The Real Life Downton Abbey (14 page)

H
ere we are in an idyllic setting, a vast house in the peace and tranquillity of the countryside. But is the perfection of the landscape matched by the warmth of the day-to-day relationships of the people living inside? Do they get on? Are they close? Are there strong bonds and friendships?

Hopefully, there are sometimes. By our twenty-first century standards, these relationships are difficult to fathom: servants with no real life of their own constantly running hither and thither at their master’s whim; wealthy landowners whose lives are dominated by matters of inheritance – yet who see very little of their children; mothers who relinquish the
baby-bonding
process to hired help; relatives whose primary concern is rank, political manoeuvring, or marrying off their heirs into equally rich families.

We are in an odd world of marriage negotiations for fat dowries, entertainment on a grand scale mainly for social position, servants who are snobs because they earn their living by a strange mixture of deference and ordering other servants about. Are there any normal, everyday human relationships in such a world? Let’s look more closely at some of these.

The fictional
Downton Abbey
marriage is one of many similar ‘arrangements’ of the times – it starts out as a ‘cash for title’ deal: rich and beautiful young American girl marries Earl who really needs her money to swell his dwindling resources.

Yet the relationship develops. Gradually they grow close – and loving. So much so that the Countess of Grantham conceives – and loses – a male heir after their three daughters have grown up. With this as an example, it seems that Edwardian aristocratic marriages might be similar to all marriages – some work, some don’t.

But that isn’t quite the case. Not all aristocratic marriages are cold, sterile, unhappy affairs: marrying for love isn’t completely unknown. And, like the Granthams, some marriages begin as a trade-off for cash and status, yet they do work over time, though quite often, unlike the Granthams, they wind up as friends rather than lovers.

However, a lot of these ‘arranged’ marriages, or marriages of convenience, do not work at all when the main objective is money and inheritance rather than love and desire. Once the woman has fulfilled her part of the deal – by producing ‘the heir and the spare’ – there’s often an end to any physical relationship. Separate bedrooms are common. Affluence and privilege mean that these couples don’t need to retain any personal intimacy with each other if they prefer a ‘hands-off’ relationship after children are born. The focus of their world, remember, is not on romantic love – it’s on the clearly defined rules and role-playing which dictate practically every minute of their lives. And, of course, inheritance.

Rich as she may be, the aristocratic wife cannot have an independent role outside the boundaries of the rules, other than as a kind of superior manager of the household. Apart from this, she can only involve herself in charitable concerns. She may be important but hers is a fairly restricted job description.

Essentially, she is close to what we’d call a Trophy Wife. She is required to be attractive, dress beautifully in the very latest styles and look fashionably alluring at all times – a living reflection of the wealth and influence of her husband. She can be intelligent – but she can’t be too clever. In some ways, she is very much akin to her children in the nursery – seen at set times but not heard too much. Conversationally, on a social level, she is expected to make witty, light conversation. But nothing too deep.

If she doesn’t have great interest in the day-to-day running of the household, she can, if she chooses, leave much of it to the housekeeper. And if she is politically minded, interested in women’s rights and drawn to such worldly matters, she may, if she is bold enough, involve herself with such things – but only up to a point because she’s probably going against her husband’s wishes, so needs a strong will to do so. Her status as part of a power couple is more important than anything else.

The rules of the aristocratic marriage mean that the couple are rarely in each other’s company anyway. They dine together at home and when they entertain. They accompany each other to all the big events of the Season, the parties, balls and concerts where they are obliged to be seen together – as well as the local events like the fund-raising fêtes. But that’s it. When at home in the country, most of their time is spent apart – he in his study or on the estate, tending to his affairs, she paying courtesy calls to friends or relatives or visiting the poor (in between those lengthy sessions with her lady’s maid as she changes her outfit and hairdo several times each day). And when the social clique moves to London, through the summer, her husband will frequently spend a great deal of time at his club of choice, maybe the Carlton or White’s or, if he’s a working MP, at the Houses of Parliament. In so many ways, theirs is a marriage in name only.

So is there a get-out clause? Unfortunately, divorce is not really on the agenda. Despite their fabulous wealth and luxury surroundings, a divorced woman, middle class or aristocratic, faces a problem: her valuable social status vanishes if she’s no longer officially part of a couple. Everyone, including her family, rejects her.

So how, you wonder, do such unhappy or loveless aristocratic marriages continue to survive?

There are a couple of reasons – aside from the very restricted status of all women at the time. In the world they live in, constantly surrounded by servants, a ‘private’ life for anyone seeking extra-marital dalliance is somewhat difficult to maintain. You need your peer group to turn a blind eye and maybe servants whom you hope you can trust (not a very reliable premise). And so when either he or she seeks some sort of romantic or sexual satisfaction in their lives, it’s unofficially yet widely accepted among their chums that society will politely turn away from openly criticising any infidelities.

The other thing that holds the whole thing together, of course, is the very nature of their lifestyles. Because of the way they live, together but apart, provided they fulfil their many social obligations as a couple, the ‘You live your life, I live mine’ deal is something many can live with. Yet again, as with the rest of their lives, only appearance matters.

Though there are exceptions, in many aristocratic households the parent-child relationship is emotionally distant and very much hands off: child rearing does not feature in the duties of an aristocratic woman – the servants, nurses, tutors, nannies and governesses fulfill most of that role. As tiny tots, a set time of day is set aside for the children to be brought down from the nursery to see their parents, usually around 4pm or after dinner and, once a son reaches eleven, sometimes sooner, he is packed off to boarding school while his sisters remain at home to be educated by a governess or tutor.

Yet if the aristocratic wife is a hands-off mum for much of the time, her partner, preoccupied as he is with his estate, his politics or his outdoor pursuits, is frequently even more remote from his children: the ‘Distant Dad’ is the kindest way to describe him, an unknown and often unseen authority figure. Some high-born mothers do develop a closer rapport with their children, over time. But essentially, the younger parenting years are left to the hired help.

But there is sometimes one loving and caring relationship in all this: the children’s nanny. Though there are exceptions – nannies whose demeanour is cold, even ferocious – a good nanny is likely to form a close bond with the aristocratic children in their charge: a source of love and support that many children, semi-ignored in this bewildering world of appearance and convention, treasure and cherish, even cling to, as they grow up. And the children, of course, are the only people in the big country house who might sometimes climb downstairs, so they can have some sort of familial relationship with those below stairs.

Nanny is often valued. In some country houses with big families, she is kept on as an employee in the house, with different duties, even when the children have grown up. She is, effectively, a surrogate mum. And often a good one at that. Yet her status remains fixed: she may be loved, even adored by ‘her’ children, someone to cuddle and nurture them at all times, someone to guide them, to trust and confide in. But she’s still a servant.

Even her earnings don’t reflect her true value to the family: she usually earns less than the housekeeper. Or the chef. It’s an odd world, for while good behaviour and manners are high on the list of the privileged person’s rules, the emotional wellbeing of their children, as we understand it, isn’t really a priority.

As siblings, of course, the children sometimes form close relationships with each other, particularly in the nursery years before the boys are packed off to boarding school. Some form lifetime bonds. Others are quite detached in their relationships with each other. The regimented nature of their existence and the huge distinction between the sexes, where only the boys really ‘matter’ in the aristocratic world, can create resentments as they grow older. Many younger aristocratic women are already rejecting the limitations of a world where only the ‘right’ marriage and having sons matters: at the turn of the century (in 1900) a third of all peers’ daughters remain single.

So there it is, relationships, Toff style: husbands and wives leading separate lives, children nurtured by surrogates, only siblings sometimes forming closeness with each other. Is the master-servant relationship any different?

While some aristocratic wives have a good relationship with their housekeepers and rely on them heavily, it is the lady’s maid who ventures the closest to what we’d call a close relationship with her boss, partly because of the nature of her work, and also because women, by instinct, have a greater tendency to confide in each other.

At times, a lady’s maid might be her mistress’s confidante. The lady of the house will correspond with friends and relatives of equal status and share her concerns or thoughts with them but on a daily basis, the lady’s maid is the person with whom she chats and discusses her concerns about her children, her husband, her worries big and small.

Occasionally, a lady’s maid will know more than anyone else in the house – even the master – about the woman she serves because if she’s really trusted, she’ll hear quite a lot about her boss’s secrets – and what is going on generally within the family. In turn, her mistress will sometimes ask her maid for her views, though it’s more likely to be her opinions on the latest fashion or the nicest hat to buy than anything else.

If the lady’s marriage is a sexless arrangement and she is tempted towards or indulging in other liaisons or flirtations, the lady’s maid may possibly be aware. (Just as if her boss is pregnant, she’ll be the first to know, since she washes all her undergarments.) The lady’s maid performs so many personal tasks, washing and arranging her boss’s hair, running her bath, helping her dress, travelling with her, that she’s privy to a great deal of information. She’s more than a PA, but a shade less than a chum.

This puts her in a very odd position because the boundaries of deference are always there, day in, day out. If she repeats what she hears, she risks her job should she be found out. And yet there’s a good chance that she won’t. Sometimes it’s quite easy for a gossipy lady’s maid to repeat the things she’s been told to someone downstairs, and for the gossip to then be passed on, by other staff, to people outside, like tradesmen. Then the gossip and the stories will go beyond the house, right across the county, a local version of email or Facebook, if you like. And because the toffs’ world of rules is so regimented, quite often they’re unaware that this is actually happening: many don’t even regard their servants as human beings, even though their etiquette always warns them: ‘servants have eyes and ears to wag downstairs’.

More enlightened families, of course, don’t see their servants as inhuman (again, the Granthams are sometimes good role models for how to treat your servants), but many view servants as little more than robots. And so a dinner-table conversation where butlers or footmen must stand, outwardly impassive, yet with ears flapping, taking in every word, all too often winds up as good fodder for downstairs gossip to spread beyond the estate. So a nosy servant who loves to gossip – and relishes the little bit of ‘power’ this gives them – may seem to risk much. But they know the chances are high their bosses will never know what is being said about them. The real downstairs currency isn’t cash – it’s gossip about other people living in the house.

Gossip aside, many loyal and trustworthy upper servants remain proud of their hard work and their relationship by association with their bosses, especially butlers or valets whose loyalty and feelings for their masters can often be strong, especially if they are valued.

Even after they leave the job, some upper servants will keep in touch by letter. But the uppers are the servants with staying power, sometimes working with a family for many years, giving them more opportunity to develop closer links with their employers. But even with this ‘insider’ access to their employer’s lives, they must always, at all times, stay on their side of the line; even after years of service, they can’t start a conversation or initiate a topic for discussion. They still have to wait to be asked.

Generally speaking, the lower servants, some footmen, kitchen staff and housemaids, don’t form any relationship of any description with their masters. They don’t have face-to-face dealings with them as such; many don’t stay in their posts for any length of time, often opting to move around from job to job. Many young women take a position in a big household for opportunistic reasons – because they know it will teach them the household duties and skills they need for marriage. Then, once they find a marriage partner, they’re gone. Many footmen don’t see it as a job for life either, given the restrictions.