In some ways Eric hated change. A few years earlier, dissatisfied with the new class of moneyed employers, ‘the profiteers’ (‘you cannot make a silk purse out of a soused mackerel’), he had joined the railways as a porter. But he found the work dispiriting, and on one occasion was nearly trapped between the buffers, and after recovering from the shock, returned to domestic service, and tried to adapt. Another attempt at a career change also failed when his efforts to secure an official ScotlandYard taxi licence nearly robbed him of the chance of employment altogether. To demonstrate his comprehensive knowledge of the eight square miles of London, a taxi driver was required to know not only street names but the whereabouts of clubs, hotels, railway and tube stations, theatres, music halls, hospitals, police stations, mortuaries, cemeteries, prisons, docks, wharves, banks, museums, and all the principal buildings. The cost of lessons for this demanding feat of memory was £7, or roughly the equivalent for a journey to America in steerage on one of the transatlantic liners. Eric’s brother had warned him that there would be additional questions concerning the colour of certain buildings, and even the different materials used for roads – some London streets were still made from packed earth beneath wooden slats, whereas others, like the Embankment, had been asphalted over. In preparation for the theory exam Eric walked the streets day and night over a three-month period; he was one of only 10 per cent who passed. The practical testwas not such a challenge, although he thought it most unfair that he was required to reverse round a corner and through an arch, while the horse-taxi drivers just had to turn their vehicle in a circle. But the experience left him exhausted. Accustomed to working indoors, he soon came down with shingles and pleurisy, and for a time was dangerously ill. When he eventually got well he returned, disillusioned, to his old life.

  The summer shooting season in Scotland was still a month away, and Eric was not looking forward to the arrival of the foreigners who came for the August grouse slaughter. A Frenchman the year before had behaved in a shocking manner when confusing the ‘black faced shaggy looking beasts with curly horns on the Scottish moors’ for alien animals. ‘Of ze grouse birds I got none,’ he announced apologetically to Eric, but added proudly, ‘of ze moutons sauvages I ’ave twelve already.’ The Coronation and all the extra preparations it involved – for travel and dress and entertainment – had been a big strain on the staff, and there were other things to worry about as well.

  Those ‘in service’ made up 16 per cent of the labour force, the largest single group in the country. Eric was one among thousands who felt resentful that the servant’s voice was rarely heard. ‘It requires the temper of an angel to take the insults of some of the gentry,’ he would say to the first footman, bristling. The gentry were always overstepping the mark, making demands beyond the call of duty. Lady Ruthven, an insomniac with a soft spot for romantic fiction, insisted that her husband’s valet read racy French novels aloud to her until well into the night. He had a particularly good French accent which she found comfortingly soporific, reassuring her anxious women friends that he did not actually understand a word of what he was reading, so there was no danger of him being corrupted. In 1911 servants were indispensable to the rich. In the Borough of Westminster there were twelve male servants for every hundred male residents. Miss Ernestine Mills, author of a recent book, The Domestic Problem, could not envisage the survival of the upper or middle, or even some of the lower classes, without servants, and she thought the chances were slight that a new publication, Life without Servants, would enjoy commercial success. A more appropriate title, Miss Mills suggested helpfully, might have been ‘Life with your own very capable wife as cook, your amiable energetic daughter as housemaid and your sympathetic gardener as stoker to your up-to-date system of heating’.

  At Chatsworth in Derbyshire some 260 people worked on the estate; there were two full-time rabbit catchers, 44 woodmen, 55 under-gardeners, and a resident fireman. This figure was added to when the Duke and Duchess were in residence, bringing with them their ‘travelling’ staff who included a considerable number of personal footmen and maids. Arriving for a hunting weekend at Blenheim, Churchill’s friend F.E. Smith would bring with him not only three grooms to look after his own two hunters, his wife’s two hunters and his children’s ponies, but also two nurses, a maid and a valet. In the house, 40 indoor staff prepared for guests, and there were five electricians and a couple of full-time florists. The night-watchman patrolled the Palace with his especially trained Airedale police dog, and throughout the summer a professional cricketer was available to give guidance and instruc- tion. Gerald Horn, who worked as hall boy at Blenheim, described the ritual of the several footmen preparing their hair before appearing for public duties. ‘They powdered every day, washing the hair with soap, combing it out, setting it in waves and then applying the powder. The hair was never dried but was left to set hard like cement. The powder the footmen mixed themselves, buying violet powder that was then blended with flour. For this they were allowed two guineas a year.’

  The number of servants registered on the National Census in 1911 was a fifth lower than in 1891. Apart from the new generation’s unwillingness to continue in service, scientific advances had made many jobs obsolete. Electricity was a mixed blessing. No longer did the ‘odd’ man at Hardwick have to trim and fill 14 lamps for each of the larger rooms every day, and carry them to the rooms before dusk. He no longer had a job. The wooden case that once hung in the servants’ hall of every large house, with a bell for each room, each with its own idiosyncratic tone or jangle, had been replaced by an unpopular electric version that required checking every time it rang since all the rings now sounded the same. After the arrival of plumbed-in baths the ‘water men’ of Diana Manners’s childhood were no longer to be seen in the dark underground corridors at Belvoir. She missed the ‘unearthly water giants, the biggest people I have ever seen’who used to carry vast cans of water to the upstairs part of the house, suspended from a giant yoke balanced across their great shoulders. Dressed in brown with green baize aprons, they never spoke more than the two words needed to announce their arrival from beneath the ground: ‘Water man’. The gong man who walked the corridors at Belvoir brandishing his knobbed and padded stick, the coalman who had to knock on doors with his knee because his hands were too dirty and the upholsterer in his room that was a ‘confusion of curtains and covers, fringes, buttons, rags and carpets, bolsters, scraps and huge curved needles’ – all had vanished.

  Those who owned the great houses of England were rattled by their staff’s new unpredictability and insubordination, and by the blurring of the boundaries between servers and served. A spirit of rebellion that reflected the feelings of many discontented people in England rippled through the ranks of domestic servants that summer. The young novelist Virginia Stephen had become aware of the changes below-stairs. ‘The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ She may have exaggerated, but until Edward VII’s death a rigorous adherence to the rules had gone largely unquestioned.

  Below stairs romance could be frustratingly difficult. Blenheim footman Gerald Horn had fallen for the sweet charms of Nellie the head kitchen maid. They would leave each other notes under the mat in the lamp room, arranging a rendevous in the larder at 4 a.m. Planning a walk in the woods one pre-dawn morning they escaped through the larder window, but Nellie, in her best blue dress, slipped on a plank that had been laid over a ditch below the window. ‘I had a devil of a tug o’war with the mud before it would let her go,’ confessed a bedraggled and still romantically frustrated Gerald. The penalties for misbehaviour could be extreme: wages might be docked for an accidentally broken plate, possessions confiscated or wages withheld if a servant expressed unhappiness at harsh treatment; a maid might have her hair cut against her will. Young girls from the workhouse were recruited for the most menial tasks, popular for the low wages they commanded. One teen-aged girl who arrived for work weighing 76 pounds was returned to the workhouse a year later weighing just 62 pounds, and with no sign of the two shillings a week wage (a poor Londoner might pay rent of five shillings) she had been promised. It was hardly surprising if servants in 1911 were beginning to object to their employers’ failure to treat them like people.

  The summer heat was making Eric’s work more difficult: no fires had been lit for weeks, and to heat the kettle for tea he was driven to using a hot plate belonging to the rather irascible Italian cook. To Eric’s horror the Italian was so angry at this that he attacked Eric with a long knife. This new passion for foreign servants was something Eric found threatening: ‘Gentry are very partial to them and will chatter to them, whereas if it is a British servant it is “go on and get on with your work you dirty dog” sort of air.’ He knew of one MP who employed a German housekeeper, a French chef, a German under-housemaid, a Swiss under-housemaid and a French lady’s-maid, all under the same roof. At least Eric’s employers did speak to him – unlike the old Duke of Portland, who had such a phobia about being seen by anyone at all that in the 890s he had a series of underground tunnels built so that he could move undetected from room to room. When he travelled to London, black blinds covered his carriage windows, and the carriage was then loaded into a railway truck with the fearful Duke hidden inside it. The Duke of Bedford’s antipathy to servants and particularly women prompted Lady Troubridge to believe that he had ‘some great hidden pride in his own rank and station in life, some consciousness that he was set apart from the rest of the world by it.’

  One of the most unpopular developments of recent years was the addition of chauffeurs to the staff payroll. The first drivers, like the first car manufacturers, had been French, so all were thenceforward known disparagingly by their British co-workers as ‘shuvvers’. Faced with a specimen of this new breed, senior male indoor servants indicated their contempt by the agreed sign of hooking their thumbs into the armholes of their waistcoats.

  At Chatsworth, two large sections at the back of the stable block next to the plumber’s shop and the small area previously reserved for carthorses had been converted into ‘motor house’ areas. The 33 mechanics employed adopted an attitude of superiority designed to undermine the pre-eminence of the butler in the staff hierarchy. It was muttered that the shuvver ‘preferred to think of himself as a gifted artisan rather than a servant’. Many were recruited from car factories – coachmen and grooms generally despised the new calling; ignorant of the refinements required of indoor servants, they brought the smell of petrol with them into the house, in the same way that a farmer carries with him the unmistakable stench of cows. Their arrogance extended to a refusal to muck-in at other jobs, apparently believing, Eric concluded, that combined posts like chauffeur-valet or chauffeur-gardener should be left for ‘the Chinese or other amiable aliens’. Their rudeness and their tendency to ignore the advice of The Chauffeur’s Companion (published in 1909, it cautioned ‘let not the chauffeur be offended if his master is not inclined to listen to his conversation and tells him so’) meant they did not hold their jobs long, and turnover was rapid.

  As if Eric did not have enough to contend with below-stairs, he found the deterioration in the standards of behaviour prevailing on the floors above the servants’ hall increasingly disturbing. The passion for gambling had intensified. There had always been a great deal of cheating at cards, husband and wife in league, raising a left eyebrow to indicate a hand that held a heart, rubbing the left-hand side of the nose for a diamond. But by the summer of 1911, Eric noticed, the toffs were beginning to play for ‘really big money’. It was not uncommon for sums approaching £10,000 – enough to buy a decent-sized Georgian manor house with its own deer park – to be wagered in one night, and as he watched the frenzied craze for baccarat and chemmy (chemin-de-fer) Eric felt they were playing ‘as if they were working up for a disaster’. Some of these gambling evenings were run as illegal clubs: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen well known in Society’would rent a big house in the West End, paid for by creaming off a percentage of the winnings; Eric would be taken along by his employer, with instructions to get everyone ‘as fuddled as possible for the more fuddled they were the more reckless they were likely to be.’There were scenes of terrible distress when ladies lost everything, but they could often be cheered with a ‘stiff little dose of brandy’ and a reassurance that an IOU would be quite acceptable. One gentleman who could not be cheered up ran to escape his creditors by hiding in the conservatory, and then tried to shoot himself. Unfortunately he had drunk so much that he misfired, survived, and was taken to hospital with a bullet in his ribs, the debtor’s chit still in his otherwise empty wallet. Another unfortunate, a young lady who had been alerted that the gambling salon was about to be raided escaped by slithering down a drain-pipe and straight into the arms of the police. Her father was ‘in a pretty good rage’, Eric heard, when he had to bail her out of the Bow Street cells the next morning, still wearing her by then bedraggled evening dress.

  If the behaviour of the adult gentry did not earn a butler’s respect, nor did the next generation offer much hope. According to Eric, the children of one family he worked for had a habit of smuggling the family silver along to the pawnshop. Discovering that the knives and forks and ivory billiard balls in his custody were missing from their rightful places, Eric was obliged to ask the son and heir to turn out his pockets, from which fluttered the pawnbroker’s tickets. Some wise owners identified their silver with the words ‘stolen from . . .’ and the name of the house stamped on each piece. It was also possible to threaten the pawnbroker with an action for illegal dealing with underage clients, but pawn-broking was a cunning profession and crooked dealers knew a butler was often reluctant to pursue the matter for fear that a forged pawn ticket might be produced with his own name written on it by the pawnbroker himself.

  Butlers and other ‘upstairs’ servants were expected to pretend not to notice inappropriate high jinks, and were advised to have neither eyes, nor ears nor understanding for anything an employer might wish to conceal from them. ‘There is nothing will sooner make you feared distrusted and ruined,’ Eric commented wisely. He frequently stumbled upon sights ‘not fit for curates’, but was expected to forget the married lady taking a bath in an unmarried gentleman’s room, and the couple he surprised behind the study sofa. ‘Every day there is evidence’, he noted in his diary with some satisfaction, ‘of anyone’s wife but his own. And anyone’s husband but their own.’

  But maintaining the strictest discretion proved impossible for some, especially where a cash reward for spilt beans was involved. Lady Colin Campbell’s distress during the divorce proceedings against her was compounded by the fact that several of her senior servants appeared as chief witnesses for her husband, their through-the-keyhole evidence providing invaluable material for his case against her. There were indications that servants were no longer content to accept bad treatment from their employers as a return for loyal silence: they wanted to get their own back. George Cornwallis-West’s butler once admitted to him that the greatest amusement a servant could hope for was the piecing together of torn-up letters retrieved from the upstairs waste-paper baskets. ‘Far more entertaining than jigsaw puzzles,’ he confided.

  In the early summer of 1911 a lucrative trade between English private servants and American newspapers was exposed in the pages of The Times. A butler unhappy in his job who had placed an advertisement in the Morning Post seeking a new position was surprised a few weeks later to receive a letter from an American lady journalist offering him tempting sums of money for juicy inside stories about leading members of Society. Her American readers were fascinated, she said, by the goings-on in the English aristocracy, particularly those involving marital upset, financial ruin, or any whiff of illegitimacy. The lady, ‘Harriet’(her full namewas not revealed by The Times, to avoid giving her undeserved publicity), went further, inviting the butler to write her long gossipy letters packed with any anecdotes he could wheedle out of the domestic staff who worked for Lord Howard deWalden, an exuberant peer, Lady Gerard, whowas involved in a delicious slander case, and Mrs George Keppel (former mistress of the late King); she was also interested in stories from well-placed employees at the Turf Club, White’s, Claridges, the Savoy and theWaldorf. ‘Harriet’ promised to pay ‘liberally and settle each month’, on the understanding that the informant was entering into an ongoing arrangement.

  The Times was outraged by the discovery, calling the practice ‘a disgusting invasion of the sanctities of private life’, and a correspondent wrote to the newspaper claiming that it shed ‘a lurid light upon the tastes, ideals, standards of life which flourish in a modern democracy.’A literary agent,Mr Curtis Brown, wrote to The Times to counter this attack on the servant class, revealing that he had been offered some stories gathered by a William Pierrepoint, an American who had set himself up as ‘enquiry Agent to theNobility and Gentry entrusted with confidential enquiries and delicate negotiations all over the world’. Mr Pierrepoint had gathered his material from ‘quite an array of girlfriends in the best of the English County sets’, providing proof that tittle-tattle was likely to seep out from both sides of the baize door. The Evening Standard was more sanguine about the ways of the world, arguing that this sort of ‘kitchen journalism’had gone on for years, and that if dinner-party guests were not so garrulous, the servants standing behind their chairs would not be able to gather material to pass on. Yet another Times contributor quoted Juvenal to demonstrate that human nature had not changed for many centuries: