian pilot after the war rather than re-enter domestic service.
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When he retired, Arthur Inch was adviser both to the National Trust and to the makers of the film
Gosford Park
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The plunge in the customary level of household staff must have hit some country-house owners hard. When asked when he thought the fundamental change occurred, Sir John Leslie replied: ‘In most big houses the staffs stayed the same until the 1950s. The Wingfields, Lord and Lady Powerscourt, certainly had footmen in livery at Powerscourt until the early 1950s, and there was a gatekeeper with a top hat and a cockade. Here at Castle Leslie, there were about ten servants in the house before the war, then it fell to five, then one, and finally only people coming in from the village. It happened gradually, and you just acclimatised to the change. However, we probably took them too much for granted.’
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Barbara Cartland, born in 1901, was familiar with the comfort and security represented by the well-staffed country house. A small section on managing staff in her
Etiquette Handbook: A Guide to Good Behaviour from the Boudoir to the Boardroom
(1962) is testament to how different that world had become: ‘only a few people today are fortunate enough to have living-in servants, who are no longer called servants but “the staff”. . . . It should be obvious that to retain the services and remain in the good graces of these invaluable people the old-fashioned autocratic attitude is as dead as Victorian bustles.’ Above all, she said, ‘it is no longer good manners to keep people “in their place”.’
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Her advice on giving dinner parties in an increasingly servant-less age is interspersed with comments on how to manage ‘Without staff’. At first, she considers the case with staff: ‘For a dinner party of eight or ten I have four courses: Fish or soup/Meat or game/An exciting pudding/Savoury/Dessert/Coffee/
Without staff: Three courses will be plenty for your party
.’
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Some aspects of her advice, however, have a curious echo of manuals of housekeeping going back to the seventeenth century: ‘Female servants should always receive orders only from the wife; males from the husband. If occasion arises for one or the other to pass on an order then it should be “Mr Brown wants you to . . .” or “Mrs Brown asked me to tell you that . . .” These days it is rarely possible to say “your master” or “your mistress”.’
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She took the view that some rules still persisted when addressing staff, especially if you were fortunate enough to employ any of these fast-vanishing people: ‘Housekeeper (almost an extinct race) is called Mrs by her employers and the staff whether she is married or not. Cook-Housekeeper is called Mrs by her employers and staff whether she is married or not . . .
Butler
(more usually a manservant these days) is called by his surname only by his employers and “Mr” by the staff.’
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During the 1950s and 1960s, to supply the gaps left in houses, in both town and country, there was a sharp rise in domestic servants brought in from overseas. Mrs Cartland cautiously advised: ‘
Foreign Staff
. Most people these days employ one or two foreigners in place of the aforementioned staff. These are usually called by whichever
name is the more easily pronounced.’
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In the same period, it became more difficult to recruit native domestic staff. Many who entered domestic service, not only from all over Europe but from places as remote as St Helena and Jamaica, were unlikely to have been trained in the traditional country-house system, yet eager to find employment in a difficult economic climate.
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At Chatsworth, the then duchess was unable to recruit new servants prior to opening the house to the public for the first time in 1948. The present Dowager Duchess observes: ‘I imagine because people had been so badly paid in service before the war.’ Her mother-in-law’s path crossed with that of the Hungarian sisters Ilona and Elizabeth Solymossy, cook and housemaid respectively to Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington, the Devonshires’ widowed daughter-in-law, who had died young earlier that same year. The Devonshires invited them to recruit a team of nine of their compatriots to help prepare and clean the house for opening. As the duchess recalls in her book, they ‘immediately made their presence felt by setting about the rooms methodically and thoroughly, dressed like Tabitha Twitchit in cotton kerchiefs against the dust, while delicious smells of goulash in the kitchen passage reminded one that the Hungarian takeover was on’. In their capable hands, the house was made ready for its public opening in Easter 1949.
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There were similar patterns in other great houses. At Weston Park, Shropshire, in the 1960s, the Earls of Bradford employed domestic servants from St Helena, one man recalling spending much of his youth barefoot and then, as a teenager, on his first day in England learning to tie a white tie. At Longleat in the 1970s, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath were looked after by a couple from Portugal (although in his youth there had been forty-three indoor servants); since the late 1950s, the Bromley-Davenports at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, have been taken care of by an Italian, Gilda. For fifty-one years, Gilda Mion has been their cook and housekeeper, catering for shooting parties every weekend in the season, with her husband, Luciano, working as a painter and decorator to the estate and eventually in the house, too.
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Whilst those born and brought up in houses with large staffs might
struggle to manage their own households with a minimum of help, it must have been doubly hard for the generation of staff who had been trained in traditional country-house service and attained senior positions to discover that they had little or none of the support that in their youth they had themselves supplied as junior servants.

Mrs Davidson’s observations on the greater workload of post-war service are echoed again over and over. As former butler Stanley Ager pointed out in his memoirs, those who remained in service, or returned to it, had to combine in one person duties that had once been the preserve of many.

Mr Ager was born when Edward VII was on the throne, and his training dated back to the 1920s. He was a butler for more than three decades, retiring in 1975. His book,
The Butler’s Guide to Clothes Care, Managing the Table, Running the Home and Other Graces
, published in 1981, includes a short memoir that looks back with warmth on his years of experience of working in beautiful historic houses.
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Retirement seemed strange to him: ‘At first I didn’t feel right being out of uniform and in casual clothes in the morning.’ Otherwise, he said, he was content to cease working. ‘After all, I have travelled the world, lived in some magnificent houses and been lucky with my employers. But I still miss the staff. They fought amongst themselves and they always caused me far more trouble than the Lord and Lady – yet I miss them most of all.’ As this narrative has shown, the community of the staff could be all-important to the enjoyment of being a domestic servant.
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Mr Ager began his life in service in 1922, aged fourteen, as the hall boy at Croome Court, Worcestershire, ‘the lowest servant of all’, in the household of Lord Coventry. ‘On my first day it seemed like a house full of servants; there were some forty people of all ages working there. Everyone was friendly except the housekeeper.’ As for so many young people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his choice seemed made for him: ‘after my parents died, entering service seemed the best way of supporting myself.’