Why did families need so many servants?

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I've done my family tree, and rather unsurprisingly some of the lines were fairly well off.

In 1861, I have a 'Gentleman' (aka posh farmer), with SIX indoor servants. He had one daughter and a wife at home.

In 1891 I have a Merchant ancestor with five servants in their house! They had 4 kids, but the house was only about 14-15 rooms.

What on earth meant they needed so many staff? How could a family of three need 6 other human beings to live with them to look after them? How was there even enough work?

No running water, no central heating... all the fetching and carrying water and lighting fires and all that must have taken a fair amount of time. Imagine running a bath, how many people did you need to heat water and fill it up for you?

People were poor and worked for a pittance - often for little more than board. And 15 rooms was an enormous middle class house!

My great grandmother and grandmother were both servants in farm houses. You might find that if you check dates carefully, they had more than the number of children on the registers!

Cook, maid, butler, ladies maid, gardener

I read a historical biography that stated people (men) of status had no fewer servents than the amount they believed their status called for

In other words your ancestors thought they were pretty special haha

Servants*

Doing the laundry would have taken all day. They'd have to hest the water, scrub the clothing, put it through the mangle (they're hard work- my grandparents had one), then hang it out to dry. Iron the clothes using an iron heated by the fire or range.

There was more work, though, especially in the kitchen. So, eg, your 1891 family could have had:
Cook
Scullery Maid
Housemaid
Nursery maid
Governess
Gardener

That’s six off the top of my head. And that’s not counting people like coachman or butler.

Most big houses would have a groom to look after the horses.

plus- growing and processing food, including preserving it
making, cleaning and repairing clothing
child care, nursing and care of the sick
maintaining the physical property
if the servants lived in, they were also members of the household, so all they were also eating, washing, etc (not to the same standard perhaps) so it wasn't simply that 6 people were running around after 3
we have solved some of our labour problems with mechanisation, and some we have outsourced to the developing world

Employing people would have seemed like a good thing to do. It stopped people from starving. Presumably they needed male AND female attendants for propriety.
Why wouldn't you staff your home well?

NB in real life I employ no one in my home on a regular basis. I'm not only too tight, but also too insular.

There was a lot more housework to do, no time saving apparatus at all. Lots to maintain. It also indicated status. 6 servants isn’t loads. Housekeeper, ladies maid, cook, scullery maid, gardener, governess/nursery maid, maybe someone to care for your horses if you had them...

Servants cost little in wages, teenaged girls were especially lowly paid. Even quite small middle class families could afford a cook and a general cleaner.
If the family kept a horse or two, they would need a groom/stable lad.

You only have to read about the long hours that servants worked to see the amount of work that was expected of them.

Up at four in the morning to light the fires, bake that day’s bread, heat water for the family to wash with, preparing breakfast. Things like washing day, having to iron everything with a flat iron, plucking fowl, making preserves to see the household through the winter, all must have used a huge amount of energy.
Their work was never done!

You realise they weren't nipping around with the Dyson in the morning before throwing a few loads of clothes through the machine, whacking the dishwasher on and then having a quick browse through the fridge to see what to cook that day? Someone will have been food shopping every day. The laundry will have been endless. The fires as other posters have mentioned will have all had to be cleaned out, set and maintained every day. The clothes the family wore may genuinely have been too difficult to get into on their own. Then a team of servants needs to be managed as well.

Open fires cause a lot of dirt. Cleaning and lighting fires takes a long time. Imagine a fire in every single room to manage.

No central heating - it would have been freezing. Even just keeping the fires lit and grates cleaned would have kept someone employed for best part of a day. Plus sorting all the candles and later oil/gas lamps.

I got to visit Syon House out of season once when the heating wasn't on. We were warned it would be cold - we had no idea! Those period dramas give quite the wrong impression, most of the time everyone would have been huddled around the fire not wandering around the rooms in a light shawl.

My grandmother was in service to a not particularly special family (the father of the family was an actor). She went to them when she was 15 I think and one of several live in servants. She'd have to carry water up to the bedrooms first thing, light their fires, carry up tea, serve breakfast, do cleaning, help cook prepare lunch, more cleaning, run errands and so on. Just feeding the family was a full time job for cook as nothing at all was prepared - no stock cubes or bottled sauces, with everything being delivered daily which needed ordering, selecting and so on

I recently learnt about tweenys - sounds like Tweenies from TV but they were a very very junior staff member whose primary job was to take away and sluice the contents of chamber pots. Boke.

Running a home was more than a full-time job - many of us complain about it in the modern day and we have washing machines, dishwashers, groceries delivered... You name it. Back then, if you could pay someone to do it, you paid. Harsh.

Reading 'one pair of hands ' by monica dickens is fascinating. Pretty ww2 it seemed that the world was divided into middle and upper class who had servants...and everyone else was a servant...

Pre ww2'!

Yeh even my dad's mum had a maid for a while and later someone who came in to help on 'washday'....wash day took all day...

Thing is, many families who were not by any stretch rich would have had servants, mostly maids of all work or "girls" who came in to help. Day girls or chars in the C19th.

Not housekeepers and butlers necessarily.

In Austen's Sense & Sensibility, the character Mrs Jennings plans out a life for an impoverished vicar and his wife - first she imagines them having a couple of maids, then realises they really won't have much money at all, so downgrades to "a stout girl of all work".

You can't really compare modern lifestyles to C19th, but if you think about it, if you have a washing machine or a dishwasher, you have a servant, and how many households do you know without either of those?

The "indoor" servants would not have included gardener, coachman etc. Any family aspired to have at least one servant to do the heavy work, it was not just the rich who had servants.

Nowadays some people have cleaners and nannies....

Doing without servants for the middle and upper classes until well after WWI would be the equivalent today of doing without a household appliance generally considered essential by all but the very poor, like a fridge.

If you want a fascinating and detailed look at cleaning, laundry, cooking, serving meals, clothes, pastimes etc during the Victorian era, I recommend Judith Flanders’ The Victorian House. The chapter on laundry alone — including things like the fact that many middle-class women’s dresses contained Skirts/bodices/sleeves of fabrics/dyes that could not be washed together, and so needed to be unpicked into their constituent parts, laundered separately and then sewn back together — would make you weep with gratitude it’s 2020.

Slightly later, but ‘Mrs Woolf and the Servants’ is very interesting - you need an interest in Virginia Woolf too really but all about the transition away from domestic service that began after WW1, and was really completed by WW2.

My family were by no means middle class, they lived in a back to back. Even when my mum was growing up in the 1950s Monday was wash day and it took all day for my nan to do the washing of just 4 of them. They had cold cuts for tea as she wouldn't have had time to cook a meal as well. Everything hand washed, squeezed through and mangle, line-dried, ironed and starched. She also made most of their clothes and repaired things that were getting worn out. Walked to the shops and back every day and had to queue in each individual shop (greengrocers, butcher and so on), no supermarkets. Then add in cooking and cleaning. All that was basically a full time job for a very small house. It's not surprising that wealthier people with larger house had help. Social history like this is fascinating.