Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [129]
Lady Phyllis Macrae, daughter of the 4th Marquess of Bristol, had similar memories of interwar shooting parties, with guns coming to stay with their wives, valets and lady’s maids, ‘and very often a chauffeur and a loader, and they all expected to be put up. The loader was quite often the gentlemen’s gentleman [valet] – he was perhaps the first footman who had been taught to load. A few of them did teach the chauffeurs to load.’39
Behind the scenes of these social events with all their luxury and finery were the servants of the house, inhabitants of a partly invisible world behind the green baize door, explored in the last chapter. Their accommodation in the newer country houses of the early twentieth century was given particular attention by Herman Muthesius, German cultural attaché, whose admiring account was published in 1904–5. Deeply impressed by English country-house life, he remarked that its ‘most genuine and decisively valuable feature’ was ‘its absolute practicality’ over ‘the superficially decorative side’. It seemed to him that centuries of domestic life in such establishments had refined many elements into their best and most practical version, although he recognised that they were still predicated on a large servant body.
Amusingly, it was the very multiplicity of rooms with dedicated purposes (which only fifty years later would seem so completely superfluous when there were not the working hands to fill them) that for him represented the ‘high level of culture’ in the English country house. He wrote: ‘the continental observer may find that the residential quarters are not so very different from what he is used to, but the domestic quarters come as a total surprise.’40
According to Muthesius, everything took place in a continental kitchen, from cooking to cleaning – including the servants’ social life. He contrasted this with the English country house, in which ‘the management of the household is broken down into a dozen different operations, for each of which a room is provided’. These arrangements, in his view, had reached an ‘exemplary level’, being placed in recently built country houses in side courts, rather than in basements. This solved three problems: service was made easier; there were no stairs to climb; and it reduced the transmission of cooking smells. It also made the living conditions of servants much healthier.41
He noted the provision of the various spaces that had been a feature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century house: a large kitchen, a scullery,
a second kitchen known as a still-room, larders for dry stores, meat, game, milk and butter, store-rooms for wood, coal for the house and for the kitchen, cleaning rooms and store rooms for lamps, boots (Motcombe [Dorset] even has one [a brushing room] for riding breeches), a pantry and bedroom for the butler, with adjoining plate room, a housekeeper’s room with adjacent laundry room and a communal dining room for servants.42
Muthesius examined every aspect of country-house design in his book, noting especially the provision of a servants’ hall, which by the early twentieth century had become more comfortable than in the previous one:
besides the domestic room already mentioned, all larger and even medium sized houses in England have a servants’ dining-room known as the servants’ hall. It is a large, long room; it must be as near to the kitchen as possible but at the same