Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [133]
Lanceley himself felt that there were still great attractions to life in service, especially in the big house, with good food, opportunities to move up the ladder, the variety of being in a rural situation with an annual period in London. In his view, no servant was really overworked, and the differences in servility between domestic staff and office workers were exaggerated: ‘the head of a firm, the manager and foreman are held in far greater awe than my Lord or Lady.’ Perhaps he was influenced here by the fact that, owing to his experience and seniority, he was by then not in awe of his employers, but their close confidant.67
Eric Horne, a former footman, valet and butler, whose racy memoirs were published in 1923, turned a more cynical eye on the life of the aristocracy, but could not disguise a certain dismay at the decline of the world in which he had spent so much of his working life, which he attributed to the immediate post-war years: ‘Now that England is cracking up as far as the Nobility is concerned, who are selling their estates, castles, and large houses . . . it seems a pity that the old usages and traditions of gentleman’s service should die with the old places.’ The new rich, in his opinion, made fat by the profits of war, were a poor substitute: ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a souced [sic] mackerel.’68
Horne’s affection and respect for some of his employers is evident, just as he is driven by others to despair and fury. He wrote that he had ‘lived in the service of a noble family who were ruined by the war; they were such nice people to their servants that, could I have afforded to do it, I would have worked for them for nothing’. These enlightened aristocrats had to reduce their indoor servants from twenty-five to just three. The bleak economic climate brought about the collapse of the social whirl that had once centred on the London house. In leaner times, Horne missed the pageantry of pre-war Belgravia, with ‘pairs of horses and carriages, with footmen powdered and breeched, silk stockings, and a lot of pomp and show’. In contrast to these happier experiences, he had worked in some places where it required ‘the temper of an angel to take some of the insults of the gentry’.69
He certainly felt that the deep social gulf between the classes could not be sustained indefinitely and recalled with irritation how servants were treated like chattels and loaned between employers for big events, ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’.70 His bitterness at the behaviour of some of his employers, although by no means all, was sharpened by the death of his wife in the 1919 flu epidemic. He had been obliged to live separately from her for much of his working life by the accepted conditions of service that compelled many domestic staff to be (or behave as if they were) single and live separately from their families.71
In the period directly after the First World War, the struggle to recruit new servants prompted the Ministry of Reconstruction to set up a government commission that revealed, if nothing else, what people already in service disliked at the time.72 This turned out to be not so much the work but the social stratification and deference demanded of them, as well as the lack of personal freedom. Despite much contrary assertion in the letters pages of newspapers, domestic servants were not being tempted away from service by the newly established ‘dole’, as they were not included in the scheme until 1946.73
Ironically unemployment created by the Great Depression forced many women back into domestic service in the late 1920s, when it is estimated that there were 1.1 million of them in service. By the late 1930s this figure had risen to nearly 1.5 million, although a greater proportion were non-residential or day workers.74 However, this did not necessarily mean that