Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [122]
The deference of traditional service was possibly becoming more difficult to bear in an era of febrile political activity, as the country moved slowly towards universal suffrage. The two significant dates are 1918 and 1928; before the first, no male or female domestic servant, however responsible, had the vote; after 1918, the only women who could vote had to be over thirty; it was not until 1928 that all female servants were enfranchised. Various attempts to set up a trades union for domestic service were unsuccessful, compared to those of industrial labour movements. Until the passage of the National Insurance Act in 1911, there was actually no legislation that legally protected the servant in sickness or old age.3
The constant refinement of technology during the nineteenth century meant that light and heat no longer needed so much manual labour. Even the carrying of messages by trusted hands was made obsolete by the successive invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and the telephone in the 1870s. Most significantly perhaps, increased taxation had an immense impact on the economy of the country house. Large staffs began to shrink in the 1930s – some houses dispensing entirely with senior menservants and opting instead for parlourmaids who were paid less. After the seismic shifts of the Second World War, few establishments could return to the complex and stratified staff hierarchies that until then had been so much a part of the cultural prestige and demography of the British country house.
But up until that point, and especially between 1900 and 1914, most of the great country houses of the early twentieth century remained lavishly staffed and complex organisations. The principal jobs were much the same as in the previous century, although with subtle variations reflecting new technologies, such as technicians for private electricity generators, and chauffeurs for cars. (Some services such as laundry were also beginning to be put out to private companies.) However, in the early 1900s the demarcations, refined over a century or more, were drawn more carefully yet than in the preceding hundred years.
This peak of specialisation was underlined by the slow process of training country-house domestic servants from their youth, with upper servants coaching the younger ones in the strict disciplines of their duties, giving them the necessary experience to move on eventually to the more responsible roles of steward, butler, valet, housekeeper, lady’s maid and so on. As Ernest King recalled when he started as a hall boy early in the century: ‘I suppose I first learnt to be a servant by being a servant to the servants: the table in the servants’ hall to lay, the staff cutlery to clean and staff meals to put on the table.’4
That these complete and seemingly self-contained communities still existed is clear from so many personal histories, one of the most vivid of the Edwardian period being Frederick Gorst’s memoir of life as a footman to the Duke of Portland. The duke’s large estate in Nottinghamshire, as well as his other coal mining interests, brought him in ‘many millions a year’. He also had a court appointment, as he was Master of the Horse to King Edward VII. At that time, ‘the estate of Welbeck Abbey was more like a principality than anything else . . . It was, in a sense, like working for the reigning prince of a small state within a kingdom.’5
He was one of the four ‘Royal footmen’ who worked at Welbeck Abbey, unless they were required for ceremonial duties in the Royal Household in London. Mr Gorst recalled arriving at the former along a private tunnel, ‘electrically lighted and wide