The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (21 page)

Daisy
The chimney isn’t drawing
properly. This oven’s not hot enough.

Mrs Patmore
A bad workman
blames his tools.

The younger servants tend to be more susceptible to the changing world and its influence, partly thanks to their better education. Even Daisy, a young country girl from the lowest end of the working classes, received a fairly decent schooling. From the 1870s and 1880s onwards, there were big strides towards teaching all children literacy and numeracy. Daisy would have benefited from free compulsory schooling up to the age of ten, at least, in a way that her mother almost certainly wouldn’t have: she can read and write and do simple sums. Just reading one of the tabloid newspapers would have encouraged Daisy to think differently and be more ambitious for herself.

Daisy
I’m running at full strength
and I always have been with no one
to help me, neither.

Mrs Patmore
All in good time, Daisy.
All in good time.

As sole keeper of her kingdom and in charge of her own servants, Mrs Patmore has limited relationships with the others below stairs – the kitchen staff even eat separately. She is ready to help Mrs Hughes when asked, on a personal note anyway, and she respects Carson as a butler who does his job well (even if she does think he takes it a bit seriously). But otherwise Mrs Patmore keeps to herself and her staff, avoiding too much contact with the other servants, and in particular O’Brien and Thomas, of whom she has a healthy, cynical view. ‘She has a strong personality, she can be quite sarcastic,’ says Nicol. ‘But she enjoys her wit and uses it to good effect. She reminds me of the women I grew up amongst in the North West. They were honest and direct and very funny.’

As for the family above stairs, Mrs Patmore is amusingly timid in the presence of Lord Grantham – he is the only person by whom she seems rather overawed. Lady Grantham is less of a challenge, as they talk daily to discuss the menus. But even then, Cora would be careful not to come down to the kitchens unexpectedly. And if the cook was expected to prepare lunches and dinners on schedule, the family was expected to eat them on time as well. Eileen Balderson, who worked as a kitchen maid in a succession of country houses between the wars, recalled that if the family were late for a meal now and then nothing was said, but if it happened repeatedly, ‘the mistress would soon be told about it’.

Daisy, being youthful and curious, has a more lively set of relationships within the household. Partly because her job takes her all over the house – from laying fires in the bedrooms upstairs before anyone wakes, to her kitchen duties – she has been privy to details that others miss. Not just the sleeping habits of the household (she might have been shocked at first to discover that the Earl and his wife shared a bed every night), but real secrets, as when she saw Lady Grantham, Lady Mary and Anna dragging Kemal Pamuk’s corpse back to his bed. ‘She’s the first person to wake up in that great big house,’ says Sophie McShera. ‘I always think of that. How strange it must have been.’

It’s understandable that she would want to move on to greater things. The lot of a kitchen maid – the lowest of all the servants – was onerous. Aside from performing a few tiresome tasks around the rest of the house, they rarely left the kitchen, even eating in there rather than in the servants’ hall. The round of food preparation and pan scrubbing was ceaseless, and while potato peeling may have been tedious, other tasks were far less pleasant. Sculleries were not a place for the squeamish. Millie Milgate, who worked as a kitchen maid in the early 1920s, was alarmed to find herself being asked to ‘dress a chicken’. When she admitted that she didn’t know how to, the cook slapped her face and pushed her into the scullery. ‘There, I was initiated in the art of bird dressing. It was greasy and smelly and I felt sick but, after several painful pokes on my arm, I was forced to go on, with the cook saying, “That’s nothing my girl, wait ’til you have to do game birds that’s been hanging for a month.” … A few days later a hare was slung at me, which I was shown this time how to skin and gut, but I vowed never again.’ (Millie resigned soon after and became a housemaid.)

Despite the new wave of labour-saving devices that Mrs Hughes is enjoying, the mechanics of a kitchen remained basic. Soft soap remained the principal cleaning agent for the majority of tasks, except for copper pans, which had to be cleaned with a mixture of salt, vinegar, sand and flour. Mixed together and rubbed on by hand, this brought the metal up to a lustrous shine, but at a price. Every kitchen maid complained bitterly of her cracked and chapped hands, which in turn made other tasks more difficult and painful. The worst of these was preparing the daily supply of cooking salt, which was done by rubbing a large block of solid salt through a sieve. ‘Everything was so much more brutal then,’ says McShera. ‘Harder, heavier and took longer. The first time I picked up my [cleaning] box, it was so heavy it left big red marks on my hand. And on top of all that, everyone’s shouting at you all the time.’

Even though they are busy
running their own domains,
Carson, Mrs Hughes and Mrs
Patmore all support one another
during difficult times.

In an age of hospitality and show, the quality of the food a family presented to its guests was a key element in its standing and reputation. It was the cook’s responsibility to deliver. Moreover, it was a task that had to be faced against the clock – six times a day, plus elevenses and tea – in an often crowded kitchen in stifling heat produced by the huge coal-fired range that was kept lit all day. That high-quality food was produced under such conditions was truly wondrous.

Some commodities remained scarce after the war. Butter and sugar were still rationed and generally supplies grew more expensive. On estimate, food prices rose by 155 per cent between 1914 and 1920. An estate such as Downton, with home farms, dairy herds and walled vegetable gardens within its grounds, would be largely unaffected by such troubles. Mrs Patmore’s specialities of truffled egg on toast, oysters
à la Russe
, lobster rissoles in mousseline sauce and asparagus salad with champagne-saffron vinaigrette ensured that the dining room fare remained impressive despite the reduced availability of certain ingredients.

The sophisticated French dishes that were popular would, however, have made both Mrs Patmore and Daisy uncomfortably aware of their limited education. Much of the vocabulary of a country-house kitchen at that time was in French – the names of the dishes, the styles of preparation and the cooking methods. The young Margaret Thomas recalled how, for news of what she was supposed to be cooking and preparing each day, she was told she must ‘read the slate’. This had been ‘passed’ by the lady of the house after her morning consultation with the cook and was always written in French: ‘So I spent most of my afternoons, until I got a working knowledge of the language, studying the cookery book, which gave the names of each dish in English as well as French.’

With the long hours, the constant pressure and the uncomfortable working conditions (particularly in a hot summer), it seems quite extraordinary from our modern perspective that the servants stayed in their jobs for as long as they did. While housemaids and many of the kitchen maids tended to leave after just a few years to marry, the likes of Mrs Patmore (unmarried, the prefix is merely to give her respectable status) and Daisy, if she chooses to train as a cook, will remain in a kitchen for most of their lives. But perhaps the exit route is not easy for the kitchen staff to see, even if they think to look for it. We don’t know what will happen to Daisy, whether love or ambition will come through for her and decide her fate. As for Mrs Patmore, she will stay at Downton until old age forces her to leave. ‘The house was their whole world,’ says Nicol.

With four meals a day to be prepared for both the family
and the servants, meticulous planning was essential; so,
too, was good communication. Mrs Patmore, much to her
annoyance, has to order all her supplies through
Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper.

Although books such as
Mrs Beeton’s Household
Management
were a fixture in all country-house kitchens,
successful cooks also kept detailed notes of their favourite
recipes to serve as references for themselves and their
kitchen maids. Daisy studies Mrs Patmore’s recipes with
the aim of bettering her position. She was just one of many
working-class girls who took courage from the tenor of the
times: as another young kitchen maid recalled, ‘Everything
was going well for women when Nancy Astor was elected.’