Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [135]
A reassuring glimmer appeared in his eye as he closed the door on me and by the time I got to the rear he had alerted the steward of the house whose task it was to employ the servants . . . [He was engaged as hall boy for £25 a year.] As hall boy I had very little contact with the Duke and Duchess; I attended to the whims and needs of the fifty senior servants.
[He was later promoted to steward’s room footman literally the footman who attended to the upper servants’ meals, the yearly increment for which was £10.] There were also peripheral benefits, including two free suits of clothing a year, special allowances for laundry and beer, the provision of meals, and a comfortable room of my own in the house.’81
He moved on to work as a ‘schoolroom footman’ for the Earl and Countess of Derby, attending to their orphaned grandchildren.
Most colourfully, he assisted at the Derby House ball, given the day after the Epsom Derby, dressed in full footman’s livery of a gold and silver embroidered red tail cut-away coat and a stiff-fronted wing-collared shirt and white bow tie; blue velvet knickerbockers; pink silk stockings; and silver-buckled black pumps. ‘My hair was waved and powdered white.’82 In 1930, he was recruited as a travelling footman to Lady Louis Mountbatten, from which he progressed to being valet to Lord Louis, then butler, as described with great gusto in his book, Fifty Years with Mountbatten (1980).
In the great landowners’ houses, the staff numbers in the early years of the century stayed at a similar, or only slightly reduced, level between the wars. In the interwar period, Chatsworth in Derbsyhire employed a comptroller, who ran all the Cavendish houses, whilst the staff of Chatsworth itself comprised a butler, the duke’s valet, an under butler, a groom of the chambers, two footmen, a steward’s room footman, a housekeeper, the duchess’s maid, a head housemaid, two second housemaids, two third housemaids, two sewing women, a cook, a first kitchenmaid, a second kitchenmaid, a vegetable maid, two to three scullery-maids, two still-room maids, a dairymaid, six laundrymaids and the duchess’s secretary, all of whom lived in the house.
The Chatsworth footmen still powdered their hair until the 1920s, and until 1938 always wore livery if there were more than six for dinner. Some staff, many living in estate cottages, came in daily, including the odd man, an upholsterer, a scullery man, two scrubbing women, a laundry porter, a steam boiler man, a coal man, two porter’s lodge attendants, two night firemen, a night porter and two window cleaners.83
In the 1920s and 30s, when all the families of the children of the 9th Duke came to stay for Christmas, they each bought with them a nanny, a nursery maid, a lady’s maid, a valet and sometimes a chauffeur and a groom. This swelled the numbers of resident servants over the festive period, so on Christmas Day itself ‘there were about a hundred and fifty people to feed – thirty to forty in the dining-room, twenty in the nursery, up to thirty in the steward’s room, up to fifty in the servants’ hall, and some meals in the house-maids’ room.’84
In 1928, Cliveden, whilst smaller in scale as a whole, was certainly run on the model of a great country house, and required a small army of servants. The indoor staff comprised the steward, Edwin Lee, the valet, Arthur Bushell, the under butler, three footmen, a hall boy, two oddmen, a house carpenter, the chef, Monsieur Gilbert, three kitchenmaids, a scullery-maid, a dairymaid, a housekeeper, Mrs Moore, a still-room maid, a head housemaid, three under housemaids, and two daily maids. Lady Astor’s maid, Rosina Harrison, wrote a remarkable memoir of her life in service, from which this list is taken. There was also a maid for the Hon. Phyllis Astor, a head laundress, Emma Gardener, three laundrymaids, a telephonist and a nightwatchman. A nanny, Miss Gibbons, two nursemaids and a governess made up the nursery staff.
The gardens were in the care of the head gardener, W.