Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [144]
This scarcity of personnel had a huge impact on the practicality, even desirability, of maintaining a large historic house. Many were given up, either taken into care by the National Trust, leased, or sold for institutional uses, such as schools or hotels. A critical factor was the inability to recruit new servants, not merely to look after the landowner’s family personally, but also to maintain the contents and fabric of the house. The loss of the ‘odd man’ who had once swept the gutters and cleared the drains was in many ways as significant as the loss of a steward or a butler.2
Those estate owners who had survived the trials of the immediate post-war years, keeping together their houses and collections in the teeth of every adverse circumstance, continued to call on the services of certain key individuals, supplemented by daily cleaners. On the bigger estates they could often draw on support from the estate works department for some of the essential care and maintenance that in earlier times had fallen to the indoor staff.
Indeed, in certain country houses those who had trained up in service returned to their pre-war employment and worked on into retirement in the 1960s and 1970s. For some observers, this is when the final watershed came: when the whole generation trained before the war finally retired.3 The remarkable story of Harvey Lane, the butler of Leigh Manor in Shropshire, is symbolic of this. He trained as a house-boy and then as a footman to William Bridgeman, later 1st Viscount Bridgeman, becoming butler in 1920 and remaining with the family until his death in 1989. He served both the 2nd Viscount Bridgeman and his grandson and heir, David Stacey, many years his junior.4
When demobbed from the armed forces, Mr Lane returned to his former post as butler in 1945, but with little additional help. Mr Stacey observed with wry amusement the silent tussle between man and master:
at every opportunity [Harvey] would bring out the silver and the white linen tablecloth and make sure that the dining room was used in the style which he expected from a lord. My grandfather, a man of great humility and no pretension at all, hated this kind of behaviour – he would have been much happier eating in the kitchen – but Harvey would always get his way and would appear in a white jacket and insist on serving at the table.
Mr Lane continued to work, despite being confined to a wheelchair, right up until the 1980s, becoming a close friend to his employer, who was young enough to be his grandson.5
The size of post-war staffs generally depended on the age and income of the employer. The older generations often tried to stick to the way of life they had been brought up to, but were usually forced to reduce staff numbers over the decades in the face of higher taxes, inflation, and a wholly modern desire for increased privacy.6 By the 1970s, the advantages of new technologies, which had promised so much in the interwar years whilst not actually delivering very much, had begun to make a noticeable difference. This was especially true of central heating and modern vacuum cleaners. By the 1980s and 1990s, the younger generation of country-house owners were accustomed to doing much more of their own day-to-day cooking.
Where staff were still employed, they were also expected to be adaptable and flexible. This meant that while some traditional titles survived, individuals often took on much wider duties than had ever been demanded of them before. Mr Lane at Leigh Manor found himself doing the job of butler, footman, houseboy and gardener all rolled into one. As David Stacey points out, ‘but for the fact he couldn’t drive he would have become the chauffeur as well.’7
By the end of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, there is such diversity in domestic service and it has been so little researched that it is impossible to discuss entirely representative