No more domestic bliss
WHEN THE MIDDLE CLASSES FACED THE ‘SERVANT PROBLEM’
A century ago, some people complained bitterly of the difficulty in finding reliable and honest domestic servants. But many of the women who had found alternative employment weren’t complaining at all. Eugene Byrne examines “the servant problem” as seen from Bristol
IF you live in a house built during the 20th century, it’s possible that there is (or used to be) a rectangular hole in the wall between the kitchen and one of the downstairs reception rooms. This wooden-framed aperture, which originally would have had a little door or doors on it, is generally called the “serving hatch”.
If you grew up in such a house, perhaps the serving hatch was used daily (or just on Sundays) by your Mum for passing meals through to the dining room or living room.
In the 1920s and 30s, the serving hatch was a common feature of new-build semi-detached houses for the private market. It was even incorporated into some of the new council houses. But however convenient it may or may not have proved for the 20th century housewife, it was not invented for her.
The serving hatch was indeed a convenience for the lady of the house, but in the 1920s and 30s it was designed on the assumption that the person passing things through it would be a servant.
After the First World War, the position of women in British society was undergoing radical changes. Women over 30 got the vote in 1918, and women had the vote on equal terms to men by 1928.
The war had seen women taking on many traditionally “male” roles and while many at the war’s end welcomed the opportunity to return to the domestic sphere, others did not. Some married women wanted to carry on working, while for most single women a job was a necessity.
By 1920, with the foundation of the Bristol Venture Club as a female equivalent of the Rotarians, there were plenty of women in professional occupations to join it. Even such all-male bastions as the law or even architecture were falling. Eveline Dew Blacker designed council houses and was co-architect of the Bristol Cenotaph, while Angela Tuckett became Bristol’s first woman solicitor in 1929, and her sister Joan qualified not long after. Bristol had women councillors by the 1920s, too.
Women were also working in far greater numbers in manual jobs. Fry’s and Wills were only the biggest local employers who were taking on ever-larger numbers of female production line workers. Even though they were cheaper than men, women were happy to work in factories.
Not all women had sisterly feelings about this. The problem for the middle classes was that it was getting harder to find servants.
A letter to the Western Daily Press in 1919 wailed:
SIR, – Will you allow me space to say something concerning the domestic servant problem? Here am I with four children, delicate, a large house, unable to get help on account of the high wages girls are asking. In consequence have work so hard that my health is crippled. If this continues, how are wives in the middle classes with families going to carry on alone without serious consequences? I may add also when my husband was demobilised my Army allowance was stopped, and for three weeks I had to manage as best I could, having used up all my spare money while my husband was in the employment after Army she has … Yet been can a single doing get 29s woman war a work. week out Why cannot these women go back to domestic service, where most of them came from, and be content with good homes and living, good outings and moderate wages?
DISTRACTED WIFE
Domestic servants had been a feature of English life for centuries. Every large household required labour to function. This was as true in a Grand Victorian country house as it had been in the castle of some medieval lord; the owners needed people to do the cooking, cleaning, washing, gardening, maintenance, nannying, looking after the horses – everything – because they weren’t going to do any of those things for themselves.
It was also true of more modest homes. By Victorian times, every middle-class home would have at least one maid.
By 1900, there were about a million and a half domestic servants in Britain, from a total population of 36 million. That is, one Briton in 24 was in service. We don’t know the exact number for Bristol, but it’s likely that the proportion was even higher because of the city’s relative prosperity. It might be that in 1900 as many as one Bristolian in every 20 – men, women and children – was a domestic servant of some sort. Forget about Downton Abbey or Upstairs, Downstairs and their portrayals of grand town and country houses with their huge establishments of maids, butlers and footmen. Most servants were women, and most worked in ones and twos in much smaller homes. They were often “live-in”, sleeping in attic rooms and at the beck and call of the homeowners 24 hours a day.
They were expected to work at least six days a week, but often longer, with just a Sunday afternoon off.
Householders without the money or space for a “live-in” might have one or two “dailies”, women who travelled in to work each day.
By the early 1900s, the area by St Augustine’s Bridge in the city centre where tram passengers waited was known as “Skivvies’ Island” because of all the housemaids who would gather early each morning to take the trams to work in the wealthy households up in Clifton and other suburbs.
This was probably not lost on Sir George White, the Tramways Company boss and one of the richest men in the country – his own mother had been a housemaid.
Never mind the rise of trade unions and the Labour party; the everyday class struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries was also played out in countless homes. The middle classes wanted to get as much work as possible out of their domestic staff as cheaply as possible. The staff wanted the opposite.
In Victorian times they started to speak of “the servant problem”, the difficulty in obtaining reliable and hard-working staff. It would become a rich vein of humour.
In 1901, for instance, someone despairing of being able to secure the services of a maid on what s/he considered reasonable terms, took out an advert in a Bristol newspaper:
Wanted: General Servant … no work; no caps or aprons; every evening out; visitors permitted; bicycle; good wages …
And while any employer would require a “character” of any job applicant – that is, references from the previous employer – the satirical Bristol Magpie turned the situation on its head in 1902 with a cartoon in which the applicant declares “character” she of the will lady be of seeking the house a from her previous servants …
A running joke about Clifton was that the matrons there were so ruthless they would think nothing of trying to entice away a good servant from the homes of their friends.
If you were the only maid in the house, life was lonely. You worked hard for poor money and any friendliness or familiarity between yourself and the family was usually frowned on
With the Great War, the middle classes complained bitterly about how young women were now getting well-paid jobs, not just in factories but in other roles which had previously been all-male. They were even working on the trams.
By 1915, the problem was considered so urgent locally that a conference was organised to look at how more young women could be encouraged to become domestics. Miss Deane of the Board of Trade observed that there would be far fewer female servants after the war unless their wages and working conditions were greatly improved.
The Lady Mayoress, Mrs Barclay Baron, said that the shortage was “one that affects mistresses very much, and the happiness and comfort of their homes.”
Mrs Barclay Baron noted that a big attraction of factory work was that the working hours were clearly set, while many housemaids had very little definite free time to themselves.
Someone suggested that it might be an idea to have some sort of training scheme for prospective maids. Someone else said it might be a better idea to have a training scheme for their mistresses.
Mrs Barclay Baron had made an important point. Work in factories might be hard, but the hours were set. What was also the case during the war was that work in many of Bristol’s war factories, making munitions or aircraft, was wellpaid.
But there was something else, an important issue for most young women: if you were the only maid in the house, life was lonely. You worked hard for poor `money and any friendliness or familiarity between yourself and the family was usually frowned on.
Even long before this, Mrs Beeton had observed: “The general servant or maid of all work is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration. Her life is a solitary one and in some places her work is never done.”
Factory work was not just about set hours and better pay; it was also more sociable. Even in those places where conversation was forbidden in work time, you had plenty of workmates to chat with before and after work and at break-times.
(There were limits: In the 1920s it was considered remarkably “progressive” that the factory girls at Wills were allowed to sing while they worked – but only at Christmas!)
While life was hard for the lonely housemaid in a small house, life in the big houses with their large establishments of servants was not much easier.
Below stairs was a strict hierarchy even more rigid than the class structure upstairs. In a big house, such as Tyntesfield or Ashton Court, the butler and housekeeper and cook had virtual powers of life and death over the lesser servants. Though the precise position of the children’s governess, who often herself came from a “respectable” family, was never resolved. Dining with the servants was beneath her status, while mixing with the family was definitely above her pay-grade.
Naturally there was some mixing across the class divide. It was a tired old cliché that masters, or more often their sons, would end up getting young female servants pregnant.
A few relationships between gentlemen and female servants ended in marriage, though most did not. The usual outcome was the ruin of the young woman, instant dismissal and the workhouse, with the child going to an orphanage. For the male party the consequences, if any, were far less serious.
Not everyone had an awful life, of course. Many servants stayed with a single employer for decades, happy in their lot, and while there was no transcending the class barrier, some employers could be decent and generous.
BT received an email many months ago from reader John Moore. He has been researching his family history and was wondering how one of his forebears, Elizabeth Savage, who worked as a servant and housekeeper for tobacco magnate Henry Overton Wills III, could have left more than £6,000 on her death in 1921. This was a very considerable sum in those times, vastly more than you’d expect a mere servant to have.
The answer was in H.O. Wills’ will: He was an immensely rich man and on his death in 1911 he left many bequests, including £10,000 outright and a life interest in a £5,000 trust fund to “my faithful and most valued friend, Elizabeth Julia Savage, in grateful acknowledgement of her care and attention for 27 years and upwards, during which period, owing to her unselfish disregard for her own interests, she has been in my opinion by no means adequately remunerated for her work, helpfulness and devotion to me and my family.”
There was no denying wider social trends. In the 1930s, the writer and commentator J.B. Priestly could baldly state that domestic service was “as obsolete as the horse” was becoming in the age of motor cars.
Yet neither horses nor servants disappeared overnight. Women in Bristol were relatively lucky in that the city offered a great deal of factory employment, but in the economic ups and downs of the period many had no choice but to become “skivvies”. By 1939 the number of servants of all types in the country was half that it had been 40 years previously, but it still amounted to perhaps 700,000 people.
So it’s possible that even in a suburban semi, the serving hatch might indeed have been used by a servant, though probably not by one who lived in.
But in the meantime, it’s no coincidence that the 1920s and 30s saw a flurry of invention and progress in domestic appliances – washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, etc. – because many women now had to become housewives.
It would be the Second World War, once more offering women jobs that were beyond their reach in peacetime, that would finally see service jobs fall to a tiny minority of the working population.
Yet even in August 1945, the “servant problem” was alive and well in the minds of some. That month, Miss Phyllis Delve of Sneyd Park received an anonymous letter:
“Now hostilities are ceasing [the war with Japan had just ended], a few of us hope that you will return to domestic service, and do in peace-time the essential work you have evaded during the war years …”
In 1939 Miss Delve had become an ARP volunteer and by 1945 was an Assistant Commandant in the Red Cross.
“Your career as a temporary lady has been watched with the greatest amusement,” added the letter.
Miss Delve was understandably upset and showed it to her local vicar, who told the Daily Mirror:
“It is obviously a group of disgruntled old maids who cannot get domestic servants and are using this vile and cruel letter-writing”, he said, adding that he was going to engage the services of handwriting experts to track down the culprits.
Alas, we don’t know if he succeeded.
» We have received some readers stories of family members who were in service in times past which we hope to publish next week. If you’d like to tell us about your servant ancestors, please mail bristol.times@b-nm.co.uk
» Now see over the page for one family’s experiences in service.