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in various philanthropic movements . . . we were doing nothing in the same direction for the members of our own household . . . nothing to bring all into human relations with each other and ourselves, beyond our daily gathering in the Haddo House Chapel for family worship day by day, and on Sunday evenings’ – daily prayers were commonplace in country houses throughout the nineteenth century.146 The committee, formed in 1889, was elected annually from the heads of department, both indoor and outdoor. ‘Before a fortnight had passed we had a singing class of twenty members . . . and a carving class of twelve members, led by our governess; a drawing class of thirteen members, led by our butler, who attained no mean proficiency as an artist; a sewing class, led by our nurse’ and so on. There were social evenings with entertainment provided ‘by home talent’.147

Lady Aberdeen wrote: ‘there is no doubt but that the classes and social gatherings drew all the household very closely together’, noting with pleasure that a ‘branch of our club was formed, with our butler as secretary’, when Lord and Lady Aberdeen were in Government House in Ottawa. She felt that she depended on her servants for everything they did in terms of hospitality and entertainment and that the Household Club introduced ‘the element of deep, mutual regard and understanding and sympathy for one another’s lives, and a basis on which to build a common fellowship for all true and noble purposes, which should surely be the aim and desire of every thoughtful householder’.148

Lord Aberdeen even included a letter from J.M. Barrie, refuting the widely circulated rumour that the Aberdeens’ relationship with their servants had inspired his 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, about an aristocratic family who are shipwrecked with their butler. It is Crichton’s physical dexterity, intelligence and ingenuity that save them and which lead to his becoming effectively their chief. When they are all eventually rescued, he returns without batting an eye to his former subservient role.

It was rather the servants’ skills and intelligence, observed by Barrie in the great houses of the aristocracy, that had prompted his teasing allegory, rather than the socially minded projects of a well-meaning countess. Even then, however, the world was already shifting. The glory days of the Edwardian country house, the subject of the next chapter, marked a definitive turning point. The structured world of the country-house servant that had seemed, as H.G. Wells suggested in his autobiography, such an assured and confident feature of British achievement and of British life would change out of all recognition in the twentieth century, even if it did not quite disappear altogether.149

7

In Retreat from a Golden Age

The first half of the Twentieth Century

WE HAVE NOW traced the story of the country-house servant from the 1300s to the beginning of the twentieth century, a time that is only just out of reach of living memory and is often looked on as the Indian summer of the country-house world. While the great rural households of the time might have seemed foreign to the sixteenth-century servant, used to a more public form of service, they would have been recognisable in daily routine to an eighteenth-century time traveller. In 1900, most major landed estates continued to support large regiments of staff but their days were numbered.

As so often in history, change came in waves. After the great earthquake of the First World War, nothing was ever quite the same. Although many houses continued to employ staff in the same numbers as before (nationally more than 1.4 million people were still employed in domestic service1), gradually these numbers were eroded, with new shocks following taxation, inflation and the effects of the Great Depression of the 1920s. After the massive upheaval of the Second World War, the landscape was unimaginably different, as will be shown in the final chapter.

To remain for the moment in the early twentieth century, among these shocks were changing social