Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [58]
Recruiting a cook could obviously be a challenge. Lady Grisell Baillie’s household accounts for 1717 show that one cook arrived on 1 February and stayed just two weeks, whilst the next candidate spent only one night in the house. It was not until July that Lady Grisell found a cook who was content with the situation. Anne Griffith was to get ‘£7 a year’ and ‘£8 if she does well’.63 Mrs Delaney, looking for a cook for her country house, regretted the one that got away: ‘the cook I gave an account of who was a most desirable servant, said she could not live in the country it was so melancholy.’64
In The Housekeeping Book of Susannah Whatman (1776), the author stresses how important it was for the mistress, or her housekeeper, to lay down the rules of the house and the kitchen to any new cook: ‘When a new Cook comes, much attention is necessary till she is got into all the common rules and observances . . . filling the hog pails, washing up the butter dish, salad bowl etc.: giving an eye to the scowering of saucepans by the Dairy-maid, preserving the water in which the meat is boiled for broth: keeping all her places clean: managing her fire and her kitchen linen.’65
Mrs Purefoy, a gentry lady running her small country house, wrote to one candidate cook, Betty Hows, offering to train her in the finer points of her duties, which in her house also meant some cleaning and milking: ‘If you can roast & boyll & help clean an House, & make up Butter, & milk two or three cows . . . & you help iron & get up ye Cloaths. If you can do these things wee will endeavour to teach you the rest of the Cookery.’66
During the course of the eighteenth century, it appears that the roles of the traditional ‘waiting gentlewomen’ and the chambermaid gradually merged to become the familiar ‘lady’s maid’, a well-presented servant who would be always in attendance on a great lady. In many cases such a personal maid would sleep in the same room, an adjoining room or even in the passage outside, and travel with her mistress from place to place.
In another book, The Servants Directory, Improved, published in 1761, Hannah Glasse outlined the duties of the traditional chambermaid, who is encouraged to ‘Take great care to know all your mistress’s method and time of doing her business; and be very punctual and acute in your attendance . . . and be sure to have all her linen well air’d and when dress’d or undress’d, fold up everything very neat.’ She focuses on cleaning the fine textiles of the day, such as silks, satins and damasks, with special instructions for cleaning flowered silks with ‘bread and power-blue . . . and if any silver or gold flowers be in it, take a piece of crimson velvet and rub the flowers’.67
The housemaid was essentially the cleaner, doing everything from making beds and mending linen to cleaning floors, doors, windows, carpets and furniture, as well as the scrubbing, cleaning and preparation of fireplaces. A housemaid’s day was gruelling. In Hannah Glasse’s book she is told to:
Be up very early in a morning, as indeed you are first wanted; lace on your stays, and pin your things very tight about you, or you never can do work well . . .
Be sure always to have very clean feet, that you may not dirty your rooms, and learn to walk softly, that you may not disturb the family. The first thing, if in winter, is to light your fires, and clean your hearths; if in summer, the stove rubbed and the dirt in your hearth swept out.
These directions continue for over a page, before the housemaid is advised to move on to locks, then carpets, curtains, windows