Never Despair, Keep Smiling
Better than wealth with its carriage and pair
Better than rank or a face wondrous fair
Is a heart that life burdens can cheerfully bare
Just a brave loving heart, that never despairs
B Wallis
april 23rd, 1916
"Staying at an English country house, the Edwardian viceroy of India was faced with the challenge of opening his bedroom window after the servants had gone to bed. Baffled but indomitable, he picked up a log from the grate and smashed the glass. Forty years later, Winston Churchill's valet was unimpressed to find that the former prime minister was incapable of dressing himself without assistance. "He sat there like a dummy and you dressed him."
The great men who shaped 20th-century Britain were able to do so because ordinary life was taken care of by servants. And, as Lucy Lethbridge reveals in her fascinating history of domestic service, this was true even for socialist radicals. In the 1930s the novelist and socialist campaigner Ethel Mannin had a maid who called her "madam" whose assistance enabled her employer to busy herself with abolishing class distinctions. "It was snobbish; it was class distinction; it was exploitation but it worked," Mannin wrote later.
Indeed, it becomes clear in Lethbridge's account that the history of 20th-century Britain can be told as a history of the changing status of servants. They proliferated in the Edwardian home, which was buttressed by a "bustling subterranean township" staffed by skivvies, slaveys, grafters, tweenies (between maids), useful maids (just below lady's maids), odd men and even the occasional gong man. The Duke of Devonshire found that 200 servants were required to look after the needs of a house party of 50 people.
At this stage it was common for the employers to be whimsical and often obsessive in the demands made on their staff. "Don't you think, George, that a few sheep, with lambs gambolling about, would make the fields look furnished?" one duchess suggested to her butler, who obediently provided the requisite livestock the following morning. Egg yolks throughout England were diligently centred to grace the breakfast tables of the rich. And it was crucial that these servants remained invisible as well as ubiquitous. They were provided with non-creaking shoes for this purpose, and houses were designed with hidden doorways on landings so that housemaids disturbed at work could make a hasty escape.
Servants became somewhat scarcer during the first world war, when women were delighted to be offered jobs that took them outside the home and granted them free time. And they reappeared between the wars when women went back into service to free up jobs for the unemployed men queuing for the dole. "Don't think your life will be any different from mine," a young woman was told by her mother when she reluctantly returned to service. The history of domestic service in this period reveals the limitations of the liberation of women brought about by the war.
At this stage, master-servant relationships became rather more embarrassing. Bohemians such as Mannin still relied on servants but oscillated between expecting the traditional invisibility and treating servants as fellow human beings who rather awkwardly shared their home. This could result in antagonism on both sides. "The cook is evil," Katherine Mansfield once pronounced. It was especially discomforting for the servantless who found themselves weekending in country houses. There was the quandary of tips, which added up quickly, and the question of how polite you needed to be. If the housemaid laid out one dress on the bed, would her feelings be hurt if you chose another one?
As the second world war approached, there was a general move to modernise the home and avoid the need for servants. This was resisted at first. A gardener later described how his wartime landowning employers believed it was their patriotic duty to prevent "that dreadful man" in Germany from changing their feudal slice of England. There were some who insisted that domestic service guaranteed moral order, just as in Edwardian times charitable foundations such as Barnardo's saved the souls of city waifs by sending them into service. And others simply solved the servant problem by using evacuees as maids.
But once the second world war was won, this position became less tenable. Throughout the war, British subjects were promised that they were fighting for a new social order. Hence the new ideal of the 1950s housewife: clean, efficient and servantless. For years, the upper classes had withstood the modernisation of their homes, with many insisting that even gas and electricity were vulgar. But by 1948, 86% of Britain's homes were wired for electricity. Fridges, vacuum cleaners and wipe-clean surfaces were introduced, offering the promise of easy domesticity. In 1959 the Ideal Home exhibition included a fully automated Kenwood dishwasher. And the Duke of Bedford, who opened the exhibition, was photographed in his shirtsleeves, smiling as he carefully loaded plates into the racks. Gradually the world was shifting to the one we know today, where the majority of British homes are unstaffed and the servants that still exist are usually foreign.
Servants is at its best when telling this social history. The second, more briskly chronological half of the book is stronger than the thematic sections of the first half, where the structuring principles are more elusive. The book is perhaps more a panorama (brought to life with an assortment of wonderfully colourful anecdotes) than an intimate history. It rarely offers the "downstairs view" of 20th-century Britain that the subtitle promises. There are a few revealing extracts from servants' diaries but we don't often see into the minds of the servants because not many had the time or the skills to write about their experiences, although a few have written later memoirs. Indeed, only this week Penguin has published a memoir of downstairs life entitled Aprons and Silver Spoons by former scullerymaid Mollie Moran.
But as a panorama, Servants is a great success. Enthusiasts of bonnets and waistcoasts will find Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey all the more enjoyable after reading this nuanced and elegantly written account of the wider context. And in tracing the history of servants throughout the whole of the 20th century, Lethbridge offers a new vantage point from which to reassess British social history."
Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury)
Throughout the 20th century a veritable bustle of young middle-class women went under cover to investigate life as a domestic servant. Donning caps, dropping their aitches and secreting a small notebook in their pinnies, these journalists and social investigators behaved like anthropologists on the scent of a skittish Pygmy tribe.
Some of these tourist skivvies were simply after good copy – Monica Dickens, for instance, the former deb who turned her experiences of snooty bosses and collapsed soufflés into the rollicking comic classic One Pair of Hands. Others, though, were driven to solve what felt like a mystery that lay just beneath their feet. For if Britain was ever to shed its feudal mindset (in 1960 the Lady Chatterley jury could still be asked to ponder the reading habits of their servants), then it felt vitally important to know what life was really like in the terra incognita that lurked below stairs. Despite domestic service having finally died out in the last 40 years (today's Lithuanian au pair doesn't count) this impulse to find out about it has only intensified.
These days you can't go into a rural local studies library without seeing a corner dedicated to oral histories of life in the servants' hall at the Big House. On TV we have both sober documentary series (a recent excellent one by Dr Pamela Cox) and some pretty fantastical imaginative recreations (yes, Downton, I'm talking about you). Servants, then, continue to comprise a kind of psychic disturbance in our historical understanding, an intriguing puzzle to which we return in the hope that, one day, we will solve the riddle of our own curiosity.
In this excellent addition to the history of domestic service in the 20th century, Lucy Lethbridge has swept the existing archive and added new sources of her own. The result is a richly textured account of what it felt like to spend the decades of high modernity on your knees with a dustpan and brush.
Here is chapter and verse on all those dawn starts, raw hands, rank ingratitude, scratchy blankets and heinous double binds. For instance, the only way you could leave service was if you married your sweetheart, yet "followers" (one of whom might become a sweetheart) were strictly forbidden. You were encouraged to "improve" yourself, yet quickly put in your place if you asked to borrow a book from Madam's library. And despite the ready availability of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers, the "Quality" still considered it better for the floor tiles to be cleaned with a combination of sour milk and hard labour.
Lethbridge is canny enough to know that hearing people moan about their jobs for 400 pages isn't much fun, no matter how badly we might feel for them. A little bit of us, regressive to be sure, wants to hear all about the lovely pomp – what the social scientist Thorstein Veblen called the "symbolic pantomime" – of domestic service from the other side of the green baize door. And Lethbridge is happy to oblige, with details about how the Duke of Bedford insisted on all his parlourmaids being over 5ft 10in, and the fact that the Duke of Portland employed so many staff at Welbeck that his servants had servants.
There is the obligatory backstairs tour of Belvoir, the Duke of Rutland's feudal palace, where one man's job was simply to bang the mealtime gong. A quick detour to Longleat introduces us to the "steel boy", who would spend his day burnishing the metal parts of the horses' harnesses. Another estate, meanwhile, employed a lad as a "spider brusher".
This is hugely enjoyable, if familiar, stuff, but where Servants excels is in describing those places where the older paradigms of domestic service, inherited from the late 19th century, began to break down. Lethbridge investigates the dilemma of the "lady-help", an awkward, hybrid creature who popped up after the first world war to take the place of all those uppity working-class girls who preferred a job in a shop or factory to a lifetime of sulky deference. Well educated, but financially impoverished, the "lady-help" was supposed to help out with a vague list of activities that included light nursing, flower arranging and playing bridge. What employers actually wanted was someone to peel the potatoes.
An answer to what anthropologists might call this "status incongruence" arrived with the establishment of personal services bureaux such as Universal Aunts. Now repositioned as a family member, albeit one who had a tariff for her services, the living-out lady-help could get on with the sort of things she was good at: escorting children by train, giving the newly moneyed lessons in how to hold their teacups, getting to grips with someone's chaotic filing. One of the bolder Aunts even hired herself out as a motorboat pilot. Lethbridge's always-pleasurable prose is at its most joyous here, as she charts the transformation of the drooping interwar spinster from domestic gooseberry into a crisp proto-professional, speeding into a bright future under her own steam.
Lethbridge's second stand-out section concerns another group of people who did not fit the standard servant mould. This time, though, there was no Universal Aunts to the rescue. Lethbridge tells the story of the thousands of German and Austrian refugees who came over in the 1930s to work as servants, sometimes leaving impeccably genteel lives of their own behind. Often ensconced in remote rural locations, they faced anti-Hitler hostility from their below-stairs colleagues and veiled antisemitism from above. Even Joyce Grenfell, a woman who might have seemed to be above such prejudice, confessed to her diary that it felt "uncosy" having a "non-Aryan" cooking her dinner.
The last thing this category of alien domestics wanted was to leave the servants' hall, since that would almost certainly mean being put behind barbed wire on the Isle of Man. So, instead, they made the best of things, carrying on valiantly with Veblen's now distinctly tatty "symbolic pantomime". One newly arrived German refugee, a well-known actor, was congratulated by his new employers on his performance as the sole footman at his first drinks party. How had he managed so well? Simple, replied Sidney Schott. He had thought back to the grand continental hotels of his youth and modelled his performance on the impeccable service he had received in happier times.
• Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.
