Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [117]
The moral standards of the Victorian age were reflected in his attitude to planning: ‘the working rooms of the men ought to form one division, and those of the women another. In all good plans this distinction is very clearly to be seen; the Servants’-Hall being properly the point of meeting, with the domain of the butler on one side and that of the housekeeper on the other, and as little necessity as possible on either side to pass the boundary. Separate Passages and Stairs also lead to the private rooms of each Sex.’117 This division of the sexes is met in many houses at this date.
Addressing the decoration of servant’s sitting rooms and bedrooms, Kerr believed that ‘all private rooms to be equal to those of a similar class of persons in their own homes – perhaps a little better, but not too much so’.118 He added a remark that suggested that in the minds of some architects or patrons, servants could be considered as inseparable from the technology of the house: ‘every servant, every operation, every utensil, every fixture, should have a right place and no right place but one.’119 Nevertheless, servants’ quarters should be well designed and decorated: ‘Cheerfulness . . . will still be desirable; and in the private apartments of the servants, there is no reason why so cheap a luxury should be forgotten. Elegance, Importance, and Ornament would be quite out of place.’120
Memorably, Kerr wrote that the kitchen, that most important of country-house offices, had attained ‘at last in our own day the character of a complicated laboratory, surrounded by numerous accessories specially contrived, in respect of disposition, arrangement, and fittings, for the administration of the culinary art in all its professional details’.121 Ranges in country houses were generally coal-fired until the early twentieth century; gas was introduced originally as a supplementary and was available as early as the 1830s.122
Although the surprising aspect of Victorian kitchens is their distance from the dining room, this was because Victorians had a horror of cooking smells. Kerr was emphatic: ‘It must also be remembered that various household incidents, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, storage of provisions and other goods, and so on, positively engender offensive vapours.’123 It may seem today that the Victorians were being absurdly sensitive about smells, but a country-house kitchen was coping with conditions more like those of a top modern hotel than a private house, and without the benefit of modern extractors.124
Yet, paradoxically, the distance between the kitchen and the dining room was a constant source of concern, for obvious reasons of the logistics of service and hotness of food. Whilst this distance shrank over the century, some was always expected. One change was that the aristocratic family became less tolerant of the sight of liveried servants actually carrying trays of food through the main part of the house. In the 1840s, the Marquess of Westminster at Eaton Hall in Cheshire did not care to see his dinner being borne across the main hall and had the architect, William Burn, insert a new serving stair, directly linking the serving room and the dining room.125
Echoing a debate that can be traced from the seventeenth century, Kerr had strictures on the upper servants’ offices: ‘A position ought to be chosen for the Butler’s-Pantry which shall answer for several relations. It must be as near as possible, indeed close, to the Dining-room, for convenience of service. It ought to be removed from general traffic, and especially from the Back-door, for the safety of the plate. The communication with the Wine and Beer Cellars must be ready, and in a manner private.’126
Because the butler’s pantry was, as we have seen, a practical room where silver and glasses were carefully washed up, it needed to be well lit with a really good sink,