Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [104]
On the larger estates, annuities and legacies often placed retiring domestic servants in a better position than many other kinds of workers of the same era. Lord Northwick left annuities of £5 for his butler, under butler, groom, nurse and coachman (to be forfeited if invested in a public house), with £10 to their widows, and £5 to those of his gardeners and labourers. He added a codicil that paid £100 to everyone who had been in service to him for a full year leading up to the time of his death.33 At Trentham, annuities to servants included £50 a year to a housekeeper, while many others were entitled to accommodation of some sort on the estate.34
Some elderly servants on the larger estates could expect accommodation, perhaps being put into gate lodges and given the lesser duties of gatekeeper, for example. There is a painting at Carnfield Hall in Derbyshire that shows just such a gatekeeper: a retired housekeeper or housemaid by the name of Mrs Mumford, painted in 1890 when she was a hundred.35 In 1890, the Duke of Portland, who owned racehouses, built a substantial set of almshouses on his estate at Welbeck Abbey called ‘The Winnings’ because they had been paid for by prize money from a horse race. They provided housing for servants obliged to retire while in service to the duke on account of either ill heath or old age.36
Many servants, or former domestic servants, of course, were not so lucky, particularly those whose later years of service were spent in towns. Joseph Chamberlain, in his evidence before the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor in 1893, remarked that people were often reluctant to employ servants over the age of fifty ‘and accordingly almost by the necessity of the case, they will have to go [to] the workhouse’. He asserted that in the Birmingham Workhouse then, of the 438 female inmates one in every three had been connected with domestic service in some way.37 Fear of the workhouse persisted among elderly servants well into the twentieth century.
Servants who had passed their whole lives working for one family were certainly better looked after. One of the most interesting (and as yet unpublished) personal memoirs of a domestic servant in an important country house is that written by Thomas Kilgallon, long-term manservant and valet to Sir Henry Gore-Booth. His diaries, which survive in a typescript version in the Belfast Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, not only give a deeply personal picture of life in service, but delineate the roles, experiences and duties of the whole household as he remembered it.38
Kilgallon spent his entire life with Gore-Booth, moving up from a very junior position to become his valet and, ultimately, the butler at Lissadell in Country Sligo, a position from which he retired around 1920. As his memoirs show, he sank his whole life and energies into looking after his employer and his family. Penned in the early years of the twentieth century, they cover the period from the 1860s to the 1890s. Throughout, he continually uses the phrase ‘we’ when speaking of the experiences of himself and Sir Henry and Lady Gore-Booth, rather than himself and his fellow servants.
A portrait of Mr Kilgallon by Count Casimir Markiewicz was painted directly on to the wall of the dining room at Lissadell beside the sideboard where he would have presided over so many meals. In 1900, Markiewicz had married Sir Henry’s eldest daughter, Constance, who became an Irish Nationalist, fought in the Easter Rising in 1916 and was celebrated in verse by W.B. Yeats. What a key presence in her life this strong-minded individual must have seemed, not least as Kilgallon was the first Irish Roman Catholic to be the household’s senior servant, an issue that seems to have been little explored in biographies of the countess.39
It was in fact very unusual for a Roman Catholic to become a butler in a Protestant-owned country house, even then, and it is testimony to the close relationship