Upstairs, Downstairs

Many of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry were absentees landlords, some living most of the year on their ancestral English estates or in their families’ townhouses in London, serving as Members of Parliament (MPs) in Westminster, or as British imperial military officers overseas, diplomats or colonial administrators. Many of those that lived in Ireland took on the roles of local justices of the peace and had to attend sittings of the law courts. But they also enjoyed busy social calendars based around dance balls, dinners, race meetings, hunts, fishing and shooting parties.

Of course the gentry’s lavish lifestyles were only made possible by the rents collected from their Irish tenantry who often lived in abject poverty as well as by the household and farm workers who looked after their personal needs from dressing them in the morning to producing the foods for their dinner tables. On the eve of World War One, 30% of the Irish female workforce, primarily daughters of labourers and small farmers, were in domestic service a profession where exploitation was high.

Whilst many of the Big House servants developed strong bonds with the landowning families, nevertheless a strong class barrier was maintained
between those that lived ‘upstairs’ in the Big House and those that lived mainly ‘downstairs’ in the servant quarters.  Servants had a separate back entrance to the house; would have to stand still or look the other way when a member of the owner’s family passed; or hide if they were working in the grounds when the master and mistress were out walking in the estate.

After the defeat of the rebellious Irish Catholic forces in the 1690s, the ruling Protestant Ascendancy class soon moved from living in austere castles built primarily for military and defensive purposes to creating ostentatious mansions and gardens where luxury and architectural beauty were the prerequisite. These fine Georgian and Victorian buildings dotted the Irish landscape. But viewed as symbols of centuries-old malignant foreign rule that left the majority population in servitude and penury for so long, over two hundred were burnt by Irish republicans during the War of Independence and Civil War period.

The pictures, stories and films shown here of the owners, servants, tenants and neighbours of the Big House (‘Tí Mór’ in Irish ) portray the changing fortunes of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry from the glory days of the Hanoverian monarchy, when they played a prominent role as builders and administrators of a British Empire on which it was said ‘that the Sun never sets’, to their decline from the end of the 19th century as a result of political, legal, religious, property, economic and social change.