Up and Down Stairs Read Free Page B

London home, following the parallel stories of the servants and the employer’s family. Although first proposed as a comedy, it was made as a drama series. A more recent example, a fruit of the imagination rather than observation, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel,
The Remains of the Day
(1989), filmed in 1993. This evocative account of the personal tensions and professional pressures on senior country-house servants in the middle of the twentieth century interweaves their lives with the political events of the day.
     
    The film of
Gosford Park
(2001), directed by Robert Altman, with a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, made a particular virture of creating the servants’-eye view of the action above stairs. Mr Fellowes told me in a recent conversation: ‘What I was trying to express was that in these great houses there were two different worlds all operating within feet of each other.’ Fascinated by the complex world of the country house and every detail that a servant would be expected to know, he also warned of the dangers of imagining that every house was the same in all respects: ‘We had a great debate about whether menus for the day were sent up to the mistress on a silver tray or not. A number of former servants with memories of the 1930s were advising us, each of whom recalled an entirely different way of doing it.’ 26 As for contemporary domestic staff, Mr Fellowes observes: ‘Money is always spent on comfort and part of being comfortable is beinglooked after well. Every generation evolves its own version of what that means, and what we have in our age is often an “impermanent” staff, where cooks are regularly hired for house parties but are not permanent members of staff, bringing something of the fluidity of service as it was known in the eighteenth century.’ 27
     
    Country houses on the bigger estates that are still in private hands have staff to take care of family, house, garden and park. When country houses began opening to the public in the 1970s or 1980s, their staff numbers often swelled, restoring the kind of working community of the pre-war years. Large numbers no longer ‘live in’, but it is still usual to find at least one member of staff living in a flat, or an attached residence, for reasons of security. Some country-house staff today may be housed on the estate or locally and come in daily. As the Countess of Rosebery observed on a tour of her family’s home in 2008: ‘We – and they – all have our own private lives now.’ 28
     
    With the reduction in staff has also come a change in dynamics. At Bryngwyn, a compact Georgian house owned by the Marchioness of Linlithgow, the household is looked after by Christine Horton. Twenty-five years ago she had come to be nanny to the marchioness’s son; now she is not only PA, cook and housekeeper, but a close friend. She said: ‘I suppose that my relationship with the family has lasted a lot longer than many marriages.’ 29
     
    At Chavenage, a manor house in Gloucestershire, the Lowsley-Williams are devoted to their daily, Della Robins, who had also originally arrived over forty-eight years ago to help with the children, and is now their cleaner. Mrs Robins recalled in an interview: ‘When I came there was a butler, housekeeper, cook and nanny, and two or three cleaners – and now there’s only me.’ 30
     
    At Stradey Castle in South Wales in 2006, Sir David and Lady Mary Mansell-Lewis still lived in traditional style, but with many fewer staff than there had been only a few decades earlier. When I interviewed Sir David (d. 2009) with his former chauffeur, Ken Bardsley, perhaps the most touching moment was when Sir David recalled how he picked him out of a line-up to be his soldier-servant while serving in the Welsh Guards: ‘Little did I know I was picking a man who would be a friend for the rest of my life.’ 31
     
    Holkham Hall in Norfolk is a great country house still in private hands and still operating as the heart of a great