Pamela Sambrook - Country House Servant

These are selected interiors from National Trust properties in the United Kingdom and are open to the public during normal open times. For a fuller list, including NT interiors not open to the public, see Hardyment, Behind the Scenes, pp. 2413.

The Argory, County Armagh late nineteenth-century wet and dry laundries, dressing-rooms.

Beningbrough Hall, North Yorkshire Victorian wet and dry laundries, box-mangle.

Berrington Hall, Hereford and Worcester Victorian laundry, drying closet, walled drying ground.

Castle Ward, County Down Victorian wet and dry laundry, dressing-rooms.

Castle Drogo, Devon 1927 butlers pantry, bathroom.

Charlecote Park, Warwickshire laundry coppers

Cragside House, Nortumberland 1860s butlers pantry, electric dinner gong.

Dunham Massey, Cheshire wet and dry laundries, mangle room with box mangle, butlers pantry, housemaids closet, refurbished in Edwardian period.

Erdigg, Wrexham wet and dry laundries, drying closet, box mangle, servants bedroom, bathroom.

Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk nineteenth-century dressing-room.

Hill of Tarvit, Fife Edwardian wet and dry laundries, drying closet and box mangle, dressing-room, bathroom.

Killerton, Devon Victorian wet and dry laundries, drying closet, box mangle.

Kingston Lacy, Dorset nineteenth-century wet and dry laundries, drying closet, box mangle, loft.

Knole, Kent seventeenth-century dressing-room.

Lanhydrock, Cornwall late nineteenth-century livery room, linen lobby, housemaids sluice room, dressing-room, bathroom, servants bedroom.

Ormesby Hall, Middlesbrough wet scrub and dry laundry, box mangle.

Shugborough, Staffordshire Victorian wet and dry laundries, box mangle.

Speke Hall, Merseyside Edwardian bathroom.

Tatton Park, Cheshire nineteenth-century butlers pantry, basement railway, linen room, dressing room.

Uppark, West Sussex butlers pantry reconstructed to its 1874 condition, lamproom, 1880s90s.

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated

NB the laundries at Berwick Hall and Powis Castle are

NOT open to the public.

. For examples of servant autobiographies see bibliography. A book based on reminiscences is Frank Victor Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants: a True Portrait of Upstairs, Downstairs Life, (first published in 1973, Century in association with the National Trust, 1989).

. For example, Christina Hardyment, Behind the Scenes: Domestic Arrangements in Historic Houses (National Trust, 1997), previously published as Home Comforts: a history of Domestic Arrangements (Viking in association with the National Trust, 1992).

. For example, Adeline Hartcup, Below Stairs in the Great Country Houses (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980).

. For example, Merlin Waterson, The Servants Hall: a Domestic History of Erddig (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980; new edition published by National Trust, 1990; reprinted by the National Trust in 1990).

. Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (first published 1975, Stroud, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1986); more recent and with a comprehensive book list is Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 18151914 (Oxford, Blackwells, 1994).

. Others have noted the lack of emphasis on work; see Edward Higgs, Domestic Servants and Households in Victorian England, in Social History, vol. 8, 2 (May, 1993), 201.

. In a context wider than the country house, the components of work, technology, gender and status are the subject of a large academic research base within the historical studies of gender and the consumption of goods. A place to begin is John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (Routledge, 1993).

. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 16601760 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 89; see also Lorna Weatherill, The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England in Brewer and Porter, Consumption, pp. 20627

. Brewer and Porter, Consumption, p. 2.

. See instead Una Robertson, The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 16501950, (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1997); Christina Hardyment, Mangle to Microwave (Oxford, Polity Press, 1989); Caroline Davidson, A Womans Work is Never Done: a history of Housework in the British Isles, 16501950 (Chatto & Windus, 1982 and 1986).

. For discussion of rationality in housework see Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Oxford, Polity Press, 1995), pp. 73102.

. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour.

. Amanda Vickery, Women and the World of Goods: a Lancashire consumer and her possessions, 175181 in Brewer and Porter, Consumption, pp. 274301.

. Brewer and Porter, Consumption, p. 5.

. For discussion on the tension between profligacy and parsimony see Davidoff, Worlds Between, p. 91.

. Helen Morris, Portrait of a Chef: the Life of Alexis Soyer, sometime Chef of the Reform Club (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 345.

. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: the Ironies of household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, Basic Books, 1983).

. Davidoff, Worlds Between, p. 74.

. For functioning of the noble medieval household see Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 12501600; Good Governance and Political Rule (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988).

. Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Oxford, Polity Press, 1991); see studies in Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover (eds), Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Taylor & Francis, 1995).

. Davidoff, Worlds Between.

. Weatherill, Meaning of Consumer Behaviour, p. 214.

. Higgs, Domestic Servants and Households, p. 202.

. Leonore Davidoff, Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England, Journal of Social History, vol. VIII, 4 (1974), 413. This paper was reprinted in Davidoff, Worlds Between, pp. 1840.

. Claire Seymour, Indoor Domestic Servants under the Age of Fifteen in England and Wales, 18501914 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, 1991).

. Jessica Gerard, Invisible Servants: the Country House and the Local Community, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984); Gerard, Country House Life.

Suppliers to the Country House in Pamela Sambrook and Peter Brears (eds), The Country House Kitchen, 16501900: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning (Stroud, Sutton Publishing in association with the National Trust, 1996, paperback 1997), pp. 197209.

. SRO, Sutherland MS, D593/R.

. For discussion on working-class autobiography see David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: a study of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography, Europa Publications, 1981.

. SRO, D4177/12, manuscript, A Daily Journal or Memorandum Book by a footman in the service of 2nd Duke of Sutherland, 18389. The diary is attributed in the catalogue simply to Thomas. For commentary on this diary see Kitty Fisher, Life Below Stairs in Staffordshire History, vol. 3 (Autumn, 1985), 12.

. Dorothy Wise, The Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837 (originally published by St Marylebone Society Publications Group, 1962), extracts quoted in John Burnett (ed.),