Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times by Lethbridge Lucy

Author:Lethbridge, Lucy [Lethbridge, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

Outer Show and Inner Life

Chapter 16

‘A Vast Machine That Has Forgotten How to Stop Working’

‘The large-scale private paradise is already obsolescent,’ was the opinion of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis in 1928.1 Yet a closer look at those country houses still in private hands shows this to have been far from the case. The 1930s may have seen the final flowering of the great house but it bloomed with a spectacular show of traditional colour in those final years. ‘World War One didn’t make an awful lot of difference to life,’ reported the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, whose country seat was Goodwood in Sussex, ‘except that people started disappearing. For instance, my chauffeur, Charles Tilbury, whose home was in the Hatfield Cottages, he disappeared.’2

At Chatsworth, where thirty indoor staff were employed throughout the 1930s, the only real change in the running of the house after the war was the jettisoning of the ancient role of Groom of Chambers, whose job of looking after drawing rooms and writing tables was taken over by footmen. Lady Hambleden, born into the Herbert family and brought up at Wilton House before her marriage in 1928, remained almost untouched by the shift, so noticeable in most large houses, from male to female front-of-house staff, from butler to parlourmaid: ‘We did have quite a lot of staff: there was a butler – I think most people had butlers. I can only think of one person who had parlourmaids and everybody rather noticed it.’3

On the Rothschilds’ estate, at Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire, the gardeners still sent the vegetables to the kitchen door every day in a specially constructed pony cart painted in the Rothschild racing colours of yellow and blue, the coachman who drove it dressed in a matching livery and cockade. At Woburn Abbey, the eleventh Duke of Bedford maintained until his death in 1940 not only a household of at least sixty indoor servants to attend solely to his wife and himself, but two separate, fully staffed residences in Belgrave Square, including four cars and eight chauffeurs; the Woburn parlourmaids were all amazonian at over five foot ten, as had always been the Bedfords’ stipulation.

Vast, labyrinthine holding areas of tradition and ritualistic routine, these estates continued to function as if the social changes of the inter-war years were remote. When James Lees-Milne travelled round the country in the 1930s and 1940s in his role as secretary of the National Trust, he found many houses where a touching loyalty to the old forms of behaviour, however spectral and superfluous, still clung on. During a visit to the Marquess of Bath in 1936, a row of liveried footman gathered in ranks on either side of the steps to see Lees-Milne bicycle away down the drive; one of them solemnly carried his bicycle to the front of the steps while his host stood at the top watching until he had vanished.

In 1959 the Duke of Bedford’s grandson, the thirteenth Duke, looked back on his grandparents’ chilly and absolute

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