Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [110]
Mr Horne enjoyed working here, but as with many junior men-servants he had to move on to find a more senior position. It was during this time that he became more and more disillusioned with his treatment by the upper classes and their unreasonable demands. There was one baronet and MP whom he described memorably as having ‘the brains of a rabbit’. However, he recalled the earl and the castle with unmixed affection.
After going through the daily routine with this Noble family for several years as under butler I thought I would blossom out into a full-blown valet. As I could clean and load a gun, clean a scarlet coat, top boots and leather breeches with the best of them: also I knew about fishing, and what to do on a salmon fishing expedition. Drying the lines, and clothes, etc., ready for the next morning, and dry all the flies that had been used. I felt I wanted to see a bit more of the world before I settled down to the humdrum life of a butler.77
The latter part of his story belongs to another chapter.
Horne’s many-layered career, moving between multiple employers, reminds us of the mobility of the nineteenth-century servant. Whilst staff would usually be recruited by the house steward, or by the housekeeper where there was no steward, the landowner and his wife usually interviewed any prospective personal attendant.78 References or ‘characters’ were all important, but even when the appointment had been made, all might not go to plan.
In the 1840s, Lavinia Jane Watson, the daughter of Lord George Quin, married Richard Watson of Rockingham Castle. Her diaries for the 1840s record just such a case in point. On 1 January 1844, her trusted lady’s maid, Lloyd, was ill, apparently suffering from nerves at having to hand in her notice. ‘Champion [the housekeeper] broke the ice about Lloyd, who wishes to marry Mr Lloyd; and as it incurred her leaving me, she was in low spirits. Had an interview with the bride and comforted her.’79
However, immediately after these affectionate remarks, she expressed her dismay at the character of Lloyd’s replacement, writing on 17 February: ‘My new maid Stephenson arrived on Wednesday, a short old fashioned, mincing body – won’t do.’ By 21 February: ‘Stephenson going.’ On the 23rd: ‘Children well. I with bad cough. Took leave of Stephenson and her humble resigned manner on the occasion almost made me feel a lump, and yet I am sure I have never felt less fascinated by anyone. Champion very good about it altogether.’ This scenario must have been a familiar contest of sensitivity and self-interest.80
Mrs Watson was a close friend of Charles Dickens, who visited Rockingham Castle on several occasions. Old Champion, the housekeeper, is thought by some to have been the model for Mrs Rouncewell, housekeeper in his novel, Bleak House, to Sir Leicester Dedlock at his home of Chesney Wold. She is described in Chapter 7 as ‘a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat . . . It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine Chesney Wold without Mrs Rouncewell, but she has only been here fifty years.’ Famously, she gives a tour of the house to the visiting Mr Guppy and his friend Walt, with a young gardener opening and closing the shutters, while the visitors are overwhelmed by the size and gloom of the house.
As in the eighteenth century, the recruitment of domestic servants is often mentioned in letters between landowning families. On 3 May 1804, Lady Blount wrote to Francis Fortescue Turvile at Bosworth Hall, Northamptonshire, to say that ‘if she is not yet provided with a House & Laundry maid there is a very good one to be had who was bred up by Lady Clifford . . . & when she went to Igbrooke took [her] with her as under nursery maid where she lived within these two years’. The maid in question had also worked at two other houses where the servants had been discharged when the household was broken up but ‘had given great satisfaction’.81
Goodwood’s house steward, Robert Smith, wrote on 19 May 1858