Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [141]
Henry Moat, whose wonderfully irascible yet devoted relationship with Sir George is detailed in the same book, noted later that Sir Osbert’s Who’s Who entry read: ‘Educated during holidays from Eton’. He was quick to retort: ‘Well, Sir, I make bold to claim some of that, because whether you were at Scarboro’, Renishaw or abroad, if you or Master Sachie wanted to know anything about things on earth, the sea, under the earth or in the air above, you generally came to me, even when you had a tutor, and often the tutor came too.’ This gently bantering relationship between employer and employed, and their long-standing interdependence, are typical of early-twentieth-century memoirs, illustrating that a butler might be looked on as a friend by more than one generation of a family at the same time.113
In this context it is interesting to note that the great P.G. Wodehouse, inventor of that ultimate symbol of the skilful and dedicated English manservant, Jeeves, grew up – typically for many upper- and upper-middle-class children of his generation – in England while his parents worked abroad. Wodehouse’s biographer Robert McCrum makes clear that this often meant staying with aunts, clergyman and nautical uncles. As they lived on what Wodehouse himself called ‘the fringe of the butler belt’, he observed wryly: ‘There always came a moment when my hostess, smiling one of those smiles, suggested that it would be nice for [me] to go and have tea in the servants’ hall.’ He learnt to laugh there, in the company of footmen and housemaids. ‘I forgot to be shy and kidded back and forth with the best of them.’114 What psychological forces were at work when, while in an internment camp in Germany during the Second World War, he wrote a story in which a peer returns to the stately home he has leased out, disguised as the butler?115 His first story about Blandings Castle has two people disguised as lady’s-maid and valet manoeuvring their way through the complex etiquette of the servants’ hall.
Lavinia Smiley, one of the daughters of the Hon. Clive Pearson who restored Parham Park in West Sussex, wrote a particularly evocative account of a 1920s country-house childhood, titled A Nice Clean Plate. As with so many memoirs of the early years of the aristocracy, her recollections are interwoven with affectionate memories of servants, from maids to footmen:
The indoor staff at Parham (until 1939) consisted, with slight variations, of: Mr Cridland, the butler, Mr Hill, the valet, three footmen and the odd man, a hall boy and a night watchman. There was a housekeeper, Mrs Evans, her mother’s lady’s maid, Miss Metcalfe, the head housemaid (Jane), and three other housemaids, Mrs Dawson the cook, her two kitchen maids, a scullery-maid, and a still-room maid, as well as (a succession of) nannies and a nursery maid. Outside there was a stable staff, headed by Mr Lancaster and a team of gardeners, as well as a house carpenter called Mr Gee, and an electrician called Mr Greenfield. There was another housekeeper, and three maids, who stayed in their London house.116
Lady Smiley recalled her parents’ staff with affection: ‘we found life there [tea in the housekeeper’s room with the senior staff for company] less of a strain than it often was “through the front”.’ She could recall the family ritual of children descending to the drawing room for ‘Children’s Hour’, when they spent time with their parents, ‘During “Children’s Hour” one of the footmen would come in and put coal on the fire, and possibly dear Mr Cridland the butler would come creaking in with a message for my mother on a silver salver . . . [her father] had a very happy relationship with Mr Cridland, who had been sent to Cambridge with him as a young valet. They had been together ever since . . . My father was much cast down when Cridland died; they were very fond of each other.’
Some relationships were more strained: ‘The first nanny I can remember was a horror. She was ugly and a bully and