Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [134]
Gordon Grimmett, in his memoir published in Gentlemen’s Gentlemen and edited by Rosina Harrison, evokes one of the humblest jobs in a country house. He joined the staff at Longleat in Wiltshire at the age of fifteen as a lamp boy, going on to become a footman and working for the Astors at Cliveden before leaving service. Lamp boys were common in country-house service until the 1920s. He slept in a dormitory with six beds, which he shared with the two under footmen, one of the odd men, the pantry boy and the steward’s boy: ‘there was also a dressing-table and about four rickety chairs: that was the sum total of the furniture.’77
He would get up at six, collect sixty shoes for cleaning and distribute hot-water jugs. At eight o’clock he would have breakfast, after which he cleaned knives in a special machine. At 8.45 he would light the 140 candles in the chapel for the morning service attended by all the staff, during which he would be on organ duty. After chapel he would be responsible for gathering up all 400 of the lamps at Longleat, which, as we have seen, was still lit by oil lamps and candles because the marquess was loth to disfigure the old house with electricity. Each one had to be cleaned, trimmed and refilled. He had some help from the odd men and other boys, and many lamps were delivered to him by other housemaids and footmen although ‘collecting and replacing them itself meant a few miles walk every day’. He would trim the wicks and then ‘fill the lamps from the large oil tanks, paraffin for the corridor and staff lamps, and colsa oil for the house.’ Then he polished the funnels, globes and stands. ‘The sheer monotony of the job took some beating.’
Mr Grimmett would tackle twenty at a time, which would be collected and replaced by others. He would also replace all the candles. After tea, he would light all the lamps in the corridors, basement and cellars, while the footmen lit those in the main rooms, also helping him to put the shutters up. Despite the dullness of this drudgery, he thought his job easier than the housemaids.’78
In the early afternoon, he would have to move outside the day bed of the young Viscount Weymouth, who had a weak lung for which a daily dose of fresh air was recommended; often the two boys would walk the dogs together afterwards. ‘I learnt a lot from him and I think perhaps he did from me. I didn’t envy him, nor have I ever been jealous of my employers.’ After a year, Mr Grimmett became third footman, perhaps because the older men had gone to war.
His colleague Rosina Harrison remembered him as ‘an excellent footman. He was like an actor; he’d be playing the fool in the wings but from the moment he went on stage he was straight into his part. It was the theatre of service which appealed to him, the dressing up in livery with almost period movement and big gestures that fitted the Louis Quinze dining-room at Cliveden.’79
Charles Smith, born in 1908, served Lord Louis Mountbatten for fifty years. He too went into service at the age of fifteen after a serious illness prevented him continuing to work in a coal mine. The idea of an alternative occupation came to him while he recuperated on an uncle’s farm: ‘Four miles away, commanding the horizon and always the focal point of my eyes, was the seventeenth-century grey-stoned Welbeck Abbey, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Portland. It held considerable fascination for me, and one morning I put on my jacket and breeches – hand-me-downs from the village Squire’s son – and cycled to the Abbey.’80
He rang the front door bell, which was answered by a liveried footman