Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [94]
By this means, he argued, all errors or ‘false dealing’ will be identified. ‘All will depend upon yourself to make your Household a happy one, if you have a bad servant part with him, a diseased sheep spoils a whole flock.’125
Employers took pride in the skills and training of their chefs. The 6th Duke of Devonshire recalled in his Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick (1845):
My cook, Mr. Howard, ought to be the best in the world; for thirty years ago, when at Paris, I modestly requested Louis XVIII, to place him in his kitchen, to which his Majesty immediately consented for some months: and it was kind of the lately restored Monarch, at a moment when many thought him in constant danger of poison; but he was gracious to me, and always said ‘Duc, c’est l’air natal que vous respirez.’ Mr Howard studied also at Robert’s and Very’s.126
Among the principal outdoor servants attached to the house, the head coachman was often a figure of some magnificence in his imposing livery, according to the Adamses: ‘Every genuine Coachman has his characteristic costume. His flaxen curls or wig, his low cocked hat, his plush breeches, and his benjamin surtout, his clothes being also well brushed, and the lace and buttons in a state of high polish.’127 The fineness of coachmen’s appearance was not always matched by their care for their passengers – or other vehicles. Prince Pückler-Muskau criticised some coachmen that he encountered in London: ‘As soon as these heroic chariot drivers espy the least opening they whip their horses in, as if horses were an iron wedge; the preservation of either seems totally disregarded.’128
The coachman’s duties were not confined to driving the horses out on the road, but included overseeing the maintenance of the coach and the care of the animals themselves. ‘If not fatigued by late hours on the preceding night, he rises to take care of his horses, at the same hour as the other men,’ meaning the head groom and the other grooms. The coachman also oversaw the ‘necessary morning business’, mucking out and cleaning the stalls. After breakfast, he prepared the stables against the possibility of a visit from the master. He then inspected and cleaned the harness and ornaments, blacking the leather, which was followed by cleaning the coach, down to polishing the glass and trimming the lamps.129
Under him came the grooms, who attended to the horses, cleaned the stables, exercised the horses when required, took them to where they needed to be, and so on. As grooms often lived over the stables, this created a separate community within the wider household. In larger establishments there might be as many as sixty horses, as well as several under-coachmen and postilions (the latter rode the lead horse to ensure the good running of the team).130
A coachman might even be expected to help in the organisation of moving family and staff from one estate to another, or from the country house to the London house. In 1822, the 6th Earl of Stamford transferred his household from Enville Hall in Shropshire to London for the season. The head coachman, one David Seammen, kept the accounts when eleven of the family’s servants used the family’s private carriages for the journey, setting off early in the morning and stopping overnight in Coventry and St Albans.131 The other servants travelled by post-horse (which meant changing horses at regular intervals) and had only one overnight stop, while the earl and his valet, Samuel Church, followed later, also by the post-horse system.
The footman, made familiar to us in the eighteenth century, served the house, under the butler or steward, and attended the coach in livery on journeys. And, as in the eighteenth century, the footman’s duties were according to the Adamses ‘multifarious and incessant’, so he was not merely the liveried flunkey of fiction.132 For his household duties,