Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [137]
Sometimes, experience might be gained in unorthodox ways. In one place where she was kitchenmaid, ‘the cook used to get drunk, and I used to have it all to do’. She worked at Bramham Hall near Wetherby, before returning, just after the First World War, to Crathorne Hall, at the request of the housekeeper, to be the principal cook there. There were four in the Dugdale family plus twenty-six servants, whose feeding was her responsibility. On shooting parties there could be seventy to cater for because the beaters were given hot food as well. In 1927, Mrs Davidson married a groom, Albert, who also worked at Crathorne, and left service to devote herself to him, but she soon went back at her employer’s request and with her husband’s blessing, remaining the family cook for the next thirty years.89 Initially, meals were served by a butler and first and second footman, in a pink and fawn livery, but footmen and formality dwindled away after the Second World War.
Mrs Davidson’s observations on the catering responsibilities for a large household of staff as well as family are echoed in many memoirs, as is the pattern of staff meals being served in different rooms, reflecting their stratification, which seems so extraordinary today. Anne, Countess of Rosse, was very conscious of these fine distinctions: ‘There were still when I went to Birr, for each day, six different lunches in six different rooms. The staff could on occasion meet and talk together – Nanny could gossip with the housekeeper in the house-keeper’s room, or Miss Martin the governess could gossip with Nanny either in the schoolroom or the nursery. But eating together – NO.’90
Mrs Jean Hibbert, who worked at Gordon Castle and then Goodwood House in the interwar years, from the late 1920s until her marriage in 1932, harked back to her time as a housemaid in her detailed, amusing but unpublished memoirs. Her first post was at Gordon Castle in Moray, after which she wanted to move on elsewhere to become a second housemaid. When she sought a reference from the duchess, so that she could take up a post at Wilton House,91 to her surprise the duchess responded with a telegram: ‘You are not to leave my employment. If you want a change come to Goodwood.’ Mrs Hibbert wrote to one gardener she had met to ask his advice about accepting this offer and he encouraged her to do so – they later married. An added incentive was that the first housemaid from Gordon Castle, Annie Cowie, had already moved to Goodwood. So she travelled from Rothes in Scotland, via London, to Sussex.92
‘There were seven housemaids and our rooms were in one of the towers of the great house. We were all Scots as the Duchess liked us best, but we did not like the head housemaid who was from Glasgow . . . The maids had a sitting room with a fire on the ground floor but no fires in the bedrooms.’93 Typically the staff ate together in the servants’ hall, except for the butler, the lady’s maid, the housekeeper and the butter cook (a specialist chef), who all ate in the steward’s quarters.
The maids rose at 5.30 every day to get the public rooms ready before the family came down, yet Mrs Hibbert retained great affection for these apartments and took pride in her work:
Now that I was second housemaid my duties were largely cleaning in the main part of the house which was much older and more beautifully furnished than Gordon Castle. I particularly loved the fine paintings . . . Goodwood is famous for its Canalettos which I could see every day. When you think of it, people pay to visit such places now but I had those lovely rooms to myself every day in return for some hard work. Dusting, cleaning floors, polishing, laying fires and using the newly-fangled, heavy Hoover sweeping machines were my jobs but the worst part was cleaning steel grates until they shone.94
She also polished the dining-room table before breakfast at 7.30. When the family were up their bedrooms were cleaned and their beds made.