The Real Life Downton Abbey

B
efore 1971 the pound was divided into twenty shillings (s); one shilling was made up of twelve pennies (d). 240 pennies made up £1. A guinea was worth 21 shillings (or £1 and one shilling).

I have given many prices and sums of money in the original currency. In order to calculate today’s value of any original price quoted, the National Archives has a very useful website with a currency calculator
(
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency
)
.

S
incere thanks for their valuable insights and generosity with their time go to Joy Meir, Laura Mason, Jeremy Musson, David Trevor-Jones, Kerry Bristol and Sarah Tobias.

For more information on English country houses and domestic service, I can recommend the following:
The Country House Servant
by Pamela A. Sambrook (Sutton Publishing, 1999);
Keeping Their Place
by Pamela A. Sambrook (The History Press, 2007);
Up and Down Stairs
by Jeremy Musson (John Murray, 2010); and
Not in Front of the Servants
by Frank Victor Dawes (Century, 1991).

T
he horse-drawn State Landau slowly makes its way from Westminster Abbey towards St James’s Park. Inside the open carriage, the handsome prince in his scarlet tunic and his beautiful new bride wave delightedly at the crowds noisily cheering them on. Colourfully attired footmen ride behind them. Close your eyes briefly and you could be back in 1902, the year the carriage was built for King Edward VII. But we’re here, in the twenty-first century, on a beautiful spring day when British history, ceremonial pomp, brilliant pageantry and a spectacular display of centuries-old tradition briefly capture the whole world’s attention. Royalty and privilege. They may no longer be relevant to our lives in any way, but when they’re put on very public display it’s impossible not to be fascinated by our past.

The same applies to TV historical or costume drama. We’re fascinated by it because it shows us such different worlds to our twenty-first century lives. Fictional TV series like
Downton
Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs,
or the movie,
The King’s Speech,
are compelling because they tell us so much about our history. With their precise attention to every detail, they give us many tantalising insights into the worlds of royalty, the rich, the privileged of the time – and, of course, those that worked to serve them.

This bird’s-eye view of the day-to-day lives of the live-in servants, their subservience to the super-rich, their personal dramas and the everyday restrictions of their lives, creates an irresistible blend of history and fiction. And, of course, what makes the sumptuous
Downton Abbey
world of toffs and servants even more compelling is its very proximity in time to today; we’re not looking at the very distant past here. These lives, so different from our own in every way and lived in an atmosphere of amazing wealth, extreme formality and snobbery, stuffy convention, etiquette – and unbelievable servitude – were lived just over a hundred years ago.

But why are we so fascinated by the master-servant relationship itself? Part of the reason may be because we now feel that much closer to it because we can access our knowledge of it ourselves. We are continually encouraged to locate our own history, track down our own past. And it’s so easy. Digging into the lives of our families via information published online and websites like Ancestry.com reveals so much to us now at the push of a button. We may not have distant aristocratic relations in our family tree – the aristocrats are very much a minority group – but many of us are now discovering that we have relatives, great grandparents, distant aunts, uncles or cousins, who went into service and lived in the grand house; relatives that scrubbed, cooked and cleaned for the wealthy family with their vast estates and snobbish ways.

Just before I finished this book, a friend mentioned to me that his eighty-something mother had clear and coherent recollections of her own mother’s life as a cook in a big Scottish country house in the early 1900s. As was typical then, she left the job to get married. Photos of my friend’s grandmother as a beautiful young woman, wearing her servant’s apron, popped into my email inbox. Would she talk to me? Sadly not. She wanted to. But without a letter of permission from the descendants of her mother’s employers, she said, she dare not speak out. It wouldn’t be right. The cap-doffing traditions of servitude still, to this day, linger on in the minds of the living.

So who were these toffs and servants that hold so much fascination for us? How did they live, what did they wear, what did they eat, how did they play or form relationships – and how much – or how little – did they spend or earn? In this book I answer many of these questions and reveal, too, a lot more about what went on behind those huge front doors to the grand country house.

It was obvious before I started writing that there was a vast contrast between the two worlds of aristocrats and servants. But as I made my way through the different aspects of their lives, I discovered that the contrast was even starker than I’d imagined. A closer look at the strict social etiquette and the rules of this class-bound period gives you a powerful appreciation of today’s freedoms. Time and again the same question crops up: how could women, in particular, accept all the restriction and regulation of so much of their lives?

No one would envy the servants their slog and daily lives ruled by their employers’ whims where, for example, a young servant girl could not openly conduct a relationship with a boyfriend or admirer unless she had a very enlightened employer. The ‘No Followers’ rule of the period is unthinkable nowadays. Nor can we envisage a world where marriage spelt the end of a job or any sort of working life. Yet that is how it was for millions of women little more than a century ago. What we take for granted, our unquestionable freedom of choice, didn’t exist for them.

At the other end of the scale, the wealthy, privileged women who might, at first glance, seem enviably to have it all, with servants running back and forth to satisfy every tiny whim and trunkloads of the finest expensive designer gear shipped in from Paris whenever they wanted, were equally restricted by their class and exalted position in society – but in a very different way. They could only be married. They could not divorce (divorce equalled shame and rejection in their world), and they couldn’t remain single (spinster equalled another kind of social reject). And there were servants around them every minute of their lives. There was no privacy as we know it: they were in a gilded, very beautiful cage.

This is where the fictional TV version of the era
Downton
Abbey
mirrors the reality of those times so precisely. Many of the older, grand women – the Duchess of Grantham in particular, as recreated so beautifully by Maggie Smith – are determinedly snobbish and class conscious. In the real world outside their gilded backdrop, a major storm is starting to break: society is now rejecting the political supremacy of the ruling class and starting to give the working person a voice. Change is the last thing her generation wishes to contemplate. Yet her granddaughter, Lady Sybil, aware of this impending social storm, attempts at least, to get involved and attends a protest meeting – and she helps one of the servants find a less restrictive job in an office.

Make no mistake, the Edwardian years before World War I broke out were times of real social upheaval: the Suffrage Movement, increasingly violent and dramatic, drew much attention to the fact that women could not vote – although it wasn’t until 1928 that the vote was given to all women.

Despite the efforts of the reforming Liberal Government and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in the years between 1911 and 1914 there was considerable industrial unrest across the country. Yet the years between 1900 and 1914 were ushering in many reforms and the beginnings of a welfare state: the needs of the ordinary person were no longer going to be ignored.

Politics aside, there is another reason why we’re so drawn to the lives of the previous century: we’re immersed in the idea that we live in a ‘classless society’ yet somehow, we’re a bit uneasy about it. So we’re intrigued by a world where everyone ‘knows their place’ because everything, for them, is so clearly prescribed or set down. And, of course, we continue to live with them. The evidence of Edwardian life is everywhere. Not only the big department stores, hotels, theatres and seaside resorts where they enjoyed themselves, but our homes too. The Edwardians and Victorians built so much housing that still stands in our country. Servants worked for millions of
middle-class
families in cities too, not just the super-rich country house dwellers. So anyone living in a house or conversion from the Victorian or Edwardian era inhabits the same space, may see the same view from their window. Climb the many flights of stairs to the tiny bedroom at the very top of the house and there is the servant’s world: the tiny fireplace, the narrow single bed and bare wooden floorboards. We can easily imagine their lives for ourselves. Maybe that’s why they are so real to us.

More insights to these lives can also be found, of course, in taking time out to visit the grand country houses dotted all over the country, many open to the general public, thanks to their owners and the work of English Heritage and the National Trust. These houses are awesome examples of architectural grandeur, wealth, and the long histories of many aristocratic families. Some houses show, in some detail, the fascinating insights into life below stairs, so that we can see with our own eyes how it was, wander around their vast gardens and estates and gaze at the impressive splendour of their vast interiors.

Downton Abbey
starts in 1912 with the sinking of the
Titanic
, two years before World War I erupts. This book covers a wider period, from the late 1800s right up to 1914 when the war started.

Technically, the Edwardian period starts at the beginning of 1901 when Queen Victoria died and her eldest son, ‘Bertie’, Prince of Wales, took the throne until he too died in 1910. But although Edward VII’s reign is brief, less than ten years before his son George became King George V in 1910, the term Edwardian is used to describe the entire period after Queen Victoria died up to 1914, mainly because it is so closely linked to the opulence, elegance and sophistication of the ruling aristocratic class who surrounded Edward VII – the elite whose waning influence marked the beginning of the end of the rigid class system that dominated millions of lives for hundreds of years.

We left the world of toffs and servants when the next page of history was turned, the onset of World War I in August 1914. After this, many grand country houses were requisitioned as hospitals to treat the sick and wounded. This war with Germany – ‘a war to end all wars’ – destroyed many lives. Close to a million British men were killed and millions more wounded in combat – yet it eventually sped up the process of the changes in society that were already beginning to be felt before the war. Wealthy, privileged individuals took up arms alongside ordinary working men: unbreakable bonds, irrelevant of class or background, were formed in adversity – and after the war, they remained, helping bring the class barriers down.

Women too, took on new roles in place of the men away fighting; in peace time, they didn’t want to relinquish their recently- found freedoms and, most importantly, as they came through the disruption and chaos of war, working people started to see that they no longer had to toil away all their lives to support the lifestyle of the rich or privileged.

Servants didn’t suddenly fade away overnight, of course. But the figures speak for themselves: a life in service no longer appealed to successive generations with other work options. And the decline of aristocratic wealth meant those in servitude themselves were no longer needed in large numbers. By 1931 there were 1.3 million servants in domestic employment in Britain, 700,000 less than at the beginning of the century. In 1951, following World War II, there were just 250,000 such workers in Britain. And a decade on, in 1961, just 100,000 people worked as servants. The wider availability of
labour-saving
household devices, better job opportunities and wider education options for all, in time, limited the availability or need for servants.