The duties carried out by servants depended on the position they held and on their age and experience, as well as on the kind of house in which they worked and the attitude and financial resources of their employer. There was an immense difference between the tasks expected of a plain cook in a small establishment, with perhaps one fellow servant, and those in a major household with a large kitchen staff of subordinates to carry out the routine work of preparing ingredients, washing up, cleaning, and cooking the simpler dishes. Albert Gaillard, the French chef at Longleat, home of the Marquis of Bath, had two kitchen maids, a vegetable maid and a scullery maid, as well as a daily woman to assist him during the 1880s. Each morning he wrote out the menus for the day on a slate which he took upstairs for the approval of Lady Bath. But his skills were such that when the family was in London for the Season he was asked to lend a hand at Buckingham Palace if a big dinner party were being held. In return, the Palace chef, who was a friend of his, came to the Marquis of Bath’s residence on important occasions to prepare his own specialities.
In 1883, Gaillard was paid £130 a year at a time when the most senior female member of the Longleat staff, the housekeeper, received just £60 per annum. This was despite her responsibilities in superintending the feminine department of the household, as well as distributing the stores to the staff once a week, finding work and repairs for the two sewing maids, and performing ‘feats of alchemy’ in the still room. There she distilled rose water from roses, produced pot-pourri, preserved fruit, and made jam. As she moved around the house the jangling of the keys she wore at her waist warned juniors of her approach. Housekeepers (and female cooks) were always addressed as ‘Mrs.’, as a mark of respect, regardless of their marital status.
Even less prestigious chefs, like William Cook, who worked at Englefield House in 1854, earned more than other staff members. In that year he was paid £94 10s. per annum while the housekeeper received £40 a year and the butler, usually regarded as the most senior male servant, received £60. The kitchenmaid was paid £15 a year and the scullery maid £11. The gender difference in pay was made clear by the fact that even in the early 1890s the then female cook was only paid £50 per annum, although the wages of her kitchenmaid had risen to £18 and the scullery maid now received £12 a year.
The largest group of female servants in the Victorian years, however—the maids-of-all-work—were employed not in these prestigious households but in modest homes, where they worked alone or perhaps with one or two fellow domestics. In 1871, general servants comprised nearly two-thirds of the 1.2 million females employed in private domestic service. This may be compared with cooks and housemaids, who contributed less than one-tenth of the total each.
The general servant was expected to carry out a multiplicity of tasks, including cleaning, cooking, running errands and, on occasion, accompanying her mistress when she went out, perhaps to carry her parcels. Mrs. Beeton considered that she was ‘perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration; her life is a solitary one, and in some places, her work is never done... [She] has to rise with the lark, for she has to do in her own person all the work which in larger establishments is performed by cook, kitchen-maid and housemaid, and occasionally the part of a footman’s duty which consists in carrying messages’. Despite this, she concluded optimistically that a ‘bustling and active girl will always find time to do a little needlework for herself, if she lives with consistent and reasonable people’. But if she were not ‘quick and active’, she would be unable to do that because her duties were ‘so multifarious’.
In the late l860s and early l870s when Hannah Cullwick was employed as a maid-of-all-work by a widow and her daughters in London, she described some of those duties. She had as fellow servants a house-parlourmaid and a young boy who was not strong enough to carry out the heavier tasks of the household. So Hannah did them instead:
All the cabs that’s wanted I get, & if the young ladies want fetching or taking anywhere I’ve to walk with them & carry their cloaks or parcels. I clean all the copper scuttles & dig the coals clean the tins & help to clean the silver & do the washing up if I’m wanted, & carry things up as far as the door for dinner. I clean 4 grates & do the fires & clean the [fire] irons, sweep and clean 3 rooms & my attic, the hall & front steps & the flags & area railings & all that in the street. I clean the water closet & privy out & the back yard... I get all the meals down stairs & lay the cloth & wait on the boy & the housemaid as much as they want & if it’s my work, like changing their plates & washing their knife & fork.
On occasion she went out on errands or to deliver messages, while ‘anything as wants strength or height I am sent for or call’d up to do it.’
The daily round of other categories of servants in small households could be similarly wide-ranging, with cooks expected to help with the cleaning of downstairs rooms, and housemaids combining their cleaning duties and the laborious carrying of cans of hot water to bedrooms for the family to wash, with serving at table and other chores. The detailed timetable prepared by Marion Sambourne for her housemaid in what was normally a three or four-servant household, began at 7 a.m. when she took her mistress’s hot drinking water to her room before sweeping and washing the stairs, bathroom and lavatory. She also had to fit in her own breakfast before 8 a.m., when she carried up the hot water for her mistress’s bath. After this, she drew the blinds, emptied the bath, removed it, and continued with other duties. By 8.30 a.m. she was starting to clean the drawing room, while her mistress had breakfast in bed, taken to her by the parlourmaid. Bedmaking followed, with detailed instructions given on the cleaning of the bedrooms. The wardrobes, for example, had to be ‘dusted inside and out’. Between 1 p.m. and 1.20 p.m. the housemaid had to be ready to answer the hall doorbell so that the parlourmaid could put on a fresh uniform in readiness for serving luncheon. After this, hot water had to be taken to her mistress’s bedroom so that she could wash her hands before eating. The maids had their own dinner at 2 p.m. and when this was over the housemaid’s detailed tasks continued, with each activity carefully timed. Thus between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. she had to look over Mrs. Sambourne’s belongings ‘and take any things needing mending’—a chore she likewise had to perform. At 8 p.m. the family dined and she had to help with the serving, before again going to the bedrooms to turn down the beds, clean the washstands and make sure that the chamber pots were ready for use. Supper for the servants was at 9 p.m. and at 10 p.m. she took letters to the post before she finally went to bed—having worked a fifteen-hour day, with five short breaks for meals. On Mrs. Sambourne’s weekly ‘at home’ day, when she received her friends, the work included not merely giving the drawing room a ‘special’ clean but arranging the flowers, emptying the aquarium, and putting the tea table ready: ‘all silver taken down on tray’.
Despite this formidable programme, and a similarly detailed one for the parlourmaid, the girls found opportunities to gossip and giggle in the kitchen. Marion often commented on this and wished they might be quieter and better behaved. At least once, in February 1885, she dismissed the cook and the housemaid for gossiping, though it is not clear if this was because they were talking about the family. Too great a display of curiosity about an employer’s correspondence, conversations or callers was always resented by the employer. Indeed, Jane Welsh Carlyle was advised by a friend to dismiss immediately a maid who had apparently looked at her letters, since this would soon lead ‘prying into all your comings and goings’.
The multiplicity of duties expected of female servants in small households applied to single-handed men servants, too. They were required to act as a valet to male members of the family, to trim the lamps, clean the candlesticks, serve the meals, take messages, and go out with the carriage. This was true of William Tayler, who was employed by Mrs. Prinsep and her daughter in London. However, his diary for 1837 also reveals that, unlike the women servants in such households, he had freedom to go out, for example to pay bills on the family’s behalf. Sometimes this led to his receiving a modest commission from the shopkeeper. He obtained occasional tips from visitors to the house, too, and estimated that in total these ‘perquisites’ yielded about £10 or £15 a year, to supplement his basic pay of £42 per annum.
William’s diary shows he had a fair amount of spare time, which he spent in reading, sketching and painting. He and his three fellow female servants often entertained their friends in the kitchen or went to celebrations in other households. ‘I went to a party today’, William wrote on 27 December. ‘It was gave by some servants. There was card playing, fiddleing and danceing and some singing, plenty to eat and drink’. He paid clandestine visits to his wife and family, who were lodged not far away, too. The existence of his wife was kept secret because married servants frequently found difficulty in getting places. Employers feared they might pilfer food or other goods to help support their family, or perhaps their loyalty to their employer would be less than absolute.
As part of his ceremonial role, William went out with the carriage when his mistress and her daughter paid calls or attended special functions. At these times he was sometimes entertained in the servants’ hall by the staff of the house they were visiting, and enjoyed gossip and refreshments, including copious supplies of alcohol. However, on 19 May, when the daughter went in the carriage she stayed out longer than he ‘thought she aught to of done, therefore I gave her a little row for it. I hope it will do her good. I served the old lady the same way the other day and it did her a deal of good.’ It is unlikely that in grander establishments such impertinence would have been tolerated. William remained with the Prinseps until his mistress’s death in 1850. He then moved to another household.
The conditions and the relative informality which existed in these small properties differed greatly from those in the homes of the social elite. There the staff were extremely rank conscious and jealously protected their position in the servant hierarchy. This particularly struck the Frenchman, Hippolyte Taine, when he visited England in the l860s. ‘Each has his post rigorously defined,’ wrote Taine. ‘The work is divided, no one either trespasses on, or trusts to another.’ He compared the upper servants to ‘a species of sergeants, who ... do their work conscientiously, with perfect punctuality and regularity, at the appointed time’.
At the head of these households on the male side was the house steward or the butler, while the housekeeper was the most senior female servant. Valets and ladies’ maids had a special position because of their sartorial skills and intimate relationship with their employer. This sometimes made them objects of suspicion among junior members of staff, who suspected them of tale bearing. If there were no valet, the butler or a footman might fill that role for male members of the family and their guests, while the housekeeper or the housemaids took on a similar responsibility for the females.
The specialization of functions applicable to housemaids was recalled by Margaret Thomas when she worked in a large country house in Yorkshire. There ‘the fourth housemaid worked entirely for the staff, the third for the schoolroom,... and helped the second, who had to be downstairs at 4 a.m. every morning to get the sitting-room done before breakfast. The second housemaid had a medal room to keep clean where the medals were set out in steel cases, and had to be polished with emery paper every day...The head housemaid did light jobs’.
Butlers did not wear livery and their duties included care of the plate chest and the wine cellar. They also overlooked the arrangement of the table for each meal, before waiting at it. They were expected to exercise strict control over their subordinates, particularly the footmen, For as one servant handbook advised, ‘under servants are never ... comfortable, much less happy, under lax management’. At Longleat, according to Lady Bath, the ‘butler was far too grand a figure to roll up his sleeves and work in his own pantry; and in the dining room he would serve only the wine and the more imposing dishes.’ The under servants, by contrast, ‘were kept strictly in their place and had little liberty’.
Footmen were chosen for their good looks and height. They combined a ceremonial role with various menial duties, like polishing boots, looking after the lamps, cleaning the silver and laying the table, under the direction of the butler or under butler. They played their ceremonial part when, dressed in elaborate livery and, in some households, with their hair powdered, they waited at table, answered the drawing room bell, sounded a gong before dinner, and went out with the carriage or with messages. They were hired partly as symbols of the family’s wealth and importance and their earnings were influenced by their appearance. Hippolyte Taine claimed that ‘the ornamental look [was] worth to them as much as an extra £20 a year’, although he also added sourly that their ‘stuckup airs have become proverbial’. In great houses they spent much time changing their clothes and standing idle in the front hall ready to open the door to callers.
The discipline imposed by senior servants and the training they gave their subordinates were rigorous and even harsh. As Jessica Gerard notes; ‘Having to combine instruction with operating the department [which they controlled] created pressure to teach recruits quickly, and this sometimes degenerated into bullying.’ ‘We lower servants had to walk the chalk-line,’ declared one male domestic. ‘Obey, or else’. Some young servants left because of this, but most accepted it stoically as part of the learning process. Margaret Thomas, for example, worked as a kitchenmaid in London for a very clever cook. Although the woman was rather bad-tempered, no doubt because of the hot, badly ventilated kitchen in which she worked and the need to produce high quality dishes each day, Margaret ‘ignored all the hard things she said to me ... because I admired her skill’.
The distinctions drawn between members of staff as regards the duties they performed and their status within the household also applied to the serving of their meals. In small establishments the servants ate in the kitchen, but in large households the senior servants would eat in the steward’s or the housekeeper’s room, while their juniors ate in the servants’ hall or, in the case of kitchen workers, in the kitchen itself. The main exception was the midday dinner in the servants’ hall. Then, as at Longleat and many other similar properties, the under servants would troop in and remain standing at their places until the senior staff had filed in. These entered in order of domestic ranking and after the first course had been served, they would depart in a similar fashion, headed by the steward’s room footman, who at Longleat carried out the joint with great ceremony. The seniors retired to the steward’s room for the rest of their meal, while the housemaids and sewing maids at Longleat hurried off with platefuls of pudding to eat in their own sitting room. In most grand households, however, the juniors remained behind in the servants’ hail and would be free to gossip with one another while they finished the meal. When the seniors were present they had to remain silent. This seems to have been common practice in many large houses.
Because both male and female staff were employed in these major establishments, great care was taken to segregate them when they were at work, and to keep their sleeping quarters well apart. The maids often slept in the attic although at Blenheim Palace they apparently lived ‘up in a tower where there was no running water’, much as housemaids there ‘had... lived for nearly two centuries’, according to the Duchess of Marlborough. The menfolk frequently slept in the basement or in a special wing. At Erddig, the Yorkes required their footman to sleep with his bed in front of the only door to the safe where the silver was stored, for security reasons. But in-house flirtations did take place, as ways were found to ‘dodge the housekeeper’s eagle eye’.
In small households, too, there were usually strict rules prohibiting ‘followers’. However, some mistresses took a more liberal stance. Louise Creighton was quite happy that two of the maids had ‘young men’ in the village. The men were not yet in a position to marry and she thought this would encourage the servants to stay in their posts.
Occasionally, despite the restrictions, clandestine meetings in large households had unfortunate consequences. At Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, Sir George Crewe commented drily on the pregnancies of two maids. One involved his footman, Samuel Williams, and his wife’s lady’s maid; the other, his mother’s coachman and her lady’s maid. At Hesleyside in Northumberland, the Charltons kept on their butler, Inkley, for a number of years, despite his notorious womanising. They did so because it was so difficult ‘to get a sober and efficient butler in such a house for drink as Hesleyside.’ Eventually, though, his conduct caused a severe breach with the long-serving housekeeper and he was dismissed.
In all servant-keeping households the restrictions on the dress and conduct of staff and on their opportunities for contact with the outside world gave rise to tensions and quarrels ‘below stairs’. Margaret Thomas, employed at a large Yorkshire property, complained that there was ‘no mateyness in that house, everyone seemed too conscious of their position...We, in the kitchen, found our friends among the outside staff.’ The housemaids favoured the footmen but members of the kitchen staff, like Margaret, disliked them because ‘they used to stand silently criticising us, tapping out a tattoo on the table if we weren’t ready with the meals’.
Yet there could be happy times in these large houses, too. At Erddig, the maids all went to one room at bedtime to gossip with one another, while at Eden Hall, Charles Cooper recalled there were ‘eighteen servants kept, so we had plenty of fun.’ Sometimes recreational facilities were supplied for the staff by their employers. Taine mentioned places where there was a library provided for them as well as various board games for them to play. Elsewhere sporting facilities were offered and cricket matches arranged for the menfolk. At Longleat and certain other houses, servants’ dances were organised. These were attended by the outside servants as well — the unmarried grooms and gardeners. ‘I like to think of those still room maids and housemaids discarding their printed chintz dresses and muslin caps for their evening finery, prinking in front of their mirrors before going down to the hall to dance’, wrote Lady Bath, years later. The housekeeper, though, kept a close watch on the younger maids, ‘reprimanding the over-frivolous.’
Some senior servants found satisfaction in their work. A skilled cook enjoyed producing gourmet meals and a butler took pride in a well-laid table. Head gardeners cultivated high quality vegetables and flowers, and won prizes at exhibitions. Even in small households, staff could develop a proprietorial attitude. At Alderley Edge, Katharine Chorley remembered that the gardener ‘ruled the garden like a grand vizier ... I dared not pick a flower or eat a strawberry without permission’. He even resented her parents donating fruit and flowers to their friends and to Manchester hospitals.
The amount of time off which servants were allowed depended on the attitude of the employer. Although it was customary by the end of the period for servants to have half a day a week free, plus some time on Sunday, and a week or a fortnight’s holiday annually, that by no means applied everywhere. William Lanceley, who worked in a number of large country houses, noted that staff were usually offered a holiday once a year, normally when the family was away. But according to him, few took up the offer. His first holiday in four years’ service ‘was three days, quite enough at that time,’ for servants found ‘cottage homes and food were no comparison’ to living in a mansion.
In small households the situation was still more variable. Marion Sambourne’s maids seem to have had time off at irregular intervals, and they might have to postpone an outing if there were company. This happened to Laurence, the parlourmaid, early in April 1886, when Marion recorded that the maid had gone out a week later than planned ‘on acct. of company’. Mrs. Layton, employed as a general servant at Kentish Town in London during the l870s, recalled spending much of her spare time reading ‘trashy novels’, some borrowed from the maid next door. She was allowed out on Sundays only, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. one week and from 6.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. the next. She spent the free hours going for a walk, but then her mistress asked her to take the children of the family with her as well. As she had them during the week, she felt this was a great imposition and the two parted.
It was in these circumstances that indoor domestic service became increasingly unpopular, especially among the young. That was not so true of outdoor posts, such as gardeners, grooms and gamekeepers. Their numbers continued to rise sharply to the end of the Victorian era. By contrast in the second half of the nineteenth century, male indoor servants in private households declined from just over 74,000 in 1851 to less than 48,000 by 1901.
Although the number of females in service did continue to rise, in the final decades of the century it was among older age groups that the increase occurred. In 1881 43 per cent of female servants had been under twenty; by 1901 that had fallen to less than 35 per cent of the almost 1.3 million still engaged in private households. With improved educational opportunities and a rise in alternative employment outlets, youngsters, both male and female, were reluctant to accept the restrictions of servant life and to adopt the deferential attitude expected by their employers. The uniform or livery they wore depersonalized them and the fact that they were often treated as if they were invisible when going about their duties underlined their social inferiority. Even those, like Mrs. J. E. Panton, who ostensibly sympathized with them, could nonetheless display wounding insensitivity. In From Kitchen to Garret (1888), she exhorted her fellow servant-keepers to ‘make real friends of those who live under our roof’, but then commented that although she would like ‘to give each maid a really pretty room’ that was impossible.
No sooner is the room put nice than something happens to destroy its beauty; and I really believe servants only feel happy if their rooms are allowed in some measure to resemble the homes of their youth, and to be merely places where they lie down to sleep as heavily as they can.
She also advised against allowing them to keep their boxes in their rooms, for ‘they cannot refrain somehow from hoarding all sorts of rubbish in them.’
By the 1890s mistresses were lamenting the ‘independence’ of young maids and their readiness to move to a new place. An official survey of domestic staff in London during the middle of that decade revealed that 47 per cent of the general servants covered, 33 per cent of the cooks and 35 per cent of the housemaids had been in their current post for less than a year. Only 5 per cent of the general servants, 9 per cent of the cooks and 6 per cent of housemaids had stayed with the same mistress for ten years or more.
Some employers reacted to the situation by cutting back on resident workers and recruiting daily cleaners instead. In the case of landed families, falling rental incomes gave an added economic impetus to the reduction in numbers, or perhaps led to the replacement of expensive indoor men servants by parlourmaids.
Technological innovation played a part, too. The introduction of the telephone reduced the need to send footmen out with messages, while piped hot water to bathrooms and electric lighting to replace oil lamps and candles, were other labour-saving devices. On a minor scale, the use of carpet sweepers eased the work of housemaids. Commercial enterprises played a role as well. Many landowners closed their personal laundries and used the services of outside businesses. The Duke of Bedford patronised two firms of dyers and cleaners for Woburn Abbey at the beginning of the twentieth century, while a local baker supplied bread to the household at around the same time. Other products like jams, pickles, chutneys, cordials and polishes were purchased from retailers rather than being produced in a still room.
Domestic service remained the major employer of female labour up to the First World War and, indeed, beyond. Even when Gwen Raverat married in the early twentieth century she admitted it would never have occurred to her ‘that I could possibly be the cook myself, or that I could care for my baby alone, though we were not at all well off at that time. It was not that I was too proud to work ... it was simply that I had not the faintest idea how to begin to run a house by myself.’ But by 1900 growing numbers of mistresses were coming to recognize that this automatic dependence on servants to ensure the efficient running of their home was already under threat. In the twentieth century life ‘below stairs’ was never to be so unquestioningly accepted by the populace at large as it had been in its Victorian heyday.