Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [50]
These memoirs remind us that however serene and luxurious life in a great household of the period might seem at this distance in time, it was subject to all the tensions, anxieties and turmoils that are the lot of human beings at any point in history. What is most surprising is the number and variety of Macdonald’s jobs, and the extent of his travels, during which he passed with ease between aristocratic, mercantile and military employers. He worked for more than twenty-five masters, for varying intervals, relishing his independence and the mobility of his profession – although his initial training was in a country house in the early part of the century.5
This is a flesh and blood tale, in which Macdonald displays his vanity, admits his own faults and forgives those of others with admirable equanimity. Servants were not just items in the account books, any more than the aristocracy and gentry that they worked for were as one-dimensional as their posed portraits might suggest, or as vacuous, haughty and thoughtless as characterisations in period drama would have us believe.
Mr Macdonald’s memoir begins with a childhood pitched into destitution that segues into a long and relatively rewarding career in domestic service. From the lowly position of postilion and footman, he rose to become valet and manservant to numerous gentlemen, particularly when on their travels. He was clearly talented as a barber and a cook, judging by his ability to secure a place when he needed one. In early adulthood he opted for service in households kept by unmarried gentlemen. Because, he said, of his good looks he was considered too much of a risk around young wives or daughters, or in a household with a large number of women servants.6
The ‘affliction’ of his appearance was a source of both pride and vexation for him (he asked a friend: ‘What makes the women take to me so?’), but it became an advantage during his travels to Asia, especially India (these being the real reason for publishing his memoirs), where his bearing and liveried dress often made him admired as a gentleman: ‘They think you are a gentleman because you are dressed in scarlet and that fine gold lace hat.’7 He is thought to have settled finally with a wife and young family near Toledo in Spain, although history does not relate whether there are Macdonalds there still.
It was the country-house service of his youth in which he acquired his skills and adopted the standards that set him on this path. His experiences and observations of that time are a window on the hopes, expectations and perils facing a young boy with few prospects, learning to work with horses and dancing attendance on the gentry and nobility and, by his own account at least, prospering and improving himself by education and travel. It was not unusual for country-house servants to come from equally disadvantaged beginnings, and children left at the famous Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, for instance, were usually trained as domestic servants.8
Mr Macdonald’s father was, he said, a grazier who became a captain in the Jacobite army and was killed at Culloden in 1746. As their mother had died three years earlier, the five children were now left parentless. Macdonald tells a tale of their wanderings that suggests he was lucky to have survived at all. When his sister found work as a servant, this led to his securing a post as a postilion in a livery stable in Edinburgh.9
With his next employer, he immediately moved up in the world. John Hamilton (formerly Dalrymple and a connection of the Earl of Stair) was the owner of the Bargeny estate in south Ayrshire, covering ‘twenty thousand acres of ground’. In 1750, Hamilton had ordered a new coach