Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [89]
Two junior levels of female staff were the laundrymaid and dairymaid. The former, who washed ‘all the household and other linen belonging to her employers’, certainly had one of the most unrelentingly hard jobs in country-house life.85 The housekeeper of Goodwood in Sussex, Mrs Sanders, recognised this, as is clear from the letter she wrote to the Duke of Richmond’s secretary, Dr Hair, in June 1857: ‘I thought it right for me to write to Munro Daughter to Acquaint her with her duties that she would be required to do as the place is a very hard one . . . I heard from her this Morning saying it is such a hard place she must decline it as she would not be strong enough.’ The same month she reports that one Louisa Carey, the under laundrymaid, was ‘very poorly’ and adds: ‘I am very sorry to think I frightened Munro Daughter with what little I said.’86
Mrs Beeton described in some detail a laundrymaid’s typical week, including the areas required for her many tasks: a washing house with a mangle, an ironing room and a drying closet. In the wash-house should be ‘a range of tubs, either round or oblong, opposite to, and sloping towards the light, narrower at the bottom than the top, for convenience in stooping over’.87
The laundrymaid had to sort the washing, putting white linens and colours, sheets and body linen into one pile, fine muslins into another, coloured cotton and linen fabrics into a third, woollens into a fourth, and coarser kitchen cloths into a fifth. Everything had to be recorded and examined for particular stains, for which they would be left to soak overnight. Then the coppers and boilers had to be filled, and fires laid ready to light under them in the early hours of the morning.
The following day, once the water had heated, linen items were rubbed with soap and then boiled, rinsed and hung out to dry or spread out flat in the sun to bleach. All the other fabrics would be washed according to principles that would still be recognised today in the age of the washing machine.88 When the washing was done, the process was always ‘concluded by rinsing the tubs, cleaning the coppers, scrubbing the floors of the washing-house, and restoring everything to order and cleanliness’.89 And all this without the benefit of rubber gloves.
Washing day was not the end of it either. As Mrs Beeton observed: ‘Thursday and Friday, in a laundry in full employ, are usually devoted to mangling, starching and ironing,’all according to the different textiles concerned. ‘Linen, cotton, and other fabrics, after being washed and dried, are made smooth and glossy by mangling and ironing. The mangling process, which is simply passing them between rollers subject to a very considerable pressure, produced by weight, is confined to sheets, towels and table-linen, and similar articles, which are without folds or plaits. Ironing is necessary to smooth body-linen, and made-up articles of delicate texture or gathered into folds.’90 There is no need to look any further for evidence of the hard work that scared off the poor girl at Goodwood.
Female servants in the household were sometimes responsible for washing their own clothes and menservants usually had to make their own arrangements. Many of the bigger laundries at country houses such as Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Powis Castle in Wales catered for the laundry needs of all the other houses owned by the family, including their London town house.91
The dairymaid or maids came under the supervision of the housekeeper