Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [114]
He was also clearly proud of the new kitchen although he had reservations about some of the other service areas:
The kitchen itself is handsome and spacious, and contains steam-cupboards, and a hot steam-table; and wood is the sole fuel employed in the high grate as well as coke for the steam contrivances, which, diminishing the quantity of blacks [smuts], must add greatly to the cleanliness of the place . . . The pastry [cook’s preparation room] convenient, the scullery awful, and the larder atrocious; for, although it may be airy, and highly convenient for salting, it looks into the abysses of a dusty coal-yard. . . . I spare you bakehouse, washhouse, and laundry: neither will we boast of the poultry-yard; but the dairy, of good architecture, is not bad. You pass under a building that contains the Clerk of works’ office and lodging-rooms, and by a gun-room [count] to the Porter’s lodge.99
Given the ever more complex arrangement of rooms, it is not surprising that the technology of bells continued to develop throughout the nineteenth century, during which period many late-eighteenth-century wire-systems were updated wires. Many early-nineteenth century systems are still visible, if now unused, in the staff corridors of country houses. But the constant ringing of bells could be the source of some contention with staff, some servants walking great distances to find out what was required, before covering the same distance twice to return with the required object. Such strains, indeed, lay at the core of one of the most famous murder trials, when in 1840, a Swiss valet, François Courvoisier, murdered Lord William Russell, uncle of the Duke of Bedford. He was said to have been discovered as a thief and murdered his elderly master, and hanged. But in his defence, he said his master was always finding fault with him.100 At midnight on the dreadful day, his master rang the bell for attention and Courvoisier went up holding a warming pan to be at the ready. Lord William was furious that his servant should had seen fit to prejudge his request and sent him down. He rang the bell a little later and when the valet arrived asked him to fetch a warming pan. Later he came down, found his valet in the dining room and sacked him; shortly after this, the valet claimed he snapped and killed his master in a fury.101
No doubt to avoid such possible irritations some houses installed speaking tubes from the 1840s, although they were also thought to be a risk to privacy (by both parties) and, at the end of the century, internal telephone systems, sometimes routed through the butler’s pantry. Better systems were continually being explored, including pneumatic systems and eventually electrical systems, with the little flags in the windows of a glass box that moved to show which room had called.102
One of the great bones of contention about servants’ accommodation was the potential dampness of subterranean bedrooms, an issue highlighted by a comparison of two great Irish country houses: Lissadell, where Thomas Kilgallon worked, which was constructed in the 1830s and little changed thereafter; and Humewood, built some three decades later.
Lissadell, with its neoclassical style and characterful, late-Georgian design, enjoys a dramatic position near the coast in County Sligo. The English architect, Francis Goodwin, published his designs for the house in Rural Architecture (1835), explaining in detail why the service quarters had to be placed below ground: ‘The offices, together with the sleeping rooms for the servants, are in the basement, yet, as may be seen by the view of the house, partly above ground. One advantage, if no other, gained by this system is that it raises the floor above them, and therefore contributes to the cheerfulness of the principal rooms, which thus being a little elevated, enjoy a better prospect.’103
Goodwin acknowledged that ‘many, we are aware, object to offices being at all sunk below the house in a country residence where there is generally