Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [80]
The Adamses speak with some authority because they had both worked as servants from an early age. Mr Adams had been ‘educated in a foundation school, entered service as a footboy, in 1770, and during fifty years he served successively as groom, footman, valet, butler and house-steward. His Wife began [in] the world as maid of all work, then served as house-maid, laundry-maid, under-cook, housekeeper and lady’s maid, and finally, for above twenty years, as housekeeper in a very large establishment.’ The authors add that they had also sought the advice of ‘a lady of high rank in whose family Mrs Adams resided’.19 It seems possible that Sarah, the co-author, might be the same Mrs Adams who is mentioned in papers relating to Wilton in Wiltshire, around 1800, and who had an unusual position of trust there.20
At the very end of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Pembroke drew up a series of household regulations for the servants at Wilton, which refer to a maître d’hôtel or head servant, working under a Mrs Adams. For the management of the menservants, this individual’s attention was drawn to ‘a journal in Mrs Adams’ possession of housekeeping proceedings in a House very remarkable for being well kept & served with comparatively few hands by the means of a faithfull & excellent housekeeper, who is consequently well hated by a proportion of the servants under her direction’.21
A flavour of the size and character of an aristocratic household in the 1820s and 1830s, at the time of the Adamses’ work, can be gained from Petworth House in Sussex, which had always been famous for the scale of its entertainments. The aristocratic diarist Charles Greville described a house party given by the 6th Duke in 1829, where forty people sat down to dinner every day and there were about 150 servants in the steward’s room and servants’ hall: ‘All the resources of the house – horses, carriages, keepers, etc., are placed at the disposal of the guests, and everybody does what they like best.’22
In 1819 there were fifty-two indoor servants at Petworth, nineteen of them upper servants who dined in the steward’s room, with twenty in the servants’ hall and thirteen in the parlour. In 1831 this had risen to ninety-seven, with eighteen dedicated especially to the nursery. In 1834 there were seventy-three in the servants’ hall and the total staff of the house was calculated to be 135.23 The Petworth servants were well known for their loyalty and long service.
Thomas Creevey recorded of a visit in 1828 that the servants were ‘very numerous, tho’ most of them very advanced in years and tottered, and comical in their looks’. A member of the family explained to him that there were more servants at Petworth ‘of both sexes, and in all departments, than in any house in England, that they were all very good in their way, but they could not stand being put out of it, and were never interfered with, that they were all bred upon the spot, and all related to each other’.24
The familiar intimacy of the kind hinted at by Creevey is also reflected in the album of photographs put together in 1860 by Lord Leconfield’s daughter-in-law, Mrs Percy Wyndham. It contains thirty photographs of ‘the dear Servants at Petworth’, annotated with a handwritten commentary. The photographs, carefully posed, show the staff in formal wear, and many of them were advanced in years even then. The best paid of them was the man cook at £120 per annum; the least paid were the housemaids at £8 per annum.25
The servants’ quarters, which are neatly contained in one freestanding range along with the kitchens