If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (29 page)

The arrival of the cleaner but more expensive electricity in the 1880s gave householders a choice. Some people started to have their gas pipes and fittings converted to take electricity instead. Yet a light bulb cost the same as the average week’s wages, and you needed to have your own generator. The armaments manufacturer Sir William Armstrong was a prominent pioneer of electric light and installed a small hydro-electric plant in his Northumberland home, Cragside. His innovation was rivalled
across the Atlantic by several Fifth Avenue millionaires who also built their own small generators in 1880s New York. In 1881, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt even went to a ball dressed as an electric light. But these early adopters ran the risk of accidents. After her electrical system at home caught fire, Mrs Vanderbilt panicked and had it taken out.

The widespread adoption of electricity was delayed for many years because each generator produced a different level of output. This meant that different towns, or even individual houses, had their own currents. Manufacturers were therefore reluctant to invest in developing fittings because there was no national market for their products. It would take the creation of the National Grid in the 1930s to allow electricity to achieve ubiquity.

The other twentieth-century transformation in living-room light levels was the use of glass on a scale not seen since the huge windows of the strangely proto-modern Hardwick Hall. Natural light was worshipped by twentieth-century architects, who liked to blur the boundaries between indoors and out. ‘The spaciousness of the modern sitting-room is not limited by the enclosing walls, but is extended to the garden and distant landscape by means of large openings – windows, loggias or sun-porches,’ wrote F. R. S. Yorke in a round-up of the latest architectural developments in 1934. He was describing one-off, architect-designed houses for the rich, but these values would also be seen in post-war affordable housing. The influential SPAN houses produced by Eric Lyons from the 1950s, for example, have their own enclosed garden courtyards separated from the living room merely by glass, and are full of natural light. ‘The convenience and simplicity, and indeed much of the charm of the modern interior are due to open planning,’ Yorke added, describing a trend which defined the twentieth-century living room.

Oddly, the modern open-plan house represents a return to medieval times, when houses had a central, flexible and spacious
hall. The difference lies in the absence of people: today a quarter of American households consist of just one person, and a further 50 per cent of them consist of couples living without children.

This leads us on to the biggest-ever change in the history of home life: the disappearance, in the early twentieth century, of the servants.

28 – ‘Speaking’ to the Servants

No relations in society are so numerous and universal as those of Masters and Servants … so it is proportionally important that they should be well defined and understood.

Samuel and Sarah Adams,
The Complete Servant
, 1825

Our review of living-room technology has very quickly revealed that pre-twentieth-century houses of any pretension whatsoever simply could not operate without their servants to carry coal and to clean. Perhaps the biggest difference of all between then and now is the absence of this particular variety of intimacy in the home. People in the past took it completely for granted that they’d have non-family members living cheek by jowl beneath their roof.

In Tudor and Stuart times, between a quarter and a half of the entire population were employed in domestic service at some point in their lives, and the bond between master and servant was one of the most important social relationships. Being a servant wasn’t something of which to be ashamed: you gained protection and honour by association with your own particular lord. You would be glad to wear his badge or even a cloak in his household colour, a uniform called a ‘livery’ because it was part of a living allowance that also included bed and board. People were proud to serve the man who in return met their physical needs.

Clearly this attitude was long gone by the beginning of the twentieth century, but in 1900 domestic service remained the single largest source of female employment, and liveries were still worn. Henry Bennett, a footman who started work at Chatsworth House in 1928, was issued with several sets: a state livery, ‘one semi-state and a black suit yearly, and a black mackintosh, and a white coat and cap for car work … we had to breech when over six for dinner’. Yet Bennett was a living anachronism; domestic revolution was on its way. In the most significant upheaval in a thousand years of domestic history, by 1951 a mere 1 per cent of households had a full-time residential domestic servant.

Once upon a time masters and servants were more than used to each other’s company. In the medieval house with its common hall they simply couldn’t escape from each other, and ate all their meals together. In such crowded circumstances servants were constantly enjoined to discretion, sobriety and the avoidance of gossip. The members of Henry VIII’s privy chamber, his most intimate servants, were instructed to be ‘loving together’ and not to ask questions: ‘they must leave enquiry where the King is or goeth, not grudging, mumbling or talking of the King’s pastime, late or early going to bed, or anything done by His Grace’.

These people close to a great nobleman, serving him in even quite menial ways, were themselves well-born. One Elizabethan, noticing that his fellow gentlemen were less and less willing to work as servants and that the ties linking households were loosening, deeply regretted the passing of the great medieval household. He mourned for the ‘decay of Hospitality and Good House-keeping’ in elegiac terms: ‘The Golden world is past and gone.’

Yet even 350 years later, a houseful of servants could find a sense of community and pleasure in each other’s company. Stanley Ager, a butler, remembered his first day of work as a
‘hall boy’ at a Worcestershire country house in 1922. Although he was the lowest of all forty servants working there, ‘everyone was friendly’. Gradually he climbed to the lofty position of butler. In his retirement, he wrote: ‘I still miss the staff. They fought among themselves and they always caused me far more trouble than the Lord and Lady – yet I miss them most of all.’

The decline in the status of household service was linked to the growing requirement for privacy on the part of the family, and gradually servants began to spend less time with their masters. In the seventeenth century, this took architectural form: the backstairs, the servants’ separate dining hall and the bell to summon service all made their first appearance in the home. In the medieval house there had been no need for bells: you simply shouted for a servant who would have spent all of his or her time well within earshot.

In the 1760s, Hannah Glasse advised young housemaids to become soundless, like ghosts: ‘learn to walk softly, and not disturb the family’. Hers was the century in which the green baize door appeared as a potent symbol of the division between above and below stairs. Its green felt covering was intended to eliminate any noise from the servants’ quarters. By 1864, the Victorian architect Robert Kerr could write that ‘the family constitute one community, the servants another … each class is entitled to shut its door upon the other, and be alone … on both sides this privacy is highly valued’.

In class-conscious Victorian times, these attitudes led eventually to hideous extremes, such as the fifth Duke of Portland insisting that his servants turn to face the wall as he passed (though he did also have a personality disorder). His household at Welbeck Abbey was most unusual, remaining almost medievally huge and male-dominated: even in 1900 it still contained 320 staff, including four ‘royal’ footmen to wait on the family, two ‘steward’s room’ footmen to wait on the other servants, a ‘schoolroom’ footman, a valet, a wine butler, under-butler,
master of the servants’ hall, two pageboys, a hall porter, two hall boys and six odd-job men.

When it came to the relations between family and servants, the views of Mrs Beeton, household manager extraordinaire, grate upon modern ears. ‘A servant is not to be seated’, she wrote, ‘in his master’s or mistress’s presence; nor offer any opinion, unless asked for it; not even to say “goodnight” or “good morning”, except in reply to that salutation.’

No wonder servants throughout the nineteenth century became increasingly demoralised and unhappy in their roles. Eric Horne, a retired manservant, gave a welcome glance into the heart that beats beneath the butler’s impassive waistcoat when he described his discouragement: ‘I felt that I was gradually going into a net, and losing all liberty in life: the constraint became almost unbearable, but what could I do? … I knew nothing but gentleman’s service wherewith to get a living.’ The head butler at Cliveden House in Berkshire, Edwin Lee, likewise remembers a lonely life:

It may seem strange for me to say that when I was surrounded by so many people, but I was like the captain of a ship, there was no one to whom I could go with my problems … I received little praise if things went well. I remember once saying this to her ladyship.

‘What do you expect me to do, Lee, keep patting you on the back?’

Given an answer like that I never laid myself open again.

Lower down the social scale, economics still dictated a much closer proximity between employer and employee. In the parsonage where the Brontë sisters grew up, there was just one servant, old Tabby. Charlotte, aged twelve, described a typical morning at Haworth: ‘Tabby the servant is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister … is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlour, brushing the carpet.’ This communal, almost medieval mingling of family and servants brought them all very close together. When Tabby broke her leg in 1836, the
three sisters insisted that she stay in bed while they looked after her and did her work.

Among the many different specialist roles to be found in a large establishment, the footman’s duties are particularly interesting because they are quite hard to define. His job was essentially to look impressive and add grandeur to the household. In the early 1900s, former footman Eric Horne recalled ‘an old titled lady in Eaton Place who was very proud of her two tall matching footmen. When she was engaging them she would make them walk backwards and forwards across the room to see if she liked their action, just as though she was buying a horse.’ Footman Henry Bennett was required to change his own name (Ernest) to Henry, for the convenience of his employers. He was replacing a man named ‘Long Henry’ who had been an impressive 6 ft 2 ins tall. Records of footmen’s wages show that those over 5 ft 6 ins often received a higher wage than their shorter colleagues.

The footman passed many of his working hours enduring the mind-numbing tedium of ‘waiting’. Being in waiting meant standing, smartly, ready to take a message or bring a tray or open a door as people came through. In 1905, Diana Cooper described an aged footman at Belvoir Castle whose job was to beat the dinner gong, ‘feebly brandishing the padded-knobbed stick with which he struck it. Every corridor had to be warned and the towers too, so I suppose he banged on and off for ten minutes, thrice daily.’

This must have provided nothing like the job satisfaction of making a meal or producing a pile of clean clothes. ‘The life of a gentleman’s servant is something like that of a bird shut up in cage,’ wrote footman William Tayler in 1837. ‘The bird is well housed and well fed, but deprived of liberty, and liberty is the dearest and sweetes[t] object of all Englishmen.’

But to describe their duties as entirely demeaning and nebulous is to underestimate the sense of theatre, excitement and occasion
that footmen brought to their employers’ lives. Jonathan Swift, writing in the eighteenth century, confirmed that the footman was ‘the fine gentleman of the family, with whom all the maids are in love’. In the previous century, we hear that the ‘running footman’ who delivered urgent messages or ran alongside his master’s coach was always a fine physical specimen, and that ‘the waiting-woman hath the greatest fancy to him when he is in his close trousers’. With Gordon Grimmett, third footman at Longleat House in Wiltshire,

it was the theatre of service which appealed to him, the dressing up in livery with almost period movement and big gestures … the throwing of the voice when announcing the guests, their beautiful clothes and jewels, the style, the grace.

This is a theme often returned to in footmen’s memoirs. Even in the twentieth century they express a nostalgic fondness for the pageantry of the past:

There’s something artistically satisfying in wearing full livery and carrying it well. It encourages graceful movement and gesture and adds a bit of theatre and glamour to the occasion. With the shift towards the ordinary and the tawdry we could well do with a bit of it in our lives today.