Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [138]
She heard some local gossip about the West Dean estate, where ‘the morals of the guests were supposed to be so loose that the garden boy had to ring a bell fixed to the corner of the house wall at 6 a.m. called “the change beds bell”, so that housemaids would find the right husbands and wives together in bed when they delivered their morning tea at 7!’ Even Mrs Hibbert thought that this was probably quite apocryphal but it has echoes of the bed-hopping life of the aristocracy in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.96
At Goodwood in the 1920s, staff numbers were still high. There were twenty-seven indoor staff: the steward, who looked after the accounts; the butler; the housekeeper; the cook; the duke’s valet; the duchess’s maid; the porter who sat in a cubbyhole by the main door and took in messages and post; five footmen, seven housemaids, two pantry boys, three kitchenmaids, three still-room maids and two scullery-maids. Then there was staff for the laundry, the stables, with both horses and cars, and the garden, where fourteen gardeners worked under the head gardener, his deputy and his foreman, seven of them under Mrs Hibbert’s future husband, Spencer Hibbert. An additional team of gardeners looked after the pleasure grounds and cricket green, not to mention the gamekeepers and woodsmen.97
Mrs Hibbert looked on the then Duchess of Richmond as ‘an excellent employer’ who threw a good Christmas party and sometimes treated the maids to an afternoon at the theatre with tea at the Grosvenor Hotel. When she and Spencer Hibbert became engaged to be married, they handed in their notice as was usual. However, the duchess, ‘knowing my family was far away and very poor . . . offered to organise and pay for the wedding from Goodwood House’. She even gave Mrs Hibbert furniture for their new home. The wedding breakfast was ‘a magnificent spread and lovely wine which the Duke gave us as his present and a fine three layered wedding cake . . . the kitchens had been working hard and in secret because I knew nothing about it.’98
Some young women, unable to pursue an expensive higher education during the Great Depression, found careers in service the only option. Lavinia Swainbank began work in 1922, which was ‘not an easy time to be starting out on one’s career. For those were the days of depression on the Tyne.’ Although Miss Swainbank had passed the eleven-plus, a shortage of money hampered all her attempts to go further: ‘Thus at sixteen I entered into a career of drudgery, where long hours and very often inadequate food were accepted standards of a life that was thrust on one out of sheer necessity.’ She was taken on in a hotel as a ‘tweeny’ (or between-stairs maid), then became second housemaid: ‘ultimately I reached my peak as third house-maid in one of the stately homes of England’.99
When she was a second housemaid in ‘gentleman’s service’ for an elderly lady and two spinster daughters, her daily timetable had echoes of service in a country house during the previous four centuries:
6.30 Rise. Clean grate [and] lay fire in Dining Room. Sweep carpet and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in Library. Sweep and dust. Clean grate and lay fire in billiard room. Sweep and dust. Polish staircase. Clean grate and lay fire in Drawing Room. Polish floor. Clean grate and lay fire in Morning Room. Sweep and Dust vestibule. Sweep and dust Blue Staircase.
All that before the 8 am. Breakfast in the Servants’ Hall. 9 am. Start bedrooms. Help with Bedmaking and slops and fill ewers and carafes. Clean grates and lay fires. Fill up coal boxes and wood baskets. Sweep and dust bedrooms. Clean bathrooms. Change into afternoon uniform. 1 pm Lunch in Servants’ Hall. Afternoons, clean silver, brass, water cans,