The Real Life Downton Abbey. Jacky Hyams

upper-class of servants live more comfortably, often with their own live-in quarters, earn more (but not much more) and have far greater access to their employers’ private lives – and their darkest secrets – theirs is still a working life of rigid formality, unstinting routine and furious bursts of planned activity when large groups of rich and famous guests are due to be entertained or the family go travelling – and very little else.

      OK, it represents a steady job for life for many, at a time when the majority of the population are living in less than luxury (and the upper echelon of servants can sometimes be just as snobbish about their position in life as their masters). But this is definitely not anything like a working life as we might recognise it.

      THE SERVANTS

      The size of the very grand country house varies from estate to estate. Yet the working traditions of these houses remained pretty much the same over hundreds of years. Anyone who worked as a servant in a big country house remained a servant: that was it. Provided you stayed employed, of course.

      By 1901, an estimated two million people work as domestic servants (out of a total population of 40 million). Many of the servants working in the biggest, grandest houses continue to be drawn from a vast pool of poverty stricken, sometimes rural families: in some areas, successive generations have been working for a local aristocrat for centuries, a long-standing means of survival for millions in a harshly delineated existence.

      Mostly, though, their education has been restricted. Although the official school-leaving age in Edwardian times is 13, attendance by poorer children is frequently haphazard, simply because so many have to work to help provide for their family. Even the brightest poverty-stricken child has no option other than to work, if circumstances dictate, rather than study.

      Literacy, however, is now becoming important: employers prefer to take on servants who can read, write and add up. In some cases, poorer people have become more literate since the late 1800s. But there are still huge discrepancies in people’s knowledge. A young, illiterate girl entering service at the lowest level is at a distinct disadvantage with scant chance of promotion: there’s a great deal of paperwork involved in running a country house: archives show lots of bills, accounts, letters, inventories. A cook or her assistant should be able to read and write a menu, for instance. And if a servant can’t write properly, they can’t even communicate with their own family should they find themselves working some distance away from home. The consequences of poverty, such as malnutrition, poor health and lack of communication skills, don’t exactly help anyone’s prospects if they follow a life in service.

      And, of course, poverty itself continues to cast a terrible shadow over Edwardian families as it did in Victorian times; a family of ten children or more could be reduced to the breadline – or worse, the workhouse, where the very poorest in society wind up – if its sole wage earner, a working father, dies or becomes too sick or injured to keep working.

      So most Edwardian country-house servants begin their working life at a very low social level indeed. Perhaps bitter and twisted sneaky lady’s maid O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) got that way because she started her working life in another country house in the same job as Daisy (Sophie McShera), the lowliest scullery maid, the person with the hardest and worst job in the household.

      Yet despite all the drawbacks, even a low-ranking post in a big country house is regarded as a better job prospect than being a live-in servant for a middle-class family in the city. First of all, working for the upper-crust rich families in their country residences is seen as being of a higher social status, rather than working for comfortable but less-affluent middle-class families in a smaller house in town.

      Then there’s the practical consideration: more space. Town or city servants don’t always get much of a deal in terms of accommodation because their work in smaller homes frequently means they have to sleep in very cramped conditions, often right next to their place of work. In a London house, for instance, an under butler might sleep in the butler’s pantry. Or a footman will sleep in a basement.

      Since country-house servants already come from pokey and overcrowded homes housing many children – where even having a bed to yourself is a luxury only to be dreamed of – sleeping conditions in big country houses can sometimes be better. A young female servant, for instance, starts off in service sleeping in a sparsely furnished attic room, usually a hard-to-reach dormitory at the very top of the house (sometimes known as ‘the convent’), which she shares with six or more other young girls. Sometimes she might have to share a tiny bed with another girl.

      Servants’ sleeping quarters are rigidly segregated. The general idea is to keep the young women away from the attentions of all men; not just the more lecherous employers (the sons and heirs) but the other male servants too. So the servants’ quarters have completely separate staircases and entrances, sometimes overlooked by the butler or housekeeper’s rooms.

      The back stairs of the house and the servants’ entrance at the rear of the property (the place where all household deliveries are made) is only to be used by the servants – at all times. In fact, the only time the domestic staff are allowed anywhere near the main staircase in the house – used only by the family and their guests – is when they are actually doing their job of cleaning or dusting it. And, of course, they must never ever be seen by their bosses, they are an invisible army of manual labour, sweeping and dusting, polishing and cleaning, often while the family are asleep.

      And if they need to clean a room, for any reason at all, they are only permitted to work in it if anyone in the family is not scheduled to use it. What this means is that a lower servant can wind up working in the same country house for years, yet not once will they come into contact with a member of the family they work for.

      Yet despite all these restrictions, a tiny narrow bed in a room shared with many others might well be an improvement on the poverty-stricken environment of their own family home.

      Some country-house archive inventories show that in exceptional cases, live-in servants slept in feather beds – on wool mattresses. But usually the sleeping facilities are very spartan and the dormitory accommodation has very little furnishing, bare wooden floors and not much more. Washing facilities in the dormitory are usually limited to a basin and a jug of water on a stand and, of course, toilets are shared with many others – and are not always close to the chilly dormitories. A zinc or copper hip bath might also be located separately in a servants’ bathroom for their use or, in a few cases, in the communal sleeping quarters – but usually, on rising, it’s just a case of a quick splash from the water jug.

      In the newer, more recently built big country houses, the layout is more thoughtfully planned: many rooms are allocated to specific household tasks in order to make the management of the house easier. (This follows a general trend of grand and wealthy households where the rooms they use often have one function only.) These areas of the household, let’s call them task rooms, might be allocated to side courts in the house, rather than the more traditional basement areas for kitchens, for instance.

      There could even be a second kitchen (sometimes called a still room) as well as separate spacious larders for dry stores, meat, game, milk and butter, plus storerooms or cleaning rooms for lamps and boots. All this means that a twentieth-century country-house servant’s life might be a fraction easier, less smelly – even slightly healthier than it was in the previous century. Throw in the distant prospect of more privacy, like your own bedroom, if you eventually make it to the upper servant ranks, and though the incentive itself of more space may seem small to us, it still counts for something for the young and impoverished.

      Food is another important reason why a country-house servant’s job is desirable. Three – or even two – meals a day is unheard of in very poor homes, where a tiny amount of money has to stretch to several young hungry mouths. Meals in poverty-stricken homes are meagre, even sparse, mainly consisting of bread and jam or dripping, potatoes and a tiny amount of meat or fish, if they’re lucky. As a servant, you get to eat regularly – one big main meal a day – and even though the food itself might consist of your employers’ leftovers or badly prepared dishes, it is usually more substantial, with a bit more variety than at home. Think fairly