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| ISBN-13: | 9780752494661 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 579 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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The Country House Servant
By Pamela A. Sambrook
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Pamela A. SambrookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9466-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In recent years there has been a tremendous growth of interest in the domestic organisation of our country houses. A whole world is opening up before us, as both private and National Trust houses rediscover their kitchens, laundries and housekeepers' rooms – interiors which in an earlier decade with different values were destined to be converted into cafés, bookshops and public lavatories. The story of household management is now a major part of many historic houses, an economic reality of modern times. To accompany the interiors there is no shortage of books about country house servants or their physical environment.
So why yet another? Modern publications about domestic servants in the country house are of several types: some are plainly reminiscent, full of anecdotes of eccentric owners and snobbish servants; some describe the material culture of the house, and are redolent with gleaming copper, scrubbed wood and sparkling tiles; others are based on documentary extracts from country house archives, or focus on individual households; finally, academic papers and books explore the social and economic structures of domestic service. Despite this variety only a few describe the actual work done by servants in the country house, and even fewer touch upon systems of skill or work management or what they might mean. This is strange, for work defined domestic servants and their place in the hierarchy of the community of the country house. It dictated the objects with which they were surrounded, the food they ate and the place they slept. Very largely it governed whether they were happy or wretched. So this is the heart of the book – viewing the country house as a place of work for the domestic servant rather than a home for the élite family, it explores the nature of the work done, how it was organised and what was its meaning.
Since this is such a large subject area I have limited my scope, focusing on those servants who were involved in cleaning the country house. In particular, I have chosen three functional types: housemaids, footmen and laundrymaids. These were the people whose task was to keep the house comfortable for its occupants and to look after its treasures for future generations. This choice inevitably ignores others who were involved with cleaning – the kitchen staff, scullery maids and grooms – who constituted separate groups of servants deserving their own study.
Given this focus, a number of themes – of status, skill and gender – form a thread running through the book and herein lies another reason for writing it. Although the nuts and bolts of objects or processes are interesting in themselves, what is truly fascinating is the insight they bring into the social context of working lives. If the interpretation of country house domesticity is to move into the exciting future which I believe it deserves, the heritage world needs to learn more about the material goods, skills and technologies of domestic service, but also it must address questions of management, motivations and meanings. To do this we need to borrow from some of the ideas debated by academics.
Any individual may be trapped by a material culture which requires laborious upkeep; but societies have choices about the value-systems which drive them, dictating the nature of the goods they strive to own. As one historian of material goods has written: 'Buildings and interiors were constructed to convey social meanings as well as for practical purposes. ... Material goods, such as furnishings, made physical and visible statements about accepted values and expected behaviour'. Another explains: 'every object bears a meaning and tells a story: belongings are good to think with'. It is just these 'social meanings' which this book hopes to explore through the minutiae of interiors, material goods and behaviour patterns in the backstairs world of the country house. It does not aim to be an encyclopedia of household objects; the only piece of equipment which is dealt with in some detail is the box mangle, which relates in a unique way to the context of the country house.
Hierarchy and status are essential components of a society based on deference. Status systems ran from top to bottom of the country house through all its structures – physical, economic and social. Sometimes the boundary-defining features are obvious, sometimes extremely subtle, sometimes cruel. We can see them not only in hierarchical wage structures, but also in the clothes servants wore, the food they ate, the particular work they did, the tools they used and the way they behaved towards each other. Yet there was also a common-sense rationality mixed up with this. That upper servants were waited on by lower servants reinforced the hierarchical nature of the household, yet served also as a useful training system for inexperienced youngsters.
Within the domestic household, work helped delineate the boundaries of status systems. In a study of lower- and middle-class homes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lorna Weatherill recognised that the material culture of the domestic scene was subject to complex considerations of status, some work acquiring 'front of house' status while lower-status jobs were hidden at the back. In a way, the household was a stage on which goods were presented to show different levels of status, and where individuals played different roles in different parts of the house. A complex set of variables influenced the pattern of accumulation of goods and the roles of servants.
The playing out of roles within the household was further explored by Amanda Vickery in relation to a single household in Lancashire. Servants were 'monitors' of consumption, the housewife the 'inspector'. But the meaning and roles of goods were complicated and in many circumstances could be related not to status but 'character' and what Vickery called 'sentimental materialism'. For example, in a domestic environment, possessions had meaning and value because of who previously owned them, not the status they gave. Yet this sentiment in itself was an indicator of wealth; the poor could not afford it.
Applying such issues to the country house context, can we see patterns of 'front' and 'back' working practices in the cleaning routines of the élite country house, and did these reflect the different roles of housemaid and footman? How did objects and behaviour express status in the closed world of country house service?
Conscious or unconscious archaism also had connotations of status. People can value possessions because they are new or because they carry the patina of age. The defining features of the country house household were of course wealth, size and quality – quality of goods and quality of services. But the English country house style is something more subtle – a highly characteristic fusion of professional quality of service with an apparent effortlessness. A meticulous attention to detail behind the scenes supported a superficially relaxed atmosphere, even a sophisticated shabbiness – acceptable, even desirable, as characterising a family which had occupied its 'country' for a long time. The household was thus pulled in at least three different directions: towards a status-seeking consumption of goods which developed almost to the point of fetishism; an ambience which we can represent by words like relaxed, homely, family, country, domestic; and a professional, 'businesslike' management which aimed to curb waste and excess. There is plenty of evidence to show that these tensions actually existed on the ground and caused a fair degree of disruption. Did the country house servant fall victim to such tensions?
Status is one element in an equation of work, skill and the use of technology. The élite domestic house has always been in two minds about the last of these. Given the financial resources available, one would expect the aristocratic household to be in the vanguard of innovation; and certainly there are examples where this was so, at least in relationship to specific areas. By and large these areas were those which carried a degree of status acquisition. In the nineteenth century, for example, the fame of kitchen designers such as Count Rumford, the chef Alexis Soyer or the highly fashionable architect Sir Charles Barry made kitchen planning a respectable activity for the upper classes – witness the aristocratic visitors who trooped around the kitchens of the Reform Club, accompanied by a ladle-waving Soyer, attired in white apron and red velvet cap, expatiating on the unrivalled sophistication of his domain.
This does not seem to have been so true of laundry design. Not much status was attached to the management of large quantities of dirty washing. It was not until the electric-powered washing machine was adopted in the twentieth century that laborious hand-washing was made redundant. Until then, laundry techniques within the country house were labour-intensive, dependent on a highlevel of manual skill and fastidiousness. So if we wish to characterise changes in the work processes of the country house laundress we have to engage with detailed methods of handwork and systems of work management developing over centuries, rather than with technological expertise. This is true also of the two other servant-types dealt with in this book.
It may be that when we come to study progress in working systems we will find that what resulted was more work for the servant rather than less. Studying the field of technical innovation in housework, Ruth Schwartz Cowan propounded the startling idea that the introduction of labour-saving devices into housework did not result in a real saving of either time or labour. New technologies brought higher expectations of cleanliness, new jobs expanded to fill time saved, and new patterns of ownership of goods needed more complex methods of servicing. This theory has been explored by many researchers since, within different contexts and timeframes. In the country house of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did changes in work practices reduce time spent on housework or cut down on labour input or drudgery?
A reliance on manual dexterity rather than expertise with technology is common to many areas of work traditionally associated with women, and this highlights a third theme, the gender-related barriers erected between different aspects of work. These might be particularly meaningful in relation to cleaning, a process which has strong connotations of purity or impurity. Within the country house, there seem to have been clear-cut divisions between men's work and women's, but since the work environment of servants was also their home, the gender implications were complex. This was especially so given that the country house had historic traditions stretching back over centuries and many of its definitions of women's as opposed to men's work related to a context developed in the medieval household.
Historical studies of women's work by Judy Wajcman and others have shown how widespread were traditional mindsets in relation to the confrontation between women's work and technology. Inherent in these were a number of convictions which still strike sparks today within gender discussions. They include, for example, the belief that all men were naturally strong; that all work which was typically feminine was also typically unskilled; that women could not understand machines even when they could operate them; and that the techniques used in women's work (requiring qualities which women were good at such as dexterity and patience) came 'naturally' to them, did not have to be learnt and were therefore of low value. Leonore Davidoff has explored such issues in relationship to the élite household in a collection of writings which includes discussions on the boundaries between hierarchies and genders, the way in which the change from productive household to consumer household affected attitudes to housework, the tendency of a household to become ever more specialist and structured, the relationship of women's work in the household to notions of uncleanliness, defilement and impurity and the definition of separate spheres of life for men and women. How do such issues relate to the detail of work in the country house?
It has been argued that 'an in-depth study of the trivia of domestic life' is essential if we are to understand the dynamics and motivations behind the ownership and organisation of goods, be they necessities, decencies or luxuries. Such studies in the context of middle- and lower-class households have earned a respectability denied to the élite household. With few exceptions, academics have been reluctant to enter into the minutiae of day-to-day work in this context, partly because of a conviction that such employment was divorced from the 'common reality' facing the more numerous general servant employed in middle- and upper-working-class households. This is a pity, for although it is true that country house service represented only a fraction of the whole context of domestic service, this minority was hardly negligible and might well have performed a useful function in providing an exemplar for the rest, perhaps a target for both employers and employees to aim for and a model for the working-out of difficult relationships.
The working household of the élite country house was after all a highly intricate social union. The complex hierarchies of stewards, butlers, footmen, housekeepers and laundresses who inhabited the stewards' rooms and the servants' halls were themselves serviced by younger, older, less skilled or less intelligent servants. The aristocratic household threw up its fair share of filthy or tiresome jobs, and the honourable tradition of such households was to put these out to its weakest members – old men, old women or young girls. Where would the country house have been without the 'odd man', who carried logs and coal, humped trunks, pumped water and did any job which no one else would? Or the army of female day labourers – charwomen, washerwomen and seamstresses – who brought to the household both flexibility and consistency of family service, sometimes over centuries, which was pegged to a stable local rural population for whom the 'big house' was a vital and long-term source of employment. Or the young girls who even early in the present century went into service on the great estates at the bottom of the house, laundry or kitchen hierarchy, aged a mere thirteen years, working for little or even no wages, serving unofficial apprenticeships. In some respects the situation of these unfortunates who propped up the bottom of the wealthy household was little removed from that of servants working for masters who hailed from a lower level of society.
A few recent studies have tried to address the complexity of country house domestic life, emphasising, for example, the different kinds of people going into service and the important role played by casual day labour. As yet the enormous numbers of specialist contract craftsmen and craftswomen, tradesmen and professionals who also serviced the élite household await research. Some of these contractors worked in the house and lived with the servants for months on end, others were casual visitors. Many were associated with the supply of goods from local or regional centres and in particular many were involved in the transport of supplies and the movement of horses. Others serviced equipment: the tortuous chimneys which needed sweeping twice a year; the smoke jacks which ground to a halt unless greased once a month; the bell-pull systems which required regular overhaul. The balance of advantage between the employment of permanent live-in servants and the putting-out of work to contract has always been delicate and subject to considerations other than the functional. Thus the picture of any one household is extremely intricate, with different people employed on different conditions, town-based households mixing with country households, individuals moving up and down the employment ladder and the whole sometimes changing wildly with the fortunes of families or developing slowly with increasing commercialisation and growing technical sophistication.
Primary Sources
Given that we are searching for details of experience rather than statistics, the choice of sources is limited. Manuscript evidence exists within collections of landed estate family archives, yet the three types of servants selected all give problems. None of them left a substantial body of records. Two of them – footmen and housemaids – had only limited complex specialist interiors connected with their work such as can be seen in inventories or plans; their workplace was the house itself. We can gain access to individual names through wage lists but these are intermittent over time and can be supplemented in the nineteenth century by census data only once a decade. Other household documents such as servant tax returns, malt composition returns, meal books and beer consumption records are useful but highly variable in their survival; and the nature of servant work is barely indicated in household disbursement books recording the purchase of raw materials for cleaning.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Country House Servant by Pamela A. Sambrook. Copyright © 2013 Pamela A. Sambrook. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,1 Introduction,
2 'A Lazy and Magnificent Fellow': the Footman's Work,
3 'Dancing till Supper Time': the Footman's Lifestyle,
4 'Unseen and Unheard': the Housemaid and her Work,
5 'Very Old and Very Worn': the Use of Linen,
6 'Preparing for the Great Wash': Early Processes of Washing,
7 'Ingenious and Simple': the Material Culture of Laundering,
8 'We Feel Much Happier Washing at Home': Laundry Management,
9 'Clear from Spot or Blemish': the Meanings of Cleaning,
Examples of Butlers' Pantries, Housemaids' Closets and Laundries,
Notes,
Bibliography,