In the 18th and 19th centuries, everybody had servants. But we know better, don’t we? We don’t have servants, we have cleaners and au pairs and nannies. The rich have concierges and personal assistants.
In the early days, servants were necessary to provide light and heat. You rang for a servant to “snuff” the candles because self-consuming wicks hadn’t been invented. An unsnuffed candle would melt, and a waterfall of wax would drip on the carpet. They also cleaned and replenished the candlesticks. When oil lamps came in, they filled and cleaned them. They carried coals and logs, and built fires in every grate. A gentleman or lady could not put a lump of coal on the fire if it burned low, even with tongs – you rang for the servant.
Apart from cooking and cleaning, serving food and clearing it away, servants were necessary for sanitation. Your bedroom was your toilet as well as your bathroom, thanks to the chamber pot that lived either under the bed or in a “nightstand” next to it. You threw the results into a covered “slop bucket” under your washstand. Servants carried up cans of hot water for washing, poured the waste water into the slop bucket and carried the whole thing downstairs to the kitchen. The products of the outside privy were thrown into the ashbin where all the household waste went. This was collected after dark by “night-soil men” and was sold as fertiliser. (Flush toilets and drains arrived in the mid-19th century.)
If ladies ran out of conversation, they could always complain about their servants. The comic magazine Punch published a series of “Servant-gal-isms”, hilarious cartoons in which servants were ridiculed for calling a maisonette a mayonnaise, and having interests above their station. “Can I have the evening off, madam? Cook next door is having a Language of Flowers bee.” (A “bee” was a quiz.)
Middle-class home-owners suffered from something called “the servant problem” as new laws forced them to pay their staff a decent wage, and give them time off. Many women found better jobs in shops, cafés and factories. After World War II, servants seemed to be a thing of the past. But the 50s housewife was now expected to do the entire work of the house, cook all the meals, wash the clothes and bring up the children – singlehanded. It took a few years before people realised that this was, in fact, impossible – and labour-saving devices were born.
This long preamble is to explain why our family had servants in the 50s. My mother produced four children in ten years. Our parents bought a big house in the country which was a bargain for several reasons. It was remote, and it was the partitioned-off servants’ quarters of an even bigger house. We lived with the old wallpaper for years. There was no central heating – warmth came from an Aga in the kitchen (powered by coal-dust nuggets), open fires, and paraffin stoves. In winter, we had chilblains. The Good Old Days!
We were looked after by a live-in nanny, who had been my father’s, and had been rather wished on us by my grandmother. Edie also lived in and did some of the cooking. She started boiling the cabbage at ten in the morning, so by lunchtime it resembled seaweed. A joint of meat was cooked every Sunday, and we lived on it throughout the week. It got progressively more edible as it reappeared as rissoles and cottage pie. Jam, sugar and butter came off the official ration, but they were doled out parsimoniously. (“You don’t need to add sugar! It’s got sugar in it! It’s sweet enough!”) There was no chutney, and no salad cream or tomato ketchup until the 60s.
Dolly came in to clean, and Mr Young worked in the huge garden in which we grew a lot of our food. Dolly, Edie and Mr Young were all related, and eventually another family member, Mrs Thayer, became our cleaner. Edie moved on to housekeep for the single man who lived at the bottom of our garden. Nanny was pensioned off and replaced by 16-year-old Patty, who wore pointed shoes and full skirts and went to the Youth Club. (Why couldn’t we join when we were old enough? Or perform in the panto? They were Church of England only. Those were the days.)
Yes, it makes us sound rich and privileged, doesn’t it? Didn’t we know that it was just wrong to employ servants? "How can I ask another woman to clean my oven?" moaned a middle-class columnist recently.
Let’s take food first. Post-war, we thought we should eat meat now that it was available again, and it required a lot of preparation. There were no convenience foods, no ready meals. You couldn’t buy a tray of cooked chicken pieces, or even chicken legs or fillets. If you wanted chicken, you bought a bird. At least they came featherless, with the giblets wrapped in paper inside. Fish sometimes came whole, requiring “cleaning”, and rabbits came with fur. There were no takeaways apart from the odd chip shop and of course we couldn’t go to one of those. Vegetables were sold caked in dirt. Desserts, scones, cakes, jam, marmalade were home-made. Without freezers, veg was preserved in Kilner jars (or you opened a tin). We'd have been happy with macaroni cheese, sausages, bacon or beans on toast, all of which can be cooked in half an hour. But they were an occasional treat.
The laundry: Our first washing machine had a boiler compartment, and a mangle. This monster was replaced by a “twin-tub” with a terrifying spin-dryer. We kept these devices until they wore out – they must have been expensive. It was much harder to get credit, and “hire-purchase” or “the HP” was looked down on by people like us, partly because you ended up paying much more for the thing. There were no disposable nappies.
Cleaning: Our house was too big, and inconvenient, with dark unused spaces left over as the Victorians added extensions to extensions.
Clothes: My mother made quite a lot of ours, and her own. Jerseys and vests were knitted by our grandmother and great-aunts. Kind friends passed on clothes their children had grown out of.
Outings and entertainments were few, and we had no TV for years. (My father was given one as part-payment for a job.) On holiday, we took huge picnics instead of going to cafés.
So, we "heated" our bedrooms with paraffin stoves, wore hand-me-downs, grew our own food – and employed
servants? I hope I’ve made the case that running a home was far harder work in those days, and it was cheaper to hire someone to do some of it than to buy the washer-drier that wasn’t on the market yet.
Despite all this, 50s husbands expected to come home to a fancy dinner every evening, served by candlelight and to be eaten with silver cutlery. The pre-war life enabled by servants was supposed to continue.
In the 60s, we tried out TV dinners (once), and bought Lyons cakes (delicious). We experimented with spaghetti, Instant Whip, Nesquik, yoghurt, peanut butter and Dairylea cheese triangles. Food became “fun”. The house was remodelled and redecorated. “Nightstor” heaters were installed to “take the chill off” – we weren’t allowed to turn them up. We acquired a huge freezer and my mother cooked a lot of pies to be defrosted later. And of course freezing transformed shopping – though I can’t recommend the French beans. The legs of mutton disappeared and were not missed.
We were better-off now and we all relaxed a bit. The youngest went to school, Patty got married and only Mrs Thayer remained. (When my mother met her again years later she hugged her and addressed her as “Joyce”, commenting how times had changed.)
These days, we wouldn't dream of cooking anything that took three hours to prepare. And standards have slipped a bit – who cares about a bit of dust? Anyway, we've got rid of all those dust-gathering knick-knacks. Why make work for yourself?
Were we terrible people to employ servants? Does it mean that we were so privileged that we should spend the rest of our lives apologising? Or was it just the way we lived then?
Thanks to
Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson, and
Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light.
