Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [156]
There are consistent themes in these stories: of country-house service becoming a life’s work, of association with the estate through marriage or family connections. Martin Gee, the current head gardener at Weston Park in Shropshire, has worked there for forty years and his family has had remarkably long connections with Weston.
The first member of my family to work here came in the early nineteenth century from Norfolk as a ploughman. There is a painting of him by Weaver in the house. He was recommended to the family by Coke of Norfolk as the owner of Holkham Hall was known because the owner wanted someone to work with Suffolk Punch horses. Since then, my family have all worked in agriculture or as gamekeepers and carpenters on this estate.
When my father left school he went into agriculture and eventually came to the gardens here. He served in the army during the war and returned to his old job at Weston in peacetime. I came just after leaving school. Weston is my life. Staff numbers went down gradually from the late 1960s because the work wasn’t very well paid and they were probably trying to reduce staff numbers as well. It was still a family home, and the cook and the butler both came from St Helena. You could get a British passport if you spent two years in domestic service. We had one very cold winter and none of them had ever seen ice before. Most of the cleaning staff came from the village.
My father used to talk about all the characters here when he first came in the 1940s. (Someone said I was a Weston ‘character’ now!) There were still thirty gardeners in those days and there were fifteen when I joined in 1969, but now there are just three, with me as head gardener. We do have other help, volunteers and students, as the house and park are now in a trust, the Weston Park Foundation. Today you can do a lot more work on your own with the aid of technology, but then things have changed in the country generally. At one time most of the village children would have begun working on the estate and gradually moved on. Everyone used to know everyone else who lived here, which isn’t so true now, although there is still a hard core.67
There is a similar pattern of long service at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, one of the best-known country houses still in private family hands and still at the heart of a substantial landed estate. The present Earl of Leicester – who has recently handed over the house to his son, Viscount Coke – first got involved in the management of the estate in the 1960s, before eventually inheriting from his cousin in the 1970s.
He has vivid memories of his first visits to Holkham, which contrasted with his own childhood in South Africa: ‘There was Rees, the butler, and Mrs Stubbs, who came in to clean and would sometimes serve meals, when she used to stand behind Lord Leicester’s chair, surveying the scene.’ He remembers asking his cousin, Tommy Leicester, ‘why he did not entertain that much. He said it was because they found it so difficult to get servants and his generation were simply not brought up to make their own beds. Before the First World War, Holkham still had something like fifty indoor servants.’68
The territorial nature of service life emerges from a story from his mother’s early visits to Holkham in the 1930s: ‘The librarian asked the butler: “Am I to understand that crumbs on the library table are the preserve of the butler?” To which the butler replied, “Yes”, but with a deft pass of his hand sweeping the crumbs to the floor, he