as we will see, by the way they continue to live – and party – you’d never have guessed the storm was coming.
THE SERVANT CLASS SYSTEM
This incredible class divide where everyone ‘knows their place’ and has a firmly set series of tasks to perform day-in, day-out, is not just a division between the two groups, master and live-in servant. For such is the long-established country house servant tradition – in Tudor times a noble with a vast country estate might have hundreds of staff working for him – that even in the early 1900s, when the British class system is already beginning to buckle, there is frequently a hierarchy amongst domestic staff, two separate servant classes living under one roof. Three very distinct groups of people all labouring and living under the same roof in the big country house or within its vast surrounds.
First in the pecking order are the upper servants, an experienced group of well-drilled slightly older professionals with specific areas of responsibility and direct, if usually formal, access to their employers. (In some instances they will have to make an appointment to talk to their master or mistresses.)
Then, way beneath them in status – even applying to the areas of the house they sleep in – is the second tier, the lower servants, frequently younger, ‘invisible’ workers, some of whom virtually work as servants for the upper group.
The harsh and rigid line dividing the two servant classes may only be crossed by the lowers in one way: hard work – strict adherence to all the restrictive rules and regulations governing a life in service and complete, unstinting deference to both their masters and the upper servants, from whom the lowers learn the ropes. Careful behaviour and steady, if gruelling, toil for years can eventually mean a move up to the higher servant ranks. Promotion. Of a sort. Because while the upper-class of servants live more comfortably, often with their own live-in quarters, earn more (but not much more) and have far greater access to their employers’ private lives – and their darkest secrets – theirs is still a working life of rigid formality, unstinting routine and furious bursts of planned activity when large groups of rich and famous guests are due to be entertained or the family go travelling – and very little else.
OK, it represents a steady job for life for many, at a time when the majority of the population are living in less than luxury (and the upper echelon of servants can sometimes be just as snobbish about their position in life as their masters). But this is definitely not anything like a working life as we might recognise it.
THE SERVANTS
The size of the very grand country house varies from estate to estate. Yet the working traditions of these houses remained pretty much the same over hundreds of years. Anyone who worked as a servant in a big country house remained a servant: that was it. Provided you stayed employed, of course.
By 1901, an estimated two million people work as domestic servants (out of a total population of 40 million). Many of the servants working in the biggest, grandest houses continue to be drawn from a vast pool of poverty stricken, sometimes rural families: in some areas, successive generations have been working for a local aristocrat for centuries, a long-standing means of survival for millions in a harshly delineated existence.
Mostly, though, their education has been restricted. Although the official school-leaving age in Edwardian times is 13, attendance by poorer children is frequently haphazard, simply because so many have to work to help provide for their family. Even the brightest poverty-stricken child has no option other than to work, if circumstances dictate, rather than study.
Literacy, however, is now becoming important: employers prefer to take on servants who can read, write and add up. In some cases, poorer people have become more literate since the late 1800s. But there are still huge discrepancies in people’s knowledge. A young, illiterate girl entering service at the lowest level is at a distinct disadvantage with scant chance of promotion: there’s a great deal of paperwork involved in running a country house: archives show lots of bills, accounts, letters, inventories. A cook or her assistant should be able to read and write a menu, for instance. And if a servant can’t write properly, they can’t even communicate with their own family should they find themselves working some distance away from home. The consequences of poverty, such as malnutrition, poor health and lack of communication skills, don’t exactly help anyone’s prospects if they follow a life in service.
And, of course, poverty itself continues to cast a terrible shadow over Edwardian families as it did in Victorian times; a family of ten children or more could be reduced to the breadline – or worse, the workhouse, where the very poorest in society wind up – if its sole wage earner, a working father, dies or becomes too sick or injured to keep working.
So most Edwardian country-house servants begin their working life at a very low social level indeed. Perhaps bitter and twisted sneaky lady’s maid O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) got that way because she started her working life in another country house in the same job as Daisy (Sophie McShera), the lowliest scullery maid, the person with the hardest and worst job in the household.
Yet despite all the drawbacks, even a low-ranking post in a big country house is regarded as a better job prospect than being a live-in servant for a middle-class family in the city. First of all, working for the upper-crust rich families in their country residences is seen as being of a higher social status, rather than working for comfortable but less-affluent middle-class families in a smaller house in town.
Then there’s the practical consideration: more space. Town or city servants don’t always get much of a deal in terms of accommodation because their work in smaller homes frequently means they have to sleep in very cramped conditions, often right next to their place of work. In a London house, for instance, an under butler might sleep in the butler’s pantry. Or a footman will sleep in a basement.
Since country-house servants already come from pokey and overcrowded homes housing many children – where even having a bed to yourself is a luxury only to be dreamed of – sleeping conditions in big country houses can sometimes be better. A young female servant, for instance, starts off in service sleeping in a sparsely furnished attic room, usually a hard-to-reach dormitory at the very top of the house (sometimes known as ‘the convent’), which she shares with six or more other young girls. Sometimes she might have to share a tiny bed with another girl.
Servants’ sleeping quarters are rigidly segregated. The general idea is to keep the young women away from the attentions of all men; not just the more lecherous employers (the sons and heirs) but the other male servants too. So the servants’ quarters have completely separate staircases and entrances, sometimes overlooked by the butler or housekeeper’s rooms.
The back stairs of the house and the servants’ entrance at the rear of the property (the place where all household deliveries are made) is only to be used by the servants – at all times. In fact, the only time the domestic staff are allowed anywhere near the main staircase in the house – used only by the family and their guests – is when they are actually doing their job of cleaning or dusting it. And, of course, they must never ever be seen by their bosses, they are an invisible army of manual labour, sweeping and dusting, polishing and cleaning, often while the family are asleep.
And if they need to clean a room, for any reason at all, they are only permitted to work in it if anyone in the family is not scheduled to use it. What this means is that a lower servant can wind up working in the same country house for years, yet not once will they come into contact with a member of the family they work for.
Yet despite all these restrictions, a tiny narrow bed in a room shared with many others might well be an improvement on the poverty-stricken environment of their own family home.
