The Real Life Downton Abbey by Jacky Hyams Page B

5
     

Who Runs this House Anyway?
     
     
    I t runs like clockwork from just before dawn to the wee small hours. The grand country house is a veritable hive of incessant activity on a scale similar to that seen in today’s finest luxury hotels; staff are cleaning, dusting, polishing, chopping, cooking, arranging flowers, gardening, stabling, greeting guests – the only difference between then and now is that the most pampered luxury hotel guests probably don’t expect quite the same level of personal service, someone to help them dress, undress or shave, as you would find in the big Edwardian country house.
    The rules and etiquette of behaviour are rigid. Yet not all country houses are run on exactly the same lines. Nor do they have the same number of servants. Or the same number of rooms. Some owners have already installed indoor plumbing and electricity – yet still don’t permit the lower servants to use the flush toilets at night or have a bath more than once a week. Other families are more considerate of their staff ’s bodily needs. And some stubbornly insist on hanging on to the older, more labour-intensive ways of running the place rather than embracing the latest mod cons.
    But with the family’s status and appearance so high on the priority list, one thing matters above all: any visitor here must be suitably impressed with the smooth, orderly way the house runs.
    Essentially, this is a showplace, a demonstration of the family’s wealth and privilege. And that smooth running operation can only be achieved by the hard work of all the servant labour. Without the precisely calculated, hour-by-hour routine of the house, the whole thing becomes a shambles. And that must never happen…
    Here is a brief rundown of a domestic schedule of the grand country house. It can, of course, vary – the family will, at set times of the year, be absent, visiting friends and family and socialising in London. And the pace of activity revs up when there are guests to be entertained with multi-course meals and shooting parties. But from the servants’ perspective, an average day’s work would run something like this…

T HE H OUSE
    The big grandfather clock in the hallway near the servants’ quarters chimes 6am.
    A 14-year-old housemaid in an attic room with sloping ceilings, shared with three other young housemaids who are reluctantly waking up too, gets out of a single, narrow iron bed and steps onto the bare wooden floorboards. A small table by her bed holds the candle that lit her way up a hundred stairs to an exhausted sleep the night before. On a washstand nearby sits a china basin and a big jug. Underneath her bed is a chamber pot, which will later be collected by an odd-job man or a very young hall boy whose role it is to empty the pots, take them downstairs and tip their contents into a covered slops bucket in the outdoor area.
    Padding outside in her long nightgown, down the long, chilly corridor, she reaches a servants’ bathroom. She and the other girls line up to fill their jugs with cold water, then hurry back to their room for a speedy wash, hands, face, underarms, private parts, before struggling into their underwear – knickers, pantaloons, corset – then the housemaid’s workwear, a printed dress. Downstairs in the kitchen, the scullery maid has already been up since 5am, cleaning the grates in the vast kitchen, laying out the fire to heat the kitchen range, dusting and sweeping the kitchen in readiness for Cook’s arrival, making sure everything from the night before has been cleaned.
    By 6.30am the housemaids have climbed the several flights of stairs down to the backstairs basement kitchen area, running the entire length of the house, to start their first task of the day, preparing tea and toast for the housekeeper and the lady’s maid.
    Once they’ve delivered this, the housemaid’s cleaning duties begin in earnest. They are busy opening the big shutters in all the ground floor areas, dusting and