Sat here watching Downton Abbey (of all programmes) and I’ve been thinking, back in the early 1900s, these big houses had lots of servants, footmen, butlers etc.
I mean, we still have the houses and i used to know a woman who was 5th in line to some title. But i wonder how many position have survived through to today?
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Very few, most of those households are financially fucked so can’t afford anything close to that number of household staff.
Outside of a few notable places (like Buckingham Palace), the answer is probably no.
There’s a great documentary called The Fucking Fulfords that shows the sort of genteel poverty some of these people live in.
Looking at Huge Houses with Hugh Dennis, your still-lived-in castle employs a couple cleaners, couple gardeners, at least one maintenance person, and a housekeeper slash event organiser, with cooks etc drafted in for the weddings and parties which are needed to keep the place going.
Super rich people may well have a housekeeper, maid for cleaning, a nanny, cook, a PA etc, but generally live somewhere where all the maintenance is much easier.
There are houses with dozens of servants, but virtually none with hundreds now. I guess Buckingham Palace and maybe one or two other royal places are an exception.
It died out after the war, though had been in decline due to taxation and industrialisation luring workers away. Post WWII, Women had other work options and didn’t need to go into service, and many of the men were dead, injured or, like the women, now drawn to other careers. Large houses couldn’t keep a staff any longer and many were abandoned and fell into disrepair. There were many years of simply pulling them down. It was only around the 70s or 80s that they were considered heritage buildings to be saved.
A small number are still private residences. They might have employees, but they’re not servants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_country_house
People who live in houses like that, generally are pretty cash poor.
The cost of maintaining and heating them is astronomical.
Back in downtowns days, the house owned the entire estate, along with the farms, cottages and often the whole village. All of this paid into the estate and helped fund it.
That’s not the case now. Most of the big estates sold off the villages and lots of land, and even those that didn’t, the system has changed and villages don’t pay in towards the manor house. They still have some tenant farms, but they don’t make a lot.
Most of the big houses have been sold off to developers for swanky apartments or National trust properties.
It’s just not financially viable for pretty much even the richest person to actually live in one.
I employ hundreds of spiders to make sure the house is free of bugs, in turn i do not charge them rent
Not really. Partly for the reasons people have already outlined and partly because a lot of the old jobs that needed doing simply don’t exist now thanks to automation and readily available goods. And even in the “old days”, I think “hundreds” would be unlikely. 30 or 40 for a very grand house maybe – Highclere (where Downton was filmed) apparently had 25 maids, 14 footmen, and 3 chefs on the payroll in 1912.
Closest you’ll probably find now is the big luxury yachts – the larger ones have crews of maybe 50 people covering both running the ship and looking after the guests.
Big houses might well have a housekeeper although I think they are held in a higher level of respect – as an employee not a servent.
Plenty of houses (not as big) might have a regular cleaner and/or nanny these days.
Nobody has mentioned that even if you did want that sort of life and have the money to afford it between vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dishwashers, hedge trimmers, ride on mowers and the like you wouldn’t need anything like as many people.
My neighbour has 3 staff. Cleaner, Dog Walker and Nanny. They live in a 4 bed terrace š¤·āāļø. A lot of people have this kind of āhelpā that donāt live in huge houses. Maybe occasionally a Gardener and Window Cleaner too!
Very very few. More likely to employ tour guides rather than footmen these days
Not so much 100s but some households still use staff. The days of a butler being much like Downton style are not fully gone! Now, it’s more a combined role you find when in employ as such for example organizing day to day events, paying bills, dog selling and so forth.
Some of the very rich probably still do, but it has always been something for the mega rich
It still exists to an extent, but now rather than being the landed gentry it’s Arab sheiks & Russian oligarchs.
Worth remembering that it would likely have been cheaper to have a huge amount of staff back then as they didn’t need to worry about paying staff minimum wage or allowing them holidays etc.
Nope. The closest really you’d get now is the numbers of staff at a country hotel. But they are staff not servants.
To give you an idea why it no longer happens in 1890 a live in “housemaid” (near the bottom of the servants pecking order) would get pay of just Ā£14 a *year*. The purchasing power of that Ā£14 is in today’s money is just Ā£1,400 – that’s your salary for the year! – and she may have worked 12+ hours a day on-call 24h with only part of Sunday off. Even the “head of house” of a large estate managing a staff of more than a hundred would only get Ā£120 a year which is about Ā£12k in today’s money.
So back then it was feasible to employ large numbers as you paid them very little not just in absolute Ā£ terms but also relatively.
Why do you say ‘of all programmes’.
It’s a very good series
They don’t need to. A household wouldn’t need more than a few regular staff at most – a housekeeper and maybe an additional cleaner, a chef, a gardener, a maintenance guy, a nanny, maybe a bodyguard and that’s about it. Even then not all of those staff would necessarily be full time – the gardener might also do maintenance. Other staff would be as needed – you just bring in a tennis coach or violin teacher for a couple of hours a week.
In the 19th century EVERYTHING took manpower. Lighting the fires and lights would take two people HOURS. It’s literally done at the push of a button now.
A lot of middle class ppl hire cleaners. Who are servants by another name.
I was incredibly privileged as a child and grew up in a fully staffed house.
It still happens, just isnāt as common as it used to be.
Yeah, I knew a few families who have housekeepers but I don’t think they’re live-in
Some 20 years or so ago I was doing some temping work and I got talking to one of the other guys. It turned out that he’d worked as a butler in the past, but had stopped doing it because he didn’t enjoy the industry any more. He said that while there were still some jobs available, the nature of the role had changed and that he’d be more likely to be up a ladder fiddling with the guttering than serving food at a banquet.
Some of the duties those staff would have done will now me superseded by technology. Even if you have a full staff, you won’t need them to stoke up a fire in the laundry to boil all your linens, for example. Even if you still like an open fire, you’ve probably got radiators that run off a gas or oil boiler, so you’d only have a fire while you were using a room and not *need* someone to be ferrying buckets of coal around the house before dawn so that you wake up toasty, and you don’t need a bloke living next to your central heating boiler continually stoking coal into it,
well no. Because they dont need too. Technology has got us to a place where machines do the work.
A washing machine does the work of 10 wash maids
A petrol lawn mower/hedge trimmer does the work of 10 gardeners
A car does the work of 4 horses and a carriage, meaning no need for stable hands, footmen.
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For context, our house was built for a victorian business owner and his family who had a live in housekeeper and maid to buy groceries, cook, clean, wash clothes, set fires.
We have click and collect/tesco delivery, a microwave/oven/gas hob, a roomba, washing machine and central heating to do that for us now
You wouldn’t need that many staff nowadays, even for a large country house. Most of the workers can be replaced by machines. No need for a large team of kitchen, cleaning or gardening staff.
Only exception I can think of is the royal palaces, especially Buckingham. But I guess a lot of the staff there don’t see a lot of action unless there is some sort of event going on.
You cant get tax relief against servants, so add the highest tax rate onto their salary.
Yes, most English people have at least 5 servants each.
We once rented a rural Airbnb whose owner had her household staff come and drop things off. I’ve also had a few dealings with some very wealthy folk.
The answer is likely that in an automated age, hundreds of servants are no longer needed or desired. This was different in the old days when you might have a full-timer stoking the kitchen fire, or looking after the horses.
Thus, unless you are literally the king, most folk in this country generally would want a minimum – so housekeeper, au pair, chef, etc, but not loads of staff.
Those people will usually have a maid and/or butler, and possibly a cook and seperate cleaner, but not the same level of servants as before. Its gone out of style.
Its worth noting, though, that back in those days having a presentable house for guests staying was the aboslute priority. It takes a lot less people to take care of a house for four people who live there than it does to make sure the house is constantly ready for a whole hosts of guests, a potential party, possible royalty etc etc on a moments notice. Even now, if they threw a huge party, theyd probably higher caterers/decorators/etc. theres just less expectations now.