Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [76]
At Kiveton in Yorkshire, the Duke of Leeds’ house, the steward’s hall, and its adjoining closet, were rather better appointed in 1727, containing ‘I Large foulding Wainscoat Table, I Deel Side board Table’, as well as a number of pictures, including a ‘prospective of Portsmouth’, another of Constantinople and another of Tangier. There were also, among the necessaries for meals, eighteen chairs with leather seats, five drinking mugs and eighteen glasses.77 It was quite common to find the adjective ‘old’ or ‘worn’ to describe the furnishings of servants’ rooms in these inventories, presumably cast-off items from the main family rooms that were being replaced.78
At Blenheim Palace in 1740, there are a number of references to the furnishings of servants’ rooms adjoining the bedrooms of their employers. For instance, in the ‘Appartment over the Dukes Bedchamber’, in ‘the Servants Room to this Appartment: A Bed and all Conveniences proper for that use’ and in the apartment ‘that fronts the grand Parterre’ in the servants’ room ‘A Yellow Bed & all things Convenient for a Servant’ – the servants’ furniture were considered just too humble to list.79
While it is possible to re-create the appearance of servants’ rooms of two centuries past, inevitably none comes down to us in an entirely unaltered state with all its original contents intact. It is only in these precisely taken lists that we can read the actual evidence of how country-house servants of the period fared, and wonder how much comfort and refuge was actually provided. These inventories illustrate too the extent to which servants’ lives were still physically and functionally embedded in the great country house in the eighteenth century, as they were to remain for the next hundred years.
5
The Apogee
The Nineteenth Century
THE WORK OF the country-house servant in the nineteenth century is especially worthy of attention, not least because of the greater accessibility of records on the subject, but also because it could be argued that this century – and the latter part of it in particular – was the apogee of the servant-supported, country-house way of life. By 1900 the households of landowners, industrialists and bankers, whether they were buying into or marrying into landed society (or even both), had reached a supreme pitch of organisation – prefigured in the eighteenth century. As the Servant’s Practical Guide of 1880 noted: ‘Without the constant co-operation of well-trained servants, domestic machinery is completely thrown out of gear, and the best bred of hostesses placed at a disadvantage.’1
At its best, this well-oiled machinery was widely admired by visitors from overseas. In the 1840s, American author Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote appreciatively of the smooth management of English country houses: ‘An arrival in a strange house in England seems to a foreigner almost magical. The absence of all bustle consequent on the same event abroad – the silence, respectfulness and self-possession of the servants – it is like the golden facility of a dream.’2
This was echoed in a remarkable passage in the memoirs of the black American educationalist Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901). Having been born in slavery, and after beginning life as a labourer, Mr Washington managed to receive a good education and became an important voice in the search for African-American rights at the turn of the century. In 1899, a holiday to Europe led to a period in England, of which he wrote:
On various occasions Mrs. Washington and I were guests of Englishmen in their country homes, where