Class War Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs

In 1902, London Zoo held one of a series of extraordinary events

organised by Queen Alexandra,

the wife of the newly-crowned King, Edward VII.

Called the Queen's Teas, across the capital Britain's servants

were given a rare day off, with a twist.

10,000 maids-of-all-work were given the day off, they were given

a box of chocolates with a portrait of the Queen on the lid.

Most extraordinary of all,

they were treated to high tea served by upper-class London ladies.

Now even though they were promptly dispatched home at 6.00

to get the dinner table on the table, something was changing,

service was coming out of the shadows.

Like thousands of us in Britain today,

I come from a long line of servants.

Both my great-grandmothers were housemaids in the 1900s.

I've long been fascinated by the hidden history of their lives,

not just because it's the story of my family,

but because it's the story of all our families.

In this series I want to dispel the fantasies and nostalgia

that we have around domestic service and reveal a more complex world,

one of tension, deference and an obsession with status and class.

What do you think?

We've already seen that the domestic service we've come to know

in film and fiction was a Victorian invention,

a way of ordering society into its proper place.

But from the 1880s, new ideas for a new generation,

from workers' rights to the Women's Movement would shake

the Victorian ideal of service to its very core,

putting the old order under increasing scrutiny and strain.

This is the story of wayward laundry maids,

butlers selling their stories to the press,

servants taking their employers to court, even Suffragette maids.

But, most of all, it's the story of how the Victorian ideal of service

came to be questioned, not by masters and mistresses,

but by servants themselves.

This is Lanhydrock House in Cornwall.

It was once the ancestral seat of the Agar-Robartes family,

landowners, industrialists and, by the mid-19th century,

one of the wealthiest families in the county.

In 1881, the house was gutted by a vast fire,

which allowed it to be rebuilt

according to the ideals of the high Victorian age,

where although everyone lived under the same roof,

they lived separate lives.

Here, separate staircases and endless corridors

divided male zones from female, children from parents

and, most importantly of all, masters from servants.

This carpet separates upstairs life from downstairs life.

The corridor back here leads down to the kitchen.

The one across here leads over to the dining room.

This is a threshold between two separate realms.

For late Victorian elites, this is moral architecture,

it reflects an ideal class structure,

and it's a structure they'll cling to through thick and thin,

right up to the First World War.

Today, Lanhydrock's vast servant quarters

are as preserved in aspic as the food they once served.

At the house's prime,

they would have been home to over 30 live-in staff,

with a further 50 working on the estate, all of whom served

Lord and Lady Robartes and their nine children,

a core family of just 11.

In many ways, Lanhydrock is a model late Victorian house,

built at a time when the Victorian ideal of service was at its height.

But from the moment the new house was inaugurated in 1885,

that ideal was already crumbling.

Deep in the basement of the British Library,

amongst reams of national reports, are a set of records that show

that the golden age of service was actually coming to an end.

These are the Census reports from the late 19th century

and early 20th century, and their job is to make sense of the Census.

They pull out the big trends and patterns

and all that massive data around household and occupation.

But if we look at the 1891 and the 1911 Census

you see a really interesting fact emerging.

In 1891 the number of indoor domestic servants, 1.38 million,

which is a pretty high number.

Jump to 1911, it's gone down, still high,

but it's gone down to 1.27 million.

So why does it matter?

It matters hugely because the population is expanding,

the middle class is expanding,

therefore the demand for service is expanding.

But the problem is that the supply of servants is shrinking.

Domestic service was still Britain's largest employer,

out-numbering agriculture, coalmining and cotton weaving

by hundreds of thousands.

But as the booming industrial economy

offered Britain's young workers other opportunities,

the number of people going in to service

was dropping by 5,000 a year.

Whereas in the past finding good servants was the problem,

now the problem was finding any servant at all,

when so many of Britain's young were opting out.

One of the answers to the servant problem was Christian charity.

Church-going philanthropists set up hundreds of schemes to rescue

the rootless working class and train them to work as servants.

It seemed a simple solution to the problem of what to do

with those left behind in these boom times, for, by now,

extremes of wealth and poverty were at their height.

In inner city areas across the country

intense overcrowding and soaring unemployment

spread fears that a population of work-shy slum dwellers

was draining the moral fibre of the nation.

Many of these fears were created by what was called slum fiction

or slum journalism.

At the turn of the century there was a flood of newspaper articles

and sensationalist novels that shone a spotlight

on life in Britain's slums.

They had lurid titles like

Tales Of The Mean Streets, The Netherworld.

This one was called The People Of The Abyss,

and it was by an American called Jack London, who disguised himself

as a down-and-out sailor to live among the London poor.

Their readership was largely upper and middle class,

and for them using the urban poor to make up the servant shortfall

was a charitable, moral and practical solution.

Behind all this Christian charity there were two big thoughts,

the first was that those at the bottom of society should

get themselves out of the gutter by working.

The second, was that for many of them the best kind of work

was domestic service.

It offered them bed and board, practical skills,

all within the safety of the moral middle class home.

And it wasn't just the streets where the urban poor could be found,

there was also the workhouse.

An age-old institution dating back to the 17th century,

the workhouse was a way of ensuring Britain's able-bodied poor

worked in return for their keep.

But now it was given extra value, as a ready-made servant factory.

Here, as they entered,

inmates were separated in to seven different categories,

from able-bodied men and women,

down to children under seven years of age.

Women, for the most part, did domestic work.

Men worked the fields or picked oakum for shipbuilding.

And children would spend their days

behind the frosted windows of the schoolroom,

where they would be taught to read and write

before being trained for a trade or for service.

For the girls it would be teaching them, you know,

the skills of cookery, laundry work, dressmaking, you know,

cleaning and so on.

With the boys it would be craft trades, like shoe-making, tailoring,

carpentry, plumbing and so on.

But the problem they had was that life in the workhouse

is not always a very good preparation for the outside world,

so if you were in the kitchen, for example,

you might see potatoes being boiled in a big copper for 100 people.

It's not the same as peeling them for a family.

It's not peeling potatoes for three or four people.

You might not even know what a saucepan was,

in some workhouses, they didn't use saucepans,

everything was on a large scale.

Well, how did they get over that problem then?

Well, by the end of the 19th century a lot of workhouse children

were living in separate homes of various sorts.

It was believed that the workhouse had a kind of taint

associated with it.

If you mixed children and adult paupers

the children would learn bad habits.

So in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, various sorts of separate homes

were set up, with things called cottage homes,

like mini villages of houses for children away from the workhouse.

By the late 19th century,

thousands of these charitable homes had sprung up across the country,

run by organisations like the Girls' Friendly Society, Barnardos

and MABYS, the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.

Here, reformers would train street kids to clean grates

and change beds, rewarding some of them with diplomas in housework.

How to make a bed. Before commencing to make the bed

the servant should put on a large bed apron kept for this purpose only,

it should be made very wide to tie around the waist and behind.

By adopting this plan, the dirt on servants' dresses,

which at all times it is impossible to help,

will not rub off on to the bed clothes,

mattresses and bed furniture.

And I suppose the idea was that you would spend some time

training here, in an institution like this,

but then be placed in a proper domestic service job.

That's right.

I mean, in fact, in some places people came to the home

or the workhouse, you know, the demand exceeded supply in many cases.

Workhouse children were very popular.

Why do you think that was?

Well, a number of reasons.

First of all, they were used to discipline, you'd probably say.

A lot of them had no families, so they wouldn't be running off

to their families at the first sign of any trouble.

There's one lovely story in 1912,

an ex-workhouse girl in Sedgefield who'd gone in to domestic service,

wrote to the workhouse saying could she come back for her summer holidays,

because that was the only place she knew as home.

-Oh, I've seen some letters like that, yes.

-Really...

Well, they had nowhere to go, so on your time off, they often went back.

Yeah, yeah.

What's really striking about this is you get a really different sense

of the workhouse as an institution.

It's much more part of a network, national,

local networks of training homes,

different kinds of poor relief, different kinds of charities.

And, essentially, they're all mopping up working class girls

and putting mops in their hand.

That's exactly true.

Documents from cottage homes in London show

that many of the boys were sent in to trades, hairdressing,

shoe-making or tailoring,

or sent into the Army or Navy.

But if you look at the figures for the girls,

a very different picture emerges.

In that year there 469 girls placed from workhouses.

Of 469, 450 went into domestic service.

-That just, you know, really that was the only place to go.

-Yes.

In fact, they've only got two columns, domestic service

and other occupations.

And if you look at the detail, again,

the ones who didn't go into domestic service typically had

some other sort of problem, a health problem or eye problems or whatever.

Look at this, "Weak intellect, epileptic, dirty habits, opthalmia.

"Dull and epileptic."

-Yes. Quite a depressing list.

-Mm.

But really it's just striking, you know, the only destination

for workhouse girls, certainly in London, was domestic service.

One charity with a strong record of rescuing children from streets

and workhouses across the country and putting them into service

was the Church of England Waifs and Stray Society.

Amazingly, buried in the boxes of its archives in south London,

actual stories of children sent into service

at the turn of the century still survive,

as the Society kept track of every child that passed through its doors.

I first came to this archive 15 or 16 years ago,

and it's what made me want to be a historian.

There are some deeply shocking things in here,

there's some deeply moving things in here.

It's very emotional, actually, to see it all again. It's lovely.

Alongside photos of the slums in which these children were found,

are pictures of them before and after their training.

Even case files stuffed with progress reports and letters

sent back to the society from their families and employers.

Peggy wasn't a very good servant, and this is

a kind of reference letter from her employer when she was about 14.

"Peggy is quite a good worker in certain branches of housework.

"She can polish floors beautifully, can wash nicely

"and is a good scrubber, but is no good for parlour work

"or any kind of work that requires a dainty touch."

I'm not sure what happened to her next.

Harold had rather a worse time.

He actually ran away from his employer.

There's a letter here that sets out why he did that.

And this is a vicar who's writing on his behalf

to give his side of the story.

"He tells me that the reason he ran away from this place in London

"was that the head-butler, or steward, as I think he called him,

"treated him very badly and was always swearing at him.

"He says that two of the maids also ran away,

"and he apparently sacrificed his wages to do so.

"Of course, I do not know,

"but he seemed to me to be speaking the truth."

This is poor Caroline.

Caroline was reprimanded by her employers

and you can sort of see why.

She says, "She is disobedient, she cannot be left in the kitchen.

"Today she hit the cook over the head

"just for asking her not to use a spoon."

Oh, dear.

Finally, there's the moving case of Amelia,

who gives us a very different side to the story.

Amelia had a really difficult start in life.

She was abused by her step-father and sent in to care,

even though her siblings, half-siblings weren't.

She was neglected so much that her growth was stunted,

so she's described here as a dwarf.

And she was sent to train as a servant

in Connaught Home for Girls in Hampshire,

but it actually turned out pretty well for her.

She got a series of service positions,

the last of which lasted for 40 years.

And there's a letter here from her employer's daughter.

"Sir" again, writing to the society,

"I am writing on behalf of Amelia who entered the service

"of my father and mother 40 years ago today.

"When they died she remained on with me.

"So it's 40 years in the family.

"I think this is almost a record of some sort, is it not?"

And what all this says to me

is that this kind of child-saving work and rescue work

was incredibly well meant.

It was hand-on-heart reform and it did change lives.

For the children involved it was probably better in many,

many cases to be a servant in a private family home,

rather than staying on the street.

But it was also a way of solving the servant problem,

and in a way it was a bit like being able to keep a servant

and keep a clear conscience.

While most of these children were sent to middle class homes,

many also ended up in the big house.

At Lanhydrock, Lady Robartes founded

the Trevian School for the Training of Orphan or Friendless Girls for domestic service,

some of whom had been brought to Cornwall directly

from the slums of east London.

They were then sent into the lowest-paid jobs, under housemaids,

kitchen maids and tweenys, which meant a between stairs maid,

who split her duties between upstairs and downstairs.

The route from the workhouse to the scullery was now a well trodden one.

The between-stairs maid, wage £13 a year.

Hours of work - 5.00am to 10.00pm, seven days a week.

Duties - wash the dishes, scour the pots and pans with lemon and salt.

Peel the vegetables, scrub the floors.

Set and clear servants' meals.

Destroy pests. Carry the coal. Recycle the scraps.

Fetch the water from the pump.

It's certainly clear why stairs figure prominently

in the mythology of service.

Many former tweenys still remember the exact number of steps

they had to climb in every house in which they worked.

The worst job of all was slop duty, emptying the slops of every

member of the household, both masters and fellow servants.

This is what was called the sluice room,

and really it's a kind of small indoor sewage farm.

The tweenys or junior housemaids in the big house

would go around in the mornings,

collect the full chamberpots and the bedpans,

empty them in to slop buckets, bring those buckets back here,

pour the contents down here in the sluice sink,

flush them away like that.

So really servants were being used as a form of human plumbing,

and all without rubber gloves.

It's also always struck me how heavy these girls' daily rounds were,

not just in terms of the hours worked,

but also the actual physical weight of the equipment.

They're quite heavy even when they're empty.

What you've got to remember here is that working class kids

were much less well fed, less well nourished.

They had smaller frames than middle class/upper class children.

Some of them were as young as 11, 12, 13

working in places like this doing these kinds of jobs.

They were legally employed, but this was child labour.

One tweeny, Laura Halton, entered service in the big house in 1912.

I've come to find out more about her from her granddaughter,

Linda Huckle.

My grandmother is that lady just there. Yeah.

And how old would she have been there?

I think she looks about 17 there.

She might have been younger or older,

but she certainly looks about 17.

And she's sitting there with all the other housemaids,

parlour maids, and this maybe the housekeeper.

That's right. That's the older sort of larger lady.

Yes.

And this rather grumpy looking lady over here,

I think she might have been probably the cook.

Could be. Yes.

So do you know much about what she actually did?

She was the lowest of the low and started as the lowest of the low,

scrubbing floors and, in fact, scrubbing so much

that her fingers bled and she wasn't allowed to stop

until she'd done a good job.

And apparently suffered from chilblains terribly

all through her life, and my mother thinks it's because

of her early life in service.

-I think they did earn their corn, didn't they?

-Absolutely.

And what's this?

Linda has brought one of Laura's most treasured possessions,

an autograph book full of poems and messages of support

written by her fellow maids while in service.

One poem is particularly touching.

"Never despair, keep smiling

"Better than wealth with its carriage and pair

"Better than rank, on a face wondrous fair

"Is a heart that life's burdens can cheerfully bear

"Just a brave loving heart that never despairs."

-Oh.

-It's lovely, isn't it?

-Yeah, it is.

Given how tough the job was, it's no surprise that given the choice

this new generation of women were no longer choosing to go into service.

But the drop in number was also down to other significant social changes.

The Balfour Education Act of 1902 raised the school leaving age

from 10 to 12, opening up secondary education

to many more children and raising literacy throughout Britain.

This generation of children

didn't want to follow their parents into service.

They wanted better for themselves, they wanted to work in shops,

offices, factories and hotels.

Those jobs weren't brilliantly paid, but there was a crucial difference,

they came with freedom, evenings and weekends off.

To cater for this new world,

a distinct Edwardian, working class culture

was beginning to emerge,

one based around leisure and pleasure.

This was the era of seaside resorts, like Morecambe Bay, Southport

and Blackpool, where funfairs, music halls and brass bands on the pier

entertained workers on their days off.

Unlike other workers, servants still had very little free time,

for most just Sunday afternoons.

But now, rather than going to church,

they would head out to join the throngs.

And it was the park that was the place to be, for it was here

that servant girls could meet and make eyes at

boys from the Army and Navy,

some of whom had come from the same cottage homes.

Servant girls' infatuation with soldiers was such an age-old story

it even had a nickname - "scarlet fever" -

because of the soldiers' bright red uniforms.

One young servant, Lillian Westall, went into service in 1907,

aged just 14.

Later, she wrote in her memoirs about getting into trouble

after meeting a young sailor in the park.

"I got back about 11.00, I should have been in by 10.00.

"I went to the under-house maid's room and slept with her.

"But the head steward was up early, found my bed hadn't been slept in.

"That was enough for him, he sent for me.

"'Go at once,' he said sternly, 'we don't want your sort here.'"

"I made no protest.

"After all, I was in the wrong, I should have been in by 10.00.

"I packed my little basket once more and left."

What I love about Lillian is the fact that she stands for

so many servant girls of the time.

She wasn't phased by this episode, she didn't hang her head in shame,

she just went out and got another job.

In fact, she had nine jobs in seven years.

For girls like Lillian, service was something that fitted in

around their lives as well as around the whims of their employers.

Lillian ended up marrying her sailor,

but it didn't always end so happily.

New-found freedoms often led many servant girls

down a far more dangerous path.

Just three miles from Lanhydrock in Cornwall,

in the small town of Loswithiel was a home run by nuns for fallen women,

women who had literally fallen down the moral order,

mostly by losing their virginity.

The home wanted to try to give them a fresh start in life,

and one way it did that was by training them to be laundry maids.

Called St Faith's House of Mercy, it was built on land

donated by Lady Robartes, a considerable philanthropic gesture.

But it was also a way of out-sourcing Lanhydrock's

most labour-intensive job, the laundry.

Delivered by horse and cart every Monday,

1.5 tons of washing were processed every week,

overseen by a group of Anglican nuns

from a middle-class Order from Oxfordshire.

By 1900, St Faith's was just one of more than 200

of these Anglican institutions across Britain,

which in their time rescued over 100,000 girls.

Called penitentiaries,

historian Susan Munn has been studying them for over ten years.

Because when a penitent asked for admission she would be

interviewed by the Mother Superior, and the Mother Superior would

make some extremely brief notes about her story.

And these follow a very classic pattern.

And they get pushed out into service very young or they run away.

-Yes.

-And sooner or later, something happens, she's on the street,

she's had an affair, she's been raped by her master's son,

any number of things could happen.

One way or another they end up at the door of the penitentiary

telling their story.

The idea was that once you were inside the penitentiary

that life was gone, it was behind you.

They were asked to never refer to it again.

So telling that story at the time of entrance

-was a transformative moment.

-Like a confession, almost.

-Yeah, yeah.

It wasn't allowed to use your own name,

they were all given a new name when they entered.

They did not wear their own clothes, they wore a uniform dress.

And it all sounds terribly repressive until you realise

that the Sisters did precisely the same things themselves.

Of course.

They wore habits, they were given a new name when they joined the Order

and it was strictly forbidden to talk about their past lives.

Do we see a lot of servants in here, these kinds of places?

The great majority of women who enter penitentiaries

are servants, and of domestic servants they tend to be,

no surprises here, maids-of-all-work, the very bottom of the servant tier,

both in terms of status, wages and skill levels.

St Faith's was a laundry penitentiary. Why laundries?

Laundry work was noisy, messy, hot, exhausting, but it was a skill.

Yes.

And in addition to that you can see it as symbolic of what

the Sisterhoods were trying to do in the penitentiaries themselves.

Why was it symbolic?

It's symbolic because they're standing over their wash tub

scrubbing clothes and steaming the stains out

and ironing everything till it's smooth again,

while the same process is happening internally to their soul.

How to remove stains from a dress -

special items with more than one type of fabric should be unpicked,

washing each part separately.

Grease from candles is removed by turpentine. Ink with lemon juice.

Fruit stains with hot milk.

And wax by a hot coal wrapped in linen or brown paper.

When finished, sew the dress back together.

Although St Faith's hasn't been a penitentiary for over 60 years,

I've come to have a look around with Chrissie Knight,

whose Great Aunt Amelia was here in 1901.

It was converted in to a holiday home in the 1950s.

This takes you in to the laundry room.

But traces of its old life can still be found.

-Not much of it survives now.

-No, no.

This is a billiard room.

But that was the vent here, for the steam.

A busy place then it was going to be, wasn't it?

-Yeah, it was quite a little business, really.

-It was, yeah.

There's even an old pump from which all the water

would be brought in by hand.

-Oh, my word.

-And it's got a date on there. 1879.

I wouldn't like to... I wouldn't liked to have done that!

Drag water from here in to there. Buckets and buckets of water.

Yeah. Day in, day out, wasn't it?

-Yeah. All that washing to do.

-Yeah.

Up at the very top of the building you can still see traces

of the dormitory where the girls would have collapsed into bed.

-You can see the hooks up here, the original hooks.

-Yeah.

And another one there.

The only photograph Chrissie has of her Great Aunt Amelia

was taken at Amelia's third wedding when she was in her 80s.

She was a bit of naughty girl.

We were told that she was actually sent

to Bodmin Jail for prostitution.

Apparently, in Devonport there was a bit of an argument, tussle,

girls fighting.

Obviously, she was on their patch.

My belief is that the Sisters of Mercy rescued her

and brought her here to serve out her penance.

And she worked in the laundry here. From the 1901 Census here.

Oh, right, and she's here at St Faith's.

It's here at St Faith's, yeah. And there she is there.

-Oh, yes, Amelia Jane Harding.

-Amelia Jane, aged 19.

-And she's an inmate?

-Yeah.

-There's a 12-year-old girl here.

-Yeah.

-Annie Hickman. There's a 15-year-old, Elizabeth French.

-15. Yeah.

-A 33-year-old.

So at 19, she's around the middle, isn't she?

Yeah, she is, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What do you know about her early life?

Only that her father died when she was about 11 years old.

And she was then sent over to Plymouth to

the Royal Female Open Orphanage.

And it's where they used to train young girls for domestic service.

Then we've got a lapse of a few years,

which we don't know much about, until she turned up in Bodmin.

So, you know, she's had it pretty tough.

-Yeah. Yeah.

-She really has had it tough.

When you think of the other options.

Well, yeah, when you think of the alternatives, she could have

ended up and stayed in Bodmin Jail, or else the workhouse.

-But she didn't.

-Or gone back to the streets.

Or gone back to the streets, yeah.

But she came here, which I think for Amelia was probably the best thing,

because it certainly improved her life, because when she left here

she went home, got married, had children and lived a normal life.

And became a good girl. SHE LAUGHS

Not everyone was as charitable towards the girls.

Many of them recalled the walk to church on Sunday as

a day of terror, with crowds of leering men shouting, whistling

and climbing over the walls to reach them.

On occasions, the police even convoyed the nuns

and their charges to church.

It's easy to see the darker side of institutions like St Faith's,

but I also think we've got to see them as progressive places

which took in women the rest of society had abandoned.

It says, "In Memory of St Faith's maidens".

There's a list of names there,

Mercy Hooper, Jane Semple, Daisy Jewel, Grace-May Wilson.

They didn't leave the home to start a new life, their life ended there.

What places like St Faith's tell us is that many female servants

got stuck in a strange cycle of service and life on the streets,

with traditional jobs in farming or mining no longer deemed feminine,

for women near the bottom of society there weren't many options.

Male servants faced difficulties of their own,

albeit of a very different kind.

By 1901, they were now outnumbered by female servants

by more than twenty to one..

The footman - salary £20 a year plus tips.

Duties - run alongside the master's carriage to look for potholes

and ward off intruders.

Deliver the master and mistress's private messages.

Welcome visitors and announce guests.

Clean the best knives and forks and polish the silver.

Lay the table. Pour the wine and serve at dinner parties.

Reserve seats at the theatre and opera.

The footman was once the gilded peacock of service,

employed for their good looks and shapely legs, they wore the finest

livery to show their distinction from dirty and productive labour.

Once the hallmark of gentility and class,

they were now few and far between.

There are two reasons for that.

The first was that indoor service had simply become associated

with women and women's work no longer appealed to men.

The second reason is more intriguing, it's to do with tax.

A tax was first introduced on male servants in the 1770s

to help pay for the American War of Independence,

but it remained in place right up to until the 1930s.

And I've got a tax licence here, licensed for one male servant,

which allows Lady Amy to employ one male servant for one year,

having paid the sum of 15 shillings for the licence.

So this licence and the tax behind it

defined male servants as a luxury that only the rich could afford.

To add insult to injury, as the motorcar replaced

the horse and carriage in the homes of the super-rich,

the footman became little more than an ornamental throwback,

left to wait at table, clean the cutlery and open the door.

One of the best places to track the decline in the male service

is Polesden Lacey in Surrey.

This was the home of Mrs Ronald Greville,

society hostess and close friend of Edward VII,

a venue for endless glittering parties,

serviced by a small army of staff.

No doubt inspired by one of her visits here,

journalist and snooty mother-in-law, Lady Violet Greville,

wrote a witty article about the problems with the modern man servant

in the society magazine The National Review.

Lady Violet writes this as a caricature piece

for the amusement of her upper class readers,

but her comments about men servants are quite stinging.

She says that, "although our servants belong to our climate

"like our Christmas fogs, our roast beef and our cricket,

"they have become flunkies and lackeys,

"the very worst type of species."

For Lady Violet, things are not what they used to be.

Her list of complaints is rather long.

She says, "They are generally married men who have

"drifted down from a higher estate through drink or other misfortunes.

"They are slovenly and lazy and lord it over the widow

"and the orphan with whom it is their lots to be cast."

And worst still, "He remains a unique specimen of high civilisation

"acting upon a naturally uneducated nature.

"There is veneer, but no real value underneath."

What does Lady Violet think might be done about all of this?

Well, actually, not very much.

"There is nothing to be done, but for us,

"the employers, to be very kind and indulgent to them

"and blandly to hope that they will return the compliment."

At Polesden Lacey such complaints weren't unfounded.

The under-butler, a man called Mr Bacon,

was notorious for being drunk on the job,

passing inappropriate messages to lady guests

and eating the food before it got to the table.

But what Lady Violent didn't reckon on was being answered in print

in the same paper by an actual servant,

a butler called John Robinson.

John Robinson's reply is called A Butler's View Of Men Service.

He castigates Lady Greville,

he calls her attitudes to this question

"A Belgravian version of the imperial Roman elite's attitudes

"to their slaves."

The problem he says, "Is not with servants but with employers."

And it's on these employers that John Robinson really lets rip.

Their upper class "indolence" he says sets a bad example.

"Their supercilious scorn strips the servant

"of any sense of responsibility."

And worst of all, "Forced to be for ever at their beck and call,

"opportunities for servants' self-improvement are impossible."

And this is how he ends, this is his conclusion.

"Society is too much taken up with its balls and millinery, its dinners

"and matchmaking ever to think of its duties towards dependence.

"Put service on the level with a trade,

"let better service be required,

"but let the servant be treated as a man,

"in this way the existing corruption will be abolished

"and the abuses servants now complain of be a thing of the past."

You can feel the scorn scorching the page.

Servants like John Robinson were keenly aware of the sharp contrasts

between those parts of national life that were changing

and those that were not.

And, what's more, they were no longer afraid to voice it.

Outside the home, a rising labour movement organised from within

the working class was transforming life in Britain's shops

and factories, fighting for everything from safety laws

and the inspection of conditions, to strict limits on working hours.

But Britain's 1.3 million servants were being ignored.

Labour reform was beginning to gather pace,

but for many people labour in the home wasn't considered proper work,

it didn't need reform, it was a private arrangement.

Alongside John Robinson, female servants also started to

make their voices heard, albeit with more modest calls for change.

Here's one cook.

"I've been in service 20 years

"and feel sure I could make a few suggestions.

"I'm in a hard place now, I rise early and am at work all day long.

"I get out but for a few hours once a week.

"I think servants hours of labour much too long,

"and I wish with all my heart the Factory Act limiting

"the hours of labour could be applied to domestic service.

"Good sorts of people, I feel sure, would not mind."

The problem was that most employers did mind and, as yet,

not enough servants were willing to risk challenging them head-on.

One place where the ground started to shift was Glasgow in Scotland.

Built on heavy industry, by 1900 Glasgow was the fourth largest

city in Europe, home to some of the wealthiest shipbuilders,

steel magnates and bankers in Britain.

But it was also the city with the strongest workers' unions,

where the battle for workers' rights was most violently waged.

Surprisingly, one such worker was a 17-year-old tweeny

called Jessie Steven, who worked here at number 20 Belhaven Terrace

for one of Glasgow's grandest couples,

Sir Samuel and Lady Chisholm.

From the basement of this grand house

emerged a great story of servant power.

Historian Laura Schwartz has come to tell Jessie's tale.

Jessie tells a story about working here for almost a year and then

falling on the stairs when she was cleaning them and hurting her ankle.

So she continued to work on this painful ankle for two days before

it became almost impossible for her to walk, and the doctor was called.

And the doctor was horrified to find that, actually,

she'd been working on a dislocated ankle.

So he advised her to rest until it was better,

but this was not something that was acceptable to Lady Chisholm.

So this was around Christmas time when there were lots of guests.

-A busy time, yeah.

-Very busy, lots of celebrations.

So Jessie was put to work doing the washing-up,

and the only way that she could manage to stand at the sink

was to stand on one leg with her dislocated ankle propped on a chair,

and there she stayed from 7.00 in the evening

until the early hours of the morning doing non-stop washing-up.

To add insult to the injury, after Christmas Lady Chisholm fired her

for not being able to work fast enough.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Like many working class kids after Balfour's Education Act of 1902,

Jessie had won a scholarship to one of Glasgow's best secondary schools,

but forced into service at 15

when her father lost his job, she refused to become a deferent tweeny.

She wasn't so disappointed when she was fired because she had

already been doing some very useful work while she was here.

And what was that?

And that work was walking up and down the houses,

getting to know the other maids,

chatting to them in the backyards or in the basement kitchens

and discussing with them what they disliked about their jobs,

what kind of change they wanted to happen

and how they might achieve that.

-She starts to mobilise the maids?

-Yes. She starts to organise them.

And she talks specifically to them about joining a union.

Well, you can just imagine it, can't you?

You can see her down here in these basement yards

and she probably would have been leaning over the walls or

stealing a quick moment in between her tasks to go and have a chat.

Do you think that's actually another reason why she gets fired?

I think it could have been quite possibly been so.

It couldn't have escaped the notice of her employers

that Jessie Steven wasn't quite your ordinary maid.

In London,

servants had organised themselves in to a Domestic Workers' Union.

In 1913, aged just 17, Jessie became the Secretary of the Glasgow branch,

organising its first mass meeting in a tea-room here in Bothwell Street.

And what were the demands of the maids at this point?

The most important thing for them was more time off.

Maids during this period, it wasn't unusual to work 17-hour days

with maybe a Sunday afternoon off once a fortnight.

And so what these maids were demanding was a 12-hour-day,

and that was seen as a kind of utopian fantasy.

And they also specifically wanted a half-day holiday,

an afternoon off every week, and they argued for this because

they saw this being something that was achieved by other workers.

So shop workers during this time had been granted a weekly half holiday.

Right.

And factory workers also were having their hours limited.

The servants wanted a piece of this action too?

They're very aware of what's going on in the wider world, and they're

aware of these bigger working class struggles that are absolutely

at fever pitch during this period, and beginning to win stuff.

-And especially in Glasgow.

-Especially in Glasgow.

And it's picked up in the Glasgow Herald, isn't it,

-they report the meeting.

-Yes.

And at it Jessie reports that she was out to preach

the doctrine of divine discontent.

It's a great phrase, divine discontent.

In the doctrine of discontent, Jessie wrote up 13 demands,

including specified meal hours,

uniforms to be paid for by the employer, not the servant.

And, above all, recognition of the union.

The meeting was so successful that branches of the union soon

sprung up in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

But ultimately, its success was short-lived.

There was a lot of ambiguity towards it,

from both the Organised Labour Movement, which is still very much

about organising white men in factory jobs and saw,

often those men saw domestic servants

as somehow outside of a wider working...

It wasn't proper work, not a proper trade.

And it was too difficult to organise servants.

Right, right, right.

Servants work two to a house, three to a house,

they work very long hours, it's difficult for them

to get to meetings like the one that Jessie Steven organised here.

And so some people argue that it's a waste of time and resources

to put energy in to trying to organise servants

because it's such a complicated thing to try and do.

What happens to Jessie in the end?

She describes how after about six months of organising in Glasgow

things get too hot for her, is what she called it.

What does she mean by that?

It means that she's blacklisted, that she's now..

I mean, she's being interviewed in the local paper,

and she doesn't shy away from the kind of class antagonism

that's inherent in that moment.

-And she's stirring up the other maids to do the same thing.

-She is.

So who would want to employ that kind of servant?

So she leaves the city and goes and finds work in London instead.

Perhaps the most surprising reaction to the servant unions

wasn't from the male-dominated Labour Movement

but from the Suffragettes.

In 1911, Jessie became one of many militant Suffragettes,

even acid bombing letterboxes disguised in her maid's outfit

in pursuit of women's votes.

Yet even though domestic servants were the third largest group

of all the women who signed petitions for women's votes,

the Suffragettes found it difficult to support servants' rights.

I think domestic servants were very active in the movement.

They made up probably the bulk of the women

who would have clustered around Suffrage speakers at street corners.

But they're always duly recognised as members of the Women's Movement.

How do you explain that?

I think that there are many Suffragettes in the Women's Movement

during this period who are middle class women,

who are professional women and who, of course, employ servants.

And they themselves often have a very ambiguous response

to their militant maids.

So there's a letter here in the Woman Worker

from a Suffragette mistress, who signs herself "a working wife".

"I pay them good wages, they have the same food,

"the same beds as ourselves.

"I have nursed the maids when they were ill,

"and sent them away for holidays.

"I have interested myself in their affairs, helped their friends,

"sent them to places of amusement and to Suffrage meetings."

So she feels that she's doing all she can

as a progressive, feminist mistress

to help the women who work in her own home.

And she expects good performance in return.

She does. And she expects them to be grateful, which they're not.

So the rest of the letter is her complaining about how they,

nevertheless, continue to shirk their work,

how in fact this mistress who works as a doctor's wife works much harder

than her servants, who she often finds, when she comes home for work,

lounging about, sitting in front of the fire having a nice time.

So the letter shifts in tone towards the end,

and a sort of note of desperation creeps in

when this working wife asks, "Please tell me whose fault it all is,

"only, it's no use saying I ought to take a flat

"and do all the work myself,

"as well as my other work and my mothering work.

"My husband's practice would disappear for one thing,

"and then we could not live at all."

-It sounds like a very modern dilemma.

-It is.

Even when middle-class women go out to work

someone still needs to do the work of the home,

and it's unclear if it's not servants who will do that work.

There's one thing for sure, it's not going to be men.

Almost throughout these debates no-one suggests

that this domestic labour should be shared by men.

What's clear is that despite

an increasingly vocal servant community,

the reforms that had been so successfully bargained for

in the outside world, of industries, factories and shops,

had hit a brick wall inside the home.

Both workers' and women's rights might have failed servants

but, eventually, change came from an unexpected source,

from health reformers inspired by Florence Nightingale.

Spending their lives in damp, dark basements, dens of foul air,

as Florence called them, it was not their pay and working hours

that now came under attack, but their places of work.

If new laws had ushered government inspectors

in to Britain's factories and hospitals,

then why not the home too?

It was a question put to servants themselves in a government report

by the Women's Industrial Council.

"Not on any account should a girl go to service

"under the present conditions.

"Private houses should come under government

"and sanitary inspectors should visit these houses

"the same as the poorer ones, as I know several

"where the maids sleep in the basement,

"where there's no means of fresh air.

"Is it any wonder then that there are so many

"delicate and pale-faced girls to be met always.

"It's quite time this is looked in to."

"I've been where four or five servants had to sleep in one room.

"Is that healthy?"

"I would advocate for the entire abolition

"of underground kitchens and servant sitting rooms.

"They are an abomination to civilisation

"and the ruin of many girls' health."

In the end, inspectors never made it below stairs, but

many of the sanitary measures that had transformed health care did.

Unhygienic wooden beds were replaced by iron ones,

carpets were ripped up and replaced with lino.

And windows were thrown open to provide lashings of fresh air.

Although it didn't necessarily please the old guard.

One Edwardian man servant was quite unhappy about this,

and he wrote in his memoir, "When I first came to my place of work

"the servants all had feather beds, one could flop down and rest.

"Then a new housekeeper came and had them all taken away

"and we had to lie on hard mattresses.

"She was one of those fresh air hygiene fanatics."

Eventually, the government did manage

to introduce employment reform into the privacy of the home.

And it was largely down to one ground-breaking politician,

David Lloyd George.

A Liberal MP and son of a teacher,

he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, introducing

the largest sweep of working class reforms ever to hit British society.

And central to them was the National Insurance Bill of 1911,

which provided medical insurance for workers across British industry,

and which included domestic servants among these trades

for the very first time.

It was an historic moment, perhaps the first time the home was

officially recognised as a place of work.

For many politicians today it's still seen

as a benchmark of social reform.

There had been problems enough in including

agricultural labourers in reform, to include domestic servants,

who were really a second-class group of citizens was regarded

as positively revolutionary, because their employers would be

the last line of resistance against doing those things.

And what does the Act actually do?

It provides medical assistance for two categories of people.

The temporarily sick, who have ten shillings a week,

the person who's sick five shillings a week,

on the payment of a contribution.

And, of course, the great argument was about the contribution,

because part of the contribution was paid for by the employer,

and the employer didn't want to do that.

And I think very many servants would regard it as rather improper

that the state imposes restrictions on their employers.

They were rather deferential by nature, perhaps not by nature,

but by environment.

The deferential nature was imposed upon them.

And I think if you think of well, what we all think about

when we think of servants, Upstairs Downstairs,

you can imagine the butler in Upstairs Downstairs saying,

"If the ladyship doesn't want to buy a stamp

"then who am I to insist on buying a stamp?"

I think the deferential natural, the obsequious nature of some servants

in the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century

probably complicated it as much as the opposition of the employers.

There was also much resistance and humour in the popular press

and music halls around the process of getting insurance,

where employers and servants had to lick and stick stamps

to an insurance card once a week.

# Now I went looking for work one day and wherever I take a look

# The first thing that they asked me for was my insurance book... #

The lady of the house, a very well-endowed lady, I must say,

is washing one of the servants.

I'm afraid I have to say it, she isn't licking the stamps,

she's licking the soldier.

# I started sticking me stamp on, when I put out me tongue

HE LAUGHS

THEY LAUGH

# Her husband came with an hobbling stick

# He said I was a scamp

# He landed me one on my tum-pa-dum-tum

# While I was licking me stamp. #

In the end, the Daily Mail received so many letters of complaint

from mistresses that a mass rally was organised

by the Dowager Countess Dysart at the Royal Albert Hall.

22,000 women, the Grand Protest,

vast Assembly in the Albert Hall, "Kill the Tax".

Well, the great moment of this was when Countess Dysart addressed

the Assembly sitting next to, or standing next to her lady's maid.

And the Countess said, "She's too shy to speak,

"so I'm going to give the speech she would have spoken."

And having said that this lady didn't want to stick her stamp

on the card, she didn't want any sort of insurance,

she then said what my maid would end up by saying was,

"Come the four corners the world in arms, and nought shall shock us.

"Nought shall make us rue if England to yourself be true."

And the maid sat there nodding wildly about this.

It's superb, isn't it?

Before the Bill,

servants who were sick or too old to work received no medical insurance,

no pensions and no formal means of financial support.

Many of those with no homes to go had to return to the workhouse

where, ironically, so many had begun their lives.

My great-grandfather was a gardener at a great house in Nottingham,

when he retired he was cut off without a penny.

They didn't give him £50 to go away with, and certainly not a pension.

The idea that the benevolent employers looked after their servants

is a ridiculous myth.

They didn't care a damn about them

when they were too old to work and too sick to work.

Do you think there's something peculiarly English about all this?

I think the servant phenomenon is a strange English feature,

and it's all to do with our strange class structure.

We're much more class conscious, much more class divided than Europe.

We're much more opposed to what we regard as degrading,

menial domestic work, that also involves the idea that

the middle class lady doesn't dirty her hands.

Of course, that idea had trickled down from the big house,

with 30 indoor servants to look after just one family,

places like Lanhydrock were built on the premise that

the dirty work would always be done by unseen hands.

And for many they stand as symbols of a lost golden age

of upper class Edwardian life.

But they were also places that were acutely aware

that their world was already fast disappearing.

Here, philanthropy, however well meant,

saw orphans and fallen women making up the servant shortfall.

And the heir, Tommy Robartes, like his father, becoming a Liberal MP,

interested in trade unionism and the rights of domestic servants.

Soon, however, a much bigger history would transform the house for ever.

Lanhydrock was deeply affected by the First World War,

it would never be the same again.

Below stairs, almost all the men enlist

and most of the women go off to work in munitions factories.

Above stairs, the new chauffeur, Henry Baker,

drives the son and heir, Tommy Robartes,

off to war in a Rolls Royce,

taking him to his death in the trenches.

The trauma of war brought a temporary truce

in master/servant relations,

but after it the servant problem became a servant crisis.

Next time - in the face of 20th century upheavals

we witness the complete collapse of the old order,

putting an end to life below stairs for ever.

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