Life Below Stairs (10 page)
Authors: Alison Maloney
WASHDAY
In most houses washday fell on a Monday but laundry work went on all week. The traditional song ‘Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron’ is the perfect
illustration of the work involved in the weekly wash, as the object of the singer’s affections is seen doing a different task every day of the week. Beginning on a Monday morning, when he
catches her ‘A-washing of her linen’, the ditty has her hanging out on Tuesday, starching on Wednesday, ironing on Thursday, folding on Friday, airing on Saturday and finally wearing
her finest linen on Sunday. This was no exaggeration as in a grand house there was enough work to keep a laundry maid busy all week. Below is her weekly timetable.
Monday
Mrs Beeton instructed that the laundry maid should begin on Monday morning by examining all the articles in her care and entering them into a log, known as the
‘washing book’. Collars and cuffs were detached from clothing and then the washing sorted into five piles, depending on fabric. They were then placed in tubs of lukewarm water and lye
soap and left to soak overnight.
Tuesday
The following day would find the maid with her arms immersed in a huge copper bath of hot water and soda crystals or ‘yellow soap’, rubbing and scrubbing to
get all the marks out of the clothes, sheets and tablecloths. Whites would be bleached with lemon juice or, in some cases, urine, although this practice was dying out in the twentieth century. The
items would then be rinsed and examined inch by inch for any stains that had survived the wash. These would then be tackled with a variety of traditional stain removers, including chalk for grease
and oil, alcohol for grass stains, kerosene for bloodstains and hot coals wrapped in cloth for wax. Lemon juice and onion were used to lighten stains and, in order to whiten scorched linen, Mrs
Beeton suggested a paste made from vinegar, fuller’s earth, soap, onion juice and dried fowls’ dung!
Wednesday
If possible sheets were hung outside to dry and bleach in the sunlight. If not, they would be hung in the drying room. More delicate items that could not be soaked, such
as coloured silks and muslins, were washed separately with widely available yellow soap. Borax was often added to the water to prevent fading. They were then hung on a clotheshorse in the drying
room, away from harmful rays of the sun. Woollen garments were washed in cold water, to prevent shrinkage. The copper pots then had to be cleaned, the York stone floor of the wash house scrubbed
and everything put back in its correct place.
Thursday and Friday
The laundry maid’s week would end with the starching, mangling and ironing. Household items such as tablecloths, aprons, collars, shirtfronts and cuffs would need to
be stiffened to avoid wrinkles and, to do this, they were dipped in a paste made from starch and water. The actual starch could be bought but home-made varieties made from potato, rice or wheat
were also common, and cheaper. For lace, of which there was an abundance in the smart houses, sugar was added to the last rinse and the delicate fabric was then laid between white cloths and placed
under books to help it dry flat. ‘Very delicate lace may be wound around a glass jar or bottle,’ suggested the magazine
Home & Health
in 1907,
‘then washed […] leaving it on the glass jar till dry.’
Linen without frills or folds, such as sheets, tablecloths and napkins, was passed through the heavy metal mangles, with two large wooden rollers, to squeeze the water out and flatten it. It was
then dried, folded and put into a linen press, a heavy wooden contraption that resembled a huge flower press, to keep it flat.
Pressing the clothes, especially the fine ladies’ dresses, was an arduous and fiddly task. Electric irons were invented in 1882 but appeared unsafe, as the few who had used them reported
strange noises, flying sparks and blinding flashes of light. A safer one was finally introduced in the US in 1904 but most households carried on with the traditional irons, heated by the fire,
until well after the First World War. Most often the laundry
maid would use heavy flat irons, weighing around 10 lb each, which were heated on an ornate stand by the fire.
Two or three would be used in rotation so that when one was in use and losing heat the others were warm enough to replace it immediately, preventing unnecessary breaks in the process. Some used a
box iron, a hollow metal model that could be filled with hot coals and therefore stay warm for longer and, for the
frills and fluting, there was a goffering iron, a strange
metal test tube into which a hot metal poker was inserted before the item was wrapped around the outside, although these were dying out by the Edwardian era.
An early advertisement for a wrought-iron mangle
The Wash House
In the ‘big houses’, the work was done in a wash house, which was either a few rooms attached to the kitchen or a single-storey
building across the yard. It was comprised of a washing room fitted with a series of tubs and coppers, placed at a convenient height for the maid, and a stove to heat the water, unless
plumbing allowing hot running water was fitted. The floor was of York stone slabs with a drainage system to draw away the water that slopped on the floor and a flue to draw off the steam.
Next door was an ironing room and a drying room, ideally heated with a furnace. The laundry maid spent most of her time in the hot steamy environment, often with her hands plunged into
very hot water, and was left with chapped, reddened hands as a result.
For those households that did not boast a laundry maid, there were local laundresses or washerwomen who would take the dirty fabric away on a Monday and return it, washed, starched and
pressed, later in the week.
SPRING-CLEANING
When the winter weather turned warmer and the leisured classes began to organize their calendar around forthcoming social events such as the Derby, Cowes week, the London
season and the shooting season, life below stairs took on a less monotonous routine. Families with more than one home would move from their country home to their London house for months, taking
selected servants with them but leaving others behind on ‘boarding wages’ to pack up and look after the house. The family exodus would then be the signal for the annual spring
clean.
The ornaments, clocks and small items of furniture would first be packed away and the larger furniture draped with sheets, after being cleaned with vinegar and given a new application of
beeswax. The loose carpets would be pulled up and taken outside for a thorough beating and the heavy winter curtains taken down from the windows.
The maids would dust and sweep each room before climbing towering stepladders to scrub the ceiling with soda crystals and remove months of grime and grease. Then they
would wash down the woodwork using a special paste to whiten the painted areas and get on their hands and knees to scrub the vast wooden floors with soapy water, or soda crystals
dissolved in buckets of warm water, before polishing with beeswax. The windows were cleaned with vinegar, the silver and gold plates
were given an extra going over and the
hundreds of copper pots in the kitchen scrubbed until they shone. The linen was also examined and any repairs needed were carried out and, finally, the summer curtains were hung.
Skirting Boards
As well as the floors and ceilings, there were hundreds of feet of skirting boards to be scrubbed using pipe clay to remove stains. The
following is a cleaning recommendation from
Cassell’s Household Guide
:
Scrubbing
. –
Neglected boards will not come clean without extra pains. If of a very bad colour a mixture of three parts of powdered pipe clay
with one of chloride of lime, about the thickness of cream, will be useful. This should be laid on to dry in some time before scrubbing. Or some white sand laid on the brush when
scrubbing will remove the dirt. Grease will only yield to fuller’s earth spread on the spots for several hours. Well-kept boards, especially in country houses, require nothing
but cold water. Soap and soda in hot water make boards black. In scrubbing, only arm’s length should be wetted at the time, taking care that the flannel is wrung each time dry
of the soiled water. Good bass scrubbing-brushes are more cleansing than those of hair. Vulcanised India-rubber scrubbing-brushes are the best of all, but are rather expensive at
the first outlay.
Spring-cleaning lasted up to four weeks and, according to maid Margaret Thomas, it was ‘a great business in those days’.
‘As well in the kitchen we had to spring clean whenever the sweep came, which in Yorkshire, where I worked later, where we had the smoke jack, was every six weeks.’
Housemaid’s Knee
A 1909 advert shows a smiling maid on her hands and knees, surrounded by furniture covered in white sheets, scrubbing the floor with a brush
under the caption ‘For spring cleaning, use Calvert’s no. 5 carbolic soap’ as her benevolent mistress looks on. In reality, few domestic servants would have been so
happy about the annual spring clean, which was an arduous process and the young girl in the picture would be quite likely to suffer from housemaid’s knee, a painful swelling below
the kneecap that afflicted many a maid in service after hours spent on all fours sweeping and scrubbing.
TIPS FOR THE LADY’S MAID
The mistress’s personal attendant had her own recipes, or receipts as they were commonly known, for all sorts of things from hair treatments to boot polish, and an
array of brushes and other tools to keep her employers smart. Beauty products such as cold cream could be bought or mixed at home and were made from a variety of ingredients including lanolin,
almond oil, cocoa butter, coconut oil, white wax, witch hazel and spermaceti – a wax obtained from the head cavity of a sperm whale.
At the end of each day, the lady’s maid examined the dresses that had been worn and gently removed any dust or mud with a soft brush or a handkerchief. Footwear was brushed or cleaned with
a cloth and kid leather was wiped with milk, to preserve its softness. Bonnets were dusted with a small feather duster, kept for the purpose, and each decorative flower or feather teased back to
its intended shape.
As well as a working knowledge of millinery, and a basic understanding of the mixing of lotions and potions, the lady’s maid was expected to be an expert hair stylist, often sent on
courses to learn the latest trends. Mrs Beeton declared, ‘Hairdressing is the most important part of the lady’s maid’s office.’ And she recommended some strange concoction
designed to make the lady in question look, if not smell, divine.
A Good Wash for the Hair.
INGREDIENTS
1 pennyworth of borax, ½ pint of olive oil, 1 pint of boiling water.
Mode – Pour the boiling water over the borax and oil; let it cool; then put the mixture into a bottle. Shake it before using, and apply it
with a flannel. Camphor and borax, dissolved in boiling water and left to cool, make a very good wash for the hair; as also does rosemary water mixed with a little borax. After using any
of these washes, when the hair becomes thoroughly dry, a little pomatum or oil should be rubbed in, to make it smooth and glossy.
To make Pomade for the Hair.
INGREDIENTS
¼ lb of lard, 2 pennyworth of castor-oil; scent.
Mode – Let the lard be unsalted; beat it up well; then add the castor-oil, and mix thoroughly together with a knife, adding a few drops of
any scent that may be preferred. Put the pomatum into pots, which keep well covered to prevent it turning rancid.
Unlike today, hair was seldom washed as Edwardian ladies tended to feel that water was too harsh on their crowning glory. In an interview with
Every Woman
’
s Encyclopaedia
,
celebrated soprano Aline Vallandri, described as having ‘the Most Wonderful Hair in Europe’, said that while cleanliness of hair and scalp were essential, ‘I am perfectly certain
that much
washing of the hair with water is bad. As a matter of fact, I wash my own hair as seldom as possible.’
The secret, she said, was to brush the hair regularly, and to use only clean brushes. ‘Every morning when I get up my maid brushes my hair,’ she revealed. ‘As it is so long I
have had to have a specially high stool made to sit on. The maid brushes both my scalp thoroughly and my hair from the roots to the end for half an hour. The other quarter of an hour I devote to
dressing it for the day.
‘In addition to keeping the hair perfectly clean, this brushing prevents the possibility of any scurf or dandruff – and scurf is death to the hair.’ She also, alarmingly,
recommended that a compound of mercury be used if ‘scurf’ did appear.
TIPS FOR THE VALET
Like his female counterpart, the valet took a great deal of time ensuring that his master looked presentable. He would brush his clothes before they were worn and remove
grease spots from the collar of his coat on a daily basis, using ‘rectified spirit of wine’ or ethanol. Boot polish was easy enough to buy, but many a valet prided himself on his own
recipe.