Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [74]
In this [plan] we shall direct [the architect] to lodge a part of the servants at a distance from the house and a part within it. The upper servants are most wanted about the persons of the master and lady, and these we shall place in a basement stor[e]y under the parlour floor; They can be suffered here because they are cleanly and quiet; therefore there is convenience in having them near, and nothing disagreeable. On the other hand the kitchen is hot, the sculleries are offensive and the servants hall is noisy; these therefore we shall place in one of the wings. This is the conduct of reason; the house-keeper, the clerk of the kitchen, and other domesticks of the like rank, will thus be separated from the rabble of the kitchen; they will be at quiet to discharge their several duties, and they will be ready to attend the master or lady.
[The other servants] will be placed where they can perform their several offices also unmolested; and we shall lay them open to the inspection of the upper servants continually, and place them in readiness to attend the family, by means of a short open passage of communication between the wing in which they are lodged and the body of the house.
[For the other wing:] As we shall propose to lodge in one wing the lower class of servants, the other will conveniently hold the stables; as the gentleman in the country frequently is fond of horses, and has pleasure in seeing them well managed, the same kind of passage may be opened from the body of the house to that wing as to the other.66
As Ware makes little reference to the actual personal sleeping accommodation of servants, we must assume he imagined these to have been relegated to attic areas, over the main house, or over the kitchen, the stable or other outhouses, as we have already seen. These quarters, often shared, were referred to as ‘garrets’ or sometimes ‘barracks’. Whilst numerous additions were made to houses in the eighteenth century that bore little relationship to Ware’s Palladian-inspired ideals, they nevertheless offer an insight into the architectural thinking, as well as the status and working conditions of country-house servants, of the period.
The increasing separation of the employer’s immediate family from the activity of servants was also expressed by the provision of tunnels to allow servants to approach the basement quarters out of sight of the main house. Examples of this can be seen at houses such as Newhailes, Scotland, and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire.67
Another great signifier of the more emphatically separate zones of the country house as it developed in the 18th century, between that of the employer’s family and that of the household servant, was the gradual evolution of the familiar system of fixed bells to summon servants from the service quarters to the main rooms, as needed. The diaries of Samuel Pepys refer to the fixing of a bell to summon servants from an adjoining ante-room, but by the middle of the eighteenth century more elaborate systems evolved for extending the wires attached to bells, along pipes, often installed by plumbers. The standard method involved bells operated by a wire tension system between a distant pulley and the bell itself. They sometimes could sound in attic quarters, but usually in the servants’ hall or in the corridor outside (often improved and updated in the 19th century).68
A fine example of well-planned service spaces and service accommodation can be seen at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, one of the finest Palladian mansions of the mid eighteenth century, which certainly had a bell-pull system installed in the 1750s. The patron of the house, Thomas Coke, the Earl of Leicester, sent his executant architect, Mathew Brettingham, on a reconnoitring tour of other houses, asking him in a letter of around 1737 to ‘Pray take notice of those doors cover’d with green bays [baize] and the hinges that make them shut of themselves.’69
Brettingham recorded the original layout of the servants’ areas (largely contained within what read architecturally as a rusticated basement