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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF DAISY

4.30am: In the small, dark hours of the morning, the kitchen maid, Daisy, awakes alone, dresses herself in her hand-me-down corset, simple dress and apron and steals down the stairs to stoke the kitchen fire. She creeps round the family’s bedrooms to light their fires, before going down to the kitchen to blacken the stove and lay the breakfast things in the servants’ hall.

6am: Daisy knocks on the doors of the housemaids to waken them, then takes her basket of logs with brushes, blacking, matches and paper to lay and light the fires in the rooms on the ground floor – the libraries, drawing room, dining room and great hall. The hall boy, another lowly servant who was only occasionally seen and never heard, has already delivered the coal and kindling wood to the scuttles.

10am: Daisy is still in suds up to her elbows as William and Thomas bring the cleared breakfast things, except for the glasses, which they wash in the servery. There’s no respite even as the last plate is stacked to dry; Mrs Patmore tells her to start on scrubbing pots and pans needed for lunch before she chops vegetables.

2pm: Once luncheon has been served and cleared away, Daisy has to wash all the pans and crockery once more, ready for dinner.

4pm: The servants enjoy tea, although not all of them can sit down at the same time. This well-earned break ends with the dressing gong, which marks the time when the family retires upstairs to dress for dinner.

7pm: By now, Daisy has been up for 13 hours but she cannot allow her eyelids to droop. The busiest part of her day is about to begin with the final preparations for the family supper, as well as laying out the servants’ supper.

8.30pm: The pots and pans, which had been scoured to gleaming after luncheon, ready for cooking dinner, need to be cleaned again now that it has been served.

9.45pm: When the family’s dinner is finished, Daisy puts her aching hands into the hot soapy water for the last time that day, cleaning the crockery and cutlery. Once she has had something to eat herself in the kitchen, the cook will send her to bed, much to her chagrin – it’s only when the servants have finished their work for the day and are relaxing in the servants’ hall after dinner that the fun begins.

Tomorrow will be the same again. With just one half day off a week, the routine is relentless. At the end of her arduous day, Daisy trudges wearily up the stairs to her room. Just a few hours later, she’ll wake again to another day in Downton Abbey.

Writer, Julian Fellowes

‘While bells are now seen as a symbol of servitude, at the time the bell-boards came in, around the 1820s, they were hailed as an absolute liberation. Up until that point, the footmen had to sit on hard wooden chairs within earshot of the family – usually in the hall. They would get a message, say, “Please ask my maid to come and see me”, then have to go downstairs, find the maid and then go back to their chair. With the bell-board, they could not only simply be wherever they wanted to be but if the bell rang from, say, the mistress’s bedroom, it was immediately obvious who was needed.’

THOMAS

‘And they’re off.’

Carson, the butler, is the most senior member of the below-stairs family, overseeing the work of all the male servants, and is Lord Grantham’s right-hand man. Butlers were sometimes grand enough to attain a little notoriety: Edwin Lee, the long-serving butler for Cliveden, an estate comparable to Downton in size and splendour, was known even by guests as ‘Lord Lee’. While the butler’s practical duties are few – monitoring the wine cellar, decanting port, pouring wine at the dinner table, and cleaning the fine pieces of silver (the footmen clean the rest) – he is the one who makes sure that everything is running exactly as it should be, and woe betide the footman who neglects to snap to attention. Carson believes the responsibility for the entire house is his, and if there is no one to do something that needs doing, he’ll do it himself. When they are short-handed during the war, he risks his own health rather than let standards slip.

Alongside Carson is Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper, who is in charge of the housemaids – both their work and their welfare. With a big bunch of keys jangling at her waist, she manages the household accounts, draws up the servants’ rotas, checks the linens (sheets and tablecloths are used in rotation so they last for years) and keeps a careful eye on orders for the kitchen store cupboard. This last responsibility, of course, is a bone of contention between Mrs Hughes and the cook, Mrs Patmore, who cannot understand why the stores do not fall under her jurisdiction.

Working long hours in a kitchen that was boiling hot all year round, cooks were famously short-tempered, understandably so when you learn that Mrs Patmore is up before 6am and won’t go to bed until 18 hours later, after cooking eight meals for the family and the servants.

Attending to guests

Gordon Grimmett was second footman at Cliveden while it was the country home of the Astors. The many high-profile guests, including film stars, politicians and writers such as Charlie Chaplin, Gandhi, T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill, meant a lot of work for the staff. ‘Every morning would see us up at seven, running down to the stillroom, eventually emerging with six small morning tea trays arranged on one large butler’s tray, distributing them round the guests’ rooms, opening curtains and gently but firmly waking them. We didn’t want them slipping back to sleep again and blaming us for their having missed breakfast. Then we collected their clothes from the night before, and whipped them into the brushing-room, to sponge, brush, fold and hang them. Then we would be laying up the breakfast table, and bringing in the various dishes ... and the constant running to and fro with fresh toast.’