Bridget Holmes, the “necessary woman”, scrubbed royal chamber pots through the reign of five Stuart monarchs. As “keeper of ice and snow” at Hampton Court Palace, Frances Talbot hewed great blocks of ice with a 6ft-long saw so palace guests could enjoy fancy iced desserts and chilled champagne through the summer of 1775.
And William Hester, a Kensington Palace rat-killer in the 1690s, chased vermin in a crimson and blue coat embroidered with depictions of wheat sheaves and rats.
Traditionally, exhibits at historic properties focus on the lives, loves and accrued material goods of the aristocrats who owned these properties and whose portraits hang in gilt frames on the walls.
Meanwhile, the identities and daily lives of the many men, women and children who kept these grand households’ brasses shined, dinners served and bedpans emptied have remained obscure.
Now exhibitions at grand houses are training a spotlight on life below stairs. Untold Lives, which runs until 27 October at Kensington Palace, explores the lives and occupations of generations of rat-catchers, pages, wet nurses and seamstresses at the royal palaces.
“We see objects such as Talbot’s 6ft ice saw and the rather elegant cushioned box toilet cleaned by Bridget Holmes and we get a sense of the hard physical labour as well as the extraordinary skills that went into the continuity of the royal household,” said Mishka Sinha, curator for inclusive history at the charity Historic Royal Palaces and co-curator of the exhibition.
Visitors are drawn to the stories of workers at the palaces, Sinha said, “because their lives feel closer to our own”.
In July, a photography exhibition in London, The History of the British Nanny, will explore their role, from starched royal nannies to wartime nursery workers in the blitz.
Meanwhile, the National Trust’s Life Below Stairs project illuminates the working conditions of servants at a growing number of properties across the trust’s estate.
They include Uppark in West Sussex, where dairymaid Mary Ann Bullock married the elderly Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh in 1825; Cragside in Northumberland, where the servants of Victorian inventor William Armstrong gamely embraced novel labour-saving gadgets, including a hydraulic lift and an early gas stove and dishwasher; and the Blickling estate in Norfolk, where Flo Wadlow, who began her working life as kitchen maid in the 1930s, rose to become a celebrated chef.
One of the trust’s most visited properties, Erddig in north Wales, features a servants’ hall and corridor decorated with photographs, sketches and poems commemorating the Yorke family’s generations of servants.
Elsewhere, properties are expanding their archives. Chatsworth’s servants and staff database, a collaboration with Sheffield University PhD students, is a rich trove of source material on the hundreds of servants who have worked on this Derbyshire Dales country estate since the 1700s.
These include keeper of the wine cellars Reinhard Kulbach, who accompanied William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, on his travels abroad and “fell in the sea on the journey to Capri during a storm”, but was later dismissed for keeping “a house of prostitutes in Berkeley Square’’.
There was also Ellis Mellor, who in 1739 was “paid for killing moles”; accounts of “grumpy” German governess Fraulein von Bloem; and Elizabeth Bickell, who came into the house as a temporary maid for the 1843 visit of Queen Victoria and was later noted for managing “an outbreak of typhus among the housemaids’’ and “praised for her ability to generate money from tourists”.
US-based modern British historian Stephanie Barczewski, author of How the Country House Became English, said servants’ social history was a money-spinner for British stately homes as early as the 1970s.
“Domestic service was a huge employment category in Britain up until the interwar period,” she said. “So tourists might remember: ‘Oh, my grandmother was in service at Blenheim Palace,’ or something like that, and it made them curious.”
“Domestic servant” was the second most common occupation recorded in the 1851 UK census (after agricultural labourer). In 1881, it took the top spot, with a servant population of 1,237,149
Lucy Lethbridge, author of Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, said our cultural view of this class of worker is always mediated through the present. The Victorians, who invented the “ostentatiously servanted household” in which everyone knew their station, were “themselves reacting to a period of intense and discombobulating social change”.
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In the 1970s, prewar servants’ memoirs, such as former kitchen maid Margaret Powell’s bestsellers, were popular, and there was a burst of nostalgia for the days of the Edwardian country house (including the TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs, on which Powell was the consultant). “I think in periods of global anxiety we become nostalgic for eras in which we imagine a prescribed social order and happy codependence seems to prevail,” said Lethbridge.
The 1980s to the 00s saw darker critiques of servant-master dynamics such as 2001’s Gosford Park, in which valet Robert Parks thrashes against his lowly station and the squire, Sir William McCordle, seduces and rapes hisstaff.
In the 1993 Merchant Ivory adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, butler Mr Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) and housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) express the conflict between servile obedience and individual agency in their service to Lord Darlington, a first world war veteran who becomes an appeaser for Nazism.
With Downton Abbey and Bridgerton, Lethbridge notes a reversion to more honeyed depictions of dutiful servitude, while at the same time we are fascinated by the power imbalances in master-servant relations. This, she said, risks flattening historical lives into caricatures: eccentric and whimsical employers, or servants who blindly doffed their caps.
Barczewski said that the current crop of undergraduate students – generation Zs raised on Downton Abbey – write essays in which servants are imagined “living happy lives in a paternalistic world freed from the stresses of modern life”. She added: “I gently set them straight.”
Commercial genealogy websites have also improved our access to details on servants’ lives, including Findmypast.com’s searchable database of royal household employment records, and the British Newspaper Archive, where you can find situation postings for servants as well as newspaper correspondence pages on which servants air grievances about overwork and mistreatment.
Despite this, records of a specific working-class life can be sparse at best, according to Untold Lives co-curator Sinha. The exhibition leans heavily on the tools of servants’ trades and on uniforms such as the modest orange and cream pinafore of Ann Elizabeth Thielcke, a German wardrobe woman assigned to dress Queen Charlotte in her lace dresses and elaborate coiled headpieces in 1786.
Amateur genealogist Faith Moulin, 74, who is based in Somerset, has discovered a long line of domestic servants in her family history, including a footman at the Longleat estate in Wiltshire and a coachman to Lord Coleridge, who records recount as having “died lifting a dead horse”.
Most moving were the accounts of her great-aunt Min, who died before Moulin was born, but whose Limoges porcelains and postcard collection she inherited. Min’s life took her from a childhood in the workhouse to employment as a lady’s maid at a vicarage and as lady’s companion to the daughter of the Ashley Dodd family of Godinton House in Kent, with whom she took a grand tour of Europe in 1901.
Moulin has since stayed in tourist apartments at Godinton House, where she climbed the grand staircase Min would have climbed in her working day. “It was all very emotional, though I don’t think hers was an easy life.”
Sinha, whose academic work focuses on the history of empire and orientalism, said there has been a wave of inquiry into the lives of overlooked and underrepresented people, including the black servants employed by grand houses to signal their worldly refinement in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“It’s exciting that more institutions are talking about these important human histories,” she said.Despite the fresh onus on servants’ lived experience, Hills thinks we should be wary about romanticising their lot. “Imagine for a moment being a maid, aged 14, sleeping in a corner of the kitchen and never being able to leave your place of work for your own home,” shesaid. “It’s pretty heartbreaking, isn’t it?”