Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [136]
The London house at no. 4, St James’s Square, had a full-time staff of a housekeeper, a head housemaid, two under housemaids, an odd man, a carpenter and an electrician. Also based there were a controller, Miss Kindersley, who looked after all the Astors’ households, three accountants, and a number of secretaries, as many as seven during Lady Astor’s period as MP. Even though Cliveden was not at the centre of a great agricultural estate, the size of its household as a whole is on a par with the great lists of the Earl of Northumberland in 1511, or the Earl of Dorset in 1613.85
Whilst the Astor’s footman, young Gordon Grimmett, thought the housemaids’ work much harder than his own as a young lamp boy, it was junior maids in the scullery and kitchen who, like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, had the most physically demanding jobs. Rosina Harrison recalls the grand steward at Cliveden, Mr Lee, saying of the young scullery-maids: ‘Poor little devils, washing up and scrubbing away at dozens of pots, pans, saucepans and plates up to their elbows in suds and grease, their hands red raw with the soda which was the only form of detergent in those days. I’ve seen them crying with exhaustion and pain, the degradation too, I shouldn’t wonder.’86
That life was tough is borne out in many other memoirs, although some among them had pleasant memories of the houses where they had been employed, describing as their ‘happiest days’ time spent working in the company of a large body of servants. As the century progressed they were also permitted more freedoms than had been the lot of their predecessors, although younger servants were still obliged to leave to marry until the 1930s.
In 1971, the present Lord Crathorne recorded an interview with his family’s cook, Mrs Davidson, who had worked at Crathorne Hall in Yorkshire from the 1920s, and who had first arrived there in 1910, aged fourteen, through Hunt’s Registry in London. A lot of young people went into domestic service, she recalled, ‘because there was nothing else for us to do’. She was first employed as a scullery-maid, one of twenty-six indoor servants on the staff of one of the great Edwardian country houses, completed only in 1906.
I had to get up at four o’clock. We had to get ready for all the staff and we had to get the kitchen ready for Mrs Dugdale coming down, floor scrubbed and silver sand put down, the table with a cloth and all the knives put neatly on the table. And then she would come in and go through the kitchen and scullery and out into the larder, the game larder, back in and into the inside larder and then came down and sat at the table to look at the menus which were all in a book.
We had breakfast in the kitchen and the housemaids in the Hall and the Housekeeper and valets and butler in the housekeeper’s room. We had ours at 8 o’clock. After breakfast we did more cleaning, and there would be about twenty copper pans we had to clean . . . There were four of us in the kitchen and we did the vegetables. I just did the vegetables and cooked them.
Although they did not get to bed until eleven, the staff ‘used to have fun amongst ourselves’ and there was always ‘good food’ for the servants.87
From the scullery Mrs Davidson was promoted to still-room maid, ‘where you make the cakes and bread, and biscuits, and do the dining room washing up and dessert dishes, and all the morning