Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [142]
Typically for memoirs of an interwar, country-house life, ‘Nanny was permanently at war with the cook and would send insulting messages inside the vegetable dishes: “The children cannot be expected to eat this.”’117
Mrs Richard Cavendish, looking back on her childhood at Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire, recollected that her parents would never be there during the week: ‘Nanny Abbott took charge of us and during the week we did exactly what Nanny said. We had walks, and then we rode our ponies . . . we messed about and had a few lessons.’ She had warm memories of one family retainer: ‘the butler, Frederick, was the nicest fellow that ever walked. When my parents were away, we were allowed to fish from his pantry window into the moat.’ Not unusually in those days, their governesses ‘never stayed, because we were so nasty to them.’118
In 2008, Sir John (‘Jack’) Leslie, Baronet, explained the make-up of the household of Castle Leslie, County Monaghan, in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time of writing, he lives there still and has recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, although the house is now run in part as a hotel by his niece, Sammy Leslie.
Mr Wells, our last butler, who was English, was here through the war, and for a while afterwards we had Mr Murray, although he was more like a senior footman. The butler in the early part of the century was Mr Adams, with two footmen under him; at that time maids slept in rooms accessible only by passing through the housekeeper’s room. I think most of our junior servants tended to come from the estate or local village. My grandmother lived here until she died in 1944, and [between the 1920s and 1930s] she certainly gave the orders for the meals for the day to our cook, then Annie Simpson.
My father was a bit of a revolutionary and a Roman Catholic convert, more interested in forestry and writing, and I think he just took the servants and the smooth running of the house as a natural part of life.
His father was, in his youth, very influenced by the Castle Leslie forester, Mr Vogan, who, according to his sister, was described by their grandmother as the boys’ ‘real governess’, even though they had two, one French and one German.
My grandmother also had a German personal maid, called Winter. In the kitchen there was a cook, kitchenmaid and scullery-maid, and the housekeeper, Rose Mead, who looked after all the female staff and was level with the butler. There were three housemaids and the junior one looked after the nursery. There was a butler and a footman (sometimes two), the odd man, who looked after the boiler and the fuel, and the coachman-chauffeur. I think there was a pantry boy. The under servants always ate in the servants’ hall, which was under the dining room, and the upper servants in the butler’s room, which was under the drawing room.
I had governesses in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a whole string of them, all from England, and then I had tutors, a Mr Marks, recommended by the headmaster of Downside, and a Mr Ireland. They would eat with us in the dining room, and dress for dinner every evening. He slept in a room near mine and I can remember him calling out, telling me to switch off my light and stop reading in bed.119
The Hon. Mary Birkbeck, daughter of the 2nd Lord Somerleyton, was born in 1926 and grew up at Somerleyton Hall, Norfolk. She has vivid memories of life there in the 1930s. Between 1928 and 1935, the family shared the house with her father’s parents who owing to ill health were unable to cope with managing the estate:
During the intervening seven years we were all together – parents living in the north wing, grandparents in the large rooms behind baize doors and us children in the nurseries on the top floor. The other top floor rooms were bedrooms for the house and kitchenmaids.