Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [81]
While it can be misleading to compare monetary values over the centuries, it is interesting to dwell on the sample of a more mid-sized country-house household in the early nineteenth century as given in the table of wages in The Complete Servant. The budget recorded by Samuel Adams for the ‘Household establishment of a respectable country gentleman with a young family’, with a net income £16,000 to £18,000, and ‘whose expenses do not exceed £7,000’, sets out the wages for twenty-seven servants in guineas ranging from the French cook, paid 80 guineas, and the butler, paid 50 guineas, down to the assistant gardener, who received only 12 shillings a week.27 This last sum was probably a good indication of the average agricultural labourer’s wage at the time, in a job that did not include the accommodation or food provided to a domestic servant in a country house.28
Not surprisingly, the housekeeper is held up in the Adamses’ book of 1825, and in Mrs Beeton’s 1861 successor, as the key to a well-run household, after the mistress herself. The Adamses saw her as having ‘the control and direction of the servants, particularly of the female servants’. As well as having the care of the furniture and linen, the housekeeper has also inherited at least part of the role previously held by the clerk of the kitchen, namely of ‘the grocery – dried and other fruits, spices, condiments, soap, candles, and stores of all kinds, for culinary and other domestic uses. She makes all the pickles, preserves, and sometimes the best pastry – She generally distils and prepares the compound and simple waters, and spirits, essential and other oils, perfumery, cosmetics, and similar articles that are prepared at home, for domestic purposes.’
A housekeeper always oversaw the china closet and the still room, which according to the Adamses was used for preserving fruits and making distilled waters, jam and home-made wines, as well as for the preparation of breakfast and afternoon tea.29 These duties remained remarkably consistent over the centuries until the later twentieth century and reflect the varied use that could be made of the resources of an agricultural estate.
An idea of the country-house housekeepers of the period can be gleaned from well-known novels, ranging from the kindly ones, such as Mrs Fairfax at Thornfield who receives Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to such fierce dragons as Mrs Medlock in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. In real life, as sometimes in fiction, many housekeepers stayed with individual families for many years, becoming almost part of the family, and were certainly often treated as close confidantes.30 Susan Clarke was housekeeper to the Benyons at Englefield House in Berkshire for over twenty years from 1854.31 A housekeeper might even be buried beside her employer’s family, as was Mary Carryll, the woman who served the ladies of Llangollen.32 In the churchyard at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, there is a headstone to Anne Goymore, who died in 1831 having served twenty-six years as housekeeper to the Earl of Carnavon.33
At Erddig, near Wrexham, Mary Webster, formerly the cook, was promoted to housekeeper and stayed with the family for thirty years until her death in 1875. A ditty written by Philip Yorke about Mary is worth quoting because it stresses storekeeping as a central duty:
Upon the portly frame we look
Of one who was our former Cook.
No better keeper of our Store,
Did ever enter at our door.
She knew and pandered to our taste,
Allowed no want and yet no waste;
And for some thirty years and more
The cares of Office here she bore.
Mary did indeed prove to be very frugal; she was found to have left over £1,300 in her will. She was replaced by Harriet Rogers, a former lady’s maid and daughter of