LIFE BELOW STAIRS

The New Kitchen at Erddig in Wrexham Right: Livery greatcoats, once belonging to the footman, hang in the Butler's Pantry at Erddig

NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/ANDREAS VON EINSIEDEL/ARNHEL DE SERRA © PHOTOS:

The ‘downstairs’ quarters of historic houses once bustled with the servants that worked there. With a Downton Abbey sequel in the works, we discover what a servant’s life was really like

WORDS FELICITY DAY

Medieval pilgrims prayed at a shrine at Winchester Cathedral Left: The cosy Housekeeper's Room at Uppark, West Sussex

NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/NADIA MACKENZIE/ANDREW BUTLER/ANDREAS VON EINSIEDEL © PHOTOS:

If you visit Erddig House near Wrexham, North Wales, you don’t enter by the front door, into a grand and stately hallway, and your tour won’t begin with a glimpse at the lives of the Yorkes, owners and resident squires for more than two centuries. No, instead you start in the servants’ quarters, winding through the ‘downstairs’ rooms and peeping into the scullery, the servants’ hall and housekeeper’s room – and fittingly, really, since no country house could function, no wealthy family could host their shooting weekends and summer garden parties, without a team of servants working hard behind the scenes.

“Dependent on the size of the house, or indeed wealth of the family, some estates employed hundreds of people, working both inside and outside of the house,” explains National Trust curator Helen Antrobus. And as at the fictional Downton Abbey, not only did they employ them, but house them, too – in attic bedrooms and estate cottages. In houses belonging to the landed gentry, like Erddig, however, numbers of indoor servants were usually more modest by the early 20th century – the period in which Downton is set.

Mr and Mrs Yorke had between 12 and 15 servants, their cook doubling as housekeeper; while at Uppark House in West Sussex there were just nine indoor servants by 1901, down from 15 twenty years earlier. In other respects, however, life in service in a large country house was not much changed from its Victorian heyday.

‘Downstairs’ there was still a strict hierarchy. “As in Downton, the housekeeper and butler would have held a considerable amount of authority,” confirms Helen. Along with the lady’s maid, valet and cook, they often ate separately from the lower servants who were under their supervision – either at another table, or as at Uppark, in the steward’s hall. They also had their own spaces in which to work: the butler, a pantry where he could tackle tasks from polishing the silver to organising sleeping arrangements for weekend parties; and the housekeeper, a room where she could manage everything from the cleaning rotas to the checking of the household linen, stored at Uppark inside one of her cupboards.

It was the butler and housekeeper, along with ladies’ maids, valets and cooks, who had the most contact (and conversation) with the family ‘upstairs’ – indeed, many junior servants rarely, if ever, saw their employers, or their luxurious living spaces. “The design of many National Trust properties emphasises the lack of interactions,” explains Helen. “They were built to keep the two halves of the house separate. With back staircases, passages and separate entrances, a servant was meant to be a rare sight in the grand halls and drawing rooms.” At Uppark, the staff once moved unseen from the basement rooms to the kitchens and dairy via underground tunnels.

Working out of sight required early starts, with housemaids usually rising first, probably between 5am and 6am, to clean and lay fires before the family were up. Many servants spent much of the rest of the working day

Clockwise, from this image: The Scullery at Erddig; the brass servant's bells at Erddig; Uppark House as seen from the dairy; the Housekeeper's Room at Erddig

NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/ANDREAS VON EINSIDEL/NADIA MACKENZIE © PHOTOS: Left: The Butler's Pantry at Cragside, Northumberland Above: The Back Staircase and the South Landing 'upstairs' at Erddig below stairs, their employers relying on sprung bells – operated by a network of wires and pulleys around the house and placed in a prominent position in the servants’ quarters – to summon them as and when they were needed, which could be at any time. To be in service was to be almost constantly on call, though in larger houses servants might enjoy a couple of hours of free time in the afternoon, in addition to the usual scheduled half-day off. They generally fared far better than lone maids, or teams of three or so servants working in small households, who made up the majority of the more than 1.4 million Britons in domestic service in the Downton era.

Despite moving around in the shadows, country house servants were in a position of considerable trust: not only privy to all the goings-on in their employer’s house, but in charge of precious family heirlooms. Something as simple as a spring-clean could have disastrous consequences, as at Erddig in 1903, when the butler – admittedly ‘not too sober’ at the time – mishandled a chandelier, which crashed to earth and ‘broke to atoms’.

It’s not known whether he kept his job, but quite possibly – the Yorkes were known to be benevolent employers, if not high-paying ones. Housemaid Ena Davies, who worked for them in the 1920s, remembered them giving the servants half a crown each to attend the fair, and purchasing them tickets for local dances. Another former maid recalled being nursed through scarlet fever by her mistress. At Erddig, too, the servants were less separate from the family than in other houses. Female staff used

ENGLISH HERITAGE TRUST/CHRISTOPHER ISON/GEOGPHOTOS/ALAMY/ © PHOTOS: VISIT ENGLAND/THOMAS HEATON/NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/NADIA MACKENZIE Clockwise, from left: An actor plays Mrs Crocombe, one-time cook at Audley End House in Essex; the Victorian laundry room at Audley End; the Fire Attic at Erddig, featuring a sloping four-poster bed designed to fit under the eaves; Harewood House in West Yorkshire

the same landings and staircases as their employers to access their modestly furnished attic bedrooms, which make a fascinating addition to the modern visitor tour.

In fact, the Yorkes had long enjoyed an unusual bond with their staff. A series of portraits of loyal servants, commissioned over more than 100 years by successive generations of the family – each one accompanied by a personalised verse – still hang below stairs today, allowing visitors to come face-to-face with the real men and women who once strode back and forth across the flagstone floors.

At Cragside House in Northumberland, Lord and Lady Armstrong’s servants were also treated considerately. They could borrow novels from a staff library, and their bedrooms were comparatively luxurious: many had a room to themselves, with heating pipes and windows for natural light. Their work was made easier, too, by the time-saving gadgets that the forward-thinking Armstrongs had installed, including a hydraulic luggage lift, which saved servants lugging heavy coal up and down stairs, winch-operated windows for improved ventilation in the bright, double-height kitchen, and even an early dishwasher.

Like the Yorkes, they were rewarded with loyal staff. The National Trust’s archives show that Andrew Crozier quite literally worked at Cragside man and boy, starting as a footman aged 10 in 1881 and retiring as butler in his 70s

in 1943 – his career echoing that of BOOK AHEAD Downton stalwart Carson and his eventual successor, Thomas Barrow. For up-to-date information about visiting Of course, it’s not only Erddig, Uppark and Cragside, and to the Trust that has opened up rooms find out about the many other National ‘downstairs’ to reveal the stories of Trust properties with servants’ quarters their former servants’ lives. Thanks to explore, visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk. to English Heritage’s restored service To find opening times at Audley End, wing and stable at Audley End in and for details of their ‘meet the staff’ Essex, for example, we’re able to weekends and stable yard talks, visualize the working day of some visit www.english-heritage.org.uk. of the servants we haven’t ever seen For information on Harewood House, on screen in Downton Abbey: the including its below-stairs events, laundry maids, who washed by go to www.harewood.org. hand, dried, starched and ironed somewhere between 300 and 600 pieces of laundry a week in their quest to keep owners Lord and Lady Braybrooke supplied with clean linen; and the grooms, who at one time cared for as many as 20 horses. Meanwhile, the below-stairs areas at West Yorkshire’s Harewood House might have been modernised in the 1930s, but they still bear witness to hundreds of years of service, from the hefty kitchen table which carries the scars of two centuries of daily use, to the hooks in the servants’ hall, probably used to hang up footmen’s liveries. So while we wait for the Crawley family and their faithful servants to hit our cinema screens again next year, rest assured that Britain has plenty of real-life upstairsdownstairs history to explore in the meantime.  For more on stately homes, visit www.britain-magazine.com