Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [145]
Certain themes seem to be representative, so this chapter will examine a sequence of individual stories, based on interviews, to illustrate some of those key themes; such as the continuance of practical support, the link between members of staff employed on a large estate, the prevalence of long service, long-standing associations with the estate, and personal loyalty. Many domestic and estate staff on the point of retirement today began working in the late 1950s and 1960s, often having just left school at the age of fifteen. They can remember working alongside senior staff who had been trained in the 1920s and 1930s, in a world more intimately connected with the late Victorian and Edwardian apogee than might seem apparent.
First, it is important to understand the dramatic impact of the Second World War. Between 1939 and 1945 most major country houses were turned over to wartime uses, whether for military occupation, to provide a home to evacuated schoolchildren, or to house government departments relocated far from the hazards of the Blitz. As for their staff, young men in domestic service often went into the armed forces while women either joined the auxiliaries, or helped the war effort by working in munitions factories, much as they had in the First World War.9
At the end of the war things were never going to ‘return to normal’ (not least because change had first begun in the 1920s). The economic and physical strains of worldwide conflict were followed by the Labour landslide victory of the 1945 election, leading to a massive increase in taxation, especially death duties. All of this seemed to herald a new age in which the communities of the old country-house world could hardly expect to return to pre-war practices.
Many country houses simply did not revert to private domestic occupation. A sad number of important historic buildings were abandoned, sold off and ultimately demolished. These losses to our culture were catalogued by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 1973 exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House, which showed how the trend, which had begun in the 1920s and 1930s, only intensified with the economic and political situation after the war.10
In her illuminating account of a life of service, first as maid, then as cook, in town houses in Hove and in London, titled Below Stairs (1970), Margaret Powell described returning to domestic work during the Second World War, having left it some years earlier: ‘Large houses that were once opulently furnished and had had a large staff were now reduced to no staff at all; just someone coming in for a few hours daily. Much of their lovely stuff had gone; they had had to sell it to pay their income tax.’ She worked mostly for elderly ladies, who ‘accepted their change in status with fortitude’. One told her wistfully, as she polished a silver tray, of the silver service that had once stood on it: ‘when the butler carried it into the drawing room, it used to look a picture of safety and security. We never thought our way of life would change.’11
When the collapse of the country-house world was recognised in the immediate post-war era, leading civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers was commissioned by the government to write a report, eventually published in 1950, on these threats to the national heritage as they occurred.
In past times, the great houses of this country and their grounds were maintained by their owners mainly from the rent of their estates. The estate and mansion formed a single economic whole; the former provided not only income and produce but also servants to run the house and craftsmen