The irrepressible Eric Horne, who published his memoir ‘What the Butler Winked At’ in 1923, witnessed the height of the country house under Queen Victoria and Edward VII, and its decline after the war.

They offer insight into country houses and the people who lived there (both in the attics and the masters’ bedrooms), giving a voice to a class that was largely silent, appearing in literature only when convenient for upper-class authors. The cannon of memoirs is small enough that students of the country house can be familiar with them all: their authors line my desk like an advisory board –William Lancely, Eric Horne, and Ernest King, Rosina Harrison and Jean Rennie, Mollie Moran, John James, Charles Cooper, Frederick Gorst– quite often they knew more about the houses than the people who employed them. “Cliveden, where Rosina Harrison worked for Lady Nancy Astor.” My personal favourite is The Housekeeper’s Tale, by Tessa Boase (2014), in which she avoids the conventional career trajectory of the housekeeper, and describes five cases where human error or unhappy circumstances sent things pear-shaped. Social historians like Lucy Lethbridge, Tessa Boase, Catherine Bailey and Pamela Sambrook, Jeremy Musson and Jill Franklin draw on these memoirs to recreate the upstairs-downstairs world of the country house. There are a few who preceded this movement: William Lancely, who wrote one of the earlier memoirs, just missed out on the Elementary Education Act, and ‘was educated under an old-fashioned schoolmaster, before the year 1870, when it was considered that if a boy could read, write and cast accounts fairly accurately, he wanted no more.’ William did want more, and educated himself in the houses of his employers.Įnormously influential, servants’ memoirs have informed popular social histories about life in the great house at the turn of the century. Servant’s memoirs only began to make an appearance after the first batch of children, educated under the new system, retired from their long and varied careers in service, and turned their hand to autobiography. Although frequently written between the wars, (some as late as the 50s and 60s) these recollections often span the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and are a direct result of Gladstone’s education reforms in the 1870s. ‘William Lancely,’ from William Lancely, From Hall-Boy to House-Steward, dustcover.Įnter, the Servant’s Memoir.

Over a Hot Stove by Flo Wadlow