Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [107]
Looking back to the 1860s from the early twentieth century, Mr Kilgallon wrote: ‘I often wonder where all the servants slept. I know there were three or four beds in a room. Many of the men had folding or press beds here and there in the pantry and the hall,’55 – echoes of the sleeping arrangements of the sixteenth-century household.
Former footman and later butler, Eric Horne, left a splendidly rumbustious kind of memoir reminiscent of that of John Macdonald in the eighteenth century, but which tactfully – but sadly for us – leaves out all the names of the houses and his employers: What the Butler Winked at (1923). Despite this anonymity, the stories ring true. His account is much more openly critical than Kilgallon’s, starting with his first job as a footman in a country house: ‘It is useless trying to describe the thousand and one things that comprise a footman’s duties, which in every place he goes to, is different . . . in those days footmen in good families had to be not less than six feet, and taller if possible, to show off the family liveries, and look important.’56 This frustrated Mr Horne, who was only five foot nine.
His first employer, in the 1870s, was a man of property, title and a miserable-sounding temperament. Indeed, Horne described him as ‘the surliest, [most] bad-tempered man I ever met’. The house was a ‘very large, an old Elizabethan mansion, partly modernised inside, but in the rooms upstairs Moderator colza oil lamps were used, and wax candles; gas was used in the basement, made on the estate; the passages were so wide a horse and cart could easily go up them. These passages all met in a large stone flagged square, so that it took some time to find the way about.’ The household consisted of twenty-five indoor servants. ‘We [footmen] had to powder [our hair], and wear breeches and white stockings. The livery was green, covered with yellow and black braiding, the family crest being worked in braid.’57
Showing how much distance there could be between butler and footmen, Horne recalled: ‘The butler was a pompous sort of man, though a very good sort. He had previously served the Rothschilds. As long as we did our work properly he would not trouble us, in fact he very seldom spoke to us liverymen.’58 Mr Horne had to valet for the baron, who liked to have his hair parted in the middle. This was never easy as ‘he [kept] moving his head about’ so it was difficult to get the requisite straight line. The baron used ‘some very flowery language. But I was full of life as an egg and free from care. The Baron’s bad language was like water on a duck’s back.’59
Mr Horne had good memories of the companionship of the servants’ hall. ‘There was a goodly company of us in the servant’s hall at night, as the grooms and the under gardeners would come in and wash up all the silver and glass in the pantries; more for company than anything else, for there was nowhere for them to go for miles, in the evenings.’60 Looking back from the 1920s, he wrote nostalgically of ‘the usual old-fashioned usages observed in the servants’ hall, such as drinking the “Health” every day, etc., also a certain amount of Esprit de Corps among us all, which at the present day is entirely absent’.61
Most country-house establishments held daily prayers, and church attendance was compulsory:
the pews for servants were opposite to those of the gentry, so that we were under observation all the time. One Sunday the Bold Bad baron sent for the butler and asked him if we had been drinking too much beer as he noticed several of the men were asleep during the sermon. The parson was brother to the Baron; the living was in his gift, so of course he preached a sermon to please him; generally about the lower orders being submissive to their betters . . . No wonder we went to sleep.62
Typically for the period, and clearly in part for moral reasons, the sleeping arrangements