James Hervey-Bathurst, rowing blue, and Nicky – now Sir Nicholas – Mander, aesthete, used to share a staircase at Trinity College, Cambridge. They remain friends, linked by the fact that they both live in large country houses. But the way they do so is very different. It comes down to what, in the 1920s, was called the servant question. Hervey-Bathurst’s Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire is run with a staff of almost Victorian proportions; Mander’s Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire has little to help the owners keep it going beyond a loyal, long-serving cleaner who comes three days a week. In 1974, when the Victoria and Albert Museum staged the Destruction of the Country House exhibition, it seemed that country houses didn’t have a future as family homes. Now Eastnor and Owlpen are representative of those that survive. But how do they work? Who is “below stairs” in the 21st century?

Nosing my car towards Owlpen, following the hand-painted sign by the church, I thought I might not be in the 21st century at all. Men with muttonchop whiskers and brown bowler hats were loitering about, talking to long-skirted women in bonnets. Hidden in a wooded valley, Owlpen is that sort of place – not part of the present day. But then the continuity girl came into view, followed by a film crew. Owlpen has become Thomas Hardy’s Wessex for a few days: hiring your home out as a film set – the going rate is between £2,500 and £3,000 a day for a feature film – is a useful source of income to country-house owners. Mander had neglected to tell me; fortunately, the cameras weren’t rolling or I might never have got through.

Owlpen is a romantic house. It might have been brash once – new houses tend to be, like the people who build them. But over the centuries the place has weathered, sagged, mellowed and settled until it is now the architectural equivalent of an old yellow labrador by the fireside – comforting, if prone to smells.

After adding a final classicising flourish in 1719 – garden steps, gate piers with balls – the original family died off, and for the second half of the 18th century and all of the 19th, Owlpen slept. Surplus to the requirements of its owners, who occupied another, more up-to-date house, it became old-fashioned and too inconvenient to use.

Parking down by the river, I walk up to the house through the vegetable garden. On this bright day, it is being vigorously dug by a woman with iron-grey hair who turns out to be a friend of the family, Tessa Plowden, visiting from Pembrokeshire. “The staff here is very fragmented,” she comments drily in clipped upper-class tones. Supplementing her labours, a woman gardener arrives once a week to work in the borders, while the brawn comes from a contractor called Blondie, towing “huge moving things behind tractors” and wielding a chainsaw.

I feel as though a hood has been pulled over my head as I enter the stone-flagged hall, so dark, after the sunshine, that it takes a moment before I can see anything. Slowly objects come into focus: umbrella stand, oak coffer, straw boater, and a smiling man in corduroy trousers and stout boots, with an air of unworldliness about him, who turns out to be Sir Nicholas himself. I’m shown into the kitchen. Or what is now the kitchen; significantly enough, it used to be the servants’ hall. There are now no servants to fill it.

A big bowl of salad, from the garden, stands on the table. But Nicky’s Swedish wife, Karin, hasn’t had much time for cooking in the past 24 hours: she has been preoccupied with moths, yesterday having emptied out all the drawers and cupboards in the house while it was fumigated.

“When I was growing up, the kitchen was a room you weren’t really allowed into,” observes Mander as he pours the water, “except when mother was preparing a buttered egg on Cook’s night off.”

In the 19th century, the Mander family built Wightwick Manor, outside Wolverhampton, an arts-and-crafts house now owned by the National Trust, from a fortune made from paint. By 1959, Mander’s father, Sir Charles, had turned Catholic, as a result of which he was drummed out of the family firm and withdrew to a house in the north Cotswolds. It was there that Mander, born in 1950, grew up, his parents retaining “a very pre-war” way of life. “A great boon was the number of estate cottages. They could always give someone an estate cottage, so there was always someone to help on Sundays or Christmas Day.” (Eventually the house, which had grown too big, was sold to meet disastrous Lloyd’s losses.) On leaving Cambridge, Mander married and, using money from the sale of the last of the family farms in the Midlands, bought Owlpen two years later.

Only an optimist could have done it. At the height of the oil crisis, with Britain lurching from power cuts to Edward Heath’s three-day week, few people wanted to shoulder the burden of a country house, even one as beautiful as Owlpen. The advertising pages of Country Life were full of modern, convenient houses in the home counties, low-maintenance and near a golf course. Big, inaccessible houses were tarred with the dread words “suitable for institutional use”. It was the country-house equivalent of the Dark Ages, when many owners like the Manders had to adapt to life without servants. They found a woman in the village, Doreen Gawlik, who could come in a few mornings a week – 35 years on, she still does – but as regards indoor staff, that was it.

How different Britain had been at the beginning of the 20th century. Two million people were then employed in domestic service, many of them village girls who were pleased to exchange the penury of farm cottages for a hierarchical but well-fed existence below stairs. They would be up at dawn, blacking grates and carrying coal scuttles, and did not finish until dusk; holidays of a fortnight a year provided the only chance to see loved ones at home. Not surprisingly, factory work during the first world war seemed a welcome alternative: it offered camaraderie and relative freedom, and once they had tried it, many workers didn’t want to go back to the servants’ hall. Talk of a “servant crisis” rang through the drawing rooms of the inter-war years. Labour-saving appliances – vacuum cleaners, washing machines – helped keep the domestic show going, and interiors were purged of dust-collecting Victorian clutter. But hands were still required to push Hoovers; without staff it seemed that the country house wouldn’t survive.

But the extraordinary thing is that, at Owlpen, it has.

The estate cottages that would have housed previous generations of servants now provide income. The cottages are Karin’s department. New kitchens and bathrooms for the visitors come before Nicky’s desire to “knock off the horrible ’60s render” on part of the house, to replace it with lime plaster. The builder is one of a team of tradesmen, who come in as needed, and there is also a full-time male cleaner. “They all stand in the laundry room gossiping all the time,” insists Karin. “They are no better than women at all, only they don’t bicker.”

Other people do things by a kind of barter arrangement. The forester for the 80 acres of woodland is typical.

“We don’t pay him a salary,” says Nicky. “He’s got a little firewood business: it’s a bit of a share-farming arrangement.” The modest farm is run on the same basis. “There are quite a lot of people whose lives are woven into and around this place, but it’s not a master-servant relationship – that all went long ago. They’re not really employees.” The only staff approaching regulars would be a PA and a woman who does the accounts, but they don’t come every day.

Then there are the Eastnors of this world. “They didn’t have a lot of staff in James’s parents’ day,” remembers Nicky as I leave for Herefordshire. “The old major would wheel in a wheelbarrow full of firewood to light the fires. It was wonderful. It’s now so super-comfortable it’s just not true.” Will Eastnor prove to be a country house of the old school, butlers pouring drinks and valets polishing one’s shoes? I’m staying there, so I hope so.

Excitement mounts as a grand silhouette of turrets and crenellations appears on the skyline, “the pride of chivalry”, as The English Annual wrote in 1836, shortly after it was built, seemingly “calculated for a regular and protracted defence”, but – promisingly – with “all the convenient domestic offices so essentially attached to large buildings, and the whole adorned with that elegance of modern refinement that seems best fitted for the more effeminate and luxurious spirit of the age in which it is our destiny to live”. Two fat towers form the gatehouse that guards the entrance. Boldly I go through it, wheels crunching across gravel forecourt, towards an immense Norman-style porte-cochère. The English Annual was right; it is a “splendid pile”: words such as “massive” and “baronial” come to mind, followed shortly by “bloody cold”. How many footmen, I wonder, will sally out to carry my overnight bag?

It is something of a disappointment when my host, Hervey-Bathurst, emerges not from the towering front door at which I am ringing, but from a comparatively Lilliputian portal tucked away round the side. It is even more disconcerting to find that he is occupying the whole of this vast edifice by himself. His wife, Lucy, is in London; his children are at school; the dozens of staff that I had been confidently expecting simply aren’t around. Striding away from the epic portal, we dive into a subterranean corridor before popping up on the family side of the house. As at Owlpen, we eat in the kitchen. It was never the servants’ hall. When Hervey-Bathurst was a child, this room used to be the day nursery.

Every parent is supposed to love his or her own child, however unpromising; perhaps country-house owners have the same feeling about their stately piles. Lovable is not an adjective that many people would instinctively apply to Eastnor, built by Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, with 96 rooms. But Hervey-Bathurst adores it. Having begun his working life in the City, running Eastnor, combined with his job representing country-house owners as president of the Historic Houses Association (HHA), is a more than full-time occupation.

“When I was growing up, there were three or four cleaners and a cook called Mrs Onions. It was very important to my parents to have good food. Mrs Onions would come in every day except Sundays. She would depart at five, leaving dinner for my parents. The main rooms were kept clean downstairs when they were open to the public. And once a year the whole house would have a spring clean.” But most of the castle was shut up. “When my parents came in after the second world war, it was quite bleak. The house had been emptied in case anyone wanted to requisition it. It wasn’t requisitioned, but, with nobody in the house, dry rot had developed, and there wasn’t a lot of money around. As it was my mother’s house, she felt it was her duty to do it. She did consider selling it, but nobody would buy it, and she thought about demolition, but that was too costly.” So the older generation buttoned up their Huskies and soldiered on, switching off the oil-fired boilers as “just too inefficient” after the oil crisis, and freezing.

Eventually a new boiler burning straw bales was installed, but even so the enormous hall that forms the centre of the house – an atrium of dizzying height – was impossible to keep warm. It was more or less bare, the furniture and pictures still kept in the cellars. The family huddled in their own relatively small apartment, putting another log on the fire and literally closing the door on the baronial frigidity beyond. “It was the right thing to do,” insists Hervey-Bathurst. “There was no need for the hall to be warm. It was never used: waste of money.” 1963 is remembered as a low point. That was the year the fire hydrant froze, gushing water over the walls. Between 1949 and 1989, the family recolonised the castle on only four occasions: twice for dinners for the parents, once each for 21st-birthday parties for the two boys.

Now the hall inspires awe. Not just because of the scale of the room and the swagger with which it is furnished, but, on the part of old-time country-house hands, because of the wall of heat that greets you as you go in. The bedrooms are opulently furnished with carved four-poster beds and Chinese pots. From them you look out on an immaculate landscape of lake, woodland and hills, quite a lot of which belongs to Eastnor’s 5,000-acre estate. Eastnor doesn’t pretend to be Claridge’s: there is no room service, and my splendid mahogany-encased lavatory was not en suite with my room. But with a pile of books carefully chosen for the occupant (one by me has been tactfully placed on the top), it is in some ways even better. “You don’t have to be posh to be privileged,” says the advertisement, but it helps.

In the 21st century, however, Eastnor is only partly a home. Although the Hervey-Bathursts live here – or he does: his wife, Lucy, an interior decorator, and the older of his five girls are oriented towards London – they share the house with a spectrum of commercial operations. Nearly all the staff shown in these pictures are necessary to make Eastnor work as a business; unless there is a commercial reason for them to be at the castle, they aren’t.

Around 1,500 historic houses belong to the HHA, 340 of them regularly open to the public. They employ a total of nearly 5,000 full-time, 3,000 part-time and 4,100 seasonal staff. Across Britain, the demand for service seems to have increased in line with the number of mega-rich living here, particularly in London, and the increasing complexity of people’s lives. Last year Country Life introduced an advertising section called “Help!”, echoing the Beatles song, to assist readers in their search for nannies, maternity nurses, housekeepers, butlers, cooks, gardeners, chauffeurs and carers. “A lot of big houses, they do want people to live in, to be on call there any time,” comments Suzanna Asquith-Fish, who gave up her job as a PA to start Country House Staff two years ago and now places about 50 people a year. Living in has its advantages: everything except food is provided by the employer, who also settles up with the taxman. A single male butler (earning anything between £250 and £500 net a week), a female housekeeper/cook/nanny (£350 net a week) or a couple (between £600 and £800 net a week) has serious disposable income.

But the boom in pampering hasn’t reached many historic houses. Besides, there are differences between the oligarch-laden metropolis and the sticks. London employers are more likely to entertain on a grand scale, whereas “Silver service is not called for very much in the country,” says Asquith-Fish. “There, you have to be a jack of all trades, not only organising the house but looking after the pool and the garden and collecting children from the train.” Not much of the Call-me-Tony chumminess that came in with new Labour. They will probably call their employers Mr and Mrs (sorry, Lord and Lady) but relations aren’t usually starchy: a fair amount of chatting takes place when they are driving the car.

Few people make domestic service a career choice on leaving school. “Staff are sometimes people who have changed positions, given up their previous jobs, or want to save money by living in,” comments Asquith-Fish. In Yorkshire, Simon Howard, of the Brideshead Revisited house Castle Howard, declares that “getting cleaning staff is our biggest problem; people say it’s too demeaning”. Consequently, he is thinking of looking beyond local families, perhaps to former Gurkha soldiers. Stephanie Rough, managing director of Greycoat Placements, also finds former service personnel a good recruitment pool, as well as the bottomless reservoir of Filipino housekeepers and nannies. With Lucy busy in her design business, the Hervey-Bathursts employ one to help with their two youngest children, Minna and Stella. She sometimes travels with them to Eastnor but spends most of her time in London. Eastnor’s own staff, as at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and Chatsworth in Derbyshire, are firmly local. There may be a ready supply of east Europeans working in the polytunnels of Herefordshire’s fruit farms, but they haven’t so far stormed the gates of the castle.

This is a matter of chance rather than design: speaking good English may be a requisite for the house guides, because of the need to answer visitors’ questions, but beyond that a smiley face (Disneyland sets the standard – “sweeping and smiling, as opposed to sweeping and looking grumpy”) is the most important asset in what Hervey-Bathurst cheerfully calls a service business. He would quite like an Indian guide, to interpret the collection of north Indian armour brought back from the Anglo-Sikh war of 1848. It would help his ambition to hold Indian weddings.

As my host removes a Covent Garden soup from the stove (“Ouch, that was hot”), he explains the operation. Private parties come for the shooting, which is let. Then there are those weddings, often for expats working in Moscow, Hong Kong or the US who have seen Eastnor on the internet, as well as celebrities like Davina McCall. Land Rover has an off-road driving course on the estate. Every August the park reverberates to the sound of the Big Chill pop festival. Ten businesses are housed in converted barns, farms and stables in the village, employing 100 or so people. Opening the house to the public requires a staff of 12 guides. (“Paid the minimum wage,” says the manager of one house, sheepishly. Still, that’s better than the National Trust, which relies on volunteers.) “We’ve got four cleaners on the business side and one person who looks after the family side.”

The ruling principle of the Victorian household was division of labour: everyone had an allotted task and quite possibly a boot room or newspaper-ironing room to do it in. Multitasking is the modern way. “We’ve got three men who do things,” says Hervey-Bathurst broadly. “They look after the house, look after guests, do firewood, serve drinks, delivering stuff, tidying up the grounds, washing boots for guns when they are staying. We call them the house manager and his team nowadays. They are general factotums.” He corrects himself: “factota”.

They may have to come in at midnight after a wedding to move the furniture back to be ready for the public the next day. Two men work in the 40 acres of grounds, “mowing, planting, weeding, tidying up”.

Tidying up is taken seriously. When Hervey-Bathurst takes me for a walk, he slithers perilously down the bank of the lake to pick up a scrap of litter. There are two part-timers in the shop; the tearoom is let on a franchise.

One of the biggest differences between country houses today and 50 years ago comes in the cottages. Eastnor has 87 of them. There are still some owners who house workers on their estates. “We’re very old-fashioned here,” says Andrew Norman, the operations manager of Rockingham Castle in Leicestershire. Rockingham takes on apprentices, and tries “to encourage family relationships”. Elsewhere, those traditional values have gone out of the window. “Twenty or 30 years ago, housing would be provided,” observes John Hoy, chief executive of Blenheim. “But that is deemed to be less of a benefit than it used to be. For staff to have their own world outside the estate is healthy.” It also opens up a valuable income stream, with cottages letting for more than £600 a month. If you have 87 of them, that’s a lot.

At Eastnor, only gamekeepers (5½ of them, one being shared with a neighbouring estate) and farm managers live in estate cottages, as they have to be on the spot. “In the old days when people weren’t paid very much, they had free houses. Now they have higher wages and want to live off the estate,” explains Hervey-Bathurst. “We’d rather get a person we want from 10 miles away than someone who happens to be here.” The tweed-suited gamekeepers are the only people to wear a traditional uniform.

Historic-house owners compete to prove their egalitarian credentials. “Deference has all gone. You have to earn the respect of the people who are here: it’s not automatic,” declares Hervey-Bathurst. “Which is good.” It cuts both ways. Because the estate has to pay its way as a business, it gives fewer benefits for free. “It’s very nice for us to have events here – the church fete, Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Guides and Scouts. But we’re now prepared to charge, at least for the cost of labour, and most people don’t mind.”

Alan Smith, as clerk of works, has the job of looking after the properties at Eastnor, as well as several miles of underground water pipes, feeding the castle and half the village, and endless lengths of track and road: “There’s always work to be done at the castle, mainly because it’s used so much.” Even with a team of five full-time men, the “never-ending” character of the task can be “quite a headache”.

Then there are the services and goods that the estate has to buy in: plumbers, electricians, suppliers, laundry, catering, pest control, window cleaning, firewood, water for the Big Chill. The whole shooting match is masterminded by an office, the head of which would once have been called the agent but is now the general manager.

The result is what must add up to a multi-million-pound business, but one whose profitability each year depends almost entirely on how much repair work is done. “If we have a major project on hand, it wipes out the profit.” Of course, there are upsides. The weddings are “fun generally, though not always, we’ve noticed – sometimes there appear to be tensions”. The family get to use the house about four times each year: “That’s enough; it’s a lot.” There is one shooting party for the parents and another for the eldest daughter, Imogen, who also shoots. To Lucy, it’s “a wonderful place, interesting and very different”. Having grown up at Belvoir Castle in Rutland and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, she knew what she was taking on. “We live a totally normal existence, just like anywhere else. Certainly no cooks,” she says.

James Hervey-Bathurst sums it up with a sigh: “It’s a qualified privilege living in a historic house like this because it’s a big responsibility. It’s complicated. Occasionally you have the chance to enjoy it. Then it’s good fun.”

Young children love Eastnor, with its hide-and-seek possibilities. No wonder Hervey-Bathurst is so attached to the house he grew up in. But however many staff there are to help make what is now a substantial business work flawlessly, the lack of privacy and sense of being permanently on parade are not always easy for a wife who, inevitably, grew up somewhere else. Hervey-Bathurst’s first, very private wife, Sarah, a viscount’s daughter, found Eastnor difficult; seven years ago she ran away from it, in untypically public fashion, with a gamekeeper from her father’s Yorkshire estate. Social barriers have truly fallen. Eastnor was rocked to its foundations. But the towers and turrets still proudly stand, and as Terry Folly, the senior guide who has worked at Eastnor since coming back from the army in 1954, puts it, “It is very satisfactory for us who work there to be part of the success story.”

Clive Aslet is editor at large at Country Life magazine

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