Keeping Their Place

Domestic Service in the Country House 1700-1920

Pamela Sambrook, Pamela A Sambrook

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750935609, 9780750935593
• eBook ISBN: 9780752494685
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

In 1851 there were over a million servants in Britain. This book reveals first-hand tales of put-upon servants, who often had to rise hours before dawn to lay fires, heat water and prepare meals for their employers, and then work into the small hours. Yet there are also heart-warming stories of personal devotion, and reward, and of how the servants enjoyed themselves in their time off.

There are moments of great poignancy as well as hilarity: a steward's dawning realisation that the housekeeper he befriended is a thief; a young footman chasing a melon as it rolls through a castle's corridors into the moat; the smart manservant weeping at the station as he bids farewell to his mother. This was an era when footmen were paid extra for being six foot or over, and female servants had to wear black bonnets to church.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and autobiographies Keeping Their Place provides a vivid insight into the day-by-day lives of country house servants between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

ONE

‘I am perfectly master of my work’
– the recruitment of servants

Contemporary sources can show us something of the problems of recruitment experienced by both sides – the master or mistress trying to find the right servant and the servant trying to find a good place. Most writers on country-house service agree that there was a self-contained circulating system of employment at this level. Youngsters were brought into the house from the local rural areas. They were often the children of estate workers or tenants, some of them, girls especially, having gone through a first stage of training at a ‘petty place’, perhaps working for the local vicar or doctor or as a part-time child-minder. They might then be passed around the circuit.

The attributes of servants, particularly their vices, were a favourite topic of conversation among country-house families and their guests. Descriptions of servants as ‘wastfull and exstravagant’ are common in correspondence.¹ Details of their characters and interviews are often casually buried among general friendly gossip in letters. At other times the writer might exude a touch of serious desperation in their need for a servant. Friends sometimes acted as recruiting agents on a regular basis. Some writers, such as Kenelm Digby and Richard Huddlestone who enjoyed a correspondence lasting many years, showed a general interest in placing servants and a genuine care for their welfare, acting as patrons in the better sense of the word.²

Rosina Harrison’s autobiography described an equivalent network among servants, a ‘“Who’s Who” and a “What’s What” below stairs . . . also a blacklist and woe betide anyone who got on it’.³ Many country-house servants, especially those with a personal element to their work such as footmen or ladies’ maids, were highly mobile within their jobs. They moved around with their employers throughout the social season, visiting other country houses in the late summer and winter or London during the spring and early summer. At this level servants kept in touch with friends made during previous employment. The servants’ hall and steward’s room must have been the venues for lively gossip about employers and their idiosyncrasies.

Yet the existence of such country-house systems did not preclude the use of external means of recruitment. In the eighteenth century isolated country houses used the traditional venues of hiring fairs to find employees, and as the nineteenth century progressed more and more use was made of newspapers and agencies. Advertisements in local papers are usually for work at large farms rather than country houses, and quality households preferred to reply to adverts rather than place them, searching newspapers such as The Times and The Morning Post as well as magazines such as The Field and The Lady. Agencies appear from the mid-eighteenth century onwards and some households made no bones about using them. Reliable local firms and national companies such as Mrs Massey’s and Mrs Hunt’s specialised in the country-house market and could save a deal of trouble in tracking down and sifting through likely candidates. For the servant, working through an agency could save many a wasted journey.

The one critical feature when finding a new place or servant was the ‘character’. This was a written reference from a previous employer and was essential for any decent servant. On leaving an employer the servant had to ask them to provide a character when approached by the next employer. Usually, the servant would not see what had been written. Theoretically, an employer could be asked to supply a character once only, and this could cause problems if the new situation did not work out well. By the nineteenth century this had become a standardised system and many characters have a similar format – short and formal, even brusque.

Country-house service showed a high turnover of staff in the lower and middle levels. Individuals moved on for more money and more experience, for promotion and to meet new people and possible marriage partners. The character system would reveal this very quickly, and the ambitious servant had to balance the advantages of moving on to a better job with the problem of gaining a reputation for being ‘short-charactered’. Ernest King reckoned a servant ought to stay in each place for at least two years in order to obtain the ‘precious passport’ of a good reference.⁴ Job mobility declined among senior servants and varied, too, from house to house. Some, like Welbeck, promoted internally whereas others made it a policy not to do so. Some families, such as the Rushouts of Northwick, had a tradition of keeping their servants for twenty, thirty or even forty years and thus had limited experience of recruiting staff.⁵

Widows with a known track record before marriage would be welcomed back into service. With this exception, servants who had been out of work for some time could find it difficult to get back into the system. This was partly because of the need for an up-to-date character and partly because of exclusion from the internal networks. But servants’ private lives could be complex, and among the most pathetic survivals within country-house records are letters from would-be servants begging for work. Asking for patronage in this way required some sort of connection between the supplicant and the patron. This could be real or tenuous, sometimes involving a degree of ingenuity. Such letters reveal the difficult and sometimes tragic circumstances of many servants’ lives.

FINDING THE RIGHT SERVANT

Away from home, families kept in touch with their estates by letter. In the 1700s, during his absences in London, Lord Fitzwilliam wrote weekly to Francis Guybon, his steward at Milton, Northamptonshire. Most of his letters were taken up with instructions about tenantry, brewing, the culling of deer and general gossip, but a continuing theme is the need to find good servants.

Lord Fitzwilliam to Francis Guybon, 9 May 1700.

. . . Pray make it your business to get us some servants against we come downe. There must be a fellow to look after the Gelds, to make Cleane the House, heate the Ovens, & so do the other drudging work about the House. There must be Two Maids, One for the Kittchin wh: can roast & boile meale clearly, & do the other work in the Kittchin: and the other Maide must make cleane the House, & Wash the Wash Bucks and do any other business that is to be done about the House fitt for a Maide . . . Pray gett Mrs Bull to help you to these maids, or any body else that you thinke can do it: & do not neglect to do this, thinking Goody Buttler may serve for one: we will not have it so, she must go home, & will have work enough to do to wash for the family . . .

Your loving Friend

W Fitzwilliam

Same, 16 May 1700

My wife is very earnest that you & Mrs Bull should help her to Two working Maids, one for the Kittchin & the other for the House for this summer, for we must be in Towne againe the latter end of October. Neither will the Maids in this Towne do such sort of Worke, they are too fine fingered for country business . . .

Same, 5 September 1702

. . . we are sorry we can’t have the man Mrs Bull mention’d to us, because she thought he was so fitt for us: so pray lett there be another hired for us. We should be glad you could help us to good Cooke Maids because they are all here such Slutts or Whores or Thieves or Druncken Beasts, that we dare hardly bring any of them downe

(NRO, Fitzwilliam, F(M)C 1125–6, 1230)

Robert Smith, house steward to the 5th Duke of Richmond at Goodwood, was also given responsibility for servant recruitment.

Robert Smith to Dr Archibald Hair, secretary to the Duke, 19 May 1858

. . . I have not left a thing undone that I could do about getting a Still Room Maid both Publick & Private but I can find nothing Likely to suit at all – Mrs Sanders would like her to be 30 years of Age and to know Something of cooking and the Wages 10-10-0 every body tells me there is nothing of the kind to be had in London.

Same, 23 June 1859

. . . I walked from their to Chelsea where I was Likewise unsuccessful – but having called on A Friend in Grosvenor Square I was recommended to call on Lord De La War’s Butler and I think I have got hold of a capital man he lived three years with Lord De La War as Under Butler and three years before that with Lord Macclesfield in the same situation and bears an excellent character from both Places I enclose Lord De La War’s Recommendation and the Butler Said ask me whatever you like I can only give you this Answer he is (A Perfect Servant) Particularly Sober Honest Clean Truthful Active & Obliging and not Scrupleous about doing anything that does not Exactly belong to the Under Butler department he is single & 32 years of age . . . their are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘I am perfectly master of my work’ – the recruitment of servants
• 2 ‘I know two sixpences make a shilling’ – conditions of employment
• 3 ‘Cinderella couldn’t have had it worse’ – the duties of menservants
• 4 ‘We have mad four cheses pritey larg’ – the duties of women servants
• 5 ‘The water in the jug had a thin layer of ice’ – servants’ accommodation and clothing
• 6 ‘Rice on Sundays’ – servants’ food and drink
• 7 ‘His sheets taken for a lark’ – servants’ recreations
• 8 ‘We have gone through a good deal together’ – servants and employers
• 9 ‘And a nice bit of fun she is made of’ – relationships with servants and family
• 10 ‘If I must die in the workhouse, I must’ – health, old age and death
• Notes
• Sources and Select Bibliography