Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [139]
Some of her other duties were more pleasurable: ‘Early mornings, three times a week, I opened the massive front door, to admit the head and under gardener who used to arrive with masses of fresh blooms and proceed to make exquisite floral arrangements in the hall and public rooms. Later they brought fresh vegetables to the cook.’101 Despite the grind, ‘Time passed pleasantly enough here. The other servants were kind, the food was excellent’ and she even had a bike to get into town.
Her next position was more enjoyable even if the accommodation was modest: ‘here for the first time I really learned the meaning of gentlemen’s service. For the first time I was treated as a human being by people with heart and consideration for all their staff. We were even granted the then unknown privilege of two hours free in the afternoon, either to rest or sit in the lovely gardens.’ She read books from the library and became interested in the history of the place and the duke’s family, whose ‘ancestors became real characters to me’.102
She had happy memories of the servants’ ball, when the family waited on their staff. There were frequent house parties when the family returned from London: ‘although this meant more work, to me it was exciting to witness how the other half lived and there was no bitterness in this. I used to love to watch over the banisters the young people in their wonderful dresses.’103
There was a lot of fun to be had in the servants’ hall too: ‘a gramophone and stacks of up to date records, where the gardeners, grooms and under chauffeur joined the indoor staff of maids and footmen for dances after the day’s duties had ended. We had dart board, cards, and the ever popular Ludo and snakes-and-ladders, in fact everything to make a contented staff.’ Curiously enough, Miss Swainbank observed: ‘I found here that class distinction began and ended in the Servants’ Hall.’104
Another Scottish maidservant, Jean Rennie, born in 1914, had won a scholarship to university but was unable to take up her place because her father was unemployed. Having lost her own job in a mill, she got another as a housemaid: ‘My greatest horror was the knowledge that I would have to submit to the badge of servitude – a cap and apron.’ One compensation was the beauty of the castle and the gleaming kitchen, but she was appalled by seeing leftover butter and jam at tea in the servants’ hall: ‘I could remember so many hungry children – and here was good food being contemptuously pushed aside.’
She was quickly initiated into ‘the mysteries of being a house-maid during the day. The beds, the “slops”, the carpet-sweeping, the dusting. I gradually learnt whose job was which, and that one must not do anyone else’s job. Not even to help them. So nobody helped me.’ Her initial impressions of the cook were of ‘a vast mountain of a woman in spotless white. When I came to know her afterwards she was a gem of goodness, honesty and generosity. But first, at work, she was rather frightening.’105 This was no doubt the case with many senior servants and new juniors.
Of the more senior women in the English country-house household, the lady’s maid retained a primary importance up until the Second World War, and perhaps a little beyond. Rosina Harrison was lady’s maid to one of the liveliest hostesses of the era, the American Lady Astor. Born in 1899, the daughter of a stonemason on the Marquess of Ripon’s estate in Yorkshire, from the first Rosina was determined to travel. Her mother advised her to train in dressmaking and to learn French. She started as a ‘Young Lady’s Maid’ to the young daughters of Lady Irene Tufton, in their house in Mayfair and at Appleby Castle, Cumberland, then worked for Lady Cranborne, daughter-in-law to the Marquess of Salisbury, with whom she first got her proper taste of