A Country House at Work : Three Centuries of Dunham Massey

by Pamela A. Sambrook

In this fascinating book, Pamela Sambrook focuses on Dunham Massey in Cheshire, and shows how the great house and its estate functioned in the late Georgian period. At the center is the family, the Earl of Stamford. But the various groups that made the household work fan out like ripples in a pool so that we can trace the responsibilities of the house steward, the housekeeper, and the land steward, each with their own teamsthe butler and footmen, the housemaids and laundresses, the gardener and the blacksmith. Beyond them are the craftsmen who provided services great and small, from carpentry to sewing, and the tradesmen who supplied food, drink, luxuries, and necessities to a household that was far from self-sufficient. By delving into the minutiae of the household records and accounts, the author has uncovered the stories of individuals that contributed to the life of Dunham Massey, from the doctor who featured in Mrs Gaskell's novels to the hermit who over-indulged at a family wedding and fell down the stairs.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Pamela Sambrook is a freelance lecturer, writer and consultant to the Heritage Industry and is a Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University.

Reviews

[Nick Imrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So if you had to be a servant in a Georgian stately home, what servant would you be?

I've decided to be a dairy maid. This is a position that I'd previously overlooked, but it's the sweet spot. She gets plenty of fresh air and exercise, and then she gets to spend all day making butter and cheese in her comfy little cheese room. She's paid more than the housemaids and laundry maids because she's doing unsupervised skilled work, but less than the head housemaid or housekeeper because she doesn't supervise anyone. Perfect.

This book fixed a few other misconceptions for me. Despite the title, most of the book covers the regency period, because there were some particularly good records. Most of us get our idea of what a stately home would be like from TV shows like Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, but the Edwardians, and even Victorians, did things very differently than the Regency period.

The first surprise was that the Butler is not the most important male servant. All those TV shows with the Butler running the show are based on the Edwardian structure. In the Georgian period the Steward was the top servant. And a place as big as Dunham Massey had a House Stewart (absolute top steward) and a Land Steward (responsible for everything outside the house, farm, tenants, timber, waterways etc.). The Butler is more like the top Footman with extra responsibility for alcohol.

There are no parlour maids. I repeat no parlour maids. I know, I'm shocked too.
The family are waited on by footmen. In the Georgian era it would be immodest to expect women to do the more public work of waiting on the family. Women did backstage, private work: laundry, cleaning bedrooms and private chambers etc. Men did the front-facing work, answering the door, serving the family and guests, cleaning the more public rooms like the living room and dining room. There's also an elaborate hierarchy in which only men get to touch the really important and precious things. So the men do all the polishing and dusting for the silver, and for any especially expensive knick-knacks.
Surprisingly, the kitchen is much more masculine area than I expected. Although, it makes sense when you realise the kitchen is a hellish furnace with a massive open fire, a lot of heavy lifting with massive iron spits and contraptions, and a lot of unpleasant butchery of various animals, both farmed and wild, from the estate.

And, none of those TV dramas where the servants have romantic liaisons by bumping into each other in the attics would have happened. The maids sleep in the attics and the footmen sleep in the cellar. I was pretty surprised - surely a cellar cannot make for a comfy bedroom? But the family take very seriously their duty to guard the morals of their servants - and that means the men and women sleeping as far apart as possible. That might seem patronising or patriarchal, but it's worth remembering that many of the more lowly maids (like the 4th housemaid, responsible for cleaning the servants rooms, not trusted to even touch anything belonging to the family) would be as young as 12 or 14. If a large portion of your workforce are teenagers, then I won't judge you for worrying about romantic drama.

One always gets the impression from Downtonesque shows that servants are, well, servile. But service was actually a pretty good job, especially when you made it to the higher levels. The stewards and housekeeper were important people in the local community. They left vast sums to charity on their deaths, and supported all sorts of local initiatives. The picture of the housekeeper's room at Dunham Massey was positively sumptuous!
And at the lower levels the best way to climb the ladder fast was to move about. Servants would quit all the time in order to take a better position at another house. A good servant was hard to keep, and it gave them a fair bit of bargaining power.
The sad part of this, which I had never really considered before, was how it broke up families. Of course, a woman couldn't have a career and a marriage. The housekeepers and maids were always single, and maids would often quit to get married. But for the men, footmen and stewards had to live onsite, which meant that married men would be split up from their families for years, only getting to see their wife and kids on their very rare days off. And if that wasn't enough incentive to quit, apparently the footmen of the early 1800s thought that their fanciful coats and wigs looked ridiculous just as much as we do, and not wanting to look like a pillock in silk stockings was considered a good reason not to take a footman job!

There's so much else that was interesting and informative in this book. The Home Farm, the kitchen, the orangeries and pinery - the sheer massive undertaking that was a Big House. It had a huge influence on all the local businesses. It could make or break the local economy. And other amusing asides like the massive improvement in roads, canals, and eventually trains, which led to the Lord desperately trying to divert new routes passed the estate in order to improve his own travel times!

Really, the only thing missing is the Lady's Maid and the Valet. These were paid for out of the Lady and the Lord's personal expenditure respectively, which means they don't show up in the main household records. Otherwise, this book was wonderful.

[Rodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro muy bien escrito que reflexiona sobre relaciones, tipos de relaciones distintas a las usuales, la libertad dada por el anonimato de internet, vicios y desafíos a la ley y lo correcto para sentirse vivo, o como aducción.