Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [130]
Its position seemed to him to be dictated by protocol and practicality:
It is never situated that it can overlook the front door to the house, to prevent visitors feeling that the servants’ eyes are upon them as they arrive. It must however be in closest proximity to the tradesmen’s entrance, since it also serves as a waiting-room and visitor’s room for all visitors of the rank of the lower servants (the housekeeper’s or steward’s rooms fulfil the same function for the upper servants).44
Staff bedrooms continued to be strictly segregated by gender, senior servants having dedicated bedrooms and junior servants sharing dormitories. The introduction of electricity at the end of the nineteenth century might well have ushered in a more radical approach to country-house technology – indeed, it had been installed in some country houses since the late 1880s and 1890s. However, the innate conservatism of the landowning class, and the availability of cheap labour, meant that, as Clive Aslet observed in The Last Country Houses, there was little motive for change: ‘only when it became apparent that the supply of willing labour could not be increased did owners begin to look seriously into the alternative possibilities’ of the labour-saving new technology.45
Novelties such as centralised vacuuming systems appeared in new houses built in the early years of the twentieth century, as well as other useful and functional inventions, such as the internal telephone system at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, with handsome handsets for the aristocracy and less glamorous earpieces in the servants’ quarters.46 The butler’s pantry at Castle Drogo in Devon, a picturesque castle designed by Lutyens for Julius Drewe, and completed only in the 1920s, boasts a memorable internal telephone exchange as part of an unusually handsome sequence of service rooms.47 In older houses, house telephones seem to have been popular, using the old wiring tubes of the bell system, but the public telephone network soon had an even greater impact on country-house life, allowing all sorts of communication that had in the past required the services of a trusted domestic.48 Although at first it only added to the duties and responsibilities of the principal menservants expected to answer the telephone and take messages.
In contrast, the new technology might itself quickly be made obsolete. In 1913, new motor-driven laundries were installed at houses such as Sledmere in Yorkshire and Carberry Tower in Scotland, but during the interwar period, as attempts were made to reduce domestic expenditure, many country-house laundries were closed and laundry sent out to an independent contractor.49
Modernisation took place at different rates in different houses, so assumptions cannot be made that innovations in new-built country houses in this period would typically be found in older ones. The conservatism of country-house owners made many slow to modernise their historic houses, certainly before the First World War.
This is illustrated in Lady Diana Cooper’s memoir, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1958), recording vivid childhood memories of Belvoir Castle in Rutland, where her grandfather, the 7th Duke of Rutland, led an almost fendal life, dying in 1906. Born in 1892, she remembered the many additional hands thronging the long corridors of the house, such as the gong man, ‘an old retainer, one of those numberless ranks of domestic servants which have completely disappeared and today seem fabulous. He was admittedly very old. He wore a white beard to his waist.’50 Even more evocative were the water men who, before Belvoir was replumbed at the beginning of the twentieth century, still carried water by hand around the house:
The Water-men are difficult to believe in today . . . They were the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than the men of the family,