The Real Life Downton Abbey by Jacky Hyams

clean for 14–16 hours a day.
THE SCULLERY MAID
    The scullery maid is consigned to the kitchen only, the lowest-ranking female servant below the kitchen maids and the cook.
    Her day begins around 4am because she must clean the grates and lay out the fire to heat the water if the cooking is being done on a coal-fired range. She must also dust the kitchen and scullery area before Cook starts work. Then it’s back to the kitchen, for an endless round of washing up all the pots, pans, dishes, plates and cutlery for all the meals of the day. In between washing-up she must set the table for the servants’ meals, wash the vegetables, peel potatoes, rub blocks of cooking salt through a sieve – and constantly make sure the big area in and around the kitchen is as clean as possible. The washing-up is endless – each copper pan used for cooking has to be thoroughly cleaned after use with a mixture of sand, salt, flour and vinegar.
    Ignored by the household, often ridiculed by the upper servants and at the very bottom of the pecking order, the scullery maid has a very raw deal indeed. As raw as the skin on her hands.

    PUG’S PARLOUR
The lower servants deeply resent the uppers and the marked distinction in their status. So they have a nickname for them. They call them ‘Pugs’ (in honour of the upturned nose and downturned mouth of the pug dog, so popular at the time). So the housekeeper’s sitting room, her powerbase, is dubbed ‘The Pug’s Parlour’ – because after meals, the uppers follow each other, in strict order of rank, down the corridor into the housekeeper’s room to eat the final course of pudding or cheese.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Although the butler is always addressed by the family by his surname – Mr Carson in Downton Abbey – the toffs always address their footmen by their first names. Yet the names they use are unlikely to be their footmen’s real names. The names Charles, John or James are used to address these servants, regardless of how they were christened. Better than ‘hey you’. But another way of reminding them that they are mere underlings.
NO CHANCE OF A CUDDLE, THEN?
The toffs insist on segregating the sexes of their servants at all times, even when daily cleaning duties are involved. For instance, a housemaid allocated a specific bedroom to clean must attend to the fireplaces, windows and ledges, sweep the floors and the carpets – and then wait for the dust to settle. Only then can she leave the room. And only then can the footman come in to do his job of polishing the furniture. They are not allowed to be cleaning the same room together – especially a bedroom!

THE LIVE-IN LAUNDRY
By 1911 laundry maids are on the decline because some families now send all laundry out to big commercial laundries. (Some country families send their laundry off to a preferred top people’s laundry in London, because it can be dispatched and returned by rail.) But other country-house owners more resistant to change prefer to continue to launder at home, some with a new, slightly different system: replacing the old in-house laundry with one attached to a small four-bedroom cottage some distance away from the house on the estate. 
The cottage laundry uses traditional laundry methods – there’s still no electricity – and three or four laundry maids live in the cottage, earning £1 a week in board wages, which goes into a kitty and is given to the head laundress, who shares the profit among the girls. Long hours and a hard slog for them – but a slightly more flexible system. And a fraction more independence.
THE BELLS, THE BELLS
The system of summoning servants by wire bell-pull systems installed in the house was originally established in the eighteenth century. Yet many aristocratic households were still using the bell system well into the twentieth century.
     

    A housemaid circa 1900
     

Chapter 4
     

The Rules
     
     
    ‘ T he Rules’ involve everyone working in the big country house. And they