Читать книгу The Real Life Downton Abbey - Jacky Hyams - Страница 10

The shift in the power of the aristocratic elite started half a century before in the mid-1800s with the massive industrial revolution of the Victorian era and the early beginnings of what we now know as modern industry and the consumer society.

Until then, the poorest people faced limited employment options other than as agricultural rural workers or in service. But these big changes start, over time, to provide alternative means of employment for large numbers of people in mills, factories, railroads and shops. And eventually, as people begin to have greater mobility to move around – an important factor in the growth of Britain’s economy – a slow but steady shift evolves in the ways people live and work.

Bit by bit, decade by decade, the rich and powerful elite landowners find themselves under fire, criticised for their treatment of the poor – and for the shocking inequalities of a society where this 10 per cent of the British population own 92 per cent of the country’s wealth.

Taxation is also starting to be a bit of a headache for the ruling classes, nibbling away at their inheritances. Death duties on their estates, introduced in 1894, come on the heels of a long agricultural recession brought on because Britain has started to import more foodstuffs, thereby bringing down local agricultural prices. And this, in turn, reduces the value of land in the great estates – a late nineteenth-century property slump, if you like.

Some of the wealthy ruling class have huge debts to pay and they start to sell off their estates – or, if they own several country houses, some of their houses. Following continuous political pressure to increase the taxes paid by the very richest landowners, in 1909 the ‘people’s budget’, championed by the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George, introduces big tax increases for the most wealthy people in society.

Country-house owners at this time already paid tax for each male servant they employed (this started in 1777 and didn’t end until 1937), but the servant tax did not apply to female servants, who were much cheaper to employ anyway. So by the early twentieth century, the big country households had already undergone their own version of cutbacks, starting with their wages bill – often the biggest expense when running their big estates. They’d already been replacing male servants with cheaper females; previously traditional male servant roles like house stewards, hall ushers and grooms of the chamber were gradually replaced in the late 1800s by the butler, the housekeeper and the parlour maid. In some cases, footmen too were replaced – by housemaids. And by now, only the really great households continue to employ the more expensive male cooks. The hard-working and harassed cook, Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol), heading up the Downton kitchen might well have learned her duties as a kitchen maid working for a temperamental male chef with better take-home pay.

Technology too has started to influence the way the rich live: the motorcar is not reliable or even widely accepted by 1900 – but cars gradually become commonplace for the wealthy over the next few years, with the chauffeur replacing the coachman. As a result of these changes in technology, less manual labour is required in some houses.

Yet as badly paid as they are by our standards, by the early twentieth century domestic servants are getting slightly more expensive and not quite as easy to recruit as in the past, partly thanks to the growth and development of towns and cities, which eventually creates more job options for the working classes in shops, factories and offices.

Even so, most of the big country houses are still well staffed, an average of about twenty to thirty indoor servants living in each house. And the need everywhere for servants remains consistent: large numbers of them work for middle-class families in the big cities. Only the very poorest people cannot afford some sort of servant or domestic help.

Yet although the middle class tend to have far fewer servants for their smaller households, they too are often finding it difficult to employ and retain good servants: youngsters from the poorest backgrounds who might have willingly followed their relatives into an entire life working in service for the wealthy, generation after generation, are now actively starting to question this: some realise that there are different, less restrictive, ways of earning a crust other than being a live-in servant, even if the wages are low.

However the biggest power shift that is nudging the aristocracy from their lofty perch is that they are no longer the only rich kids on the block. With the English industrial revolution of the mid-1800s and the expansion of the British Empire – which spanned a quarter of the globe at its height – comes the gradual rise of the moneyed industrialists, the factory and mill owners, a new breed of get-up-and-go entrepreneurs. The Richard Bransons of their day, they are making millions from overseas trade, coal mining, shipping and cloth, rather than mere inheritance handed down from generation to generation. Some aristocratic country-house owners have benefited from this, of course, because they already own huge tracts of land ready to be developed as the towns and cities expand.

But the ever-growing spending power and influence of the new entrepreneurs – combined with the influential voice of the professional middle classes – is starting to unseat the snobbish, class-bound aristocrats who now have to face facts: they can no longer afford to shun or ignore the existence – or the company – of equally wealthy people who may have started life without an ancient name or high-born lineage – but who, through their own endeavours, can easily match the aristos’ spending power.

Some wealthy industrialists have also started to buy into the aristocrat’s way of life, building vast houses and estates of their own, sometimes with all the latest mod cons; a few have installed their own heating system, electrical plant, telephone network – and a telegrapher to send off urgent telegrams.

While the more conservative players in the aristocratic world don’t always rush to adopt the latest new technologies like electricity – some country-house owners are extremely reluctant to change rooms designed for oil lamps and candlelight – the penny is starting to drop: other people can – and do – match their vast influence. And some of these ‘new money’ people have started to marry into the aristocracy, a clear case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em – join ’em’.

Despite the big role that even the pleasure-loving King, Edward VII, has already played in introducing the aristocrats to the ‘nouveaux riches’ (the new rich) via lavish entertainments, trips abroad and expensive parties in an attempt to smooth away the rough edges of this transition, extreme snobbery about where money comes from still lingers over certain sections of the country-house world.

Super-snobs like the Dowager Duchess of Grantham (Maggie Smith) who can’t tolerate the idea of the family wealth being in the hands of a middle-class heir – a mere Manchester solicitor who actually earns his money and prefers not to have a team of servants fussing over him – underline the reality of the toffs’ position: their supremacy as masters of all they survey is all but over. And it hurts.

But as we will see, by the way they continue to live – and party – you’d never have guessed the storm was coming.