Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [127]
George Frederick Johnson, who took over as head gardener in 1904 and remained until 1952,27 first arrived at the age of seventeen, the son of an under gardener working at Swakeleys, in Middlesex. For the next five years he was trained, as was usual, in all the different departments. He learnt German and went to work in Austria for Ferdinand’s brother, moving on to the garden that Alice owned at Grasse. When the post of head gardener at Waddesdon became vacant, in 1904, Alice offered it to him: ‘Johnson, my head gardener here has given me notice that he does not wish to stay on; he is a very good man and [the] place and plants are in excellent order – I do not like changes and I know you well. I offer you the place of head gardener here.’ She said he could rely on advice from the bailiff ‘until you thoroughly understand the place’ and, indeed, expected him to take counsel from the retired head gardener, Jacques, and from Gibbs, who was gardener at the family’s other house at Eythrope. The job came with ‘a furnished house, coal, milk, potatoes, vegetables, – a horse and cart at your disposal; the doctor and medicine gratis for you and your household’. Not only that but the salary was generous: ‘To begin with I shall give you £100 a year. If you stay with me and give entire satisfaction, you will gradually be augmented up to 130 pounds a year.’28
A handful of letters survive from Alice to Johnson, written when she was regularly away in France, while her other private papers have been destroyed. ‘Quality is the one thing you must study in all your work at Waddesdon, economy too as long as you can effect it by good organisation, but not by lowering the quality of the fruit, vegetable and flowers.’29 As in previous centuries, country-house gardens usually supplied not only flowers to decorate the house, but also a considerable amount of the fruit and vegetables consumed by the household.
Johnson could command around fifty-three staff, with fourteen being employed directly in the greenhouses. The gardeners were divided into different teams, each with its own foreman: the kitchen garden; those tending fruit; those tending specialist plants grown for exhibition or competitions; those supplying bedding plants; those supplying flowers for arrangements in the house. Younger gardeners (many of whom joined in their teens and were usually single) lived together in a bothy, a house that had its own housekeeper and maid who cooked and cleaned for the men; there was also a reading room so that, when they had the time, they could study books and horticultural journals, although their working hours were long: from 6.30 a.m. to 5 p.m.30
Alice’s letters buzz with the minutiae of garden matters, illustrating her competitiveness and showing how she expected confidentiality from her gardeners. One gardener, Marcel Gaucher, working at Waddesdon in the early 1920s, described her as ‘extremely demanding’. His father ‘had the feeling of having to continually pass an examination when working for her, and [remembered] how she always said: “You must never give out the exact name of the plants to my friends, even my closest ones.”’31
During the First World War, some of her letters to Johnson refer poignantly to the deaths of young estate gardeners, as well as those of her own nephews. One is dated 4 April 1917: ‘I am sorry to hear of the death of another Waddesdon man at the front. I should like you to express my most heartfelt sympathy to his mother and to his widow – This war is indeed a very cruel war.’ Another is dated 20 November 1917: ‘thank you for your letter of sympathy. I am profoundly grieved by the untimely death of my two young kinsmen, so brave, so bright.’32
Johnson’s story is not dissimilar to that of John Macleod, the head gardener at Monteviot in the Borders, working for the Marquess and Marchioness of Lothian, appointed to his post