The Servants' Story: Managing a Great Country House

by Pamela A. Sambrook

Trentham was the Staffordshire home of the Leveson-Gower family, the Dukes of Sutherland. In the mid-nineteenth century they were said to be the richest non-royal family in Britain. They owned many other country houses and estates, bound to each other by a large and loyal staff. The resulting archive is huge. Combining these records with family history sources, it is possible to reimagine some of the triumphs and tragedies of their servants and who they were, what they did and what happened to them after their time at Trentham ended. With its strict social structure and its sometimes bizarre regulations, the world of Trentham in the 1830s can seem alien to us now, but families are always families, responsibilities can always be burdensome and sorrow is always around the corner. The stories of Trentham’s servants are not just family histories; they reveal experiences and unravel relationships to which we can all relate, and demonstrate how people coped in the face of the immense change to country-house life in the early years of the transition into a modern nation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 16, 2016

About the author

Pamela Sambrook is a freelance lecturer, writer and consultant to the Heritage Industry and is a Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deep dive into the archive of the Dukes of Sutherland covering the management of their midland estates in the nineteenth century, mainly the 1830s, this is an interesting and unexpectedly stressful look at how great estates were actually managed by agents, and the trials and tribulations of the servants, rather than a book about how individual houses were run and servant life on the day to day.

The stresses come because the archive, mainly letters between the chief commissioner (the uber-agent James Loch) and subsidiary land agents, tends to emphasise the crises rather than the every day, and covers everything from career (and life) destroying drunkenness, thefts, pregnancies, just plain incompetence, and even a gay affair between a footman and a groom, with people being fired and evicted and left destitute. Unusually for a book about servants, Sambrook follows up by investigating the immediate descendants of some of the people mentioned (including some of the families who served the Sutherlands for hundreds of years) and it can be a rollercoaster ride of downward mobility - I breathed a sigh of relief every time a family did well for itself.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much the servants in question fought back, delaying their own evictions and pleading their own cases - sometimes unwisely when they were actually being treated kindly (if paternalistically) by the standards of the day. Servant life was incredibly precarious, particularly for single women, and while every happy story of an old retainer being pensioned off is nice to read, it's also a very useful reminder of just how important state pensions and the social safety net are, so that people don't have to rely on the whims, prejudice and kindness of their employers.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had trouble getting into this book, there are a lot of details and statistics which would be more compelling for those doing a study of servants in the UK during the turn of the last century.