[0:02]A century ago, one and a half million of us worked as servants. Astonishingly, that's more than worked in industries or on the land. My great-grandmothers were servants and coming from this background, I want to find out about the reality of their lives. Country houses like these simply wouldn't have been able to function without a whole army of staff working away above and below stairs. When I come to places like this, my first instinct isn't to go through the grand formal entrance, but to find the servant's door and go in that way. In this series, I want to dispel the nostalgia and fantasies that we have around domestic service, and reveal a much more complex world. I'm going to tell a very different sort of history, one of suppressed passions, strict hierarchies and an obsession with status and class. Digging through the archives, I'll track down the lost lives of real servants, whose voices have largely been forgotten. Who's this? Me. I'm not bad looking. No, you are, very good looking. We were underdogs, we weren't on the same level as them. Hmm. And we had to know our place. I'll visit the homes of the super rich and the anxious middle classes in order to understand how servants actually lived and worked. But above all, I want to ask some difficult questions that have been left unanswered for decades. Amazing, isn't it? Our country was based on an ideal around service for so long. Why was that? Why did that world disappear? And what uncomfortable truths can we uncover by looking at the reality of servants' lives?
[2:09]Between the mid-18th and mid-19th century, grand country houses sprung up all over Britain. New wealth from the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution transformed feudal homes into the grand estates of a new ruling class. One of these was Erddeg Hall in North Wales.
[2:32]Erddeg was home to local landowners, the Yorks and their staff. 30 outdoor estate workers plus 15 indoor servants.
[2:43]In the servants' quarters, the first thing you see is a poem blessing them all. May Heaven protect our home from flame, or hurt or harm of various name. And may no evil luck betide to any who therein abide. Or who from homes beyond its gate bestow their toil on this estate. And toil is the word.
[3:11]The Hall was built on a generous scale, 200,000 square feet of house, with six formal reception rooms, a chapel, a grand dining room and nine family bedrooms. In order to service these rooms, there were twice as many rooms downstairs and in the outhouses, each with their own specific function, from the kitchen and the scullery to the laundry and the bake house. The family upstairs could summon the servants to any part of the house at any time. Erddeg might seem quiet now, but in its prime, the economic scale of the work that kept it going was staggering. Every week, three tons of coal were carried around to fuel 51 fireplaces, five ovens and three coppers. 2 to 300 gallons of water were carted around different parts of the house for cooking, cleaning and washing. And for washing, we're talking up to 600 items per week. Then there's the food, four meals a day for up to 30 people, that would be the family and their staff, guests and their staff. And all this was done by hand by a small army of servants working 17 hour days, all year round with no modern technology. This scale of service was repeated in country houses across the British Isles. But what's so unusual about Erddeg is that the family had a long-standing tradition of having portraits made of their servants. This is the family of servants at Erddeg in 1852. Family of servants at the front, the real family at the back in that window there. Each servant is depicted carrying an implement or a tool relating to their role in the house. And historians call these loyalty portraits, you find them up and down the country in servant-keeping houses. We've got the butler with his bottle, the housekeeper with a brace of fowl, the lady's maid with her sewing kit. What's particularly nice about this one is that the employers wrote poems to go with the portraits. Here's what they say about the butler, Our butler in the foreground shown, as Thomas Murray well was known, he who does night the centre stand, with bottle clasp within his hand. Clever was he at drawing cork, and a good hand at knife and fork.
[5:47]And I really like this one about the lady's maid. They don't seem to like her so much. Nearby our butler, Mrs. Hale, of whom our memories much do fail. As lady's maid she sojourned here, black was her dress, her face austere. And when she did for Brighton leave, no one here a side did heave. Oh dear. The photograph and the poem give us a revealing glimpse into life below stairs. They hint at the tension between the staff themselves, whose lives were governed by a strict hierarchy.
[6:23]In houses like Erddeg, the butler was at the top of the pile, overseeing the coachman and footmen. He was in overall charge of the house, alongside the housekeeper, who hired the housemaids. The cook dominated a separate world, controlling kitchen maids to prepare food, dairy maids to make butter and cheese, and scullery maids for the washing up. The governess and head nurse took care of the children's universe. While the lady's maid and valet, close to their mistresses and masters, stood separate from the other servants. And at the very bottom of the pile were the laundry maids and hall boys. The hall boy usually slept in the servants' dining hall on a fold-out bed. Sadly, we don't know much about the hall boy at Erddeg in the 1850s, a lad called Edward Davies. But hall boys in other houses did record their 16-hour days in grueling detail. The hall boy at Longleat was a lad called Gordon Grimmett, and he wrote in his memoirs that every day he had to trim, clean and fill all the lamps and candles in the house, and that could be up to 300. And every morning, before the other servants even woke up, he had to polish 60 pairs of staff boots. Every servant acquired a very specific set of skills, learning from senior servants or from household manuals. How to clean ladies' boots? The following is an excellent polish for applying to ladies' boots. Mix equal portions of sweet oil, vinegar and treacle, with 1 ounce of lamp black. When all the ingredients are thoroughly incorporated, rub the mixture onto the boots with the palm of the hand and put them in a cool place to dry. The pecking order was even played out when the servants ate their meals together in the servants' hall. Meal times were a time when the status, the hierarchies between servants were enforced. There would be a strict order of coming into eat, and strict rules about where different ranks of servants might sit. And you might also have rules such as no speaking unless you were addressed by one of the senior servants. And the senior servants had a great deal of power, so the butler, for example, in some households would put down his knife and fork, and everyone else had to finish eating, whether you'd finished or not. So servants had to learn to be fast eaters. Some houses had a strict set of rules governing behavior in the hall. You even had to pay a forfeit if you broke them. For instance, rule four, that if any person be heard to swear or use any indecent language at any time when the cloth is on the table, he is to forfeit thruppence. Rule seven, whoever leaves any pieces of bread at breakfast, dinner or supper, forfeits one penny. But there was also divisions between the different branches of domestic service. So famously, cooks were often very protective of their space, and the kitchen staff sometimes wouldn't eat here in in in the servants' hall, but had the privilege of being able to eat in the kitchen, and the other servants always suspected that they had better food. And of course, I imagine some servants had to serve the other servants. That's right, you would have had the very junior servants learning their trade, if you like, by serving in in the servants' hall. Way above the hall boy, the most powerful female servant at Erddeg was the housekeeper, and her room is still immaculately preserved.
[10:01]From here, she did the accounts and tradesmen's orders, marshalled the female staff, and looked after the most precious items, such as the China and the linen. In 1852, the housekeeper here was Mrs. Webster.
[10:16]One of the most iconic objects associated with a housekeeper were her keys. And here's Mrs. Webster, the housekeeper at Erddeg with her keys in her lap. In fact, it was said that it was a mark of a good housekeeper that she could strike fear into the hearts of the lower servants with a mere jingle of the keys. Mrs. Webster didn't just look the part, her employer's poem paints her as the perfect frugal employee, who rose through the ranks. Upon the portly form we look, of one who was our former cook, no better keeper of our store did ever enter at our door. She knew and pandered to our taste, allowed no want, and yet no waste, and for some 30 years or more, the cares of office here she bore. Although Erddeg's loyalty portraits and poems suggest a cosiness between masters and servants, the reality is starkly different. Most big houses were specifically designed to keep the masters and their servants apart. One of the best examples of this idea of separation is Petworth. Its Sussex estate was 15 times larger than Erddeg, and at its height, it employed 300 indoor and outdoor staff. Most of the indoor staff lived and worked in a separate servants' wing at the back of the main house. But that wasn't enough. In order to keep the servants actually hidden from their employers and guests, the architect designed a tunnel, which connects the servants' wing to the main house.
[11:58]Low, ceilinged and damp. You can just imagine what it was like with dozens of servants brushing past each other, carrying trays of food and dirty dishes.
[12:12]You can think of the country house rather like a giant swan, gliding gracefully on the surface, but underneath, there's an army of servants paddling furiously to keep the whole thing moving. It tells us a lot about the reality of servants' lives. Most big employers didn't know their servants by name, some didn't know how many they had. In one house in Suffolk, if a junior member of staff came into contact with a member of the family, they actually had to flatten themselves against the wall. Anonymity and invisibility were very big part of the job.
[12:48]As if a tunnel wasn't enough, the main house itself was designed for invisibility, with its hidden passages, secret doors and backstairs, allowing the servants to shadow their employers' every move. From here, a hidden army could service their master's needs with invisible hands, turning up beds, lighting fires, filling their baths and jugs with water brought up from the range. Scuff marks of slop buckets.
[13:25]The contrast between the sumptuous, richly decorated family areas and the dull-colored servant quarters is stark. The very top floor of the house wasn't only designed to keep servants away from their employers, it was also built to keep servants separate from each other. Up here in the attic is where the senior servants slept, the butler, the housekeeper, the valet, the ladies maids. The lower servants slept in dormitories above the servants' wing, men up one end, women down the other, separated by a locked door. In fact, I think you've got to think of this house as a physical embodiment of 19th-century values with separation and segregation at its heart. It's segregation by sex, by skill, by age, and of course, in a house like this, by class. Here, in Petworth's vast private archive, with records dating back 700 years, we see what this segregation actually meant for the servants, a huge difference in pay between the highest and the lowest. It's quite fun. Here, we've got payments for servants and and servants' wages. And these are the servants in 1860.
[14:39]They more or less go in hierarchical order. We're starting with Henry Upton who was the surveyor. 50 pounds a quarter is roughly 14 and a half thousand pounds a year today. He is by far the highest earner. And so we go on down through the housemaids, the kitchen maids, and probably somewhere at the bottom, though they don't tell us, are the laundry maids. People like Christine Anderson, who only gets three guineas a year. Just 700 pounds a year in today's money. You have to remember that the staff here were fed, provided with uniforms and lived rent-free. Surprisingly, in spite of the master servant segregation, the archives have a very rare book, an informal photo album compiled by the master's daughter-in-law. All the dear servants at Petworth 1860. Yes, this was collected by Mrs. Percy Windom. She had photographs taken of all her favorite servants here. Regardless of the house design, Mrs. Windom clearly got to know the servants and wrote affectionate notes, giving us tiny hints of their lives. And this is Thomas, who was made to Mrs. Percy Windom, who married Owen the valet. Thomas is presumably her surname. Yes. Okay. This is dear old Bowler, the nursemaid.
[16:03]A butler or under butler, name forgot, who was at Petworth but not for very long in the later days. Still got a photograph of it. Yes. There's Mr. Upton, the clerk of works, who we know got 50 pounds a year from the wage book. A dairy maid, Mrs. Greenfield, a laundry maid, Reynolds, who's John Dine, who's butler for a long time.
[16:26]They didn't really want him to be butler, they didn't think he was quite up to it because he was so nervous. Oh dear. And if you brought them a cup of coffee in the morning, his hand would shake so much that you wouldn't have much coffee left in the cup, but he stayed with them for years. So they kept him on anyway. Yes, yes. It's quite tantalizing because you get a sense of who they are from here, where they worked, what they looked like. But there's still so much more, I think. Yes, you'd like to ask them what they thought of it. Yes.
[16:58]The formal servant portraits in this album, most standing proud in their uniform, are very familiar to us. And yet, these uniforms were actually a Victorian invention.
[17:13]100 years earlier, in the 18th century, servants had dressed much more individually.
[17:31]This is a wonderful collection of portraits. They look like lords and ladies in the latest fashions. In fact, they're all servants. Up here is Mary Hayes, down here is Mary Wells. They're both housemaids. Look at them, beautifully dressed. Look at their bonnets and their beautiful lace collars. This is another lovely one. This is the housekeeper, Mrs. Edwards, who looks more like Marie Antoinette in that powdered wig. The men servants are also really well turned out. This is a lower groom, Francis Yates, but look at his orange silk waistcoat there. Up here, we've got the gardener and his wife. Beautiful bonnet and roses. Beautiful silver buttons down his jacket. This is Stevens, who is a general man servant, but if we take him off the wall. Have a look at the back. It gives you some lovely detail on him. Stevens, alias Lumpy, the famous player at cricket. So I think he was the duke's cricket coach and no doubt about why he was hired. When you think about them as a group, what really comes across is their personality, individuality with their own looks and style. The most fashionable couple of all, placed in the very centre, look like they are the master and mistress. But they too are servants. If you compare these 18th-century portraits with 19th-century photographs, there's one very clear difference: uniforms. This is a mid-19th-century photograph of a servant staff at a country house, and they're all in uniforms. Different uniforms for different ranks, for different purposes. Very clear division of labor, very clear what people do because you can read it from their dress. It's even more pronounced in this one, this group of maid servants from the early 20th century. They've not only got the same clothes, they've even got the same hair. This lovely roll at the front, some can clearly carry it off better than others, I think. What is happening here, clothing is serving a purpose, clothing is denoting class. It's putting servants back in their place. It's almost like individual identities are being flattened to a type. And this even happened with names. Fancy or higher ranking names could be changed by employers to more suitable, lower ranking names. So Florence could become Flo, Elizabeth could become Betty. In some houses, footmen were given the names Henry or William, regardless of what their actual names were. As the 19th century progressed, service became more sharply defined as a profession, with specific uniforms and dress codes, as well as particular rules and customs. Tracts and manuals spelled out these rules clearly, how to be a Victorian servant.
[20:35]This is a 19th-century pamphlet, very snappy title for servants, Hints to domestic servants. Addressed more particularly to male and female servants, connected with the nobility, gentry and clergy. And it's written by a butler in a gentleman's family in 1854. So note, he's not a master, he's a butler, and this is his view of how servants should behave. Page 74, Cleanliness, the first thing I would recommend is cleanliness. No person will make a good servant who is not habitually clean, clean in person and in work. Nothing is more offensive to a lady or gentleman than to have a dirty, slovenly servant about them, male or female. Page 78, Be uniformly obedient to your masters.
[21:25]Page 81, a slothful servant is a wicked servant. Keep your master's secrets. Never reveal what he intends should be private. Defend your master's honor and the honor of his house. Seize on every opportunity to promote theirs, and especially by praying for the renewing grace of God. Service with its particular codes of behavior and dress, became ever more sharply defined as the riches extracted from the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution flooded into cities like Liverpool, Manchester and London. This wealth fueled a massive building boom, giving rise to the terraced houses with attics and basements of the newly emerging Victorian middle classes. And one way these new middle classes felt they could cement their status was by keeping servants. One such servant, William Taylor, gives us a rare personal view inside these middle-class households. William was man servant to a wealthy widow on Great Cumberland Street in London. Back in the 1830s, this was a very smart row of houses. The fact that it's a hotel now with its own doorman is really quite apt in a way. William Taylor had grown up on a small farm and came to London to look for work. He wrote a diary, which is incredibly revealing of servant life in the bustling social city. And remarkably, it survived.
[23:00]May the 14th, mechanics and trades people speak disrespectfully of servants. If they meet a servant in company, they will say one to the other, it's only a servant. But everyone must know that servants form one of the most respectable classes of person that is in existence. They must be healthy, clean, honest, a sober set of people. May the 18th, we're going to have a party this evening, something larger than usual. It is quite disgusting to modest eyes to see how the young ladies dress, nearly naked to the waist to attract the gentlemen, naked on the breast, except to cover the nipples. If anyone wants to see all the ways of the world, they must be a gentleman servant. Amazingly, William Taylor's diary and his scrapbook have been handed down through four generations of his family, and are now treasured by his great-great-great niece. Here is the diary.
[23:58]Do we know why he wrote the diary? Yes, he says so. He says he wanted to practice his writing. As I am a wretched bad writer, many of my friends have advised me to practice. So he writes this diary, it's a year in his life, 1837. Yes. What are his duties? Cleaning the lamps and the shoes, and then and the knives, because you had, uh, didn't have stainless steel knives in those days. And then he would be taking the meals up and clearing them away. And he appears to have to do the washing up from upstairs. Which you might think the maids would do. Of course, he was married, wasn't he, William? Yes, he was. It was unusual for servants to be married at that time. And where was the wife and child then? Living in respectable lodgings round the corner. But he also kept a scrapbook and I think he was something of an artist, is that right? Yes, yes, he made a scrapbook to send home to his family for their entertainment. And this is it, yes. It's a bit fragile, obviously been much looked at. A book of entertainment, composed of drawings, scraps, memorandums by W. Taylor. All the drawings in this book that are marked W.T. are drawn by William Taylor, self-taught artist. That's his frontispiece, he's got a lovely, uh... Picture here of a lion and a tiger.
[25:31]I like the way the carpet is so carefully done. The servants helping themselves behind the screen in the dining room. And the master and mistress having, uh, dinner. I like the one having a swig from the bottle. And the ones having a swig from the bottle and the ones eating one of the sweetmeats. Yes. Just before they bring them in, you imagine. Yes. They've got the master and the mistress. Yes, they've got the master and the mistress having their, I don't know, after-dinner tea and sitting there. While this story reflects on the servant, the interesting thing to me is the way Jane tells the story is how it reflects on Jane. Yes.
[26:15]Jane had failed in this duty. And I certainly read the letter to a degree that she is setting out precisely why she didn't fail. Precisely to indicate to her friends and her family that she wasn't being an unvigilant mistress, which would have indicated a moral failing in her. It wasn't simply that the woman giving birth had failed, um, but that Jane had failed to teach her the ways of middle-class righteousness. So she's repairing herself as moral mistress. Absolutely. So what happened in the end to this servant? Jane sacked her. Most employers tried to prevent getting into such a tricky situation by encouraging their charges to read the wealth of moral literature aimed specifically at servants. In the basement of the British Library, we've unearth some rare copies.
[27:12]These are just a small selection of a vast, vast literature aimed at servants produced in the 19th century. And there's all kinds of things here. There are magazines, there are prayer books, there are fables, there are personal stories. It's a really vast amount of stuff. How would they get this material? Well, some would be given to them by perhaps their parents or relatives before they left the service. Others still, they might just buy themselves. There's one here, the Servants' Magazine, which I think is a commercial publication. And it's fascinating because it shows us the journey that the servant is expected to make, from disordered country cottage to ordered family home where she's stoking the fire.
[27:59]A crucial part of that journey for her is is a moral and religious teaching that helps her to make this journey. So here we've got the servant kneeling by her bed, saying her prayers. The servant maid, those servitude's my destined lot and I am doomed to roam, far from my native peaceful cot, far from my friends and home. Yet ever be his bounty blessed, whose hand bestows my food, I know what he appoints is best, and must be for my good. If God saw fit to make me great, he would not this deny. And while I'm in a meaner state, he will my wants supply. The message there is that servants should be happy with their position in life. God's looking after them, they're doing the right thing.
