Most of us will never know what it’s like to live in a country pile – the kind with a mile-long carriage drive, acres of parkland dotted with deer, and gilded rooms stuffed with Chippendale furniture and Canaletto paintings. Plenty of us will, however, have a forebear who once called such a house home, as they toiled as butler, housekeeper or cook, footman or maid in the service of the lord, lady or honourable squire who owned it.
These hard-working men and women, who woke to views of rolling hills and roamed palatial spaces day by day, were the aristocracy of domestic service in the 19th and early 20th centuries – a small minority of the more than 1.5 million Britons (most of them women) who earned their living as servants by 1901, in the golden age of the country house.
Their positions were highly coveted. The landed classes “seemed instinctively to know how to treat servants”, as Gordon Grimmett – one of the servants at Longleat in Wiltshire – put it in Gentlemen’s Gentlemen by Rosina Harrison. They were less stingy, more courteous, and interfered less in their staff’s personal lives than the middle-class mistress who had fewer servants than she’d like.
The wages were competitive, given the often generous free food and free lodgings, which, if sometimes damp or spartan, were usually a great improvement on those that servants left behind. William Lanceley spent 43 years in so-called ‘gentleman’s service’, and did not hesitate to describe country houses as “homes of comfort” in his memoir From Hall-Boy to House-Steward.
There was often a clothing allowance too, and the potential for generous tips from the succession of ‘upstairs’ visitors – all of them benefits in kind that mattered. When William started out as a hall-boy in a Cheshire squire’s house at 15, they enabled him to save the entirety of his £8 annual wage to send home to his widowed, debt-ridden mother.
Toiling for the nobility or gentry also carried a social cachet, as some of their exalted status reflected onto their servants. And there was a sense of camaraderie and common purpose among their staff that was utterly unknown to the lonely and overloaded maids-of-all-work who made up the majority of the servant class. They were, wrote Eric Horne, former butler to the aristocracy, in his memoir What the Butler Winked At, “a little community” with an “Espirit de Corps” that he cherished.
In some houses, that community wasn’t so little. At Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the Earls of Leicester had 25–30 indoor servants throughout the 19th century – about average – but there were 40 at Tatton Park, Cheshire, and 63 at Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire. Meanwhile the magnificent Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, home of the Duke of Portland, felt to his footman Frederick Gorst “more like a principality” according to his memoir Of Carriages and Kings. In 1900, 320 staff were spread across the house and wider estate, among them a dedicated wine butler and a vegetable maid. Even the falling incomes and rising taxes that followed the First World War had only a small impact on numbers at many such great estates.
A strict, rank-conscious hierarchy always operated among the servants, with the upper and the lower often dining separately. And as Horne caveated, there were “always spies about a place who tittle-tattle to the Master or Mistress”. But living and working together in the confines of a house where the lodge gates were a mile off, let alone the nearest village, fostered supportive friendships.
And flirtations, too. Servants’ halls were sociable spaces, with music, games and, often, weekly or monthly dances, creating opportunities for both decorous courtship and casual dalliance. At one servants’ ball, at Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire, in the early 20th century, two of the staff managed to sneak unnoticed behind a curtain to indulge in private pleasures of the kind that resulted in the housemaid having to disclose a pregnancy.
The downstairs quarters of the great country houses were, in fact, as much a marriage market as the ballrooms upstairs, thanks to high staff turnover among the junior ranks and the constant influx of new faces downstairs whenever the family upstairs hosted visitors. In West Sussex, housemaid Jean Hibbert was one of countless young women who met her future husband, a gardener at Goodwood, in service, while the archives of Petworth House reveal it to have been a hotbed of romance. By 1860, there had been at least two marriages: lady’s maid ‘Tompy’ wed Owen the valet, and Mr Smith, the bailiff, married Mrs Lingford, the housekeeper.
Of course, the service itself was as gruelling as any other kind. Working days were still long, and started early: housemaids and footmen were generally up by 5am or 6am, many working 15–16 hours a day, alleviated only by a couple of hours’ rest mid-afternoon. Duties were no less monotonous or physically demanding, either. At Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, scullery maids were reduced to tears by the endless, painful work of scouring pots and plates using abrasive soda. Even the most senior positions had their trials: one of the family at Goodwood got their butler, Marshall, to wear a pedometer and discovered that he walked 19½ miles in a single day.
Strict rules kept servants in their place, too. At some houses they were to disappear on encountering any of the family or guests, on pain of dismissal. And it was no meritocracy. “Did anyone see a cross-eyed servant? No, they are as scarce as dead donkeys,” Horne wrote. Most aristocratic households wanted only good-looking, athletic footmen “not less than six feet, and taller if possible, to show off the family livery”. Gorst not only had to powder his hair every day to replicate a wig – which, to his alarm, left him balding – but his employer insisted that he and his fellow footmen replace bread with rice, and stay trim with training in callisthenics and ju-jitsu.
Such sacrifices came with the territory. “No servant may have a will of their own,” grumbled Horne. Often, they didn’t even have their own name. In one house every footman was called William, in another Henry. Such practices made it difficult to escape the sense of being a chattel, as did “the badge[s] of servitude” – a cap and apron or livery suit.
Many elite employers also frowned upon married servants, condemning some to singledom, and others, like William Lincoln, the butler at Audley End, Essex, to live a double life, declaring himself a bachelor while living 80 miles from his wife and two sons.
Yet ‘gentleman’s service’ offered more consolations than most. There were chances to travel with the family, to escape a quiet village and see the glittering lights of London and beyond. There were also less stressful paths to promotion; it was not unusual for servants to be found positions in their employer’s other homes, or in those of their extended family, when they were ready to step up, saving them the uncertainty of job-seeking. Indeed, it was very possible to work, man and boy, for one family: Andrew Crozier arrived at Cragside, Northumberland, as a footman aged 10 in 1881, and retired as butler in 1943.
There were more perks, too: a Christmas gift of £5 at Welbeck Abbey, for instance, where there was also a billiard room for the menservants, and a maid assigned to clean the footmen’s quarters. William Lanceley enjoyed fishing in his squire’s lake, while other servants cherished access to their employer’s libraries and gardens.
And for every employer prone to shouting and bullying, there were those who showed real kindness. A maid at Erddig Hall, Wrexham, in the 1910s recalled being nursed through scarlet fever by her mistress, who also covered the doctor’s fees, while Hibbert remembered the Duke and Duchess of Richmond organising and paying for her wedding at Goodwood because her relations were so far away. Even familial-like relationships are not just TV confections. One lady’s maid kept up a lifelong correspondence with her mistress after she left to marry, while Caroline Hodges, who lived with the Cecil family at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, for over 40 years as nurse to the children, was mourned at her death as a “loved and trusted friend” according to her tombstone.
There was also a tradition of landed employers looking after staff in their old age. Often, they were housed in estate cottages and given pensions, something unknown to most of our working-class ancestors. Others received bequests that enabled them to set up in business.
Even so, the obligation was surely still heaviest on one side. No country house could function, no wealthy family could live in comfort nor host their glittering parties without a small army of servants labouring behind the scenes. “When I visit some of the stately homes today,” a former maid told Frank Dawes, author of Not in Front of the Servants, “I often think how much the owners owe to we servants who took such a pride in our work.” Perhaps we ought to do the same, whether our own forebears were among them or not.
