8
Highclere in All Its Glory

On 24 December 1928, Catherine climbed into the Rolls-Royce, which Trotman the chauffeur had drawn up outside the main door to the castle. She and Porchey were spending Christmas at Blenheim Palace, one of the greatest of all British country houses. Catherine could summon hardly any festive spirit. It had been just a few short months since Reggie’s death and she still felt low. The thought of the traditional family Christmas at Highclere had been weighing upon her for weeks. It could not possibly be the same without her brother, who had always spent it with them. In the end, Porchey had resolved that a change was required. Better to do something different than to struggle to replicate the beloved routines with heavy hearts. He accepted an invitation for him and Catherine to spend three days with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and their son and heir, his old friend the Marquess of Blandford. The children would spend Christmas with their aunt and uncle, Eve and Brograve, and their cousin Patricia, in a household where all the jolliness of the season was in full swing.

Porchey tucked a blanket around his wife’s legs and sat beside her. It was a short journey to Blenheim but the afternoon was cold. Behind them his valet Van Celst was helping Charles the footman to load their bags into a shooting brake, which would transport both staff and luggage. Doll was supervising, to ensure that nothing was forgotten.

Despite her gloomy mood, Catherine could not help feeling curious and even slightly excited. The Palace was a draw in itself, and then there were the inhabitants, whose notoriety preceded them. She knew the Marquess of Blandford well since he was probably her husband’s closest friend, and was acquainted with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, but she and Porchey had never before stayed at Blenheim. It is one of the largest houses in England, and the only non-royal or episcopal residence to be designated a palace. It was built on a monumental scale between 1704 and 1724 for the first Duke of Marlborough, the war hero who triumphed over the French at the battle that lent its name to his house. Catherine adored Highclere, which is both magnificent and beautiful, but she knew that Blenheim was a homage to glories on a different scale.

In the years after the First World War, it also had something of a reputation for being a hotbed of sin. Before her marriage, Lady Diana Cooper, who was later a frequent visitor to Highclere on account of her husband Duff Cooper’s friendship with Porchey, had been prevented by her mother from attending house parties at Blenheim. The Duchess of Rutland was most reluctant to allow her beloved daughter, who was reckoned to be the most beautiful and brilliant girl of her generation, even to set foot inside the palace. Her Grace considered it an unsuitable environment for an unmarried lady, especially one with Diana’s famously wild tastes in stimulants and capacity to arouse passions.

The Duchess of Rutland was perhaps rather suspicious of the tone set by the 9th Duke, who had turned around the sagging fortunes of the once-great house by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American railroad heiress, in New York in 1895. Marriages to wealthy Americans had become de rigueur by that point, but there was something almost distasteful about Sunny Marlborough’s total disregard for his wife’s feelings and openness about his motivation. He told Consuelo on their honeymoon that he was in love with another woman, and kept a string of mistresses throughout their marriage.

Having spent millions of pounds of the Vanderbilt dowry on restoring the palace to its former magnificence, he settled down to an affair with Gladys Deacon. Gladys was also American but was born in Paris and her childhood was shaped by melodrama. When she was six years old, her father shot her mother’s French lover in the bedroom next to her own. Gladys and her siblings were sent to a convent, from which their mother abducted them on the eve of their father’s release from jail. Gladys grew up with her father in New York but, following his death in a mental hospital when she was twenty, she returned from the States to Paris in 1901. She promptly became the toast of Europe, pursued by princes and aristocrats of all nations, famed for her startling beauty, turquoise eyes and eccentricity. Marcel Proust said of her, ‘I never saw a girl with such beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.’ Despite countless proposals of marriage, Gladys nurtured an old infatuation for the 9th Duke that she had developed as a young girl, on the strength of press coverage of his marriage to Consuelo. When she and Sunny finally married in June 1921, after his divorce, they had been lovers for fifteen years, a relationship that was considerably more successful than their marriage proved to be.

Gladys, the new Duchess of Marlborough, arrived at Blenheim in 1921 and was comprehensively disliked by the staff and refused acceptance by Oxfordshire society. The Duchess of Rutland wasn’t the only one who found her beyond the pale. It wasn’t so much the long-standing affair that rankled. Such relationships were in fact widespread among the aristocracy. Even the disapproving Duchess had never denied the widely held belief that her daughter, Diana, was the child of her lover rather than the Duke of Rutland. It was rather Gladys’s flagrant disregard for the rules of discretion and the good opinion of her peers that won her enemies and her house a reputation for louche living. Society may have been awash with extramarital liaisons (and even premarital ones as the 1920s drew on), but care must be taken to draw a veil over the consequences, even if it meant hiding a child’s true parentage in the plain sight of a husband’s name and acceptance. Gladys was indifferent to such niceties. She was prone to advise young girls who were worried about getting into trouble, ‘If you have any problems, go to the vet. That’s what I always do!’

By 1928, when Catherine and Porchey visited, the Duke and Duchess’s marriage had descended into hostility. Gladys was reported to have once led the ladies into dinner before producing a pistol as she sat down, laying it on the table beside her. Asked why it was there by an alarmed guest, she responded breezily, ‘Oh, perhaps I’ll shoot Marlborough.’

Judging by Catherine’s memories of her visit, both Gladys and Blenheim’s reputation might have been exaggerated for effect. Lord and Lady Carnarvon cannot have had too many qualms about accepting the invitation to visit, as they invited the Marlboroughs to Highclere in return, the following year. Perhaps the Duchess of Rutland had been over-cautious in her concern for her daughter’s virtue, or perhaps Porchey and Catherine were simply rather more sensible than Lady Diana, whose extravagances included not just a serious champagne habit but also (briefly) a fondness for morphine and chloroform.

In any case, the entertainments on offer that Christmas were quite without scandal. It was more snowball fights in the park and games of sardines played all over the house than opium in the drawing room, pistols in the dining room and assassinated lovers upstairs. Once Catherine had got over her initial awe at the extravagant English Baroque architecture, the vast scale of the house and the splendour of the state rooms, she was grateful for the distractions of her surroundings. She remembered having fun at Blenheim but recalled it as a cold house, the wood fires burning in the bedrooms not equal to their task. She missed Highclere’s hot water radiators and other modern comforts.

In fact, neither Blenheim’s palatial proportions nor the infamy of its current chatelaine were quite as alarming as the mannerisms of one of the Carnarvons’ fellow guests. Winston Churchill had been born at Blenheim in 1875 and was a nephew to the 9th Duke and cousin and lifelong friend to the Marquess of Blandford, who became the 10th Duke in 1934. Though he never lived there as an adult, Churchill regarded Blenheim as his second home and, naturally, he and his wife Clementine would sometimes spend Christmas there. He was the best part of a generation older than both Porchey and Lord Blandford, and already had an eventful and distinguished political career behind him, not to mention a reputation for fierce intelligence, hard drinking and pugnacious manners.

On Christmas Eve 1928, Churchill was fifty-three years old and at the height of his powers. He had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1924, under Stanley Baldwin’s premiership, which made him effectively the second most powerful man in British political life. Churchill had both the habit and the knack of dominating conversation and loved to talk politics, a subject that held little interest for Porchey, and about which he was at that point in his life largely ignorant. During a pre-dinner discussion of the relative merits of prospective prime ministers, Porchey offered a small contribution. Eddie Stanley, who had held various minor offices and was then Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, would, he thought, make a good PM. Churchill, who was by far the most conspicuous candidate for the office the next time it became vacant, stopped puffing on his cigar and, leaning over, said, ‘My dear Porchey, I can scarcely think of anybody who would make a worse Prime Minister.’ Snubbed, Porchey thought he had better stick to occasional remarks about racing.

Porchey was certainly not alone in feeling rather frightened of Churchill, but the great man carried all before him with an endless stream of fascinating stories. During the course of their stay at Blenheim, Catherine realised that above all he should not be interrupted, although she was wise enough to spot that he granted more indulgences to his audience when it was made up of pretty women.

Perhaps Churchill’s reaction to Porchey’s opinion could have been foreseen, for this wasn’t their first run-in over political matters. At the end of a dinner in 1926, hosted by the Aga Khan, Winston had leant back, brandy and cigar in hand and, turning to Porchey, asked him what he, as a racing man, thought about the Exchequer’s betting tax. The measure, the first of its kind, had been introduced in April of that year, levying a 5 per cent tax on all bets placed. Many in the Conservative Party were opposed and there was uproar among the racing community; bookies in Windsor had even gone on strike in protest. In July Churchill had moved to reduce the 5 per cent flat rate to a tax of 2 per cent on transactions at racecourses and 3.5 per cent at bookmakers’. This fudge was in the process of proving itself unworkable at the time of the dinner.

Porchey responded promptly, ‘I’m sure there are more beneficial ways to raise revenue.’ ‘Well, I should be very interested in your suggestions,’ remarked Churchill, much to the younger man’s surprise and delight.

It took Porchey six months and careful discussion with all parties to produce his proposal, which he personally delivered to Downing Street. Winston later told him that he hadn’t read it but his advisers thought it wasn’t a realistic plan and he had decided that the only thing to do was to scrap the tax entirely. It was in fact abolished by the Labour government that was returned to Parliament the following year. Porchey felt utterly put down, a sensation that was repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, during their discussion of Eddie Stanley’s prime-ministerial qualities.

Despite – or perhaps even partly because of—the bracing effect of being at a house party alongside Winston Churchill, the Blenheim trip was a success. It had taken both Porchey and Catherine’s minds off the tragedy of Reggie’s absence. They began 1929 determined to be as happy as possible and spent a whirlwind of a year at Highclere, building up the stud and giving parties and shooting weekends, throwing open the house to their many friends.

The autumn of 1929 had been unusually wet and there was no let-up as the year turned towards Christmas. Tremendous gales battered the cedars of Lebanon around the Castle lawns and brought down large branches from the beeches and oaks up on Siddown Hill, as a shooting party collected at Highclere for the first few days of December. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough came, on one of the last social occasions they ever attended as a couple. Weeks later, when the Duke had finally tired of Gladys’s odd ways and her troops of Blenheim spaniels that messed all over the house, he would evict her and all her dogs.

Despite the weather, the shooting party was a tremendous success, in large part thanks to Charles Maber, the head gamekeeper. Maber had inherited his position from his father, who had worked for the 5th Earl, and had spent years acquiring a deep familiarity with the land and honing his skills. He was determined to maintain Highclere’s reputation for being one of the best shoots in England, and the castle’s game book records that, on 4 December, the guns were shooting at the Beeches and the bag amounted to 672 game. Lord Carnarvon’s guests were delighted: that was excellent sport in strong winds.

As well as Porchey and the Duke of Marlborough, there was Harry Brown, a close friend of Porchey’s and a superb shot and first-class rider. He was very debonair and marvellously handsome; every girl was head over heels in love with him, despite the fact he was married. Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, Chairman of British American Tobacco, was another of the guns. He was a keen racing man; his horse, Felstead, had won the Derby the previous year and he was a frequent visitor to Highclere, while Porchey and Catherine often stayed with him at Newmarket. Sir Victor Mackenzie, who had been wounded and decorated for bravery in the First World War, was also staying. Sir Victor was something of a professional courtier; he went on to serve three successive monarchs—George V, Edward VIII and George VI—as a groom-in-waiting.

Ladies did not shoot, though they sometimes accompanied their husbands, to enjoy the fresh air and exercise and to assist with collecting the game. On a similar occasion, Catherine was photographed out in the park with her great friend Lady Diana Mabey. They are giggling at one another, both in ankle-skimming tweedy skirts and feathered caps, the game birds dangling from their hands. One rather imagines that, between the bad weather and the bitterness that was finally sinking the Marlboroughs’ marriage, the ladies elected to remain indoors on this particular weekend.

It is a mark of Catherine’s confidence that she was no longer daunted by welcoming a most eclectic mixture of guests to Highclere. Gladys might have been the wife to one of the grandest and richest dukes in the realm, but her reputation for idiosyncrasy meant she had not been received in Oxfordshire society for years. Socially, Lady Carnarvon was unassailable, her reputation beyond reproach.

It’s impossible to know how Catherine regarded Gladys on a personal level. They were very different people. Gladys was one of life’s adventurers with a taste for being the centre of attention and a proclivity for drama at whatever cost. Catherine, despite her light-hearted love of dancing and fun, was wholesome and straightforward by comparison. But they were both intelligent American women who had married the English aristocrat they loved and settled into a world very far from the one in which they had been born. It’s possible that Catherine thought Gladys’s decline was predictable but more likely that she felt sorry for her.

There was yet another shooting party before the Christmas celebrations of 1929 finally got under way. This year the Carnarvons were at home with their children and a group of friends and family. They had not forgotten Reggie, but it was time to move on.

The 1930s had until recently promised more of the steady success of the past few years, at least for Highclere’s owner. After six years of careful economising, in which Porchey was greatly assisted not only by Fearnside but also by Marcus Wickham Boynton, who continued to act as his agent and adviser for the estate and stud, Highclere was in much more stable financial shape than it had been when Porchey had inherited.

He had looked for ways to generate income as well as cut costs. A particular success was the golf course, which he turned into a subscription course in order to make it pay for itself. Golf was an increasingly popular pastime, and no longer just for Porchey’s guests. Local people and Highclere staff could enjoy a game. In fact Fearnside the butler and Van Celst the valet exasperated their employer by consistently achieving better handicaps than him. Lord Carnarvon would get his revenge by turning up to play in shorts, which infuriated the other players as they were forbidden to wear informal garb.

The 1920s were boom years for many, particularly financiers and industrialists. Lord Carnarvon’s situation was, if not booming, certainly not desperate. There was a general sense among the asset-owning classes that the stock market couldn’t fall and the threat of international conflict was receding. It was a decade that saw the consolidation of great fortunes alongside the continuing exposure of millions to poverty. There was a steady unrolling of rights and a gradual shifting of power, as witnessed by the rise of the Labour movement, but events such as the failure of the 1926 General Strike demonstrated that though the times were volatile and unemployment was rising, the country was a long way from revolution.

For years afterwards, Porchey loved to tell a story about his contribution to the settling of the strike. The government was unsure of the scale of the threat but had been making preparations for some time and had drafted the Army to assist the police in the preservation of order. Porchey had maintained links with his regiment ever since his succession to the title, and now found himself in Liverpool, in command of a platoon of 7th Hussars. They erected a sandbag barricade close to Union Street and each man was then issued with five rounds of ammunition, which Porchey was adamant should not be loaded without his express command. At the approach of ‘a mob of men and women’, and fearing escalating tension, he jumped up to speak and the crowd halted. ‘I firmly believe that my horse, Gracious Gift, ridden by Tommy Hulme, will win the Novices’ Chase at Manchester at three o’clock,’ proffered Porchey. He was loudly applauded and the crowd dispersed. Sure enough, Gracious Gift, which had started at odds of 11-8 against, did indeed win. The following day a steady stream of eager punters filed past the barricade in expectation of another winning tip. As Porchey wrote in his memoirs, ‘I replied sadly that I did not know any more but the best winner for all would be for them to go back to work so we could return to barracks.’ The strike was duly broken (only in small part, one suspects, thanks to Porchey’s generosity with his hunches) and many, especially among the establishment, heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Thirty years later, when Duff Cooper came to write in his memoirs about the election of May 1929, he reflected on politicians’ inevitable difficulties in assessing the mood of the moment. The country had felt itself secure, he wrote, there were no storm clouds yet on the horizon, either financially from the west or from war in Europe. The country was bored with the government, who were perceived as old and tired, but the Conservative Party campaigned on ‘Safety First’. As Duff Cooper put it, ‘No greater psychological mistake could have been made than to promise safety to a people pining for excitement.’

The Conservatives lost their majority, Labour formed a minority government with the balance of power held by the Liberals (campaign slogan ‘We can conquer unemployment’) and, just five months later, things started to get very exciting indeed, in spectacularly challenging ways.

In October of 1929 the Wall Street crash profoundly destabilised the world’s economy. The effects did not immediately take a toll on Highclere but it was nonetheless a shock to the Carnarvons, as it was to the country at large. Nationally, unemployment remained high at 10 per cent, with the likelihood of much more to come, and the new administration seemed to have no robust response to the signs of worsening gloom.

In the event it was Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald who became the next Prime Minister after Stanley Baldwin’s departure, not Churchill, who in 1930 was entering his so-called ‘wilderness years’ in opposition. If MacDonald’s name had cropped up at all during that conversation at Blenheim, it seems safe to assume that Churchill would have applied some withering epithet. On other occasions he famously referred to MacDonald as ‘the Boneless Wonder’ and remarked that he possessed a great skill for ‘compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.’

In fact, MacDonald and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, were not so much thoughtless as overly committed to the conventional wisdom of the day. Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes were among the many from outside as well as inside the Labour Party who were already urging a spending programme to stimulate growth. MacDonald and Snowden were far more cautious, being staunch supporters of an orthodox approach to finances that regarded borrowing to fund state-sponsored growth as little more than Bolshevism run mad. As the two opposing blocs of opinion squabbled, a sort of paralysis set in.

The 1929 election, nicknamed ‘the Flapper election’, was the first in which women were able to vote on the same terms as men. The franchise had been extended to all women over the age of twenty-one in the Representation of the People Act of 1928 and, thanks to the abolition of the requirement that a woman voter should be a householder or the wife of one, it also had a huge impact in terms of social class. Without the 1928 legislation, Catherine would not have been able to vote in the 1929 election, since she did not meet the age requirement of thirty. Most of her female staff, who had previously been both too young and most definitely not of the property-owning classes, were in a sense doubly enfranchised. Young working-class women who had never given politics a second thought, on the understandable grounds that it was literally no business of theirs, now had the vote. Upstairs and downstairs, the world was changing for women, but within the microcosm of Highclere, the relationship between Catherine and her employees remained the same as it ever had been.

In 1932 an eighteen-year-old local girl named Gladys joined the household as a junior housemaid. More than forty years later, having read the 6th Earl’s memoirs, she wrote to him with recollections of her time at Highclere. She remembered that during the course of her work she often saw and admired Lady Carnarvon, but that they never spoke. There was simply no need for conversation within the terms of their relationship. Gladys recalled that the Countess was always in a hurry to see Lord Porchester and Lady Penelope first thing in the morning, and since she was frequently still blacking the grate and relaying the fire in the nursery, she often saw her there. Lady Carnarvon wore the most beautiful negligees and robes made of light-coloured silk, Gladys remembered, and would come running up the Red Staircase in her haste to see her children. ‘She seemed to float,’ said Gladys, ‘she was that beautiful.’

Catherine might not have spoken to her housemaids but she had a much more direct relationship both with the cook, Mrs Mackie, and with the housekeeper, who from 1932 was Mrs Lloyd. With Mrs Mackie she planned menus for the family and in particular for the house parties that were such a feature of Highclere’s life.

Even when the shockwaves of the Great Depression finally did reach them, Porchey’s love of doing things properly meant that splendid hospitality was still one of the very first priorities. ‘In 1931 I suddenly woke up to the fact that my securities and properties were worth about one quarter of what they had been valued at a year previously.’ This didn’t stop him from spending a great deal on food, wine and the talents of the kitchen staff. In July 1933, a couple of years later, when, admittedly, the slump had eased up a little, the monthly total for Highclere’s expenses, including staff wages, provisions, coal, the telephone bill—everything required to keep the great house in peak form—was £909 7s. 8d. This sum included £265 on provisions alone, which dwarfed the combined wages bill for more than twenty-five people, of £157. Extra money was spent on fruit and vegetables.

Porchey and Catherine cut some costs when they were alone but not when they entertained. Novelist Evelyn Waugh, who spent the inter-war years flitting from country-house party to country-house party, remarked approvingly of any establishment that met his exacting standards for lavish comfort that it was ‘very Highclere’.

Waugh was an occasional visitor during the mid-1920s, but didn’t return after the failure of his brief and acrimonious first marriage to Porchey’s cousin, also called Evelyn, daughter of his aunt Winifred, Lady Burghclere. The engagement had been met with considerable opposition from Lady Burghclere on the grounds that Waugh was not just a penniless and unsuccessful writer but also a dissolute drunk. The marriage went ahead, nonetheless, in June 1928, in the presence of just three friends of the couple. A year later Waugh’s wife announced she had begun an affair with a mutual friend and he sued for divorce. Nothing daunted, eight years later he was to marry another of Porchey’s cousins, Laura, the youngest daughter of his uncle Aubrey. The family was even less impressed than it had been on the previous occasion, despite Waugh’s attainment of considerable success as a novelist and travel writer in the interim.

Evelyn Waugh was not the only Highclere guest to appreciate its blend of laid-back atmosphere, appetite for fun and unstinting attention to detail. Such a combination was made possible by Catherine and Porchey’s youthful spirits, wealth and, above all, their staff’s professionalism. House parties were a particular test of the smooth running of a household. They entailed a huge amount of additional work, on top of the already demanding everyday schedules.

The housemaids and kitchen maids were the castle’s earliest risers. Gladys’s first job after she woke, typically at six in the morning, was to clean and black-lead the Wyverns—the heraldic mythical creatures, which feature in the Carnarvons’ coat of arms and stand guard by the front door—before scrubbing the marble of the entrance hall and cleaning out the grate in the Saloon.

Meanwhile, down in the kitchens, the second kitchen maid, Gwendolen, who shared a room with Gladys in the servants’ quarters right at the top of the castle’s turrets, was making a start on breakfast as the kitchen porter shovelled coal into the great Carron stoves. Mrs Mackie bustled in to oversee preparation of eggs and cold meats for the Dining Room and breakfast trays laden with fresh fruit, tea, toast and marmalade for the footmen to take up to the ladies.

Gwendolen had started as a scullery maid when she was sixteen years old and she rose to be the vegetable maid before being promoted to second kitchen maid under Mrs Mackie. Once breakfast was out of the way, her first task was to clean the copper pans with soft soap, salt and lemon skins so that they shone like burnished gold. Mrs Mackie took a particular pride in her coppers and had exacting standards.

Two footmen would hurry up the staff stairs so that nothing became cold, push carefully though the green baize door onto the quiet Gallery and deliver the trays. Meanwhile the nursery footman would take up the children’s breakfast to the very top floor.

When all the dirtiest jobs in the house had been done, safely out of sight of the family and visitors, and breakfast had been provided, all the servants would sit down to their own meal. It was always an abundant and delicious breakfast; there was no stinting at Highclere. Having checked that the family had everything they required, Fearnside would join Mrs Lloyd and Van Celst in their dining room, where they took their meals together, waited on by one of the junior footmen.

Once breakfast had been cleared, kitchen maids had to get straight on with lunch. Housemaids set off to the upper reaches of the house, but discretion was required. Bedrooms could be tidied and cleaned only once their inhabitants were safely downstairs. Since the family moved from Morning Room to Dining Room to Library throughout the day, the footmen and maids who served and cleaned would follow in their wake, always just out of sight unless specifically summoned.

Housemaids and footmen could rest for a couple of hours during the afternoon, until tea was served in the Library, but then it was time to prepare for dinner, which might be a relaxed or a formal occasion depending on the number of visitors. The family always dressed for dinner in white tie if they had guests, but by the end of the 1920s, Porchey and Catherine had adopted the more informal dinner jacket if they were dining alone, which was considered sufficient in the privacy of one’s own home or club.

Tea-time was the housemaids’ opportunity to prepare the bedrooms so that the company could take some rest, write letters or read a little in private and then dress for the evening. Highclere had had some en-suite bathrooms with running water from the end of the nineteenth century, and Porchey’s renovations on his succession to the title had installed more. It was nonetheless customary to provide jugs of hot water with fresh white towels. There were no radiators on the first floor, so fires had to be lit and beds turned down so they could air. Footmen came on duty again to serve drinks in the Saloon, and at dinner. The kitchen was working at full pelt. Even a simple meal consisted of three courses. There were five courses when Lord and Lady Carnarvon had company.

When guests were staying there were more trays to prepare, more courses to cook and more fires to light. In exceptional circumstances, Mrs Mackie might petition Mrs Lloyd for temporary staff, but often the maids were simply required to pitch in and help out. This was sometimes a welcome change of routine. Gladys remembered that after a few months she was allowed to assist the footmen as they took the early morning cups of tea to guests. On one occasion, when both the Prince of Wales and Prince George were staying, she was thrilled to take them their morning tea. She had only ever seen their photos in the newspapers and was almost overwhelmed. She never forgot, that same weekend, that she collided with Prince George on the Gallery as she rushed to finish her duties. This was a terrific faux pas, since the art of being an effective housemaid was to be an invisible presence, not a physically tangible one. But he gave her such a lovely smile that, even as she blushed and apologised profusely, she couldn’t help thinking how good looking he was.

Prince George was a particular favourite with the Highclere staff. He was a frequent visitor throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, and endeared himself to everyone by being polite, appreciative and cheerful. Gladys remembered that the housemaids jostled with one another to be the one to air his room and turn his bed sheets down, hoping they might catch a glimpse of him. In accordance with the strict seniority of rank that governed life below stairs just as it did upstairs, it should have been the head housemaid’s privilege. One day, junior housemaid Betty couldn’t resist and, in a fit of bravery, sneaked ahead of the senior maid to turn down his bed and lay out his pyjamas.

These encounters could all be a bit much for some, though, especially the younger staff. Gladys remembered that when her friend Gwen was a newly arrived scullery maid, she was once petrified into timid silence by the sound of Prince George striding through the kitchens late in the evening and calling out for Mrs Mackie. He often came downstairs after dinner to pass on his appreciation for her excellent cooking, but Gwen, who was the only one still present, didn’t know this. She hid in the patisserie room, far too shy to answer his call. Mrs Mackie was furious when she found out.

Gladys remembered that the house party weekends were hard work, but for a young woman like her who loved to look at magazine pictures of movie stars in their gowns, they had their dreamy romantic qualities as well. Visiting royalty, handsome young sportsmen, ladies in beautiful fashions: she enjoyed it all, and sometimes tucked herself behind a pillar on the Gallery to listen as the guests assembled down in the Saloon, complimenting each other on their dresses or laughing as they chatted about some mutual acquaintance.

The two footmen, George Widdowes, or Charles as he was known to the family, and George Rand (whose name really was George), would stand tall and straight in full evening dress with their silver trays of cocktails. The custom of assigning conventional, typically ‘smarter’, names to staff seems totally archaic now and was dying out by the late Twenties. Traditionally, valets were always George, first footmen, Charles, but in the time between George Widdowes’ and Van Celst’s arrival at Highclere, the practice had slipped from favour. His Lordship’s valet was known as Mr van Celst to staff and simply Van Celst to the family.

Lady Carnarvon would have made a careful study of her guests’ interests and planned the most appropriate placement for dinner, one that took account of precedent and tastes. Fearnside, who had worked for the family for nearly thirty years, was a useful ally, since he knew everyone and could advise Catherine on who might prefer not to sit next to whom. It was his task to write out the cards with guests’ names. On his signal that all was ready, Catherine took everyone through for dinner. Lady Carnarvon and Lord Carnarvon sat opposite each other in the middle of the long table and, if Prince George were there, he would always be seated on her right.

Gladys remembered that if Widdowes or Rand came down to the kitchens with the report that the word ‘dancing’ had been mentioned, it was all hands on deck. The men would set about rolling up the carpet in the Saloon and Mrs Mackie would heat up a mixture of beeswax and turpentine for the girls to apply to the wooden floor. One of the footmen would assist Lord Carnarvon to set up the gramophone. Lady Carnarvon was such a good dancer and loved nothing more than to encourage her guests to dance; on these evenings the fun would go on late into the night. The footmen had to ensure the cigarette boxes were refilled and drinks were offered in fresh glasses to those guests catching their breath in the Drawing Room. While Lord Carnarvon enjoyed the occasional cigar, Lady Carnarvon smoked cigarettes that she fitted into beautiful slim holders.

Only once the party had everything it needed could Gladys and the other housemaids and footmen go back downstairs for their supper. The visiting valets and lady’s maids, were seated depending on their consequence (or rather, their employer’s). Footmen, guests’ valets, kitchen boys and all other male employees sat on one side of the table in the main staff dining room, in order of seniority, with female staff down the other. Once the meal was finished, Mrs Mackie carried out the final checks on her kitchen maids’ cleaning, Widdowes made one last trip to see that there was nothing else the family required, and to clear empty glasses from the side tables in the Saloon and Drawing Room. Mr Fearnside checked that the front door was locked, as was his wine cellar, and then everyone trudged upstairs to their rooms and fell into bed, while the scullery maid finished off the last bits of washing up.

If the work was demanding for Highclere’s downstairs inhabitants, their positions in a large and well-run household were nonetheless highly desirable. There was a community that provided a social life, and food and lodgings were excellent. There were possibilities for advancement, and ladies’ maids and valets enjoyed travel and variety. Domestic service in smaller or more chaotic establishments could be a far tougher proposition. If a servant worked alone or with just one other member of staff, they were vulnerable to the whims of their employers. At Highclere, the hierarchy was strict, but in the words of Matilda Hart, who joined as the fourth housemaid, the place functioned as ‘a well-oiled machine’.

In 1979, Mrs Hart wrote to Lord Carnarvon, having read his first volume of memoirs, to share her reminiscences of Highclere. She remembered how, the moment they’d finished in the bedrooms, she and her fellow housemaids had ‘chased through the state rooms, plumping cushions and emptying ashtrays.’ They were always in a terrible hurry before the family and their guests came down to dinner. Their task was rendered more difficult by the fact that they had to ‘wipe their footprints from the carpets’ as they went. No indication of how such an operation might be performed is given, but it must have slowed them down considerably.

Leisure time was great fun. Mrs Hart had learned to dance in the servants’ hall. The house must have fairly shaken with dancing, downstairs as well as upstairs. Matilda shared a room with Betty, who was flighty, and the two of them used to get into trouble with Nanny for playing their gramophone records loudly in their bedroom. When the girls were separated one night, Matilda awoke to a knocking on her window, an alarming occurrence since her room was right at the top of the castle’s turret. It was Betty, who had walked along the lead guttering just for the fun of it. Matilda was persuaded to do likewise in the opposite direction.

Like Matilda, Gladys had mostly very happy memories of the house. She worked hard but enjoyed her weekly trip to the cinema or to a dance in Newbury with Gwen. There was one recollection, though, that still made her shiver, years later. One night, as she and Gwen arrived at the back door, having walked across the park after a dance in town, they were startled by the night watchman’s dog, which was snarling at thin air. Stratford, a typically stolid man, looked shaken. He claimed that the castle ghost had just processed along the downstairs corridor and ascended the back stairs towards the staff bedrooms. Gladys and Gwen were inconsolable and had to be persuaded that it was hardly practical to spend the night in the staff dining room. Hanging on to each other for dear life, and accompanied at their insistence by Stratford, they climbed gingerly to the foot of the stairs that ascended from the first floor to the second and performed the ritual knocking and calling out of a request for the ghost’s permission to enter that was taught to all newly arrived Highclere staff by their colleagues. It must have pacified the spirit, for the girls had a quiet night and woke the following morning to radiant sunshine and the blessedly familiar start of another long day’s work.