If Her Majesty wanted to go to the lavatory, dozens of staff sprang to attention, all the way down to a maid who held out the hand towel. When Queen Mary returned to London after five years away, it took three days to fill lorries with her luggage.
Imperious: Queen Mary had 75 servants
Iimagine the tone in genteel comedy - a Bafta-winning vehicle for Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave or Joan Plowright being loveably imperious. Such was the egotism and capricious arrogance of the wealthy, who never ‘thanked, or addressed, or acknowledged’ their exhausted underlings, any upstairs-downstairs saga deserves to be treated to more of Les Miserables’ barricades, not Downton Abbey’s mythical cricket matches, which is all we ever get.
At least Queen Mary only had 75 servants. The Duke of Devonshire had 200 at Chatsworth. Amusing and horrifying in equal measure is how these people who were waited on did nothing for themselves, ever.
‘Ladies had nothing to do all day but lie on a sofa and read novels,’ we are told.
They could not dress without valets and maids wielding pins and button hooks. They did not drive and there were separate cars for their suitcases. They did not open doors, which were operated by footmen wearing white gloves and white powdered wigs. (The powder made their hair fall out in clumps.) They never cooked, shopped for their own provisions, or cleaned up afterwards.
And, of course, they never worked, to earn one’s living was vulgar. Not only was ‘the spectacle of manual labour’ abhorrent, but even doctors and lawyers were looked down upon and seldom received socially.
Well-connected army officers and the higher clergy were permitted to dine, but anyone linked with ‘the arts, the stage, trade or commerce, could not be asked to the house at all’.
8 - the age at which a girl could enter service in Victorian times
Yolks had to be positioned in the middle of an egg white, and would be sent back if not perfect. The Duke of Kent’s potatoes ‘had to be exactly the same size’. Ladies changed attire three times a day, so ‘laundering was a continuous operation’.
At Blenheim, there were 17 different choices for each course at dinner. A decree went out that ‘her Ladyship can’t sleep with creases on a pillowcase’. Waldorf Astor would only drink milk from his personal cow, which travelled everywhere with him.
These whims were carried out by the poor wretches at the other end of the scale, who lived under the eaves in cubicles ‘either freezing cold or oppressively hot’.
In 1900, there were four million maids in British households, often recruited from orphanages or Wales. A cook earned £10 a year, a parlour maid £5.
200 servants: Chatsworth House
In addition to lighting the fires, cleaning the ranges, filling the coal scuttles, scrubbing the steps, and scouring copper pans with carbolic soap, a maid had to iron the newspapers and shoe laces and ‘wash her employer’s loose change’.
Kitchens, ‘a breeding ground of rising damp, stinking drains, smoking stoves, black beetles and ants’, were always situated at an inconvenient distance from the dining room, along ‘a mazy network of stairs, doorways and passages’. Unless employed by Lady Londesborough, who ‘made it a rule never to speak to her servants directly’, and who must have instilled the gift of telepathy in her retinue, servants were summoned by bells from their ‘warren of sculleries, wash-houses, pantries and larders’.
They had to know how to arrange ‘in a very particular way’ the celery goblets, cucumber trays, custard glasses, pickle forks and silver knick-knacks on the starched linen table cloths.
A light luncheon might consist of turbot with lobster sauce, a haunch of venison, cake and jelly with fruit. There was a ‘terrible waste of lovely food’ - at a time when ordinary folk had rickets and lived on bread and potatoes.
Frozen or tinned food was taboo. There was also a prejudice against electricity, central heating and hot water pipes.
Servants were compelled to look drab and ‘never to dress out of your station’. They were not encouraged to read books, become interested in music or culture, or to be educated. Butlers had to be occupationally ‘ponderous, solemn, cautiously avuncular’, and marriage was not recommended. Through a combination of loneliness, frustration and access to the cellar, many became alcoholics.
There was no pension provision for retirement. Until the National Insurance Act of 1915, which Conservatives bitterly opposed, accidents and illness meant dismissal. ‘They don’t like ill people’, a former servant recalled. ‘You haven’t got to be ill, not ever.’
It is not often that one thanks heaven for World War I because at least it brought about the beginning of the end of all that subservience. As Lethbridge says, ‘women were mobilising themselves into a formidable force for change,’ as they found employment in munitions factories, as bus conductresses, drivers, canteen organisers and nurses. It was ‘like being let out of a cage,’ one of them said.
With the men at the Front, mansions were shut up, ‘the staterooms shrouded in dust sheets and the once-immaculate gardens given over to weeds’. Grand houses not donated to the National Trust or demolished became schools, museums, hospitals or ‘homes for the weak-minded’.
Upstairs, downstairs: Country house staff, as depicted in The Edwardian Country House
The ‘vast abyss between gentry and servants’ gradually closed, until even ‘organists, curates and sanitary inspectors’ had domestic help. A butcher in Bedwas, Wales, employed a maid-of-all-work, known as Aunty Dolly, who survived until she was hobbling on sticks and living in a grace-and-favour lean-to next to the slaughterhouse. She had an outside lavvy.
By 1945, P.G. Wodehouse lamented, ‘What the devil does one write about these days, if one is a specialist in country houses and butlers, both of whom have ceased to exist?’
The answer, with Jeeves and Wooster, as with Lord Fellowes, was to whip up a fantasy saga about ceremony and tradition, to ignore the genuine iniquities, and to pretend that masters and servants represented ‘a microcosm of the natural and social order’ - when, as this book movingly shows, in actuality that order was harsh, snobbish, spiteful, and doomed.
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