Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [132]
Among the thousands of men from all walks of life who died in the trenches and on the battlefields were landowners and their heirs, adding to the insecurity of the country-house way of life, already beset by economic uncertainty, inflation, and rising taxation. Understandably, many men who had been in domestic service before the war did not choose to return to it. New and unfamiliar experiences began to broaden society’s understanding of servants’ lives. Violet Firth, a middle-class woman who had undertaken a gardener’s work, was shocked by the treatment of servants, having become one herself: ‘It offends the innate self-respect of a man or woman to be treated as an automaton.’59
The real crisis in the servant-supported country-house way of life was an economic one. This was quite simply the result of a reduced return from land rentals at the same time as an increase in taxation and a rise in wage levels. A vivid illustration of this can be found in the diaries of Colonel James Stevenson of Braidwood in Lanarkshire. In 1915, on 6 November, he wrote: ‘The lower orders have a great deal of money – more than they ever they had before. The landowners are those who suffer as their rents remain the same – taxes enormously increased & very much higher wages have to be paid to servants on account of competition of public bodies, county councils, parish councils &c who are most extravagant in the wages they give – not having to pay them themselves’.60
The economic equation for a landowner could be compared in his mind, a wage bill for one employee equating to the value of one farm rental. In 1917, on 2 June, he is beside himself as an employee had asked for a pay increase from 25 shillings to 34 a week: ‘but as I can’t lay my hand on another man I had to give it . . . Lapsley’s wage comes to within a few pounds of the rent at Bushilhead farm [a farm on his estate he rented out]. The lower orders are having the time of their lives just now.’61
In 1924 he made a furious entry in his diary on 6 March, on the subject of the departure of a cook; ‘the woman in the kitchen has made up her mind to leave tomorrow at only a week’s notice – quite illegal but I will let her go. The lower orders are beginning to think that they are not bound by any law. I don’t much regret her, as she is stupid, fat & no great cook – but it is difficult to put anyone in her place at a moment’s notice.’62
Some shrewd individuals were quick to recognise the impact the war would have on the whole world of service. In 1920, the architect Randal Phillips observed in The Servantless House: ‘girls who formerly accepted the shackles of what was little better than domestic drudgery came into a new liberty. They got good wages for what they did and they got far more time of their own than they ever had before in domestic service.’63 On the other hand, some of the households that had been run by women during the war found they could dispense with the services of men. It was in this period that the parlourmaid began to feature on the staffs of smaller country establishments and London houses, although less so in the great country houses.64
William Lanceley, a house steward in the 1920s, commented in his memoir From Hall-Boy to House-Steward (1925):
The Great War undoubtedly upset service and this is not to be wondered at by those who know the servant question. The war called for hands to help, and many servants responded to the call. The work they were asked to do was a novelty to them, the pay was big and they had short hours, hundreds being spoilt for service through it. It made those who returned to service unsettled. They had money to spend and time to spend it when on war work, and to come back to [having liberty on] one or two evenings a week was to them a hardship.65
By the 1920s, ‘Service had no attraction for the fairly educated young man or woman. It is looked down upon – they want to do something better, and often school friendships are broken through