Free The Real Life Downton Abbey by Jacky Hyams Page B

announce visitors, assist the guests in their rooms, attend the gentlemen in the smoking room after dinner and work in the front hall as the dinner guests are leaving, helping them with their clothing and into their carriages.
    Downstairs they look after all the silver, glass and china, polish all the mirrors and the silver plate, dust in high places, clean the downstairs furniture and outdoor clothing – including the muddy riding boots and walking shoes – even ironing the master’s newspaper (with a petrol-driven iron) to fix the ink. (Ironing newspapers is a fairly common duty because the toffs like everything to be flat as well as neat.)
    The footman carries coal upstairs for the fires and lugs blocks of ice into the area where these are stored. In a country house where electricity has not yet been installed, they have the unenviable task of cleaning all the lamps, polishing the brass, de-griming the brass chimney, trimming the wicks, changing the oil regularly and checking, each night, that the lamps have gone out.
    Footmen are exposed to guests and other people constantly, so they are expected to be the most presentable of all the servants; a good-looking, six-foot footman brings a touch of glamour to the proceedings. And although the days of highly costumed footmen, in powdered wigs and bright livery, are on the wane by the early 1900s, there are occasions when they may be required to don livery provided by their employers. They have more visibility than many of the other lowers, whose presence and work goes on unseen by those above stairs. As a consequence, they are often disliked within the servant hierarchy for giving themselves ‘airs above their station’.
    Yet no matter how they are viewed, footmen are constantly on the go from dawn to dusk, sleep in shared accommodation, and the work itself is monotonous and exacting to the last detail: a footman must wear special white gloves so as not to mark the silver when he is laying the table.
THE HOUSEMAID
    It’s a toss-up between the housemaid and the scullery maid as to who has the worst deal: they both have a backbreaking, labour-intensive role to play – housemaids do nothing but clean, sweep, dust, make beds, polish, lug pails of water and generally do whatever the housekeeper orders, though there is usually a head housemaid to supervise them in a large household employing several of these servants.
    As a group, housemaids are very much regarded collectively rather than as individuals: they must walk about the house together, in single file. Or sit together in the servants’ hall in the brief gaps between their duties, sewing.
    Each housemaid is allocated a set number of responsibilities, starting work at between 5.30 and 6am. Their first task is to make tea for the lady’s maid and housekeeper and by 6.30am they are busy lighting fires, cleaning all the public rooms of the house, making beds, sweeping, dusting and cleaning the bedrooms, the bathrooms and the other rooms, scrubbing floors, sweeping ashes, polishing grates, windows and ledges, cleaning the marble floors and all the furniture, brushing carpets, beating rugs, carrying coal to the fireplaces and making sure the fires are stoked properly.
    In some cases, one housemaid works only for the upper staff, another is allocated a specific room to clean all the time. Because there’s great emphasis on specific rooms for specific purposes, a housemaid can be allocated a medal room, with rows of steel cases containing medals – which must be polished (with emery paper) every single day. Or when there’s a house party, it’s often the housemaid who has to wash the loose change the men in the party have emptied from their pockets and left out the previous night, so that a valet may return the shining coins to their owners later on.
    A very hard-working housemaid can work her way up to a housekeeper’s role. If she can handle the relentless monotony – and the sheer physical slog of doing nothing but