Up and Down Stairs (35 page)

His solution was that ‘the offices [service rooms] be all placed together; attached to the house, yet still so situated as to be easily screened from sight, and consequently to be erected without any pretension to architecture’. If the establishment is large, he argued, ‘this mode is therefore too much like building two separate houses to have the accommodation of one.’
¹⁰⁵
Above all, if servants’ quarters were placed in the basement, direct access could be arranged upwards to the main rooms of the house. An added advantage was that the principal rooms would thereby have an unimpeded view from any aspect and the pleasure gardens allowed to encircle the whole building.

Nearly thirty years later, exactly the same issues arose at Humewood, designed by William White. White began work in all optimism, presenting a paper on it to the Royal Institute of British Architects that was published in their 1868/9 proceedings.
¹⁰⁶
Humewood was commissioned for the gloriously named Mr Wentworth Hume Dick who, like Sir Robert Gore-Booth, was an MP. His house was to be in the High Victorian castellar style, of which Mr White wrote:
‘I have endeavoured to incorporate the idea of a Scotch baronial hall with certain Irish peculiarities in the battlemented details – exhibiting the fusion of the good old Scotch and Irish families.’ It was, he noted, designed more for the summer recess and the shooting season than as a permanent residence. White repeated the same arguments put forward by Goodwin, in one part using language so close that he was possibly quoting from the text quoted above. He, too, was adamant that siting the servants’ quarters underground was the best solution for the servicing of the principal apartments. They must, he said, be vaulted in brick or stone in order to prevent the communication of noise and smells from the basement to the main rooms (an obsession of Victorian architects).

White also argued that the subterranean route was better for the overall design, although this was possibly a method of expressing status by siting the service quarters in relation to the main house in such a way as to raise the floors of the principal rooms used by the family. As White put it: ‘In the present instance however, it was of the greatest consequence to elevate the “living” part of the house above the cold and damps of the country, as well as to give a greater command of the magnificent prospects of the neighbourhood, and also to give greater importance to the exterior effect in a wild and mountainous district.’
¹⁰⁷

In the public debate after the paper was read, another architect, Professor Robert Kerr, was recorded as taking issue about the placing of the service quarters, because it was obvious ‘at a glance that the lawn must be overlooked from the servants hall and other such offices . . . Mr White’s clients we presume do not object to this, but many would object to it very much.’ He also noted the absence of a dinner lift: ‘[Mr White] prefers the use of a dinner stair, to which I make no objection, except that the servants might possibly think otherwise.’
¹⁰⁸

White replied, rather coldly to modern ears, that as it was necessary to have a large basement to protect the principal living rooms from damp, you might as well use the space to accommodate the servants. He conceded that he had to use rough plate glass at some points, carried up to above eye level in the servants’ windows.
¹⁰⁹

The plan for Humewood shows the footman’s room convenient to the hall, the butler’s pantry and the plate room near there too, and the servants’ hall close to the kitchen. The laundry is at one extremity, and the stables stand separately. The servants’ bedrooms were principally above the kitchen, thus effectively on the first floor and therefore not too damp, with the nurse and nurserymaid sleeping in the nursery wing. Further accommodation was provided in the stable block.
¹¹⁰
However ingenious White’s architecture, his defence of the basement solution seems very backward-looking.

There was clearly an obsessive interest on the part of both architects and patrons in the accommodation of servants and the supporting kitchen offices, stables and yards. Careful design and layout were essential to facilitate the multiplicity of duties expected of domestic servants in a nineteenth-century house.

In his
Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture
(1833), J.C. Loudon described the ordered arrangements of rationally planned domestic services, even for a modest country villa: ‘The [butler’s] pantry is near the dining-room and commands the porch. The servants’ hall is beyond the door leading to the yard, and has the effect of being detached from the house, though really within it.’
¹¹¹
This separation was necessary for both efficiency and cleanliness:

The kitchen is arranged with the same advantages; the door opposite the pantry is only in use for the service of dinner. The scullery is wholly removed from the house. The laundry and wash-house are yet more retired, and immediately under the inspection of the housekeeper . . . The knife and shoe room adjoins the servants’ hall.
¹¹²

The Gentleman’s House, or How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace
(1864) by Professor Robert Kerr offers a good understanding of the evolving approaches to the design of servants’ halls and sleeping quarters in the mid to late Victorian period. Kerr outlined the history of the English country house and advised on designing the ideal dwelling, dividing it into ‘the first division: the family apartments’, the second division or state rooms, and the third division: the domestic offices.
¹¹³

He considered privacy to be of prime importance in the country house:

whether in a small house or a large one, let the family have free passage-way without encountering the servants unexpectedly; and let the servants have access to all their duties without coming unexpectedly upon the family or visitors. On both sides this privacy is highly valued. It is a matter also for the architect’s care that the outdoor work of the domestics shall not be visible from the house or grounds, or the windows of their Offices overlooked.

At the same time it is equally important that the walks of the family shall not be open to view from the Servants’ Department. The Sleeping-rooms of the domestics, also, have to be separated both internally and externally from those of the family, and indeed separately approached.
¹¹⁴

This separation is in contrast to earlier notions of the household as a family or community in itself, however alien that might seem today.

‘The idea which underlies all is simply this. The family constitute one community: the servants another. Whatever may be their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its doors upon the other and be alone.’ He observed of the eighteenth-century model, considered in the last chapter: ‘In the Classic model privacy is certainly less,’ whereas, perhaps oddly, he took the view that ‘in the Medieval model, privacy is never difficult of accomplishment.’
¹¹⁵
Kerr clearly regarded the planning of the service quarters as a matter of the utmost importance, with efficiency the primary issue: ‘the Family Apartments have to be contrived for occupation; but the Offices for work. Agreeable residence on the one hand and efficient service on other, are different questions.’
¹¹⁶

The moral standards of the Victorian age were reflected in his attitude to planning: ‘the working rooms of the men ought to form one division, and those of the women another. In all good plans this distinction is very clearly to be seen; the Servants’-Hall being properly the point of meeting, with the domain of the butler on one side and that of the housekeeper on the other, and as little necessity as
possible on either side to pass the boundary. Separate Passages and Stairs also lead to the private rooms of each Sex.’
¹¹⁷
This division of the sexes is met in many houses at this date.

Addressing the decoration of servant’s sitting rooms and bedrooms, Kerr believed that ‘all private rooms to be equal to those of a similar class of persons in their own homes – perhaps a little better, but not too much so’.
¹¹⁸
He added a remark that suggested that in the minds of some architects or patrons, servants could be considered as inseparable from the technology of the house: ‘every servant, every operation, every utensil, every fixture, should have a right place and no right place but one.’
¹¹⁹
Nevertheless, servants’ quarters should be well designed and decorated: ‘Cheerfulness . . . will still be desirable; and in the private apartments of the servants, there is no reason why so cheap a luxury should be forgotten. Elegance, Importance, and Ornament would be quite out of place.’
¹²⁰

Memorably, Kerr wrote that the kitchen, that most important of country-house offices, had attained ‘at last in our own day the character of a complicated laboratory, surrounded by numerous accessories specially contrived, in respect of disposition, arrangement, and fittings, for the administration of the culinary art in all its professional details’.
¹²¹
Ranges in country houses were generally coal-fired until the early twentieth century; gas was introduced originally as a supplementary and was available as early as the 1830s.
¹²²

Although the surprising aspect of Victorian kitchens is their distance from the dining room, this was because Victorians had a horror of cooking smells. Kerr was emphatic: ‘It must also be remembered that various household incidents, such as cooking, cleaning, washing, storage of provisions and other goods, and so on, positively engender offensive vapours.’
¹²³
It may seem today that the Victorians were being absurdly sensitive about smells, but a country-house kitchen was coping with conditions more like those of a top modern hotel than a private house, and without the benefit of modern extractors.
¹²⁴

Yet, paradoxically, the distance between the kitchen and the dining room was a constant source of concern, for obvious reasons of the logistics of service and hotness of food. Whilst this distance shrank
over the century, some was always expected. One change was that the aristocratic family became less tolerant of the sight of liveried servants actually carrying trays of food through the main part of the house. In the 1840s, the Marquess of Westminster at Eaton Hall in Cheshire did not care to see his dinner being borne across the main hall and had the architect, William Burn, insert a new serving stair, directly linking the serving room and the dining room.
¹²⁵

Echoing a debate that can be traced from the seventeenth century, Kerr had strictures on the upper servants’ offices: ‘A position ought to be chosen for the Butler’s-Pantry which shall answer for several relations. It must be as near as possible, indeed close, to the Dining-room, for convenience of service. It ought to be removed from general traffic, and especially from the Back-door, for the safety of the plate. The communication with the Wine and Beer Cellars must be ready, and in a manner private.’
¹²⁶

Because the butler’s pantry was, as we have seen, a practical room where silver and glasses were carefully washed up, it needed to be well lit with a really good sink, often underneath the window, so that items could be minutely inspected. The plate store and the butler’s bedroom often formed a part of this suite, and certainly it was commonplace for a butler or footman to sleep across the door of the plate safe. The butler’s pantry was often, but not always, one of the nearest service areas to the principal rooms of the house, primarily because the butler and footmen were expected to be on call, whether for serving meals, responding to bells or, indeed, answering the front door.
¹²⁷

The housekeeper’s room was also key, as we have seen, for the administration of the house, as well as the upper servants’ sitting and dining room (where there was not a steward’s room). J.C. Loudon decreed in 1833 that it should be ‘a spacious comfortable apartment, furnished as a respectable parlour, and situated so that the other offices are easily overlooked [with] all that is necessary for use and comfort in a rather plain way’. Some, such as that recorded in a watercolour at Aynhoe in Oxfordshire, seem very comfortable.
¹²⁸

Kerr was specific about minute aspects: ‘The Fittings, besides the
ordinary furniture of a plain Sitting-room, will consist of spacious cupboards or presses, from 18 to 24 inches, filled with drawers and shelving, for the accommodation of preserves, pickles, fancy groceries of all kinds, cakes, china, glass, linen, and so forth.’
¹²⁹

Related to the housekeeper’s room was the still room, where tea and coffee were prepared, and preserves, cakes and biscuits made. J.C. Loudon described his ideal still room in some detail, suggesting its importance:

It should be furnished as a better kind of kitchen, containing a fireplace, with a boiler, a small oven, a range of charcoal-stoves, with a cover; a small shut-up sink, with a water-pipe for a supply of water . . . [There should also be] A range of small closets for the maids, to keep their tea things, tea and sugar, and things used at the housekeeper’s table . . . a small looking glass might promote tidiness of person and a piece of common carpet would add to the comfort of the room. The chairs and stools should be neat and substantial, and a small case of well-chosen books should hang against the wall.
¹³⁰