a magnificently elegant and sumptuous way of life.
Venture above these vast State Rooms and you find more than fifty bedrooms, where the rich and privileged owners once played host to the many impeccably attired, equally wealthy house guests that were such an important part of their social life in the early twentieth century.
This is Highclere Castle in Berkshire. This Victorian gothic pile, home to the Carnarvon family since 1679 and rebuilt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is the stunningly beautiful location for the TV series Downton Abbey, set in the Edwardian era in the early years of the 1900s. Back in 1912, when the story of Downton Abbey starts, Highclere had close to thirty servants working there.
Across the UK, we can still visit and explore many other examples of Britain’s architectural heritage: grand, vast country houses and estates like this, some with hundreds of rooms, every estate with a proud aristocratic history going back many centuries, each one with a fascinating story to tell.
But as lovers of the TV series will know, the story of this house is not just about the fabulous setting, the grand design, our fascination with history and the trappings of immense wealth and great aristocratic privilege. For the story behind this elegantly appointed country home – and others like it – is a very human one about the people, the men and women living behind the imposing doors, their dreams, their disappointments, their hopes and their fears for themselves and their loved ones. Love, lust, deceit, duplicity and sorrow, the all-too-common elements of human experience, can be found within these majestic surrounds, even though the inhabitants of such houses, the masters and their servants, occupied very different roles in the world they lived in – and for convention and tradition’s sake frequently concealed or hid their innermost feelings or emotions.
The rigid class system that once ruled British society and the lives of the population was about to disintegrate in the ‘Downton era’, the early pre-World War I years of the twentieth century when modern Britain, as we now know it, was born. Yet the social divisions between the occupants of houses like these, bred over centuries of tradition and restriction in ways unimaginable to us, continued to remain in place in this era, as they had always been, frozen in time; attitudes and traditions where stifling restriction and rules of etiquette dominated everything, an unequal world where personal freedoms were still limited by strict social boundaries for rich and poor alike.
Move away, by design or chance, from these rigidly harsh restrictive lines and you risked everything. For the rich, stepping outside the boundaries primarily meant loss of social status, their closely guarded, highly esteemed place in the highest pecking order – though a very wealthy woman often had most to lose if she fell from social grace and was shunned or ostracised by her peer group. Yet for the servants of the upper classes, male or female, a breach of the rules – and a sacking – in a vastly unequal world could mean total ruin, abject poverty – or even starvation on the streets. That’s how vast the gulf was between them.
In the upper floors of this grand mansion, inhabiting vast luxuriously appointed spaces, lived the pampered, leisured upper-crust ladies and gentlemen and their families, their everyday lives dominated by centuries-old snobbery, convention and immense inherited wealth.
Today, most of us splash out on an exotic holiday in a far-off destination for a taste of luxury, being waited on, having whatever we want for an all-too-brief time. Yet many of the early twentieth-century country-house owners, like the fictional Earl of Grantham and his family, wallowed in luxurious living every day of their gilded lives.
Far below them, in more ways than one, tucked away in the hidden reaches of the big house, sometimes in cramped living quarters – and frequently invisible to outsiders and even their own masters – were their live-in servants, constantly at the beck and call of their masters who never needed to lift a finger to do anything for themselves – other than following a carefully mapped routine of grand entertaining, eating, visiting friends and relatives, running their estates and pursuing socially acceptable pursuits or outdoor activities.
The irony is that the two groups can’t survive without each other. The country house servant classes worked, sometimes virtually round the clock, for a mere pittance, their sole means of survival. Yet it was only their crushingly relentless toil, often backbreaking and physically tough, that enabled their masters and mistresses to live such smoothly run, cushioned, lives of luxury – for without servant labour such a house and the land surrounding it couldn’t function properly at all.
A visitor to the house in the early 1900s sees an incredibly well run, perfectly organised endeavour. Wealthy foreign visitors at this time sometimes marvelled at the amazingly well-organised way the English country house was run. But the truth is it can only work so well for one reason: the long established day-in, day-out hard work of the smaller cogs in the massive wheel, those who do the fetching, carrying, dusting, rubbing, polishing, heaving, cleaning, washing, gardening and many more complex tasks, scurrying to obey each and every command or summons from their masters’ bells.
This army of servants is the hidden element in the enterprise that ultimately gives the house its air of serene, leisured opulence. Even though equality between the sexes and the classes is now ahead on the horizon, here, among the rich, leisured classes, it still seems a long way off.
So who are they, these two groups of people whose lives are ruled, 24/7 by class and birth, the opposing ends of the social spectrum? And how do they come to be living this way in the early years of the twentieth century? Before we take a look at the many different aspects of their day-to-day lives, let’s take a closer look behind the grand façade to find out more about who these people are and how they got here…
THE TOFFS
The families that own the vast country house estates during this period are in one sense an elite power group, part of a super-rich ruling class of land-owning aristocracy and high-born gentry that have remained at the very epicentre of power and royal patronage in Britain for hundreds of years.
Effectively, they are a ruling class, around 10,000 people from l,500 families whose privilege, ancient lineage and wealth has kept them at the top of society for hundreds of years.
Aristocrats, where the head of a family might be a knight or a baronet, hold the very highest political influence and power in government. And they own 90 per cent of the nation’s land, much of it in vast, sprawling estates. As a result, their wealth, frequently handed down to the eldest son over the centuries, is immense: large country house estates valued at over £5 million (around £300 million in today’s money) were not unknown in the years just before 1914.
But it doesn’t stop there. These multi-million pound vast country homes are also continuous and awesomely impressive power bases for social networking, places for relaxing, extravagant dining, hunting and shooting parties with their owners’ wealthy equals, other aristocrats and royalty, once the cares of running the country are set aside. Moreover, some of these homes have been created, at huge expense and usually by ‘new’ money (the millions earned by entrepreneurs in trade, shipping or mining, rather than ‘old’ money, i.e. inherited wealth) as a showcase for their owner’s wealth and top-notch status, with big collections of priceless art, luxurious furnishings and enormous and perfectly tended gardens and tennis courts.
Some of these aristocrats own grand town houses too – located in specific upmarket areas like Piccadilly, St James’s Square or Park Lane in London: only the ‘right’ address will maintain the upper-crust profile, postcode snobbery of the highest order. Others own more than one estate, so they may frequently move around the country, visiting each one, according to the time of year.
As a result, huge numbers of servants have, by tradition, always been needed to work and run these mini empires: think
