The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era (6 page)

The satisfaction of seeing a job well done is one that Carson takes pleasure in. One butler recounted the pride he took in overseeing the setting of a table for a dinner party. ‘Assuming the guests have been brought up to it and know what to expect, they will sit at that table in complete comfort. Everything they need is to hand. There’s no stretching for anything, no knocking things over when they’re reaching for something else. It’s a matter of where you put glasses and plates, and the decorative effect as well. There’s ways you do things so that you don’t forget anything. Scrabbling around moving stuff while people are actually sitting there is not really on!’

Most of all, Carson delights in being surrounded by fine things. He would endorse the sentiments of the butler who saw his working life as an education: ‘It was impossible to live amongst beauty without it getting under your skin; you learn to distinguish what is good and what is not; you learn taste and appreciation; you look at books lining shelves and eventually you pick one up and begin to read; overheard conversations spark off a desire to know more. You also learn moral values, not always by example but by observation and comparison.’

Mrs Hughes appears to have less truck with this view. We don’t hear her express an interest in European royal families, much less admire the pictures hanging in the great hall. She is more likely scanning them for any dust collecting in the curlicues of the gilt frames. Of all the servants, Mrs Hughes appears to do the least. She is often spotted walking briskly through a room, pausing to question a junior housemaid on her work, keys jangling at her side, but it’s not absolutely apparent what she is there to do. In fact, there are myriad things for her to think about, beginning with supervising the housemaids in their daily round of fire-laying, sweeping and dusting, ensuring all the public rooms are ready before breakfast. After that, the beds must be made (sheets were changed once a week; the mistress’s changed twice), and the water carafes refreshed. There would be rotas to draw up and monitor, from the female servants’ duties to the linens, and ensuring the principal rooms are cleaned thoroughly in turn.

At the annual festive
Servants’ Ball, employers and
staff cast aside social barriers
for one night and enjoy
Downton Abbey together.

The linens would take up a great deal of the housekeeper’s time. Aside from bed linen there was an arsenal of ‘working linen’ to be ordered, prepared and maintained. The kitchen needed tea towels for drying dishes, oven cloths, round towels for drying hands, fine-linen cloths for straining soups and a host of other scraps. The housemaids required their own set of cloths and towels; the butler and footmen used an endless supply of linen towels as well as thin, pure- linen squares for drying the silver. All these would be used regularly, and housekeepers would often be up until midnight preparing them for the week ahead.

Mrs Hughes is also in charge of the house stores. Soap powders and so on could be ordered quarterly in bulk from London, but other items would come from local suppliers. Mrs Hughes’s eye might be drawn to ads in the paper tempting her to try something new, such as Stephenson’s Furniture Cream – ‘Gives a mirror-like polish which will not fingermark’. She’s not fazed by progress and seems eager to try out new labour-saving devices. When she travelled to London to help Anna prepare Bates’s house for letting at the start of 1920, she could have visited the Ideal Home Exhibition. The theme reflected the 1919 Housing Act, which promised ‘homes fit for heroes’, so the emphasis was on domestic hygiene and labour-saving features. Mrs Hughes might have fancied the ‘all-electric tea table’ for her sitting room, featuring a toast rack, electric kettle and heating stand.

A major perk of being the housekeeper was the ‘tip’ or ‘commission’ she received back from the suppliers that she favoured with her custom. Mrs Bristow, the housekeeper at Thorpe-Sackville in Leicestershire between the wars, recalled how the system worked: she would take all bills – signed by herself – to the master or mistress, who would then write out cheques for the various tradesmen. ‘If you paid within the week sometimes I’ve had as much as 30 shillings back from the fishmonger and greengrocer.’

Mrs Hughes arrived at Downton Abbey after the present Lord and Lady Grantham had installed themselves, and it is their vision for the house that she seeks to fulfil. This arrangement worked well, as established housekeepers tended to get set in their ways and could sometimes resent the arrival of a new mistress. The Viscountess of Hambleden wrote that when she first arrived at Greenlands (her husband’s home), the incumbent housekeeper tried to undermine and humiliate her in small ways. One of her ploys was to give the grandest guests inferior cotton sheets rather than the best linen ones. Fortunately, she soon left.

As with Carson, Mrs Hughes’s biggest challenge after the war is retaining servants and finding new ones. A whole generation of young women had experienced a life of camaraderie and relative freedom in various war-time employments – munitions factories and other industries, agriculture and office work – and they weren’t anxious to give up this newfound liberty. There was also an increasing feeling that service might be a demeaning career. One reluctant recruit, on taking up her position as third housemaid in a large house at Argyllshire, said her ‘greatest horror’ was ‘the knowledge that I would now have to submit to the badge of servitude – a cap and apron’. There was even an article in
The Lady
(a weekly magazine used then, as now, for placing ads for vacant domestic situations) in 1919 with the title ‘Why I Dislike Domestic Service’. The various objections were listed: ‘1. It means loss of caste; 2. It means loss of freedom of action – a girl was not on her own; 3. Long hours when they are on duty, if not actually working; 4. It was dull, the work was fairly hard, and distinctly monotonous.’

Mrs Hughes
We can’t do things properly
until either his lordship allows us the
staff we need, or until you and
the blessed Lady Mary come down from
that cloud and join the human race!

For the time being, Carson and Mrs Hughes are content to stay at Downton as joint rulers of their own below-stairs kingdom, enjoying respect and relative comfort. Mrs Hughes faces uncertainty about her future because of her ill health, but she can depend on those around her to keep her safe. For Carson, the threat to his security lies in his need for the old-world order to return. As the heads of the European monarchies topple he foresees a knock-on effect that could lead to his loss of livelihood and home, and the displacement of those he knows and loves. To keep his world turning, Carson fixes his attention on the things he can make a difference to: making sure the right wine is decanted, the footmen are in their livery and the silver is polished to a high gleam.

Mrs Hughes is never separated from her keys.
She was guardian of the store-cupboards, controlling
the supplies of food, cleaning products and linen for the
household. They were all valuable commodities which
were kept under lock and key.

Carson has a proper reverence for the royal family and
the sense of continuity that they provide in a changing
world. ‘It was stabilising for the nation’, explains Julian Fellowes,
‘to have a pre-war king on the throne after the war was over.’