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

Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

Smoke-filled rooms

Today many people would say that the most important room in their house was the kitchen – the place where food is cooked and, often, eaten; where the family gathers; where it is always warm. For many, the kitchen is the social centre and heart of the house. In some houses it’s an economic centre, too – I’ve known business people who hold meetings in their kitchens, and a farmhouse kitchen can be the chosen meeting place for the farmer’s family, the farm workers – and often anyone who happens to be passing.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to discover that many medieval houses didn’t have a kitchen as such. Outside the grandest of houses (and specialized buildings such as monasteries and colleges), most people lived in one, all-purpose room. This open space, known as the hall, was kitchen, dining room, office, workroom, and bedroom rolled into one. There was a central hearth for heating and cooking, and trestle tables at which to eat. Come night-time, the tables were taken down or pushed aside, and people lay down to sleep on mattresses on the floor. More prosperous households managed a private room (the solar) for the head of the household and his wife, but much of the life of the household still revolved around the communal hall.

With its central hearth, the medieval hall was the archetypal smoke-filled room – there was no chimney so the smoke from the fire had to find its way through a hole in the roof high above everyone’s heads. People seem to have got used to the smoke, no doubt learning to control it by opening and closing the room’s doors to create the right kind of draught.

In a few houses, where food was produced on a large scale, there was another smoke-filled room, a separate kitchen reserved just for cooking. These dedicated kitchens were not very common, and few survive today. This is the one at the manor house at Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, and it probably survives because the family decamped for another village in the 18th century, demolishing much of their old house but leaving some of it in place but unmodernized.

The kitchen was probably first built in the 14th century, and reroofed and given new windows in the 15th. Inside, fires were made against one wall, where spits turned to roast meat; there are also three ovens. As with the more common medieval halls, there was no chimney – the smoke rose to the ceiling where it exited through holes beneath the roof. Above all this is a cat’s cradle of timbers supporting the octagonal pointed roof, the whole thing topped off with a griffin made of lead.

The servants at Stanton Harcourt no doubt got used to the smoke, but it surprised one famous guest, the poet Alexander Pope, who stayed at Stanton Harcourt in 1717–18 while translating the Iliad. With Classical mythology very much on his mind, Pope compared the kitchen to Vulcan’s forge or the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. A dark cave of creation, then, closer to Homer’s world than Pope’s, and miraculously preserved into our own.