Read The Real Life Downton Abbey Online
Authors: Jacky Hyams
Everything on board ship shrieks luxury and sumptuous living. Liners like the
Olympic, Titanic
and
Britannic
boast four ‘parlour’ suites in first class, though the name belies the size: each suite contains a private sitting room, two bedrooms and a private bathroom. All are sumptuously furnished and the cabins have portholes. Yet such is the desire of the designers to give their first-class travellers a consistent illusion that they are not, in fact, crossing the grey choppy Atlantic waters but are ‘at home’ wallowing in the luxury that is their natural habitat, that all the portholes are disguised – with an inner bay of pretty stained glass. This way, it looks like a very grand hotel.
The twelve other first-class suites each have a private bathroom and two rooms. And the toffs’ personal servants, the lady’s maid and valet, are accommodated nearby – on the other side of the corridor, opposite the first-class cabins. The servant’s cabins don’t have portholes or bathrooms; they can use the communal bathrooms nearby. And, of course, the servants must dine in their own quarters; they have a separate dining area on a nearby deck. Technically, the personal servants are travelling first class, but in reality, their accommodation is a cramped, dark room without facilities – just feet away from their lords and masters.
These liners boast two enormous restaurants for their
super-rich
travellers. There’s a tiny smoking room, a modest-sized lounge and a ladies’ card room, but the core of the first-class public space is the vast restaurant area. Given that life on board revolves around the restaurants, every aspect of the toffs’ dining experience is perfectly considered. For instance, the super-rich like to see themselves as trend setters – so the Olympic liner has a first-class restaurant with dining tables for four – or even two. This is very new; the traditional dining style is for long tables with everyone in a row. But the designers of the Olympic liner have put in the small tables specially to attract the monied classes travelling for business: it’s easier to talk business this way.
We might think such minor matters as table size are irrelevant. Yet to the toffs, whose attention to detail in all they do is consistent and heavily focused on etiquette, such things are important talking points: social snobbery taken, as usual, to an extreme.
Life on board the liners revolves around the restaurants. In the morning, after dressing and a substantial breakfast, couples might take a promenade around the first-class section – the luxury parlour suites also have their own private area to promenade in – then recline briefly on the plush sofa in their cabin, change clothes and glide in to lunch. Then the men step out for a smoke, the women might try a hand of cards, maybe another turn around the private deck for the air – and then head back to the cabin to change into quite elaborate evening gear for dinner, helped by the lady’s maid. Their routine remains as it is at home: making several changes of clothes throughout the day, taking the air – and eating enormous meals.
So much fine attention is given to the smallest detail that the designers of the ocean liners even have special items made just for their rich passengers: an equivalent of today’s hotel bathrobe, or the basket of posh toiletries in the bathroom. Only they’re a bit more upmarket: consider a caviar dish, including a special ice compartment, specially made, in limited numbers, for the ship’s first-class passengers. Or a special brass duck press. Everything is top-notch, finest quality, tailored to this exclusive and very wealthy market for whom money is no object.
Here’s an example of what is prepared by the ship’s, mostly French, kitchen staff for an eleven-course dinner on the
Titanic
– before disaster strikes:
The servants eat much plainer fare on board, prepared in the ship’s enormous galley kitchen where separate designated teams of cooks prepare food for the officers, ship’s staff and the three different classes of passengers on board. It may be largely of the ‘meat and two veg’ variety they eat normally, but it’s plentiful enough and quite nutritious.
Not all servants travel first class: rich families travelling with a servant retinue often fork out for their personal servants or children’s nurses to travel first class (so they can have them to hand at all times), but the cooks, chauffeurs and lower servants travel in second or third class. So for a young person in service, this kind of luxury leisure travel is an experience in itself, certainly. But given their status, their time on board is still very much business as usual. And if they’re travelling to stay with very wealthy American families in their huge mansions, there will be other servants there, too – although their bosses will have slightly less rigid or formal views about those who serve them.
As we’ve seen, using a bike or going on foot is still the primary means of getting around for country-house servants when they’re not working. Yet they need to be careful when negotiating the road – fines for cycling without lights, for instance, are as much as five shillings, plus five shillings expenses, in 1913. Motorised bikes too are starting to appear – Triumph start mass production in 1903 – but these, of course are way out of reach, pricewise, for most.
Yet public transport is changing, especially in the cities, giving millions of working people the chance to get around locally: railway services are now being extended to the newer suburbs, built to meet the housing demands of the rapidly growing population and the increasing numbers of shop and office-bound staff. These suburban rail lines are very much for working people to use and their development widens many employment opportunities that hadn’t existed before.
In or around a big city, for instance, servants who opt not to live in can, in some instances, now work closer to home if they can afford the suburban commuting fares. Everyday lives are being transformed – because it’s now so much easier to get around.
In cities, commercial deliveries continue to be by horse and cart. But people are using a number of other road travel options: horse-drawn tram, motorised tram or even trolley bus. The trams run on tracks set into the road but they are hazardous; the drivers can’t steer them properly and other road users need to keep a constant eye out for them. Cyclists, in particular, are wary of the tramlines because their wheels can easily get caught in the channels on either side of the rails, unless the cyclist rides across rather than along them. Tram networks are expensive to set up, so they do not run everywhere.
Trolley buses are better – they make contact with overhead cables for their power. Yet the open tops of some of these forms of transport mean that in windy or wet winter months they’re not particularly pleasant, although waterproof covers for
top-deck
passengers are thoughtfully provided, attached to the seat in front. (Covered top buses, trams and trolley buses don’t start to emerge until after World War I.) Servants had to pay varying amounts for their travel:
There is another travel option, widely available since the railways were developed in Victorian times: the network of coastal steamer services along the coastline of the UK; these companies now compete heavily with each other to persuade people to make short sea ferry rides, often in conjunction with the railway companies. And the improved design of British packet steamers – the first turbine-powered steamer, the
King Edward,
sets sail in 1901 – provides a much more efficient use of steam power for these short journeys and offers a useful travel alternative for anyone wanting to visit family living in a coastal area.
This kind of service is very popular in remoter areas like Scotland; many are run as part-rail, part-steamer services. But the cost is still high on a servant’s pay: a third-class fare on a part rail, part steamer run from Aberdeen to Oban costs 27 shillings. For a housemaid, earning £30 a year and hoping to send money home to help support her family, it means saving hard for maybe two years. And having to be content with
letter-writing
in the meantime.
Though a week’s holiday by the seaside is way out of reach financially, two city servants with a day off together might take a special day-trip excursion train to enjoy a few hours at the seaside – or travel to another big city for an outing, to see the sights. And some country-house employers do give their staff time off for good work completed. So even a half day off can be enjoyed in this way.
There is another important angle to all this greater mobility: a servant unhappy in their job and wanting to move on can, in their time off, travel to the big city to job hunt: big city employment agencies are thriving, because the demand for good servants remains high among the middle classes. So if they have the requisite ‘character’ then time off can be used this way, especially in free-spending places like London where the new luxury palace-type hotels, like the Savoy in the Strand, are keen to recruit experienced servants with good characters who have already worked for the upper crust and understand their whims and fancies.
Personal servants, of course, get a taste of such grand hotels, here and abroad, when they accompany their employers at certain times of the year. It’s a logical step for an ambitious servant to consider such steps up towards a live-out role: a head waiter, for instance, working at the Savoy can boast of
take-home
pay, mostly made up of very generous tips, at as much as £100 a week. Loyalty to the master versus that kind of pay? No contest.
Cities, of course, offer a lot of fun, even for those on low wages. There are parks and pleasure gardens, some with free entertainment. Music halls with big variety acts are also a great diversion for the footloose footman on a day off. And cinemas are starting to open up, too. At first, the music halls start to bring moving picture screens into their theatres. Then, between 1909 and 1914, many new cinemas open up all over the country. Pricewise, they are aimed at the masses: two or three pence will buy a cheap seat – but people can pay as much as two shillings for a reserved leather tip-up seat in a brand new cinema to watch short films, like
Pathé News,
followed by a love story or a comedy. The entire programme lasts about an hour. And the popularity of the new ‘moving pictures’ is such that their masters are indulging in their own movie shows: the
well-heeled
can now buy their own projectors and acquire what we’d call ‘soft porn’ movies to entertain their friends.
But it is Britain’s seaside resorts that have really established themselves with ordinary working people now that millions can get there by train. Hundreds of seaside towns all over the country have gradually been transformed into places where working people can enjoy themselves, not just on the beach or in the sea – bathing machines, established by the Victorians in order to segregate the sexes are, by now, becoming extinct though they don’t disappear from Britain’s beaches until 1914 – but by strolling around the huge pleasure piers, pavilions and bandstands, or spending time in seaside gardens, music halls and theatres. This is outdoor leisure on a grand scale for everyone, much of it developed via the success of the railway companies – and sometimes helped by funds from wealthy aristocrats like the Duke of Devonshire who pours money into Buxton Spa, close to his Derbyshire home, Chatsworth House.
By 1911, 55 per cent of the British population spend at least one day at the seaside in the summer. Paid holidays, longer than just half a day, are now being introduced into the general workplace, so even those with little money can now enjoy the freedoms of nature; sunshine, beach and water together, if they can afford the 3d (threepence) for a deckchair.
There is, of course, a hierarchy of seaside resorts. Some, like Southport, start out catering to the monied classes but eventually, given the huge popularity of the resort, cater increasingly to the masses. Margate in Kent is very much aimed at the lower end of the market, its piers, like many round the country, offering men a penny-a-peep at the Mutoscope machine. A turn of the handle reveals a series of jerky images stuck onto a card of a woman taking off her clothes. No such machine exists at nearby Broadstairs, however, which is more expensive and only for the discerning, with its literary connection with Charles Dickens, who lived there at one stage. And so it goes on. Blackpool and Skegness? Too common for the posh middle classes.
But even if it’s only affordable for a few hours, servants are now, for the first time in their history, able to enjoy themselves away from the constraints of their environment. Ordinary people are now starting, albeit on a small scale, to be consumers. Is it so surprising, then, that young girls getting a glimpse of all this, no matter how brief, are no longer so happy to put up with the long hours and constraints of going into service that their ancestors accepted as their lot?