Keeping Their Place E-Book

Pamela A Sambrook

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

First published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing

Reprinted in 2009 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Pamela Sambrook, 2005, 2009, 2013

The right of Pamela Sambrook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9468 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

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

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to the archivists and searchroom assistants of all the record offices, libraries and museums used. Their staff not only suggested sources but also helped with reproduction and permissions. Internet systems are gradually making collections more accessible, but the painstaking and time-consuming work of cataloguing still requires the human brain, and the personal touch is invaluable.

I am grateful also to the many depositors of archival collections used, to whom copyright is reserved. Specifically, archival extracts and illustrative material are reproduced by permission of the following: Bedfordshire and Luton Archive Service and their depositors; Berkshire Record Office; Birmingham Central Library; Cambridgeshire Archives, Cambridge, together with the County Record Office, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire; Cheshire Record Office; Derbyshire Record Office and the depositors of the following archives: Harpur Crewe of Calke; FitzHerbert of Tissington; Annie Norman of Repton; Durham Record Office and Captain G.M. Salvin, the Earl of Strathmore, the Marquess of Londonderry and Miss L. Hodgkin; Enville Hall Archives and Peter Williams; Kelmarsh Hall; Arthur Inch; John Rylands Library, Manchester University; Gillian Jones; Hampshire Record Office; Leeds Central Library; Leicestershire Record Office; Manchester Central Library; Mary Evans Picture Library; National Trust, Lyme Park; National Trust Photo Library; Northamptonshire Record Office and their depositors; Nottinghamshire Archives and Derek Adlam, Curator of the Portland Collection; Staffordshire Arts and Museum Service, Shugborough; Staffordshire Record Office and Lord Stafford, Lady Bagot, Mr Richard Dyott, and the Countess of Sutherland; Surrey History Service; Warwickshire Record Office and Lord Daventry; West Sussex Record Office, Lord Egremont, and the Goodwood Estate Co. Ltd and the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign. Extracts from Backstairs Life in a Country House (David and Charles, 1982) appear by kind permission of the publishers.

All reasonable efforts have been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. Any untraced claimant of copyright should contact the publisher or myself.

I would like to thank also the following individuals for their help: Jessica Gerard, Claire Bissell, Chris Copp and Andrew Dobraszczyc. For their sustaining interest and advice I am hugely in debt to my friends and colleagues in Staffordshire, especially Rose Wheat and, of course, the staff at Sutton Publishing, Jaqueline Mitchell, Alison Miles and Jane Entrican.

Abbreviations

Within the text, each reference to an extract is given in a short form. Full details of printed sources can be found in Sources and Select Bibliography. Abbreviations used in archive sources are listed here.

BLARS

Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service

BRO

Berkshire Record Office

CCRO

Cambridgeshire County Record Office, Cambridge

CRO

Cheshire Record Office

CRoH

Cambridgeshire County Record Office, Huntingdon

DeRO

Derbyshire Record Office

DRO

Durham Record Office

EA

Enville Archives, Enville Hall, Staffordshire

HRO

Hampshire Record Office

JRL

John Rylands Library, University of Manchester

KH

Kelmarsh Hall

LCL

Leeds Central Library

LRO

Leicestershire Record Office

NA

Nottinghamshire Archives

NRO

Northamptonshire Record Office

SHC

Surrey History Centre

SRO

Staffordshire Record Office

WCRO

Warwickshire County Record Office

WSRO

West Sussex Record Office

Introduction

What was it like to be a domestic servant in a country house? The question is still a valid one, despite a large body of literature about domestic service. Though much has been published in recent years, the written word of the servant, rather than that of the master, is rarely seen. The aim of this book, therefore, is to give a sample, necessarily highly restricted, personal and therefore biased, of servants’ writing – their letters, diaries and autobiography. Editorial comment has been strictly limited, aimed at making sense of a wide range of subject matter rather than providing a closely argued analytical discussion. Above all, it is intended that the writers speak for themselves.

When friends were told of this enterprise, the invariable question was: ‘Is there enough material?’ The answer is a decided positive. Servants of the country house were, of course, working people of largely restricted education. Many of them began their careers with limited writing abilities, but many won promotion to higher levels of service where competence in literacy and numeracy was essential. Academic research has shown that literacy was more widespread among the working population than previously believed, but in any case the great country houses ran on paper.1 Enormous numbers of household records were kept, largely by servants themselves – accounts, wages books, bills, memoranda, reports and letters. Add to this the admittedly rare diaries and slightly more numerous autobiographies written by servants at the end of their careers, and there emerges a rich field to choose from indeed the difficulty has been in eliminating material, not finding it.

For this reason, a number of arbitrary choices have had to be made. The majority of extracts included in this collection were written or generated by servants, but not exclusively so. It would be perverse to exclude all letters written to or about servants by their masters, where these throw light upon particular circumstances. So some letters from employers have been included, especially in the chapter dealing with recruitment. Also included are individual examples of official documents such as articles of agreement, quarter-session depositions and employers’ or servants’ wills. All the diaries and autobiographies, however, were written by servants, not masters.

The decision has also been made to exclude oral history records. Collected over the last few decades, there is now in existence a large body of evidence recorded by servants, too large and disparate to include here, and certainly justifying a separate collection. This is not as distinct a category as might be thought, however; the line between oral history and assisted autobiography is sometimes hazy.

The time frame runs from the eighteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Few extracts have been included from the first half of the eighteenth century and most date from the nineteenth, in many ways the high-point of the country-house servant. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly the date of the last extracts as the writers of autobiography were often imprecise about timings, but few have been included later than the 1920s. This wide time frame covers a period when many changes took place in domestic service. Positions and duties changed: the traditional posts of house steward, usher of the hall and groom of the chambers became restricted to only the very richest households, replaced more usually by butler, housekeeper and parlourmaid. There was a general tendency to replace menservants by women. Conditions of employment, frequency of payment, time off, personal freedom, mobility, deference – all these features evolved or declined. Such developments over time may well be under-emphasised in a collection which is arranged according to topic rather than chronology, but it is hoped that the overall pattern of change emerges, albeit subtly.

Drawing clear-cut boundaries is always difficult. The concept of the country house itself is an elastic one. Jessica Gerard defined a country house ‘by its owner rather than by its size or grandeur’, and went on to debate the inclusion of the lesser or ‘parish gentry’.2 Yet all shared a common culture based on land ownership and tenantry, similar values and the exercise of local or national power. This means that a country-house servant could experience service in establishments which varied widely in size but usually provided a continuity of ethos, skill and tradition.

In addition, country-house servants were mobile in several senses. Many started their careers at a low social level, working as single-handed servants in urban or rural contexts, but their early employment was part of their overall experience and coloured many of their attitudes later in life when they had moved on into the country-house world proper. For these reasons an occasional extract from a single-handed footman or housemaid has been included, where this seems particularly apposite. At the other end of the scale, contributions from senior staff such as stewards have also been included, though whether these are more accurately described as ‘servants’ or ‘managers’ is a moot point. In the eighteenth century and earlier they may well have originated from fairly well-to-do families themselves, but by the nineteenth century house stewards had usually worked their way up the employment ladder.

Personal servants such as footmen and lady’s maids were mobile in a different sense, moving around with their employers from house to house and taking in the London season. One of the Sutherlands’ footmen, for example, spent much of 1838–9 dividing his time between the Leveson-Gowers’ house at West Hill, south of the Thames and still semi-rural, and their main town house, Stafford House in St James’s.3 Yet it would be absurd to include one and not the other. What has been clearly excluded, however, is the experience of the long-term urban working-class or middle-class servant.4 Even though these made up the vast majority of servants, theirs is a different story.

Domestic service as a whole employed a wide variety of servant types, but within the restricted world of the nineteenth-century country house Jessica Gerard has identified four categories: the career servant, whose whole working life was spent in service; the lifestyle servant, for whom service provided a useful stage, a traineeship before going on to something else, usually marriage; the impoverished genteel servant, often governesses or housekeepers who had come down in the world; and labourers, usually locally based, casual or outdoor workers.5 This categorisation is far from exhaustive, excluding as it does the highly skilled outdoor craftsmen such as gardeners or carpenters and the well-to-do stewards. The relevant point here is that this collection includes all of the above categories where they worked mainly indoors. In deciding to restrict the scope of the collection to indoor servants only, outdoor staff, including gamekeepers, gardeners and many other skilled workers, are necessarily excluded.

SOURCES

Some of the great family archive collections contain thousands of letters. Most are of personal, family, social or political content, but some relate to aspects of household management. The peripatetic nature of many wealthy families required frequent and detailed contact between houses. Family members would move between their own town and country establishments, visit friends or stay in London for the season, leaving behind a skeleton staff to care for their own house in the country. The servants were divided therefore into what were often called the ‘residents’ (staff who stayed in the same house all year) and the ‘travellers’ (who moved around the country with the family).6 The most numerous household letters to survive, therefore, are instructional or reporting letters, exchanged between members of the family and the resident person left in charge of the house. This last might ultimately be a steward who had responsibility for both house and estate matters, but it was more usual to leave the house in the charge of a female housekeeper. She would head a resident indoor staff which was largely female – a few housemaids, perhaps one or two laundry maids, a dairymaid, plus perhaps a brewer, carpenter and porter.

Given a regular annual routine of absence, some family archives contain long runs of instructional letters. One such is the collection of the Fitzwilliam family of Milton in Northamptonshire, a collection covering much of the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. The letters contain mainly estate-related material, but there are also ongoing sagas relating to brewing, a recalcitrant smoking kitchen chimney which seemed to afflict the household for decades, and difficulties with recruiting servants.7 In another case, the FitzHerberts of Tissington, the housekeeping contact was an old and trusted nanny who lived in a house in the park.8 The other side of this relationship, of course, is represented by letters from senior servants reporting progress, disaster or gossip. Letters from agents reporting on estate and farming progress are fairly common; much rarer are reports of internal household affairs.

Very different in style and content are ‘nanny’ letters, correspondence from old servants to their grown-up charges. These are very affectionate in manner, sometimes reproachful, evidence of the close and long-lasting bond that could develop between mistress or master and servant. Occasionally long-serving housekeepers had similar relationships and wrote similar nanny-type letters.

Different again are ‘begging’ letters, written by ex-servants to ex-employers, asking for help of various sorts, be it money, work or patronage (help in obtaining a position elsewhere). These tend to be addressed to mistresses since many are from women fallen on hard times, and it was the women of the family who seemed to deal with this side of the household administration. The 3rd Duchess of Sutherland, for example, seems to have received many such letters from contacts on the family’s vast estates throughout England and Scotland.9

Servants of course also wrote letters to their own families and friends, though these are much less likely to survive as they were not deposited in a large archive. Many families, however, had a long tradition of high-level domestic service and there are occasional survivals of treasured letters, such as those kept by the Inch family.10 An unusual survival is the Spendlove collection in Northampton Record Office – letters from Ruth Barrow, a girl living in service in Leicester to the man who later became her husband.11

Perhaps the most numerous relevant correspondence is that relating to the whole issue of recruiting staff. In many families this was a thorny problem and there is no shortage of letters complaining of the quality of servants and the difficulty of finding suitable staff. The aristocratic network of kin and friends was the most favoured means of recruitment by the incumbents of country houses. After scouring the immediate neighbourhood for likely candidates, the next recourse was to write to contacts asking them to do likewise in their area and to generally ‘put word out’, sometimes enclosing very specific requirements. Some households – the Harpur Crewes for example – had a tradition of using local employment agencies to make such searches and this was usually conducted by letter, at least in the country. Mr Palmer, the Harpur Crewe’s steward in the mid-nineteenth century, kept even failed job applications from servants.12 Generally records of servants’ ‘characters’ or references survive in great number. Given the rapid turnover of servants, especially lower-ranking staff, writing and receiving characters must have been a major domestic chore, even though most employers adopted a fairly standardised format.

Within most family and estate archives, formal household management records are much more numerous than personal records of servants. The elaborate structure of vouchers (bills or receipts), house books, collected accounts, inventories and so on are evidence of the extent to which the country house needed paper records, and they have been used extensively in studies of households and domestic service.13 Most of these records were, of course, written by middle- or senior-ranking servants, and as such speak volumes about servant literacy and numeracy. Such records can, however, be obstinately silent about individual servants and their experience of work. As it is that missing personal quality which is the target of this search, only a few short extracts of this type of record have been included where relevant.

Servants’ diaries are unfortunately fairly rare, and this collection contains extracts from six, two of which are in published form. Some senior servants kept what was called a memorandum book. This was a record of daily events, but ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically. It seems an odd record to modern eyes, but alphabetical records of various descriptions were fairly common in the eighteenth century. One such extract has been included in this collection, the alphabetical record kept by a footman in the service of the 6th Earl of Stamford.14 The book does not carry the name of its writer, only the initials WT. As the earliest retrospective entry is the record of the deaths of Mary and John Torry (under T), and other records of the Stamford servants reveal the existence of a William Torry who became footman, later promoted to butler, the record is referred to here as the memorandum book of William Torry.

One of the published diaries is by William Tayler, the only manservant of a wealthy widow, who kept a diary in 1837.15Although much of his experience during that year was in an urban environment, a few extracts have been used to shed light upon the lot of footmen, who played such an important role in the life of the country house. Tayler’s record forms an interesting comparison with that of Thomas, the footman in the service of the Duke of Sutherland, from whose manuscript diary a single year, 1838–9, has survived in Staffordshire Record Office.16 Use has also been made of a diary written most unusually by a young housemaid in the service of the family of one of the staff of Repton School in Derbyshire, dated 1914.17 Again it is hardly representative of true country-house service, but her experience in a restricted rural world was comparable. Single extracts have been included from the famous diaries of Hannah Cullwick, whose experience of country-house service was limited; of Harriet Messenger, a nanny/governess who accompanied Mr and Mrs Leveson-Gower of Limpsfield in their European travels in the 1880s and 1890s, and of Sarah Wells, housekeeper at Uppark in 1892.18

Servant autobiographies are more common than diaries, though many of the printed ones are of a late date, published in the mid-twentieth century.19 Some of them, however, reach back in memory into the late nineteenth century, the 1860s and 1870s, and even in one case to the mid-eighteenth century. They give a very colourful picture of life in the domestic offices of great houses. Retrospective records such as these have to be viewed with great care, of course. Memoirs are usually written by people who have a particular point to make – recording a rise from poverty and degradation to respectability and relative wealth, for example. With the best will in the world, memory plays tricks and some plainly bear the imprint of a strong editorial hand. For example, the servants’ memoirs which were collected together by Rosina Harrison sometimes read uncannily like Rosina’s own separately published autobiography.20

Servants’ testimonies appear in more official forms, such as wills and sworn witness statements to events, sometimes criminal, which took place inside the domestic environment. In particular, county quarter-session records contain numerous witness statements made by servants, as victims, perpetrators, or eye witnesses, but most are outside the limits of this collection as belonging to middle-class, working or urban environments. A single example of a witness statement has been included here to complete the selection.

SERVANTS’ LITERACY

The issue of the extent of servants’ literacy is an interesting one. The quality of writing in servants’ letters varies greatly, both over time and according to status. Many senior servants in the eighteenth century were well-educated sons of wellto-do families and could write highly literate, beautifully penned letters. Other examples are more idiosyncratic. Some, like the housekeeper of Lady Mordaunt writing in the early 1700s, are examples of almost phonetic spelling, what has been called ‘oral writing’, but none the less lucid for that.21 Punctuation is often non-existent, even in highly literate letters. For the purposes of presentation to a modern readership unused to such streams of consciousness, an occasional comma has been inserted, but only where the sense is difficult to follow without it. Otherwise transcripts are as exact as possible. Abbreviations and superscripts have been kept where the meaning is obvious and spelling is original.

Why did servants keep diaries or other personal records? William Tayler tells us he did it to improve himself, in which task he felt he was unsuccessful: ‘I am got quite tired of this writeing as I do not improve as I expected I should, but I neglect writeing for two or three days sometimes, then I take up my pen and hurrey it over anyhow. I am a regular dunce and allways shall be. I was born a dunce, I live a dunce and I shall die a dunce. . . .’22 Yet he also clearly wrote for an outside readership, to explain what a servant’s life was like. Thomas the footman seems to have written his entries mostly at night as he went to bed, remarkably regularly. His diary was a personal record of a time when he was experiencing work in one of the richest households in the country. He tried hard to keep in touch with his father, a Cheshire farmer, and his brother, also in service; they were obviously interested in his life and he bought newspapers and court magazines to save for them and presumably the diary would serve him as an aide-mémoire.

On the whole, employers needed literate servants. A Mrs Boon sacked her footman for not being able to read and write and Mrs Wrigley found an employer who helped her with her lessons.23 Annie Norman’s mistress gave her a present of ink, so she probably knew about her diary writing.24 Some letters, however, are clearly written by someone else more literate. We can see this in the case of Mary and Elizabeth Brook, two sisters who wrote to the Lucas family asking for help – letters from two separate people but with the same handwriting.25

Finally the point has to be reiterated. The country-house archival collections in our record offices are enormous; what appears here is but a tiny selection, taken almost at random. The choice of archives examined has been dictated largely by the practical considerations of travel and access. Diaries and autobiographies apart, any number of collections could have been made of entirely different material and featuring entirely different archives. The present selection is therefore a product of partial and personal choice, a coloured and, I hope, colourful glimpse of the real people who walked the corridors and kitchens of our great country houses.