Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [148]
She took the view that some rules still persisted when addressing staff, especially if you were fortunate enough to employ any of these fast-vanishing people: ‘Housekeeper (almost an extinct race) is called Mrs by her employers and the staff whether she is married or not. Cook-Housekeeper is called Mrs by her employers and staff whether she is married or not . . . Butler (more usually a manservant these days) is called by his surname only by his employers and “Mr” by the staff.’26
During the 1950s and 1960s, to supply the gaps left in houses, in both town and country, there was a sharp rise in domestic servants brought in from overseas. Mrs Cartland cautiously advised: ‘Foreign Staff. Most people these days employ one or two foreigners in place of the aforementioned staff. These are usually called by whichever name is the more easily pronounced.’27 In the same period, it became more difficult to recruit native domestic staff. Many who entered domestic service, not only from all over Europe but from places as remote as St Helena and Jamaica, were unlikely to have been trained in the traditional country-house system, yet eager to find employment in a difficult economic climate.28
At Chatsworth, the then duchess was unable to recruit new servants prior to opening the house to the public for the first time in 1948. The present Dowager Duchess observes: ‘I imagine because people had been so badly paid in service before the war.’ Her mother-in-law’s path crossed with that of the Hungarian sisters Ilona and Elizabeth Solymossy, cook and housemaid respectively to Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington, the Devonshires’ widowed daughter-in-law, who had died young earlier that same year. The Devonshires invited them to recruit a team of nine of their compatriots to help prepare and clean the house for opening. As the duchess recalls in her book, they ‘immediately made their presence felt by setting about the rooms methodically and thoroughly, dressed like Tabitha Twitchit in cotton kerchiefs against the dust, while delicious smells of goulash in the kitchen passage reminded one that the Hungarian takeover was on’. In their capable hands, the house was made ready for its public opening in Easter 1949.29
There were similar patterns in other great houses. At Weston Park, Shropshire, in the 1960s, the Earls of Bradford employed domestic servants from St Helena, one man recalling spending much of his youth barefoot and then, as a teenager, on his first day in England learning to tie a white tie. At Longleat in the 1970s, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath were looked after by a couple from Portugal (although in his youth there had been forty-three indoor servants); since the late 1950s, the Bromley-Davenports at Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, have been taken care of by an Italian, Gilda. For fifty-one years, Gilda Mion has been their cook and housekeeper, catering for shooting parties every weekend in the season, with her husband, Luciano, working as a painter and decorator to the estate and eventually in the house, too.30
Whilst those born and brought up in houses with large staffs might struggle to manage their own households with a minimum of help, it must have been doubly hard for the generation of staff who had been trained in traditional country-house service and attained senior positions to discover that they had little or none of the support that in their youth they had themselves supplied as junior servants.
Mrs Davidson’s observations on the greater workload of post-war service are echoed again over and over. As former butler Stanley Ager pointed out in his memoirs, those who remained in service, or returned to it, had to combine in one person duties that had once been the preserve of many.
Mr Ager was born when Edward VII was on the throne, and his training