Read The Real Life Downton Abbey Online
Authors: Jacky Hyams
The lowers also move jobs a lot because that’s the only option available to them if they dislike their employers or become angry and resentful of their behaviour. The only other way to ‘get back’ at their bosses – apart from passing on nasty gossip – is to steal from them. There’s plenty of temptation, after all, with so much valuable stuff all over the house. Court records show lots of examples of lower city-based servants stealing – yet not that many steal from country houses. Servants might smuggle out a bit of food for their family, but this goes by largely unnoticed.
Yet the most difficult, and often poisonous, of all the relationships in the country house – and what affects servants even more than the attitudes of their bosses – is frequently the relationships they have with each other.
Bad behaviour from co-workers can have a powerful impact on some servants. Because people work so closely for such long hours with little time away from one another, they are forced to tolerate each others’ shortcomings. Combine this with the snobbish distinction the uppers maintain over the lowers and you have a recipe for edginess, tension, unhappiness – and rows.
As in modern office politics, one viper in the nest can easily make life hell for the rest. And there’s no HR or personnel department to fight their corner. If a housemaid wants to tell tales on a colleague’s behaviour to the other servants after a petty row, there’s nowhere to run. Breaking rank or running to the housekeeper with such tittle-tattle could mean being shown the door. Quickly.
Yet some of the younger housemaids sharing their attic bedrooms do bond with each other. They form friendships, simply because they need to: they’re all living in each other’s pockets all the time. Many of these youngest girls have an awful time emotionally, particularly if they’re new to service. A combination of missing the familiar world of family while another servant makes their life hell with bullying behaviour or putting them down in front of the others all the time, is enough to make many homesick young girls desperate to run away. Some do just that, never to return. But a pleading letter home to family, asking to return home, will often receive short shrift: any money the girl can save from her meagre earnings is more important to her family’s survival than her battle putting up with the worst of her colleagues’ behaviour.
For the servants, emotional support (in the form of letters) from their family may often be all they have if their relationships with each other are poor. Yet even this correspondence can be difficult to maintain on a regular basis. For a lady’s maid or butler, for instance, moving around with the boss means that family communication is sometimes broken or erratic. Changing jobs might not help either – a servant with a good ‘character’ might secure a better position, say a promotion from senior housemaid to housekeeper, yet wind up living even further away from their loved ones.
Some considerate employers help with small things, like the cost of postage. And some do allow close family members to ‘visit’ for a meal in the servants’ quarters or even, occasionally, an overnight stay in the house. But usually, personal contact with family is a one-off annual event: a train ride to see them – and often to find their loved ones living in cramped conditions with little to eat.
The innate snobbery of many of the upper servants – governesses, for some reason, can be particularly snobbish towards the lowers, perhaps because they are acutely conscious of their mid-ranking status, neither lower class or quite middle – means that relationships between uppers and lowers is, at best, functional. The rules are always there. Being forbidden to speak at mealtimes, for instance, unless an upper addresses you directly, doesn’t do much to foster good relationships, especially if you’re a young and vulnerable new recruit. The best you can say about these social situations is that the lowers are very much the apprentices, there to learn the ways of service. And if they’re willing to work hard, they might be fortunate enough to have an upper servant supervising them who appreciates their diligence. Provided they keep quiet and don’t break a single rule.
Surely the uppers have some sort of relationship with each other? They do – yet they are more what you’d call work cronies than friends because of the nature of their jobs. The effective bosses of everything downstairs, the butler and housekeeper, do wind up sharing their daily experiences and views in the housekeeper’s sitting room – probably because they can’t express them openly to anyone else – unless the butler has a wife and family, of course, which isn’t often the case.
Given the huge amount of work that has to be completed and delegated each day, they rely on each other, to an extent, to share their woes. They are their own little clique. Which is probably why the lowers resent them so much.
Despite all the restrictions around followers, a job in a big house is regarded by many young female servants as a way of meeting eligible young men, despite the very limited amount of time off. These young men are usually servants in other households or young shop workers or tradesmen who come to the house, their equals in society. And once a link or attraction is established, they can maintain contact by letter. Other lower servants like footmen aren’t expecting to stay single either, so they tend to be on the lookout too. And not all employers are completely rigid in forbidding their servants to form relationships with the opposite sex: sometimes families do permit a female servant to invite her young man to tea in the servants’ quarters. It’s just not a commonplace scenario.
As for sex between servants in the house, while the toffs do everything in their power to ensure this does not happen, they can’t overcome the power of sexual attraction – and human nature. It might mean a lot of subterfuge and secrecy, given the penalties of unemployment without references if they’re caught. But at times a willing young girl will give rein to her impulses. And, of course, there are always the unwanted advances: the randy footman who pushes a girl into a corner and won’t take no for an answer, and a master – or his sons – who use female servants for sex.
This is a stereotypical view of servants – yet it seems that Sex with the Servants is something the ruling classes often see as their prerogative: a famous erotic book,
My Secret Life,
published in 1888, is the detailed sexual memoir of an anonymous but very sexually active gentleman. The book makes it very clear that the writer regards female servants as sexual playthings, ‘ready for service’.
Frequently, aristocratic parents are all too conscious of this sexual temptation with young housemaids around. And they make quite deliberate efforts to keep their younger sons away from attractive young women working in the house: a new hiring of a really pretty young servant, for instance, is often seen as A Very Bad Idea if there are young sons in the house – to the extent that it’s not unknown for families to dispatch sons to boarding school as early as possible to avoid this kind of temptation. So much effort goes into keeping the sexes separate in the country house. But there are many times when all this effort is in vain.
Sometimes a liaison between servants will lead to pregnancy. Whether they marry or not – and some do – it’s usually the end of their time in the house, though the male servants might be able to remain working in the household. Butlers, footmen or valets can take a wife, but then they have the problem of finding a home for themselves and their family. If their employer provides a home located on the estate, that’s fine, though it may still create an accommodation problem if they wish to move to another employer. And, of course, if their family home is sited some distance away, it may mean living under their employer’s roof still – yet seeing little of their wife and kids. If servants wish to marry in secret and keep quiet about it, they might stay under the same roof – but that doesn’t happen very much.
Married housekeepers? Not really wanted, thanks. As stated before, if they’re unexpectedly widowed, however, they’re often welcomed back into the household. Even the lady’s maid, well travelled and often better versed in the ways of the world than other servants, can’t marry and keep her job. So there aren’t too many examples of servants marrying each other. Given all the rules and the long hours worked, is it so surprising?
ADULTERY MAKES YOU MADIn 1913 just 577 divorces are granted in England and Wales. Divorce is avoided at all costs because it means scandal. It is expensive. It completely destroys an aristocratic woman’s reputation. And the divorce laws of the day are complex and very much in favour of the husband. A divorced woman carries a heavy social stigma: she is shunned by her elite circle – the invitations to the posh balls and lavish dinners dry up. In the phrase of the day, she is ‘cut’ by all the people she knows. She often suffers financial losses and she may even lose out where her children are concerned – access to them can be denied her. So while only the very wealthy can access divorce, few do.
One bored aristocratic woman who pays a severe penalty for her extra-marital dalliance with several men in her circle, including Edward VII, then Prince of Wales (known as ‘Bertie’ or the less flattering ‘Tum Tum’ as he aged), is Lady Harriet Mordaunt, daughter of a Scottish baronet and the beautiful young wife of a prominent MP, Sir Charles Mordaunt. After Harriet confesses to sleeping with Bertie – and other men – her enraged husband threatens to name the Prince of Wales as a co-respondent in what then becomes the most scandalous divorce case of the late Victorian era. Their country house, the 72-bedroom Walton Hall in Warwickshire, is, at the time, the most talked about stately home in the land. The Prince finally appears in court as a witness – yet coolly denies sleeping with Harriet. And her family, in a desperate attempt to preserve their honour, declare Harriet insane.
TURNING A BLIND EYEAfter the divorce, Harriet is committed to a lunatic asylum, where she remains for the rest of her life. She dies in 1906. And Sir Charles re-marries – to l6-year-old Mary Cholmondeley, a parson’s daughter.
One semi-detached marriage where an aristocratic husband is extremely tolerant of his wife’s behaviour is that of the Countess of Warwick, Frances Maynard, otherwise known as Daisy, and the Earl of Warwick, Francis Brooke (known as ‘Brookie’). Daisy has a string of lovers and admirers after their marriage in 1881. Beautiful, indiscreet and notorious everywhere for her scandalous love life (she is one of Edward, Prince of Wales’s favourite mistresses until she breaks off their relationship with the news that she’s expecting another man’s child), she inspires the music hall song ‘Daisy, Daisy’.
Yet she remains married to ‘Brookie’ until his death in 1924 – after 43 years of marriage. At one point, friends are told he would rather have been married to Daisy ‘with all her peccadilloes’ than any other woman in the world.
A SECRET MARRIAGEExtravagant and reckless, Daisy’s later years are overshadowed by money problems – at one point she tries – and fails – to sell her love letters from the King after his death. Yet despite her lurid love life, Daisy has a strong social conscience and becomes very involved with helping the underprivileged, unsuccessfully attempting to stand as a Labour MP in 1923. She dies, age 76, in 1938.
A gentleman might wish to take advantage of a housemaid’s physical charms. But in such a
status-conscious
society, very few would venture to marry a servant. Yet there are exceptions. Hannah Cullwick is a domestic servant from Shropshire whose working life in service began at the age of eight. While working in an aristocratic household in London, she meets Arthur Munby, a gentleman civil servant with an obsession for documenting the lives and behaviour of women in service – especially those whose work involved hard physical labour. They marry in secret, in 1873.
FUN WITH THE SERVANTSHannah lives in her husband’s home as his servant – and insists he continue to pay her wages. In diaries she calls herself her husband’s ‘drudge and slave’ and for most of her life wears a leather strap around her wrist and a locking chain around her neck – to which only Arthur has the key. Hannah also has a fascination with cleaning boots, sometimes licking them clean. At one point she informs Arthur she could tell where her master has been – by how his boots taste. They split up and Hannah moves back to work in the country, but they continue to see each other until she dies in 1909. Their secret marriage, recorded in detail in their respective diaries and letters, is only revealed to Munby’s brother just before Arthur dies in 1910.
Viola Bankes grew up in Kingston Lacy, Dorset, the 8,500-acre country estate and family home of the aristocratic Bankes family, the owners of Corfe Castle, destroyed in the English Civil War in 1646.
Growing up in the huge, beautiful seventeenth-century estate – boasting eleven working farms and three villages – Viola and her siblings Daphne and Ralph see little of their good-looking parents, Henrietta and Walter Bankes, whose lives revolve around entertaining high society and the social round of the London Season. Walter dies in 1904. Yet his children are not told that their father has died. Only five years later, when a servant mistakenly blurts out the truth, do they hear what has happened: their father, knowing he is dying of heart disease, has told them he is going abroad to India. In fact, he hides at home, in his huge four-poster bed – two flights of white marble stairs below his wife’s room.
With their widowed mother largely preoccupied with running the house and the estate, the three Bankes children rely on the Kingston Lacy servants for emotional support – the family butler, Mr Cooper, even gives them pocket money as part of his duties. Viola loves spending time with the servants, playing billiards and whist with them, sliding on the vast polished floors for fun. In her memoir,
A
Kingston Lacy Childhood,
Viola writes: ‘I climbed on Edith’s strong broad back whenever she was on all fours dusting the oak boards, which cannot have helped her in her work.’
KIND & CARING EMPLOYERSAs the children grow up, their bonds with the live-in staff grow stronger. ‘It was not our parents, but our governesses on whom our happiness most depended,’ writes Viola.
One country house estate, Erddig Hall, in Wrexham, has a long history of very good master-servant relationships, treating its servants with kindness and respect. Many of its staff serve with the Yorke family for much of their working life: Jane Ebbrell, who works as a housemaid for the family her entire life until her nineties, is retained on the payroll when her domestic duties end as a ‘spider brusher’ (the person responsible for brushing the cobwebs). In a period spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries the Yorkes celebrate their servants’ lives in poetry and even commission a series of portraits of their staff. These portraits still hang in the downstairs area of the house. They include portraits of a housemaid, coach boy, gamekeeper, gardener and a blacksmith. Remarkably, two tributes to former butlers are displayed on special hatchments (squares or lozenge-shaped panels or tablets, used to commemorate the death of the bearer). Traditionally, hatchments are only used to commemorate the gentry and their ancestry, a genuine mark of respect for their much-loved servants.