Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [98]
While outdoor servants such as head gardeners were sometimes given better accommodation on getting married, indoor servants were in most cases expected to leave to marry. One Yorkshire landowner, Sir Clifford Constable, wrote huffily when one servant resigned to marry: ‘You must be aware that you marrying is inconvenient to me besides being a bad precedent to the rest.’158 Another butler recalled how one butler of his acquaintance asked permission to marry and stay in post and received permission only to be give notice shortly afterwards. His employer argued that he ‘wanted his butler always within call; but that since he had got married he was often out, as he went to see his wife.’159
However, this presumption could have its positive side for the younger female servants used their early years in service to save a little money, as the board and food was usually covered, and get a training in household skills before marrying. They would often contribute monies home to the parents, especially if there were younger siblings to provide for. Menservants who married, however, often found themselves living separately from wives and children.160
6
Moving Up or Moving On
The nineteenth century
WITH SUCH HEAVING numbers of young men and women required to staff a great country house, it is impossible for a modern observer not to wonder about the permeability of the class barriers that divided master and servant. Friendship of a kind may have been common, but what about love? The incidence was almost certainly more frequent than records allow. Whilst acknowledged romances were clearly rare, some – such as the one between Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, Bt, and Mary Anne Bullock, his dairymaid – are the stuff of legend.1
A Sussex landowner, Sir Harry in his youth had been a famous rake, a close friend of the Prince Regent and a lover of Lady Emma Hamilton. In his later years he overheard a girl singing on his estate at Uppark, which had been designed for him by Humphrey Repton. His housekeeper, when asked about the singer, told him it was one of the dairymaid’s helpers. When the old dairymaid retired she was replaced by Mary Ann Bullock, supervising his delightful ornamental dairy. With the object of his romantic notions and desire installed in this pretty, temple-like structure, Sir Harry, unable to contain himself any more, proposed marriage, saying to the shocked girl: ‘Don’t answer me now, but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of Mutton that is coming up for my dinner today.’ The mutton arrived with a slice cut out, much to the irritation of the cook but to the delight of the baronet.2
Once she had accepted, Mary Ann was bundled off to Paris for an education, where she learnt to read, write and embroider. They married in the Saloon at Uppark on 12 September 1825; he was seventy-one, she exactly fifty years his junior. Despite the social disparity, not to mention the scorn of some local landowners and, indeed, some of Uppark’s own servants, the marriage was apparently happy. Sir Harry is said to have remarked to his gamekeeper, ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ but Mary Ann cared for him until his death in 1846 at the age of ninety-two, on which he left her all his possessions. She lived on at Uppark until her death in 1875, after which it remained the home of her younger sister, whom Sir Harry had adopted. It was she who appointed Sarah Wells as her housekeeper, as described in the previous chapter.3
There are other, less