The Real Life Downton Abbey (4 page)

Food is another important reason why a country-house servant’s job is desirable. Three – or even two – meals a day is unheard of in very poor homes, where a tiny amount of money has to stretch to several young hungry mouths. Meals in poverty-stricken homes are meagre, even sparse, mainly consisting of bread and jam or dripping, potatoes and a tiny amount of meat or fish, if they’re lucky. As a servant, you get to eat regularly – one big main meal a day – and even though the food itself might consist of your employers’ leftovers or badly prepared dishes, it is usually more substantial, with a bit more variety than at home. Think fairly bland nursery food, basic meat ’n’ potatoes meals and you won’t be far off. And the upper servants sometimes get a really good deal when it comes to food: much depends on how the house is run – and, of course, how considerate the employers are.

Finally, there’s the proximity to wealth and influence, even if you are an ‘invisible’ helper, with gruelling working hours which start around 6am or earlier and often don’t end until 10 or 11pm. No matter how strict the house rules are –
country-house
owners issue their own set of rules – and how
mean-minded 
and spiteful the behaviour of your colleagues, being in a beautiful setting, around priceless possessions and sumptuous displays of wealth all the time or even, in a few cases, living in an up-to-date house where electricity, telephones and motorcars are already being used (though it’s more likely to be a house where the old, less labour-saving ways are still in operation) is one more reason to understand why a life in country-house service is still regarded as a good option.

Though, of course, as part of all the rules and restrictions, even the upper servant will still have to address their employer as ‘master’ or ‘mistress’. Wealthy house guests from across the Atlantic retain servants too – but they tell their hosts they never hear such servile phrases or terms from the mouths of their servants any more – in the US even servants are starting to be more upwardly mobile.

Yet the English servant, imbued with centuries of disciplined, subservient behaviour, discretion and an awesome level of deference to their betters, still, for now, remains a breed apart. Their expectations are so much lower.

A guest’s chauffeur leaves Welbeck Abbey in 1911.

 

T
here is an enormous disparity in the spending habits and incomes of the two classes. Financially, they inhabit different planets.

It starts from the top. In many ways, King Edward VII, Queen Victoria’s son who takes the throne following her death in January 1901, is what we’d today probably call a ‘king of bling’, a party animal who loves to indulge himself with huge displays of extravagance and luxury.

In the long years before he is handed the regal crown, Edward, Prince of Wales, or ‘Bertie’, is a high-spending, gourmandizing, womanising king-in-waiting at the head of a ‘smart set’ of wealthy, highly influential socialites whose social calendar frequently revolves around following his lead. Their pursuits are many. And they usually involve huge expenditure: shooting parties, balls, theatre trips, grand dinners with rich French cuisine, gambling sessions, cards, horse racing – if it’s expensive and exclusive, they’re doing it.

This is a highly social world. Yet to us it would seem incredibly public. With servants around all the time, taking care of your every need, how can it be otherwise? Yet despite this, within this set some are sexually promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses – who might be aware of this but look away. Maintaining the status quo matters much more.

As King, Edward VII has half a million pounds a year (think around £8 million a year in today’s money) in his pocket – and his coterie of super-rich friends and acquaintances, include many ‘new’ money millionaires and entrepreneurs whose fortunes frequently dwarf his own, as well as the fortunes of the ‘old’ money aristocrats.

Someone like the 6th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck (The King’s Master of the Horse), for example, is much richer than his king. The Duke’s vast estate, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, plus his coal-mining interests, give him ‘many millions per annum’.

So playing host to Edward and his chums for a big entertainment, a country-house weekend (called a ‘Saturday to Monday’ by the toffs because the expression ‘weekend’ is considered vulgar) or a shooting party, or a trip to the South of France, involves a fantastic amount of spending.

It’s difficult to be a freeloader. Any player in this exclusive world is required to spend just as freely as the next person in their group when it’s their turn – and the extravagances are huge. As King, Edward prefers the self-made entrepreneurs to the old-fashioned aristocrats, for the self-made ‘showing off’ – essentially for its own sake – is part and parcel of the
super-toffs
’ way of life. Appearances count for everything.

Yet in some grand aristocratic houses, an announcement that the King plans a visit can sometimes be greeted with consternation: so enormous is the cost of entertaining him and his cronies for just a few days it might involve a year’s worth of economising for the host family – or even tip them into debt.

It isn’t just the food and booze, the extravagantly displayed eight-course dinners of the finest French cuisine, the crates of the King’s favourite French champagne, it’s the little extras that pad out the bill: the finest cigars he loves to smoke, the heavy gambling sessions into the small hours, the lengthy shooting sessions of game. And, of course, there are the human ‘extras’ required for putting up the royal mistress of the time, in the regal style to which she is accustomed, naturally.

No detail is overlooked: this is a time when the
status-conscious
rich will go as far as to measure the height of their footmen – to make sure they’re all the same height. After all, it won’t look good to have two liveried footmen of different heights on either side of a door. Your friends might notice. And comment.

The King leads the way in this obsession with detail; at one point, he ticks off Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough for having a semi-crescent of diamonds in her hair at dinner instead of a proper tiara. Shameful, eh?

At the other end of the scale, the working classes of the era frequently struggle to survive and feed large families on a standard wage of £1 a week or less. For the lower live-in servants, pay is sometimes much less than this. Yet the wealthy and slavish followers of the very latest fashion or trend don’t blink an eyelid at forking out today’s equivalent of £20–30,000 for a first-class return ticket, Southampton to New York, on one of the new transatlantic ocean liners going across the Atlantic to the New World.

At the brand new Ritz hotel in London, opening in 1906 to cater exclusively to the super-rich and their friends, fountains are created which spout only the finest champagne.
Ultra-fashionable
women think nothing of spending the equivalent of £3,000 on just one hat. It is standard practice to use their husbands’ millions to visit Paris high fashion salons twice a year, ordering dozens of the most exquisite creations of the time from French designer houses like Worth or Doucet and having each dress shipped home, beautifully wrapped, in its own individual trunk (beats a cardboard Tiffany or Gucci box any day, doesn’t it?).

Make no mistake, following on from the sober restraint of the Victorian years, this is a period of completely over-the-top conspicuous consumption for the wealthy. And the only ordinary people who really have a permanent close-up view of all this sumptuous extravagance are, of course, the servants – without TV and radio, many don’t know much about the indulgences and excesses of the rich – though the newspapers of the time chronicle their travels – and their scandals, should they come to light.

Yet in some cases, things have been getting a bit tight financially for the aristocrats with the ‘old’ money. Not all estates are managed or run as well as they should be. Once they could do very nicely thank you by living off the agricultural proceeds of the estate. But not any more: many English aristocrats now find themselves in a situation where they might still be asset-rich in terms of jewels, shares and land, yet there’s very little cash. So how do you find large sums of cash fast if you’re juggling ever increasing debt, unwilling to sell off all or part of your huge estates? Where could you get money? Lots of it?

Snobbery reigns supreme among the elite. By tradition, they only really want to stick to each other, and merge their aristocratic, high-born families through marriage to the offspring of other high-born toffs.

But money is money and while the aristocracy traditionally rely on primogeniture (the passing on of inheritance, land and title from father to eldest son) for hundreds of years, when pushed they have occasionally married for money outside the elite circle – provided the bride’s dowry is tempting enough. When you’ve got a lot of money and can have whatever you want, why not aim higher?

But with the wind of change blowing through their lives and, in some cases, their fortunes dwindling through higher taxation or poor management, by the late nineteenth century many discover the need to find money to hang on to their estates is becoming quite urgent.

Borrowing more cash is no longer a good option. Until the late 1800s the aristocrats have always been able to borrow huge sums of money quite easily – at extremely favourable rates of interest. Those who chose this route and used the cash to improve their estates are now in trouble: their equity or land values have crashed with the big agricultural slump when food prices plummeted. Then, just like today, the days of cheap, easy borrowing dried up. Even for them. So the temptation to hold their noses and marry into the ‘new’ money families making vast fortunes in trade or industry is overwhelming. And this idea becomes even more compelling when they consider the incredible fortunes that have been made in recent years across the Atlantic Ocean.