In Blenheim, the kitchen is in the same place it has been for the last two hundred years or so. It’s an odd mix of historic and modern; cupboards of painted wood and the inevitable display of original copper saucepans mixed with white tiling, modern stainless steel heating units and fluorescent lights. Our guide points out a shelf at the bottom of one long dresser. This, he tells us, is the place where the kitchen boy would have slept so that he could be on constant watch overnight to make sure that the fire in the range never went out, and then be ready to fire it up again first thing in the morning so that teas and breakfasts could be made. 

Once again, I am lurking at the back of the tour because I need to hold quite a lot of opinions in. To start with, these kitchen boys were, quite literally, boys. Theirs was an entry-level job in service and they would quite often start at the age of eight or nine. The boy sleeping on that shelf in Blenheim wouldn’t have been able to go to bed until the kitchen stopped work and then his first duty after starting up the range would have been to wake the butler and the housekeeper with a cup of tea, probably before 7 a.m. In short, this was Victorian child labour – but funnily enough we never seem to use this word when we talk about stately homes, just when we are looking at factories.^⁠

The kitchen boy wasn’t alone in being exploited as a child. All those copper saucepans hanging from the wall would have been used every day and, more to the point, would have been cleaned every day by a scullery maid who wasn’t much older than the kitchen boy and whose working hours – from 5 or 6 a.m. until whenever she finished the pans after supper – were just as long. But what made her work so much worse was the copper. In the age before Fairy worried about hands which did dishes, every pan had to be cleaned with a caustic mixture which made arms chap and hands bleed. And, as every scullery maid was told, if she got it wrong, there was the risk of poisoning the entire household.

We move on. In the Butler’s room, we hear about various butlers of Blenheim who have served the dukes in the twentieth century, passing their wisdom down the line. A sink and a wooden ironing board is set up as though one of their number has just left the room, but I am much more interested in what is on the other side of the room: an original plate room, as dark and armoured as a walk-in safe. Ornate pieces of gold and silver shine behind its part-opened doors.  

Plate is one of the great untold stories of the stately home, almost never mentioned in guidebooks or tours these days. But a hundred years ago or more, these vast collections of silverware and sometimes gold were one of the pillars of country house life. Its purpose was very simple, in an almost medieval kind of way: to display the status of the family to every guest who sat down at the table with them, in the form of precious metal. Any self-respecting dinner party would involve setting out huge chunks of the family’s wealth on the dining table, everything from platters and tureens to candlesticks, cutlery and complex centrepieces designed to hold fruit and flowers, and to display the maximum metal and craftsmanship in a confined space.

At the same time, these collections of silver are also performing another form of display which is almost entirely invisible to us now, and which is never mentioned either in the museum or the house itself. It’s a  demonstration of labour, specifically of how much unproductive work their household could sustain. Back when it was used, plate was meant to shine with an almost bluish tinge, something it no longer does in the museum or in the few stately homes where it is on display. This too was one of the key tasks for any good butler and was achieved with jewellers rouge – a finely ground iron oxide – and ammonia. And a lot of pain. The caustic mixture had to be applied with bare hands to get the right finish. The butler and footmen would blister their fingers every day, over and over again, until the skin hardened. The result was ‘plate hands’, shiny, red and as solid as a table top.

‘I was just told to get on with it. The blisters burst and eventually you developed a pair of plate hands that…became as hard as boards.’

While these were allegedly a badge of honour for any good footman or butler, they did not look as impressive to their employers. One of the reasons that these servants would wear white gloves when on duty would be to hide these scars. Or, to put it differently, so that the upper classes didn’t have to see the results of their exploitation. That might just spoil the dinner.

None of this is explained on the tour; instead we go round cool store rooms that once held meat and dairy for the house but are now, as we are told in some detail, used to arrange flowers. We go through the former estate manager’s room, where tenants would come and pay their rent, which is now set out as a teenage playroom with sofas and a vast billiard table. A room like a basement conservatory is lined with shelves and exists only to display china that no one uses any more.

And then we are done. Two of the American women have clearly read their guidebooks properly and done all the tours on offer, while paying close attention each time. Now they are drawing conclusions from the fact that the Marlboroughs still lease the land on which Blenheim is built from the royal family. ‘So,’ the older one asks, ‘Do most people in Britain not own their houses then?’ The guide misunderstands the question, which leaves me, as the only British person there, to explain that no, Blenheim is an aberration and, in common with most people in the UK who own a house, mine does not belong to the royal family.  

At which point, unfortunately, I have opened my mouth and started talking and it gets quite difficult to stop. Within a few sentences I have somehow brought the conversation to how this is quite the whitewashing of servants’ lives, given that the kitchen boy was eight or nine  and the copper pans were scrubbed until the scullery maid’s hands bled and why the footmen and butlers had to wear white gloves to hide their scars. The Americans are interested, the Dutch family bewildered and I don’t dare look at the guide himself.  

The saving grace is that this time I am visiting on my own so haven’t embarrassed any family members. It’s time to go. I apologise for being the ghoul at the feast and run up the stairs back into the sunshine, leaving a rather bemused group behind me. I feel guilty, but only very slightly. Mostly I’d quite like to be running my own version of the tours instead.