Frozen in time Photograph exhibition offers glimpse of the real life Upstairs, Downstairs

A new exhibition in Yate offers us a look into the life and work of the huge numbers of people who ended up working as servants and estate workers in the upper and middle class homes of the area in former times.

UPSTAIRS, Downstairs is the title of a new exhibition just opened at the Yate & District Heritage Centre, looking at the lives of servants in the bigger houses in the Yate/Sodbury area from the middle ages and onwards into the 20th century.

Much of the emphasis is on the decades before the First World War because it was during this period that the local servant population was reaching its peak. Unlike industrial and commercial centres like Bristol, where a wide range of jobs was on offer, working in the households or on the estates of the well-to-do was one of the principal sources of employment.

According to the 1891 census, around 40 per cent of all the teenage females in the area were working in domestic service, while several women living in the Sodbury Union Workhouse were recorded as having been servants. Domestic service often offered a way out of the drudgery of life in the workhouse.

By the second half of the 19th century, Yate boasted several large houses with many domestic servants working inside and out, performing every practical role required to maintain the house, garden and estate.

At the same time, the expanding middle classes living in places such as Yate’s Station Road or Sodbury High street could afford one or two servants. The 1851 census tells us that it had become commonplace for professional middle classes such as doctors to have at least one servant. Larger farms and pubs such as the White Lion also recorded servants in the later 19th century censuses.

While domestic service was always an option for working class women, it was probably also more popular with men in rural areas because high-status and skilled jobs were better paid than farm labouring jobs - and of course men were always paid more than the vast majority of women.

Most outdoor jobs were for men, who maintained the buildings and looked after gardens and parkland as well as stables and the packs of hunting hounds. Some men and their families occupied purposebuilt houses, such as Stanshawes Lodge, in their role as gardeners or stable workers.

Young women were predominant in indoor roles, usually working long hours for meagre pay – but

then there were few alternatives. The benefits for a young woman were free accommodation and food and the possibility of saving money from your wages, though in bigger houses it was a restricted lifestyle with a strict hierarchy and no protection from unfair dismissal. There was a high turnover of staff.

Economic changes during and

after both World Wars meant that men and women had newer work opportunities, such as better paid and more sociable jobs with set hours in factories, and the numbers of servants fell dramatically.

Middle and upper class matrons around the country complained bitterly of “the servant problem” – something which in Victorian times meant the difficulty in finding reliable servants but which came increasingly to mean the difficulty in finding anyone at all prepared to work in service.

The Upstairs Downstairs exhibition is at Yate Heritage centre until January 27, open Tues-Thurs 10.30am-4.30pm and Sat 10.30am1.30pm, admission free. For further information see www.yateheritage. co.uk or tel 01454 862200.

Workers at Little Sodbury Manor, about 1920 (Gazette Series) Domestic staff at Lawns House, a large middle class household in Yate, about 1914 An estate worker at Little Sodbury Manor gives a practical demonstration of ‘an ancient man-trap’, one of the methods that owners of a previous generation had to deal with poachers, c 1914. He looks understandably unhappy about the spikes digging into his leg. (Gazette Series)

Stable worker and one of the Codrington children at Dodington House, about 1895. Dodington was the biggest country house in the Yate area and in 1881 its owners, the Codrington family, had 17 house servants and several more estate workers, including seven stable hands, one of whom appears to have been the man in this photo. A Black man working in a country house in the 1890s would have been quite unusual and the exhibition organisers are hoping to find out more about him. The house is nowadays owned by Sir James Dyson.

Gardeners at Stanshawes Court, c 1914. This was the grandest house in Yate in the late 19th century and owner Robert Hooper spent heavily on the gardens and park. The gardens produced a wide variety of flowers, fruit and vegetables for the Hooper family’s lavish entertainments. Estate workers at Stanshawes Court c 1914