At the beginning of 1890 and according to the official census, the servants formed one of the largest groups of workers in Great Britain: of a population of twenty-nine million people between England and Wales, 1,386,167 women and 58,527 men served in private homes . Not surprising if we consider the staff that the Duke of Portland had in his Welbeck Abbey mansion at the beginning of the 20th century. Namely: a senior butler, a wine cellar sommelier, a second butler, a senior waiter, four liveried lackeys, two more for the senior butler, a manager of the servants’ dining room, two pages, a chef, a second chef, a baker, a second baker, a senior cook, two kitchen maids, a senior pantry, other pantries and scrubbers, a house porter, two ushers, two kitchen porters and six maintenance people.
We haven’t finished the list, but we’re giving you a break to digest it. After television years of Upstairs and Downstairs or Downton Abbey, two books present us with the reality of Downstairs. In 1972, English journalist Frank Victor Dawes placed an ad in the Daily Telegraph requesting that anyone who had ever worked in domestic service tell him about his experience in a letter. The answers overwhelmed Dawes, himself the son of a maid who began to serve at the age of thirteen, the usual age to enter a house, but thanks to social and economic changes he had not been forced to follow that path and He had become the director and news producer of BBC Radio.
The result was Never in Front of the Servants (Periférico), a written documentary that is published for the first time in Spain and in which the testimonies of people from all levels of the profession, regulated and stratified as if it were the army. . And it is not for less, given the legions of servants of the great mansions. We continue with that of the Duke of Portland: a housekeeper, a valet, a personal maid for the duchess and another for her daughter, a governess, a tutor, a French governess, a footman for the study room and fourteen maids. , in addition to six technicians and four firefighters in charge of the boilers and the new electrical systems, a telephone operator and his assistant, a telegraph operator and three watchmen. And we’re not done yet. Breathe.
A few years before the journalist began his compilation, an English cook, Margaret Powell, published her memoirs under the title En el piso de bajo, which is now republished by Alba. Powell was born in 1907 into a poor family and had what was called a head to study, he even received a scholarship, but his salary was needed in the family (there were seven brothers) and at fifteen he started working as a kitchen boy . From there begins a long list of houses and stalls, of horrible places and other better ones, of instinct and ambition to become a major cook herself, and the search for boyfriends who would change into a husband and take her out of the kitchen; memories full of anecdotes that are much more than that, like the daily obligation! of ironing the shoelaces, or the prohibition of giving anything by hand to the lady: it had to be presented on a silver tray.
It was the twenties and by then the service was no longer what it had been in Britain. The golden age of ups and downs was the Victorian era, when wealth was measured in the number of servants and manuals circulated such as the Book of Household Management, written in 1861 by Mrs. Isabella Beeton, and in which she urged both gentlemen like servants to stay “in place.” This accepting which was the place that corresponded to each one in the world based on their birth, some to serve and others to be served, was one of the foundations of domestic service in the 19th century; the other, economic necessity, which forced families to especially place their daughters as servants to ensure them at least food and shelter.
The living conditions created during the industrial revolution and child labor made domestic service, hard as it was, an acceptable option, explains the journalist Dawes, at least on a material level, not so much socially. “The maidens had no freedom, social status, or privileges,” a former maid wrote to her.
But the status was also very variable: the service of an aristocrat did not have the same prestige as that of a lower-middle class house (yes, they also had service, there is always someone poorer). And of course the servants themselves were aware of their rank and protected their position in the hierarchy below. In the large mansions, the upper and lower servants ate separately, even their clothing was different –costume issue: the maids had to have three printed dresses for the morning and two black ones for the afternoon, in addition to aprons and caps, which they had to bring they; Some girls saved up for years to buy the trousseau to serve and it was common for the Christmas gift they received from their employers to be fabrics… so that they could make their dresses. At the bottom of the scale was the maid, her hands always raw, who cleaned the kitchen, washed pots and pans, and served the other servants. The hierarchy was maintained even when setting the table: the first footman carried the silver, the second the crockery and the butler placed plates and glasses.
Victorian houses were designed to house these two juxtaposed societies, one of them invisible; normally the servants lived in the attics or in the basement, in the case of the cooks, but again class differences appeared: the butler, the first cook and the housekeeper had their own rooms, the rest shared them. Let’s go back to the Duke of Portland’s mansion, the interior staff was joined by thirty servants in the stables and a similar number in the garage, in the gardens and in the laundry, a head window cleaner and his two assistants; in total, inside and outside, more than a hundred people, with good conditions for the time.
The reverse was the employees of the middle classes, mostly children or adolescents, sometimes as young as ten years old, kitchen assistants, maids or shoe shiners, who suffered the pettiness of some gentlemen who “treated them practically like slaves” and spared them. in the food and the payments to be able to afford to have service, one or two people at the most; domestic work was exhausting and although appliances were appearing to make it easier, in many houses they refused to buy them, because that was what they had servants for.
It is not surprising that as the demands of the workers in the industry got better conditions for them, more and more servants deserted to go to the factories; The First World War marked the beginning of the end: the men who were fighting abroad had to be replaced, and these jobs offered the bonus of freedom, of not having to attend to the whims of other people and having personal time. Employers, who in the last decade of the 19th century began to offer one day off per month (yes, per month), known as “the cook’s day off”, in the early 20th century added one afternoon a week to the working hours. free on Sunday, and after the war, one day a week.
In the mid-nineteenth century, employers could hire a waitress for twelve pounds a year, not even double the cost of a subscription to the Times; the salary was rising, but they could not compete with the improvements in the living conditions of the workers, who now looked down on the servants, even the unions left them aside, everyone despised those who “had to serve” . Schools were created not only to teach how to iron or carve the turkey to a servant who had no longer seen their parents or relatives do it, but also to raise their social status. None of all this could stop the great desertion of the service. After the first war, the decline of traditional servitude began and nothing could stop it. The world below had passed into history, which did not mean that the same had happened with the one above.
