How much did the 'Downton Abbey'-era upper class rely on servants?

Lucy Lethbridge, author of “Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times," joined Antonio Mora on the Jan. 6, 2014 edition of Consider This. 

The following transcript has been edited.

Antonio Mora: How close is “Downton Abbey” to real life? Let’s start with the servants. At a big estate like Downton, the real-life Highclere [Castle], there would have been a lot more servants in a huge estate.

Lucy Lethbridge: Yes, I think that for the purposes of drama, it’s necessary to cut the cast down a bit, because otherwise we’d be very confused. There’d by at least eight housemaids, and there’d be far more, much younger servants learning on the job. But I think it’s necessary to keep the narrative tight, that you keep the number down a bit.

Mora: Is the relationship between the masters and the servants accurate? I’m sure it varies from household to household, but here there are times [where] there’s a friendship and other times there’s big distance.

Lethbridge: Well, I think that that is very characteristic of this very mysterious relationship. I think when the home is the workplace, then all sorts of rather set rules that apply in the contract, if you work in a factory or in a big institution, don’t apply when you work in someone’s home, or indeed if you have someone working in your home. And especially in the case of those [old] Edwardian households, if you actually have [servants] living with you. And I think that makes everything very different. And of course that intimacy can be abused, but it can also be very wonderful. And so, at every turn, the relationship was dependent on the types of people involved in that particular family.

Mora: In Downton, you see the real clear hierarchy among the servants. You see the butler, who, when he stands up from the table, everybody else must rise for. And you mention that there would be many young servants in a big household like that. Some of the servants actually had servants themselves.

Lethbridge: Well that’s right, the upper servants. I mean, that’s something that in fact we don’t have in "Downton Abbey" — which I think would have been the case in a large household like that — is that much younger servants learned their skills by waiting on the older servants. So Mrs. Hughes [the housekeeper] and [Mr. Carson] the butler would have had young girls or even young boys — there’s not a hall boy at Downton, but there possibly would have been — learning on the job, so that the young girl would have been taking Mrs. Hughes her breakfast. Rather, [at Downton], Daisy, the kitchen maid, is learning to cook from Mrs. Patmore [the cook].

Mora: Now, "Downton Abbey" is a massive hit. Why do you think people are so fascinated by it?

Lethbridge: Well, this is a question I’ve asked myself many times, and I don’t really know the answer. Um, I mean, it’s not new for us to find fascinating this kind of setup. You know, “Upstairs, Downstairs” is one of the biggest hits in television worldwide. It came out in the early ’70s. I think it makes fabulous drama. I think that the relationship between upstairs and downstairs is one that is so fraught with lots of very interesting tensions. And I think it tells us something of our history. It’s a world that seems both familiar to us and completely alien. And it’s a world in which you can take sides. One feels, one feels a great sense of allegiance, I think, particularly for the servants downstairs. Because in many ways I think, especially in Downton, they do exemplify a changing world. You can see how their own — the old deferences which once they took for granted — they're beginning to chafe against and that, I think, is very typical.

Mora: And servants were a major part of the workforce in Britain at the turn of the [20th] century. More than a third of women employed at the time worked in domestic service. And some have argued that at that point in British history, you were either a servant or you had servants.

Lethbridge: Yes indeed, I mean, the famous Rowntree report on poverty in 1900 drew the line between the poor and the very poor as being a line which was marked by people who didn’t have servants. So the people who didn’t have servants were the very poor, and of course that wouldn’t have been servants, naturally, in the kind of “uniformed maid” sense, that we’re talking about actually, just paid domestic help. So it might be a child who comes in to look after your child while you go off to work in a factory. But it was considered, it is a sort of outsourcing of labor. It was considered the big divider between poverty and extreme poverty.

Mora: And you have some incredible examples of just, you know, with all these servants, how it would take eight people to serve a glass of milk and a biscuit. And you bring up an example of George Curzon, a very powerful British lord. Some of these lords just didn’t know how to do the most basic things, and you have an incredible anecdote about a window?

Lethbridge: Well yes, Lord Curzon, there’s a very interesting story. He was considered to be the finest brain in Britain. I mean, he was considered, his brilliance and intellectual brilliance were renowned all over the empire, and he was in fact viceroy of India. And he was famous both for intellect and for snobbery. And he was staying in a country house one weekend and waking up in the middle of the night and wanting to open the window, but the servants being all asleep, he simply didn’t know how to do it. And he picked up a log from the grate and smashed it. And I think that was one of the most extraordinary things about my research, was the discovery of how totally lacking in practical skills and how inept were many members of the upper classes who had everything done for them. In fact, that is highlighted by the American heiresses who came over and married into the British aristocracy at the turn of the last century and often left accounts of how amazed they were by the uselessness of their husbands. How they would ring for a footman to walk down long, cold corridors and nudge the log in the fire rather than pick up the fire tongs that were three inches away and do it themselves. And that’s not necessarily because they disdained doing it, but because it never occurred to them that they might be able to, I think.

Mora: And heiresses that in many cases helped finance these huge estates at the time, including one that had financed Highclere, the estate that is involved in "Downton Abbey." One final question for you: How much of this exists today? There’s different numbers out there. Some say that domestics in Britain have dropped dramatically after World War II. Others say that there’s been a resurgence. But the kind of thing that we see in Downton, is that something that you only see in a Buckingham Palace now?

Lethbridge: I don’t think the world of Downton has completely died, because I think anyone who’s lucky enough to stay in a really, really grand hotel will probably see something like the oiled wheels of an extraordinarily efficient Edwardian country house. That will be the last place you will find it now. But there is still a demand for that kind of old-fashioned servant, the “Carson [the butler],” the “O’Brien the lady’s maid." I mean, nowadays they might be called “household manager” or “wardrobe manager,” which used to be the “lady’s maid.” And it will be a very, very, very tiny percentage of the very super rich who will employ them. But if you are minded to do that kind of work, at that sort of level, there’s a great deal of money in it. There’s a great deal of travel. There are jobs available in Russia, in China, wherever the very rich are. And [they are] jobs that require a great deal of management skill. 

Do you watch "Downton Abbey"? What do you think about the program? Would you have wanted to have been a servant in this era? Join the conversation in the comments below.