Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [75]
The accommodation at Holkham is based on the great state rooms occupying the centre, with four wings housing family, guests, kitchen and chapel. The kitchen, which took up a whole wing, was supported by an extensive and carefully planned kitchen court, with a scullery, a west larder and another larder, having access to the court; in the yard were chicken coops for fattening chicken, a charcoal and ash bin, and a slaughterhouse; the courtyard attached to the chapel wing housed the laundry with a mangle room and a wash-house underneath the chapel.
The kitchen survives as a handsome and model example of its kind from the era of the grand Palladian mansion; the diarist Mrs Lybbe Powys described it in 1756 thus: ‘such an amazing large and good kitchen I never saw, everything in it so nice and clever’.71 In the family wing (to the south-east) were rooms for the maids (who had direct access via a staircase to the room above), as well as others for the valet and the secretary beneath the Long Library, whilst a footman slept in a small room near the staircase.
The butler’s suite, pantry, bedroom and plate room lay close to the family wing, at the west end of the south corridor. The pantry included equipment for washing cutlery and glasses. It is also known that chessboards and backgammon tables were kept here for the use of family and guests. Across the corridor, steps led down to the cellar, and beer was piped directly through from the brewery at the other end of the house.72
The housekeeper was based at the opposite end of the corridor, from which she recorded acquisitions and administered the dessert room, still room, laundry and dairy. There was a separate breakfast room for senior servants. A bedchamber was recorded on this floor, possibly for one or more laundrymaids. Two large rooms in the chapel wing, each containing three beds, were recorded in 1774 as accommodation for the housemaids and were later converted to nurseries.
The house steward had a bedroom and an office in the north-east corner of the basement floor; close by was the senior servants’ dining room, where the steward, the butler, the housekeeper and the senior footmen, as well as visiting servants of the same rank, would take their dinner, waited on by the steward’s room boy. The servants’ hall lay just inside the kitchen wing and was no doubt usually comfortably warm all year round.73 The basement was like a small village.
In the mid-eighteenth century there would probably have been between twenty-five and thirty servants at Holkham, presided over by the house porter, although on special occasions quantities of visitors’ servants could swell these numbers considerably. Bedrooms for their particular use were above the guest wing (which was still known as the Strangers’ Wing) and in the other attic rooms on the east side. Above the kitchen and the servants’ hall lay a suite of rooms that were probably occupied by footmen and other male servants, as inventories record only single beds in each, all four-posters with blue-and-white checked hangings.74
The inventories of these great houses, recording the furnishings throughout and their value, often taken at the death of the owner, can be illuminating. Noble Households: Eighteenth-Century Inventories of Great English Houses, edited by Tessa Murdoch, offers numerous examples of the furnishings of servants’ halls and bedrooms, as well as their working quarters, lending colour and detail to these little-investigated lives.
At Boughton in 1709, amid the damask- and tapestry-hung bedrooms, is a ‘Closet where the footman lyes’, furnished with ‘Bedstead [with] Callico furniture compleat feather bed bolster chequer’d quilt cane chair valued four pounds twelve shillings’. The footmen’s waiting room contained ‘A folding Table