Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [125]
Mr Gorst professed genuine interest in the great house he served, still occupied today by descendants of the duke; describing it as ‘a castle of unparalleled magnificence and solidity’. Among the extraordinary additions made by the eccentric 5th Duke of Portland in the nineteenth century were many tunnels and underground rooms, including the vast ballroom, 160 feet long and 63 feet wide.
The principal tunnel, connecting the kitchen wing to the main portion of the house, was laid with trolley lines so that large wagons, all fitted with rubber wheels, could move noiselessly along the tracks and carry the food as quickly as possible to the main dining room. The wagons were fitted with plates heated by hot water on one side to keep the dishes hot, and on the other there were cold steel plates for chilled food.20
The pinnacle of staff entertainment at Welbeck was the annual servants’ ball, held in the underground ballroom and adjoining reception rooms, which ‘were beautifully decorated just as though the Duke and Duchess were giving a ball for themselves’. Staff and estate tenants were invited and no expense was spared: ‘An orchestra from London had been engaged and a swarm of fifty waiters.’ Mr Gorst attended in livery, feeling free when the duke and duchess left to change into his own dress clothes. Seeing the staff out of uniform had a profound impact on him:
It was quite a revelation to see all of the members of the staff in ball dress. Even the prim head housemaid looked quite chic in a velvet gown, and the head housekeeper, who wore a low cut blue satin gown, was almost unrecognizable without her stiff, black dress and her belt of jingling keys . . . [it seemed that] we had acquired a new kind of individuality and gaiety for the evening, and, stranger still, that we were seeing each other from a new aspect – as people not as servants.21
After the sudden death of his sister at a young age, Mr Gorst decided to seek adventure in America, closing his final pages with the Edwardian country house still at its height. The First World War followed hard behind, blowing a chill through every aspect of British life, hard-fought victory though it may have been, and changing the world of the country house for ever. (One side effect was the rapid decline in the use of London town houses, once occupied by many families for only a few months every year and most of which were given up in the 1920s and 1930s.)
The household at Welbeck was so extensive that it is worth describing the servants’ roles in some detail, department by department. Over sixty were employed in the house, with two hundred more in the stables, gardens, home and laundry. Welbeck was a ‘principality’ indeed, with a large estate beyond the house and its immediate dependencies. The indoor staff mostly lived in the house, while top servants such as the duke’s secretary were accommodated in separate houses; farmers, gardeners, stablemen and garage men mostly had their own cottages.22
The kitchen and the service of meals were the domain of the steward, the wine butler, the under butler, the groom of the chamber, the four royal footmen, two steward’s room footmen, two pageboys, the head chef, the second chef, the head baker and the second baker. There was also a head kitchenmaid, two under kitchenmaids, a vegetable maid, three scullery-maids, a head still-room maid with three still-room maids under her, a hall porter, two helpers (both boys), a kitchen porter and six ‘odd men’. (These were literally odd-job men, whose wide variety of duties included attending to drains and roofs; they tended not to graduate into footman-butler roles.)
For the household and personal ‘body’ service, there was the head housekeeper, the duke’s valet, the duchess’s personal