Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey Read online

  Ordinarily, guns were given six pheasants each, but the Prince was given twelve. The long list of recipients demonstrates the Prince’s wide social network: birds were sent to the Russian Ambassador and Nellie Melba, as well as to Mr Horace Voules, editor of Truth magazine, a well-known investigative periodical. (It is tempting here to imagine a delicate bribe to a forerunner of the paparazzi – the Prince was frequently the subject of gossip in the media, unsurprisingly given that he was an enthusiastic playboy throughout his life.) Marie Wombwell, Almina’s mother, was sent a brace of birds, some were sent to Newbury Hospital, and even the waiters, the band and the visiting valets were given pheasant. The lamp-men, however, were given rabbits.

  The visit was a tremendous success. It could not have gone off more perfectly, and Carnarvon must have felt delighted that his new wife had orchestrated the event so well. She had dazzled her guests and overseen a series of exquisite dinners and entertainments. Clearly, Almina’s ‘education for the drawing room’ had ensured she was an excellent administrator and talented hostess – she was already excelling in the role of the Countess of Carnarvon.

  The little nineteen-year-old was no longer the naïve damsel that Lord Burghclere had observed six months ago, desperate for a decent family and giddy with excitement about her future. She was a wife, a Society hostess. She was a triumph.

  5

  Life Downstairs

  The fact was, of course, that Almina’s triumph was completely dependent on a small army of other people. She occupied centre stage when the eyes of the world were upon her, but actually it was Streatfield who ruled the Castle, and he continued to do so for the rest of his life. He knew perfectly well that he was more of a fixture than the new Countess. He had, after all, known Lord Carnarvon for rather longer than she had. The little kingdom of Highclere would carry on as before and the staff would simply do their jobs and wait to see how things turned out.

  At the time of his expensive shopping expedition to London, Streatfield was thirty-nine years old. Since he was a single man, he lived in the Castle itself, rather than in one of the staff cottages, which were reserved for married couples and families. As house steward he had a large square sitting room in the basement, next to the identical housekeeper’s sitting room. This was Streatfield’s domain, where he spent his leisure time, such as it was, and from where he ran the downstairs life at Highclere. It was comfortably furnished with an Indian rug and an easy chair. In one corner stood an old English grandfather clock and the room was full of mahogany desks and tables. It felt businesslike, as befitted a man with a great deal of responsibility.

  Streatfield did the household accounts, ordered provisions and was in charge of the wine cellars and the silver safe, where the family plate was kept under lock and key. The safe was vast, a walk-in room, and contained some famous pieces collected by the great connoisseur, the Earl of Chesterfield, as well as jewellery and other heirlooms. It was carefully wrapped and stored in muslins on baize-covered shelves.

  Streatfield had mutton-chop whiskers and a habit of dropping his aitches where they needed to be and adding them where they didn’t. He was remembered by the 6th Earl as unflappable, utterly devoted to Lord Carnarvon and even more devoted to Highclere, a man who never let his professional manner slip but who had a soft spot for children. He would ruffle Porchy’s hair when he was a very little boy, a gesture of familiarity that Streatfield, with perfect timing, dropped when the young lord went off to Eton from prep school. It wasn’t until 1897 that he married a teacher from Essex called Edith Andrews and moved into one of the grace-and-favour cottages in the park.

  Streatfield’s bedroom was one of the larger rooms on the first floor of the staff wing. The footmen and the groom of the bedchambers, Roberts, had smaller rooms, all well within Streatfield’s orbit so that he could keep an eye on them. The footmen’s rooms looked out over the courtyard and the grooms and coachmen lived over the stables, which formed the other three sides of the yard.

  Mr Roberts’s position was a relatively unusual one; it was a mark of great luxury to have a groom of the bedchamber. Alfred had such a person in his household, and Almina, like Alfred, found having someone in the role extremely useful. Roberts was a sort of valet ‘at large’. He was tasked with a host of little details, from ensuring that Lord and Lady Carnarvon never ran out of writing paper or ink in their bedrooms, to being in charge of calling cards from visitors, announcing guests and liaising with Fearnside, the Earl’s fiercely loyal valet, and Miss Adams. His remit was extended to cover the house parties when there were guests. Roberts’s overall responsibility was to ensure that everyone’s stay was exquisite.

  The housekeeper at the start of Almina’s time at Highclere was Mrs Emily Bridgland. Her title was given as a courtesy, as she was in fact single. Mrs Bridgland had her sitting room next to Streatfield’s, but whereas his was dark and full of heavy furniture, hers had a lighter touch and was more comfortable. She had two sofas covered in brocade and a large rosewood lounge chair, as well as a writing desk and sewing machine. She knew where all the keys to each room were and kept the key to the china cupboards, which lay not far from her sitting room, on a chain around her waist. As with Streatfield and his silver, she guarded the china fiercely.

  Every day at 10.00 a.m., Mrs Bridgland made her way up the staff stairs to the ground floor of the Castle. Lady Carnarvon’s sitting room was directly underneath her bedroom and could be quietly reached from various private stairs. Almina had just redecorated. It now had a thick, dusky pink carpet, and the delicate Georgian plasterwork was complemented by soft pink walls, against which hung a charming collection of paintings and miniatures. It was a peaceful room, full of light, in which she could discuss household matters in privacy with Mrs Bridgland. As in everything at Highclere, the structures below stairs mirrored life upstairs, so just as Mrs Bridgland and Streatfield had their sitting rooms next door to one another, so too did Lord and Lady Carnarvon. Mrs Bridgland could ask Lady Carnarvon for her instructions and discuss plans for the day: what time guests were arriving and departing, the entertainments planned for the afternoon, the menus for lunch and dinner. Once they had concluded their business, Mrs Bridgland retraced her steps and delegated the jobs through the head housemaid and the cook.

  On the wall of the corridor that ran the length of the house, from the back door to the wine cellars, was the panel of bells that the family used to ring for attention. It was positioned between the house steward’s and the housekeeper’s sitting rooms and there were sixty-six bells in total, one for each of the State Rooms and the family and guest bedrooms. Streatfield employed a steward’s room boy in order to run and alert a maid or a footman when a bell rang.

  Particular staff answered each bell. Streatfield, Fearnside and the footmen ensured that the family and any guests were properly greeted, announced – and that they lacked for nothing. The more senior housemaids would be on hand to look after the female house guests. But many of the staff rarely met the guests as only the footmen were in attendance at each lunch or dinner. A kitchen maid might go for months without ever seeing a member of the family since there was no reason for her to go upstairs and Almina seldom came downstairs.

  The unmarried female servants lived in the main Castle, on the second floor and in rooms in the tower reached by a winding staircase. Each single room had its own bed and fireplace where water could be heated up for washing, but some of the junior maids shared, two to a room. Bedrooms were strictly for sleeping in, since there was a servants’ hall and sitting room for relaxing, and there was no such thing as truly private space. Bedrooms could be inspected at any time, and although Mrs Bridgland was no tyrant, she took her duties seriously, opening cupboards and looking under beds for evidence of any wrongdoing. Policing of morality and observance of the social codes were as much a part of the house steward and housekeeper’s duties as organising the wine cellar, keeping the key to the silver safe, ordering provisions or supervising housemaids. The maids were usually
seventeen or eighteen when they started in service, and were often living away from family for the first time. There was an element of pastoral care to the role of the senior staff, who had to spot upset of any kind since it might disrupt the smooth running of the household.

  The girls were a good long way from the male staff, which was obviously the intention, but they were also a long way from the ground if there were a fire. The provisions for escape in such an event were pretty terrifying in themselves. Outside the bedrooms there are painted notices that announce, matter of factly, ‘In case of fire, use chute.’ The heavy canvas tunnels were on iron hooks that could be wedged in the window frames. The far end was held firmly by a couple of men standing far below on the lawn. They must have worked, because later generations remember being made to practise a fire drill with them. The housemaids knew the main thing was to wear thick sweaters and hold their arms close to their bodies so they didn’t catch their elbows in the metal hoops of the tunnel.

  There were rules governing interaction below stairs at least as elaborate as those that prevailed upstairs. Streatfield dined every day with Mrs Bridgland and Mr Fearnside, the valet, in the steward’s room. They were served by a junior footman. Mr Roberts, the groom of the bedchambers, and Miss Adams presided over the housemaids and footmen in the servants’ hall, women on one side of the table, men on the other. Precedence was carefully preserved, with the senior housemaid sitting to the right of Roberts whilst the butler and under-butler would be seated either side of Lady Carnarvon’s maid. The chef’s departments were quite separate. Visiting ladies’ maids and valets would be placed according to precedence: the rank of their family’s title and size of establishment would be as carefully studied by Mrs Bridgland, poring over Debrett’s in her parlour, as by Almina doing a table plan upstairs in the State Dining Room.

  In Almina’s time there were at least eighteen members of male indoor staff reporting in a strict hierarchical structure to Mr Streatfield. Even their clothes reflected their status. Streatfield changed to white tie when Lord Carnarvon dressed for dinner, since he would be serving in the Dining Room. Footmen likewise had to change from their liveries into white breeches with dark blue jackets and powdered wigs. Female staff wore blue dresses with white aprons and little frilly caps: the more senior their role, the more elaborate the cap. At the very top of the scale, Mrs Bridgland could dispense with the apron, and at the very bottom, the scullery maid had just one work dress and a vast quantity of aprons that she had to change constantly.

  The Castle household ran like clockwork, with new arrivals slotted in to junior jobs in order to learn how things were done. Each different employee at the Castle had tasks to perform at different times of the day. A scullery maid, who was the most junior of all the maids, was up at 6.00 a.m. to light the fire in the kitchen so the senior staff could have their cups of tea. She would be frantically busy doing the washing up during cooking hours and after meals, and therefore up to her elbows in suds and grease from breakfast time to long after the family had finished dinner. A housemaid might have an hour of relative leisure mid-afternoon. On the other hand, housemaids also got up at the crack of dawn to begin the enormous and crucial task of lighting dozens of fires throughout the house. A junior housemaid would begin by cleaning the housekeeper’s grate, and do the job every day first thing, until she got the hang of it and could be relied upon not to dirty the carpets in the State Rooms.

  The fires had to be cleaned of the previous day’s ashes and then re-laid with fresh white paper before the footmen brought in the hot coals to light them. After breakfast, the maids would begin to clear the rooms and make the beds, a task that could take them until lunchtime if the family was in attendance with guests. The staff had their main meal at midday in the servants’ hall, an hour before the family ate at 1.00 p.m. The late afternoons would bring another round of duties. Once the Carnarvons and their guests had taken their tea and retired to the Library for a game of bezique or gone out for a stroll in the park, the maids had to clear away any evidence of their occupation of the rooms they weren’t using, plumping cushions, emptying ashtrays and sweeping carpets to remove footprints. The task of restoring an impression of pristine readiness in the State Rooms could be completed when the house party retired to dress for dinner, but of course that also meant a new round of work in the bedrooms. There were more fires to be lit and then endless pails of hot water to be taken up. Bathrooms were not installed at Highclere until 1897, so before then baths were taken in freestanding tubs in front of the fire in the bedrooms. If there were twenty-five guests staying, plus family, that meant thirty fires and thirty baths to fill. There would have been a great deal of running up and down the back stairs, trying not to spill the water as the doormen lugged it up. Even once the plumbing was installed, some jugs of hot water were still taken up. Old habits die hard, and many guests preferred to use a jug and a bowl than the marble inlaid basins.

  The main kitchen at Highclere is a large, high-ceilinged room tiled up to beyond the height of a tall man. There is an enormous and elegant wooden-framed clock on one wall, so that everyone could keep to the rigorous schedules demanded by the cook, and a huge table in the middle of the room. Gwendolen Gray, who was a scullery and then a kitchen maid, remembered ‘the huge Caron stove, it took five hods of coal in the morning and five in the afternoon, the long white scrubbed table, the shelves with gleaming coppers – and when I was scullery maid, how I took a pride in those coppers!’

  The Earl and Countess ate four times a day: breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner; there were a tremendous number of ‘removes’ for each meal, but especially for a dinner party. When in residence, Lord and Lady Carnarvon were rarely without visitors, and even on a slow day the pace of activity must have been relentless. Occasionally, mistakes were made. Dorothy Wickes was a kitchen maid during Almina’s time and years later she told a nephew about the day the Lady of the House complained of oak leaves in the cabbage. The following evening Almina prepared the cabbage herself but Dorothy was feeling mischievous and added a couple of leaves later. There was no further complaint.

  The cook had her own sitting room, a sign of her high status, and food was taken very seriously at Highclere. She had three kitchen maids as well as a scullery maid, and in addition to the main kitchen and two sculleries, there was a still room for more storage space and activities like making preserves that were not directly connected to the day’s cooking requirements. There was a lot of equipment to store, from stew pans to preserving pans – and not merely general fish kettles but salmon and turbot kettles, too. Moulds of various shapes and sizes were used for cold first courses such as jellies mousselines, as well as the fruit jellies and puddings, all of which were beautifully presented.

  Dinner was announced at precisely 8.00 p.m. by Streatfield. Two footmen could serve dinner on a quiet evening, but if there were ten guests or more, four footmen were in attendance, and they would be required to powder their hair, a practice that only ceased in 1918. A scullery maid recalled ‘what a long way the second footman had to go to take the courses to the Dining Room. If there was a soufflé on the menu, I can still hear Mrs Mackie standing at the serving hatch begging the footman to “run, run, run”. The butler would sometimes bring a note on a silver salver from His Lordship commenting on something concerning the dinner. Mrs Mackie called these her “billy dos”.’

  Both the Earl and Countess ate sparingly. Lord Carnarvon thoroughly enjoyed Turkish cigarettes, to be smoked over brandy and cigars with the gentlemen guests in the Dining Room. The ladies took coffee, in the Drawing Room. Almina didn’t like to spend too long over a dinner party as the staff would have to clear and wash up and prepare for the next day.

  There were always quantities of dripping left over from the preparation of these meals, so local people would bring along basins and Minnie Wills, who arrived at Highclere as a kitchen maid in 1902, would let them have some nourishing dripping in return for a penny or two placed in the slot of a neatly-made wo
oden box; at Christmas the coins would be shared amongst the servants.

  Eventually the staff had their hot supper in the servants’ hall, which was directly beneath the State Dining Room. It was a large room dominated by a massive seventeenth-century refectory table made of oak. ‘Our food was as good as in the Dining Room,’ according to Mrs Hart, a long-term Highclere resident who began as the fourth housemaid. She remembered learning to dance in the servants’ hall after supper and there was often singing around the piano. The maids finished their day with hot cocoa with the head housemaid in the servants’ sitting room, a separate space from the main servants’ hall, and much cosier – full of easy chairs and decorated with framed prints.

  It would be foolish to pretend that the life of the domestic staff was idyllic, however. In some great houses, any female member of staff who had ‘a follower’, i.e. a boyfriend, would be instantly dismissed – a practice which seems barbaric today – although Highclere may have been more liberal in this respect as numerous marriages occurred between estate staff. The pay was not generous, but of course food and lodging were included, so wages could be saved and service in a household such as the Carnarvons’ was generally seen as a good job with possibilities for advancement. By the 1890s, changes to legislation meant that servants got a week’s paid holiday a year, as well as their half-days on Sundays and, sometimes, an evening off in the week. During house parties the routine was arduous and days were extremely long and busy, but when the family was away in London or abroad, there was more opportunity to relax.

  The work might have been hard, but the rule at Highclere was not at all tyrannical. Minnie Wills always said that she had come from a home that was not happy and Highclere became more her home than that one. The piano in the servants’ hall and the care implied by that cocoa at the end of the day attest to a benevolent regime. The staff enjoyed trips to Newbury and, later on, to the racecourse. There was also an annual dance, held in the Library, to which staff from all the other large houses in the neighbourhood were invited. Lord and Lady Carnarvon upheld a tradition that Highclere should be ‘a household of kindness’. Winifred, Almina’s sister-in-law, remarked on this approvingly. And as Nanny Moss, the 6th Earl’s much-loved nurse put it, ‘No one from Highclere Castle will ever go to Hell.’