Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [165]
I have to thank my colleagues on Country Life magazine, not least for giving me the wonderful opportunity to visit so many country houses over the past fourteen years, and to the BBC and the National Trust for the same great privilege. Also all the owners of country houses I have visited, all those who work in them and, indeed, all those who work to maintain and open such houses to an interested public. I am continually humbled by the dedication, devotion and hard work of country-house servants in history, as well as their staffs in modern times, and I hope that this book does some justice to the skills and dedication that I have encountered and perhaps understood only now for the first time.
I am immensely grateful to Clare Alexander, of Aitken Alexander, my literary agent, for all her wisdom and kind encouragement and to Roland Philipps of John Murray Publishers for his faith in the project and his wise editorial insight and helpful guidance, also to Helen Hawksfield of John Murray for all her hard work, kind support and enthusiasm, and to Celia Levett for her masterly copy-edit that helped improve the text so much, and to Sara Marafini for her design work and to Anna Kenny-Ginard for her work on promoting the book, and to all those who make it possible to produce a book in the twenty-first century.
A special thanks to my family, my wife Sophie, my daughters Georgia and Miranda, and our dog Archie, who all support me in everything I do.
For the following permissions to quote from copyright material, I am immensely grateful to:
To the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire for permission to quote from her book The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth; Mrs Gill Joyce for permission to quote from the memoirs of her father Stanley Ager, and to Fiona St Aubyn his co-author, and to James St Aubyn of St Michael’s Mount; the trustees of the Goodwood Estates for permission to quote from the memoirs of Mrs Jean Hibbert; to Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, Bt, for permission to quote from the Thomas Kilgallon memoir; to Mr Ian McCorquodale for permission to quote from the Etiquette Handbook written by Dame Barbara Cartland, first published in 1952 and re-issued in 2008 by Random House; to the Duke of Northumberland Estates for permission to quote from manuscripts held in Alnwick Castle relating to the 1st Duke and Duchess’s Household Regulations and the Kildare Household Regulations; to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for access to, and permission to quote from, the diaries of Hannah Cullwick; to Lord Sackville for permission to quote from the Knole Household Catalogue; to Christopher Simon Sykes for permission to quote from his memoir, The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family, published by HarperCollins in 2005; to Taylor & Francis for permission to quote from the memoirs of maidservants published in John Burnett’s Useful Toil; to A.P. Watt and the literary estate of H.G. Wells for permission to quote from H.G. Wells’ Experiments in Autobiography, published in 1934, and Tono Bungay, published in 1909; to Frances Lincoln Ltd for permission to quote from The English House, 2007, by Hermann Muthesius, translated by Dennis Sharp.
Attempts to trace the copyright holders of Frederick Gorst, Of Carriages and Kings, published in 1956 by W.T. Allen (now a title of Random House, and of Rosina Harrison, Rose: My Life in Service, published in 1975 and Gentleman’s Gentleman edited by Rosina Harrison, by Cassell plc (now a division of Orion Publishing Group), were unsuccessful.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, John Murray (Publishers) will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition.
Notes
Introduction
1. Samuel Johnson,