Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [100]
To the children who had grown up in them, some remoter country households might have seemed like extended families. Elizabeth Smith (née Grant) put down her Memoirs of a Highland Lady in old age, recalling memories of Doune, her family home in the early nineteenth century, and its large but by all accounts somewhat unruly household of 1812. It is a vivid vignette of an isolated rural estate, where the staff were a mixture of local families and recruits from England, and a way of life that she felt had changed out of all recognition by the end of the century:
Our family then consisted of my father and mother, we three girls and our governess, and our young French companion, Caroline Favrin, William during the summer holidays, Johnnie and a maid between him and my mother, poor Peggy Davidson. Besides her there were the following servants: Mrs Bird, the coachman’s wife, an Englishwoman, as upper housemaid and plain needlewoman, under her Betty Ross, the gardener’s youngest daughter; Grace Grant, the beauty of the country . . . our schoolroom maid; old Belle Macpherson, a soldier’s widow . . . was the laundry maid.11
The picture she creates, perhaps partly romanticised because of the distance in time, is of a highly interconnected and intertwined microcosm of society.
The cook and housekeeper was an Englishwoman Mrs Carr from Cumberland, an excellent manager; a plain cook under her from Inverness; and old Christie as kitchen maid. The men were Simon Ross, the gardener’s eldest son, as butler, and an impudent English footman, Richard, with a bottle-nose, who yet turned all the women’s heads; William Bird, the coachman, and George Ross, another son of the gardener’s as groom . . . Old John Mackintosh brought in all the wood and peats for the fires, pumped the water, turned the mangle, lighted the oven, brewed the beer, bottled the whisky, kept the yard tidy, and stood enraptured listening to us playing on the harp, ‘like Daavid’!
At the farm were the grieve [farm bailiff], and as many lads as he required for the work of the farm under him, who all slept in a loft over the stables and ate in the farm kitchen. [There was also George Ross,] turner, joiner, butcher, weaver, lint-dresser, wool-comber, dyer and what not; his old wife was the henwife. [Old Jenny Cameron] . . . was supreme in the farm kitchen; she managed cows, calves, milk, stores, and the spinning, with another girl who also helped in the laundry in which abode of mirth and fun [or so it must have seemed to a bored young girl in the big house] the under housemaid spent her afternoons.12
In addition to a smith, John Fyffe, who came twice a week, there was a ‘bowman’ who looked after the cattle and who, ‘like almost all the rest of them, lived with us till he died’. This is a riveting portrait of a little self-contained world in a remote area, an almost self-sufficient community, which she looks back on with nostalgia, not least perhaps because it located her – the daughter of a landowner who later lost his lands – near its apex.13
To contrast this somewhat romanticised view with one of more gritty reality, a number of first-hand narratives of service offer an insight into the experiences of working servants, even at the most manual level. The most remarkable nineteenth-century memoir of a maidservant was written by one Hannah Cullwick, who was born in 1833 and died in 1909.14 Her recollections of her early life and her diaries provide a window on to what life was like for maids, who bore most of the hardest jobs of country- and town-house life.
Hannah left school at eight years old and entered service shortly afterwards, working in various country houses in fairly