Up and Down Stairs Read Online Free Page A

nature, form and atmosphere of country houses. For many servants, their employment might have been just a job; some were hard pressed and discontented; others found their work so rewarding that they spent their whole working lives with the same family, perhaps advancing from menial roles to ones of considerable responsibility.
     
    The below-stairs community, with its inevitable tensions and interactions, seems often to have been one of warmth and colour. Henry Moat, the famous butler at Renishaw Hall, whose role in the life of Osbert Sitwell has brought him his own entry in the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, once wrote to his former employer, Lady Ida Sitwell, looking back fondly on his arrival in service in 1893: ‘You were a fine young lady then full of high spirits and fun. I would not have missed the career for the earth . . . I never felt lonely when I think of my past life, the cinema is not in it.’ 35
     

8
Staying On: A Changing World
The later Twentieth Century
     
    T HE S ECOND W ORLD W AR was clearly a major watershed in the style, character and condition of the servant body employed in country houses. Nothing would ever be the same. Although some owners of large establishments reassembled their sometimes extensive staffs immediately after the war, many more found it simply too difficult. The diaries of James Lees-Milne attest to the struggles of aristocratic ladies suddenly trying to run such houses without enough help. 1
    This scarcity of personnel had a huge impact on the practicality, even desirability, of maintaining a large historic house. Many were given up, either taken into care by the National Trust, leased, or sold for institutional uses, such as schools or hotels. A critical factor was the inability to recruit new servants, not merely to look after the landowner’s family personally, but also to maintain the contents and fabric of the house. The loss of the ‘odd man’ who had once swept the gutters and cleared the drains was in many ways as significant as the loss of a steward or a butler. 2
     
    Those estate owners who had survived the trials of the immediate post-war years, keeping together their houses and collections in the teeth of every adverse circumstance, continued to call on the services of certain key individuals, supplemented by daily cleaners. On the bigger estates they could often draw on support from the estate works department for some of the essential care and maintenance that in earlier times had fallen to the indoor staff.
     
    Indeed, in certain country houses those who had trained up in service returned to their pre-war employment and worked on into retirement in the 1960s and 1970s. For some observers, this is when the finalwatershed came: when the whole generation trained before the war finally retired. 3 The remarkable story of Harvey Lane, the butler of Leigh Manor in Shropshire, is symbolic of this. He trained as a house-boy and then as a footman to William Bridgeman, later 1st Viscount Bridgeman, becoming butler in 1920 and remaining with the family until his death in 1989. He served both the 2nd Viscount Bridgeman and his grandson and heir, David Stacey, many years his junior. 4
     
    When demobbed from the armed forces, Mr Lane returned to his former post as butler in 1945, but with little additional help. Mr Stacey observed with wry amusement the silent tussle between man and master:
     
at every opportunity [Harvey] would bring out the silver and the white linen tablecloth and make sure that the dining room was used in the style which he expected from a lord. My grandfather, a man of great humility and no pretension at all, hated this kind of behaviour – he would have been much happier eating in the kitchen – but Harvey would always get his way and would appear in a white jacket and insist on serving at the table.
     
    Mr Lane continued to work, despite being confined to a wheelchair, right up until the 1980s, becoming a close friend to his