Up and Down Stairs Read Online Free
Author: Jeremy Musson
country estate. Before the First World War the house had fifty indoor staff, while in 2006 the present earl employed just an administrator, a butler, a cook and three cleaners who came in daily, to help look after the family and the house, ‘much aided by technology’ and with secretarial help from the estate office. There are three full-time gardeners, and the house and estate were also supported by an estate buildings department, a woods department and a farms department. 32
So much of the vanished pre-war and immediate post-war world of large staffs still survives in living memory. The final chapter draws on the recollections of a number of people who work or have worked in country houses, offering insight into the historic country house, of lives devoted wholly to others.
Landowners who spent their childhoods in pre-war country houses have equally sharp recollections. When I was shown around the complex of back rooms and attics at Dalmeny in Scotland by the Earl and Countess of Rosebery, I found that the service quarters had been used for largely the same purposes from the early nineteenth century right up to the 1960s. The present earl, born in 1929, could remember those rooms being occupied by a traditional staff when he was small, with gardeners still using yokes to carry buckets of coal.
As we walked around, he was able to describe, almost as if commentating on a reel of film, his own vivid memories of the staff who had worked for his father – a son of the great Victorian prime minister; his mother was a Rothschild. 33 Not untypically, the Roseberys themselves now live in a comfortable private apartment on the first floor of the house, while the richly furnished state rooms are opened to the public and used only on occasion.
In the butler’s pantry (now a store room), there was once a big basin under the window, a plate warmer and a table, as well as some comfortable chairs. Lord Rosebery recalled: ‘The butler had an office elsewhere but spent most of his time here.’ In his parents’ day there was usually a butler, two footmen and a boy. ‘The footman slept in the small room off the pantry, so that he could be beside the room where the silver was locked up.’ 34
Beyond the pantry is a series of offices and the now busy estate office occupies what was once the housekeeper’s room. Lord Rosebery says: ‘The housekeeper and the odd man were here permanently, but all the other staff really travelled between my parents’ other houses with them.’ He points out the original still room: ‘Here they prepared breakfast and afternoon tea, leaving the kitchen free for the bigger meals.’
The former servants’ hall has a spacious area at the end, which was where they used to wash up after the servants’ meals: ‘No one was allowed into the kitchen except the kitchen staff.’ The ground floor of the old kitchen is now a lecture hall; you can still see the roasting oven, but the main range was removed during electrification in the 1930s. ‘There was also a room for kindling and a room for the “odd man”. This room was shown as the oast house in the original plans, but I can remember it being used to trim and refill oil lamps.’
What staff does he employ today? ‘In the 1970s we had around four live-in staff, a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a nurserymaid for the children. Now we have two cleaners who clean our flat, as well as the rooms opened to the public and the estate office, but no cook. The cleaners come in nine to five and we don’t have any live-in staff.’
As there have been many detailed studies of servants in different periods, this book is an intentionally broad sweep of history, bringing together the world of the medieval page with that of the Edwardian footboy, and the buttery and pantry of the Tudor mansion with the butler’s pantry of the nineteenth-century house. The subject has much to teach us about the human condition as well as about the
So much of the vanished pre-war and immediate post-war world of large staffs still survives in living memory. The final chapter draws on the recollections of a number of people who work or have worked in country houses, offering insight into the historic country house, of lives devoted wholly to others.
Landowners who spent their childhoods in pre-war country houses have equally sharp recollections. When I was shown around the complex of back rooms and attics at Dalmeny in Scotland by the Earl and Countess of Rosebery, I found that the service quarters had been used for largely the same purposes from the early nineteenth century right up to the 1960s. The present earl, born in 1929, could remember those rooms being occupied by a traditional staff when he was small, with gardeners still using yokes to carry buckets of coal.
As we walked around, he was able to describe, almost as if commentating on a reel of film, his own vivid memories of the staff who had worked for his father – a son of the great Victorian prime minister; his mother was a Rothschild. 33 Not untypically, the Roseberys themselves now live in a comfortable private apartment on the first floor of the house, while the richly furnished state rooms are opened to the public and used only on occasion.
In the butler’s pantry (now a store room), there was once a big basin under the window, a plate warmer and a table, as well as some comfortable chairs. Lord Rosebery recalled: ‘The butler had an office elsewhere but spent most of his time here.’ In his parents’ day there was usually a butler, two footmen and a boy. ‘The footman slept in the small room off the pantry, so that he could be beside the room where the silver was locked up.’ 34
Beyond the pantry is a series of offices and the now busy estate office occupies what was once the housekeeper’s room. Lord Rosebery says: ‘The housekeeper and the odd man were here permanently, but all the other staff really travelled between my parents’ other houses with them.’ He points out the original still room: ‘Here they prepared breakfast and afternoon tea, leaving the kitchen free for the bigger meals.’
The former servants’ hall has a spacious area at the end, which was where they used to wash up after the servants’ meals: ‘No one was allowed into the kitchen except the kitchen staff.’ The ground floor of the old kitchen is now a lecture hall; you can still see the roasting oven, but the main range was removed during electrification in the 1930s. ‘There was also a room for kindling and a room for the “odd man”. This room was shown as the oast house in the original plans, but I can remember it being used to trim and refill oil lamps.’
What staff does he employ today? ‘In the 1970s we had around four live-in staff, a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a nurserymaid for the children. Now we have two cleaners who clean our flat, as well as the rooms opened to the public and the estate office, but no cook. The cleaners come in nine to five and we don’t have any live-in staff.’
As there have been many detailed studies of servants in different periods, this book is an intentionally broad sweep of history, bringing together the world of the medieval page with that of the Edwardian footboy, and the buttery and pantry of the Tudor mansion with the butler’s pantry of the nineteenth-century house. The subject has much to teach us about the human condition as well as about the
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