Longleat, Wiltshire

Illustrations of the month: Servants’ Hall

A good browse in a favourite secondhand bookshop the other day threw up a small surprise. I was attracted by a book cover bearing the title Before the Sunset Fades and an illustration of a group of people standing in front of a tent. The author’s name was The Marchioness of Bath. The fact that the purple colour of the cover had itself faded added poignancy to the effect: surely this was going to be a lament for the country house life that declined in the period between the two World Wars, written by one who could remember the days of glory?

Well, yes, in a way. This small work of 1951 is indeed about the life of the great house in its Edwardian and Georgian heyday, but most of the book is actually about the lives and duties of the servants. In its brief 32 pages, it tells us about the life of the kitchen, the stillroom, the butler’s pantry, and the rest of the below-stairs world. It recalls servants’ balls and shooting parties, the jobs of the coachman and the bothy boy and the ‘tiger’. It illustrates the servants’ hall and the housekeeper’s parlour.

Longleat: The housekeeper in her parlour
The illustrations are by Cecil Beaton. Beaton is best known as a photographer. He started in the 1920s and by the following decade was a key man on Vogue, having a long career in fashion and society photography and in the post-war period he was a bright old thing, still active and influencing a younger generation of photographers including David Bailey. He was also a notable stage designer.

Beaton was not a great draughtsman, but the illustrations he did for the Marchioness’s book are charming and do a good job at evoking a world unknown to most people. I like the rather stern-looking housekeeper in her parlour, in which a riot of Beatonian squiggles evokes the rather fussy patterned carpet and wallpaper, or the economy with which kitchen workers are caught at their task. The book and its illustrations also summon up forgotten rituals, such as the ceremonial removal of the joint of meat from the servants’ hall after everyone had taken their fill – a procession headed by the steward’s room footman, followed by the ‘upper servants’.

For an upper-class author to dwell on the work of her servants in this way was quite unusual in 1951, even if the overall tone is one of nostalgia – something, the author says, that was shared by the staff themselves – for the allegedly ‘good old days’. She only occasionally allows a note of regret that the servants’ lives weren’t better, noting for example how arduous was the work of the housemaids who were constantly carrying hot water jugs to bedrooms and moving heavy hip-baths around the place. But to write about this at all was unusual. It was decades before the National Trust began to devote the effort they do now to displaying below-stairs areas in country houses and explaining the lives of the staff in kitchen, pantry, and garden. It’s interesting to see the Marchioness and her illustrator doing this just six years after the end of the war.

Longleat: the kitchen

Horningsham, Wiltshire

Discreet meeting place

Strung out along a valley in Wiltshire, Horningsham is a straggling village belonging to the estate of Longleat, the 16th-century prodigy house belonging to the Marquis of Bath. Scattered thatched cottages, a pub (the Bath Arms, naturally), and a church sit behind hedges, down slopes, and across greens. There is a backdrop of woods and parkland and a pervasive feeling that the great house cannot be far away. And down one lane is this building, which may be England’s oldest nonconformist chapel.

The traditional story is that the Congregational Chapel or meeting house at Horningsham was built in 1566 for Scottish workers who were building the great house. Its sweeping thatched roof and unassuming design certainly look as if they belong to a building from the earliest era of religious dissent, when places of worship had a domestic appearance, because dissenting groups spurned the decoration and imagery of Catholic churches, were persecuted and so had to be discreet about their religious observance – and anyway mostly lacked the money for an elaborate church.

There seems to be no documentary evidence that the chapel actually dates back to 1566 and the story of its origins has been questioned. But there are plenty of references to people worshipping here by the end of the 17th century, by which time the chapel was clearly well established. Some of the worshippers were coming from neighbouring towns and villages. And still they come. Whatever the building’s exact age, it is certainly one of the oldest nonconformist chapels still in use and, in both its setting and simple construction, one of the most attractive too.