Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [120]
Not all nineteenth-century architects revelled in the excessive elaboration of service quarters. In 1880, the architect J.J. Stevenson wrote in House Architecture of the need to simplify the intricacies that had become the norm: ‘Keeping pace with our more complicated ways of living, we have not only increased the number of rooms, in ordinary houses, but have assigned to each a special use. Instead of the hall and single chamber of the middle ages, with which even kings were content, every ordinary house must have a number of separate bedrooms, at least three public rooms, and a complicated arrangement of servants’ offices.’ Stevenson sensibly went on to point out how this complexity itself demanded extra labour: ‘All these places, with the interminable passages connecting them, have to be kept in order; and, if they increase the facility of doing the work, they increase the labour of the house, and necessitate a greater number of servants.’141
As the century drew to a close, there was a growing awareness of the social disparities between master and servant as a matter of political principle. In some households, more thought was given to the continuing welfare and education of servants, although, bizarre as it may seem, a serious concern of this kind could rebound on the reputation of the employer, and not always in a positive way.
But you cannot always please everyone and giving servants too comfortable quarters alarmed some social observers. The diarist Augustus Hare famously always used the word ‘luxurious’ to describe the houses of the newly rich in a tone of disapproval, and could hardly credit the comfort of the servants at Worth Park, in Sussex, the home of the Montefiore family: ‘I went to Worth, the ultra-luxurious house of the Montefiores, where the servants have their own billiard tables, ballroom, theatre and pianofortes, and are arrogant and presumptious in proportion.’142
And not only comfortable rooms were criticised, general benevolence could be a problem, too. In the last years of the century, the Countess of Aberdeen was somewhat taken aback to find herself notorious for her supposedly radical views; indeed, such was the credibility given to the idea that she used to dine once a week with her servants, while Lord Aberdeen was serving as Governor, that Queen Victoria asked Lord Rosebery to look into it: ‘we gave our good friend Lord Rosebery the necessary information as to the strictly orthodox character of our household arrangements.’143 The same rumour reached Edward VII shortly after he ascended to the throne: ‘[it was] only very recently that an intimate friend of ours, who was staying at an Alpine resort, was solemnly told by another guest at the hotel when visitors came to Viceregal lodge [that] they were liable to be taken to dinner [i.e. on the arm of] by the butler or the housekeeper.’144
In their affectionate, co-written memoir, ‘We Twa’: Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen (Vol. II, 1925), Lady Aberdeen mentioned a newspaper article, warning the people of Canada that
they would have to put up with a lady with a bee in her bonnet with regard to the servant question, one who would never allow her servants to wear caps, and who was in the habit of playing hide-and-seek and other such games with the housemaids and footmen, at all sorts of odd hours of the day. Moreover, it was stated as a fact that Lord Aberdeen and I dined habitually in the servants’ hall on certain days of the week.145
The real origin of these stories was that Lady Aberdeen had founded ‘The Onward and Upward Association’ for the benefit of farm servant girls working on Lord Aberdeen’s estates, as well as a Household Club for their immediate staff. The first association was intended to give the girls ‘an occupation and recreation outside their daily work, and assistance with keeping up their education’. There were also social occasions intended to encourage a common purpose between girls and their mistresses.
The Household Club was ‘really the outcome of an uneasy feeling on our part that whilst sharing