The Real Life Downton Abbey. Jacky Hyams

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       Author’s Note

      Before 1971 the pound was divided into twenty shillings (s); one shilling was made up of twelve pennies (d). 240 pennies made up £1. A guinea was worth 21 shillings (or £1 and one shilling).

      I have given many prices and sums of money in the original currency. In order to calculate today’s value of any original price quoted, the National Archives has a very useful website with a currency calculator (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency).

       Acknowledgements

      Sincere thanks for their valuable insights and generosity with their time go to Joy Meir, Laura Mason, Jeremy Musson, David Trevor-Jones, Kerry Bristol and Sarah Tobias.

      For more information on English country houses and domestic service, I can recommend the following: The Country House Servant by Pamela A. Sambrook (Sutton Publishing, 1999); Keeping Their Place by Pamela A. Sambrook (The History Press, 2007); Up and Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson (John Murray, 2010); and Not in Front of the Servants by Frank Victor Dawes (Century, 1991).

      Contents

      Title Page

      Author’s Note

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: The House

      Chapter 2: Money

      Chapter 3: The Pecking Order

      Chapter 4: The Rules

      Chapter 5: Who Runs this House Anyway?

      Chapter 6: Relationships

      Chapter 7: Food & Drink

      Chapter 8: Entertainment & Sport

      Chapter 9: Getting Around

      Chapter 10: Morals & Manners

      Chapter 11: How to Wear It

      Chapter 12: Health

      Copyright

       Introduction

      The horse-drawn State Landau slowly makes its way from Westminster Abbey towards St James’s Park. Inside the open carriage, the handsome prince in his scarlet tunic and his beautiful new bride wave delightedly at the crowds noisily cheering them on. Colourfully attired footmen ride behind them. Close your eyes briefly and you could be back in 1902, the year the carriage was built for King Edward VII. But we’re here, in the twenty-first century, on a beautiful spring day when British history, ceremonial pomp, brilliant pageantry and a spectacular display of centuries-old tradition briefly capture the whole world’s attention. Royalty and privilege. They may no longer be relevant to our lives in any way, but when they’re put on very public display it’s impossible not to be fascinated by our past.

      The same applies to TV historical or costume drama. We’re fascinated by it because it shows us such different worlds to our twenty-first century lives. Fictional TV series like Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, or the movie, The King’s Speech, are compelling because they tell us so much about our history. With their precise attention to every detail, they give us many tantalising insights into the worlds of royalty, the rich, the privileged of the time – and, of course, those that worked to serve them.

      This bird’s-eye view of the day-to-day lives of the live-in servants, their subservience to the super-rich, their personal dramas and the everyday restrictions of their lives, creates an irresistible blend of history and fiction. And, of course, what makes the sumptuous Downton Abbey world of toffs and servants even more compelling is its very proximity in time to today; we’re not looking at the very distant past here. These lives, so different from our own in every way and lived in an atmosphere of amazing wealth, extreme formality and snobbery, stuffy convention, etiquette – and unbelievable servitude – were lived just over a hundred years ago.

      But why are we so fascinated by the master-servant relationship itself? Part of the reason may be because we now feel that much closer to it because we can access our knowledge of it ourselves. We are continually encouraged to locate our own history, track down our own past. And it’s so easy. Digging into the lives of our families via information published online and websites like Ancestry.com reveals so much to us now at the push of a button. We may not have distant aristocratic relations in our family tree – the aristocrats are very much a minority group – but many of us are now discovering that we have relatives, great grandparents, distant aunts, uncles or cousins, who went into service and lived in the grand house; relatives that scrubbed, cooked and cleaned for the wealthy family with their vast estates and snobbish ways.

      Just before I finished this book, a friend mentioned to me that his eighty-something mother had clear and coherent recollections of her own mother’s life as a cook in a big Scottish country house in the early 1900s. As was typical then, she left the job to get married. Photos of my friend’s grandmother as a beautiful young woman, wearing her servant’s apron, popped into my email inbox. Would she talk to me? Sadly not. She wanted to. But without a letter of permission from the descendants of her mother’s employers, she said, she dare not speak out. It wouldn’t be right. The cap-doffing traditions of servitude still, to this day, linger on in the minds of the living.

      So who were these toffs and servants that hold so much fascination for us? How did they live, what did they wear, what did they eat, how did they play or form relationships – and how much – or how little – did they spend or earn? In this book I answer many of these questions and reveal, too, a lot more about what went on behind those huge front doors to the grand country house.

      It was obvious before I started writing that there was a vast contrast between the two worlds of aristocrats and servants. But as I made my way through the different aspects of their lives, I discovered that the contrast was even starker than I’d imagined. A closer look at the strict social etiquette and the rules of this class-bound period gives you a powerful appreciation of today’s freedoms. Time and again the same question crops up: how could women, in particular, accept all the restriction and regulation of so much of their lives?

      No one would envy the servants their slog and daily lives ruled by their employers’ whims where, for example, a young servant girl could not openly conduct a relationship with a boyfriend or admirer unless she had a very enlightened employer. The ‘No Followers’ rule of the period is unthinkable nowadays. Nor can we envisage a world where marriage spelt the end of a job or any sort of working life. Yet that is how it was for millions of women little more than a century ago. What we take for granted, our unquestionable freedom of choice, didn’t exist for them.

      At the other end of the scale, the wealthy, privileged women who might, at first glance, seem enviably to have it all, with servants running back and forth to satisfy every tiny whim and trunkloads of the finest expensive designer gear shipped in from Paris whenever they wanted, were equally restricted by their class and exalted position in society – but in a very different way. They could only be married. They could not divorce (divorce equalled shame and rejection in their world), and they couldn’t remain single (spinster equalled another kind of social reject). And there were servants around them every minute of their lives. There was no privacy as we know it: they were in a gilded, very beautiful cage.

      This is where the fictional TV version of the era Downton Abbey mirrors the reality of those times so precisely. Many of the older, grand women – the Duchess of Grantham in particular, as recreated so beautifully by Maggie Smith – are determinedly snobbish and class conscious. In the real world outside their gilded backdrop, a major storm is starting to break: society