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keepers, advised that servants’ bedrooms should be ‘merely places where they lie down to sleep as heavily as they can’; prettiness and comfort were wasted on them. No wonder Joyce Storey, a bright working-class girl, whose hopes of a better life were crushed by 1920s unemployment, ‘swore a terrible oath’ as she scrubbed her employer’s coal cellar: This is the last time in my entire bloody life I will ever be on my knees with my nose to the ground, for I belong up there with my eyes to the light, and walking upright and tall.
In 1911, 800,000 families employed staff. Lethbridge is just as interested in the struggling households with a single skivvy as in establishments like Blenheim, which were beyond parody. Consuelo Vanderbilt, the
American wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, brought her knitting to the dining table to alleviate the boredom of tête-a-têtes with her silent husband, who insisted that meals be served by a staff of eight and that each course consist of 17 choices.The butler poured all the leftovers into one huge bowl for ‘the Poor’, pudding, bones, soup, all mixed together. In grand establishments, servants entered without knocking because they were ‘invisible’; there were hidden doorways on landings or behind false bookcases so that maids could literally disappear. But Lethbridge is even-handed, and cites examples of servants who loved both their work and their employers. She quotes extensively from the diaries of Alice Osbourn, housekeeper to an upper-
the spectator | 16 march 2013 | www.spectator.co.uk
Books_16 Mar 2013_The Spectator_
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middle-class family. Alice has great fun with ‘Daph’, the young lady of the house, who writes to her as ‘Dear old Onion’ and treats her as an equal — almost. The general mucking-in required by second-world-war deprivations brought employers and servants closer; the fictional Mrs Miniver’s belief that ‘the mechanics of life should not be allowed to interfere with living’ proved unsustainable. Postwar, some found the redrawn social boundaries hard to negotiate. Mont Abbott, an Oxfordshire shepherd, tells of an awkward encounter with his elderly aristocratic employer, who invited him in for ‘whisky from a crystal glass’. ‘She set me next to a posh silver ornament with polished rams’ horns “so you’ll feel at home”.’This had the opposite effect: ‘I were wanting to get back to my flock.’ Lethbridge enables us to hear the voices of her subjects; she skilfully interweaves written and oral testimony. Sometimes she leaves assertions unexamined. It isn’t credible, for instance, that Churchill, with his adventurous soldier past, was ‘unable to dress himself’; if he expected his valet to dress him, it would have been for a reason, and one which it would be interesting to know. When she states that there were as many domestics in London in 2011 as there were in the 19th century, does she mean that the total is numerically the same, or is she talking about the proportion in relation to the rest of the population? This recent rise in demand for servants is an interesting and important subject which she isn’t able to explore in any depth. But this book is empathetic, wide-ranging and well-written; it will enthrall many readers. 35
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