Print this post.Why downstairs HATED upstairs: The acerbic memoirs of a Twenties maid reveal what domestic staff REALLY thought of their masters
By MARGARET POWELL
Last updated 26th February 2011
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- Insight: Margaret Powell’s memoirs reveal what it was like to be treated less than human as she worked as a maid
In the Twenties, Margaret Powell worked as a kitchen maid, the lowest level of the servants’ hierarchy.
With unusually sharp observation, Margaret — who died in 1984 — recalled in a fascinating memoir what it was like to be treated as less than human by her wealthy employers in London and at Hove in East Sussex.
As her book, republished next week, reveals, the animosity was very much mutual…
One morning, as I was polishing the brass knocker on the front door, the newsboy arrived with the papers. Just then, my employer floated downstairs — so I dutifully handed them over.
In response, Mrs Clydesdale just gave me a long stare, looking at me as if I were something subhuman.
As the moment lengthened, I couldn’t think what was wrong. I had my cap and apron on; I was wearing the correct thick wool stockings; my hair was even scraped back in the regulation manner.
Then at last she spoke. ‘Langley,’ she said, ‘Never, never on any occasion ever hand anything to me in your bare hands — always use a silver salver.’
Tears started to trickle down my cheeks. So this was what being in service was all about: you were so low that you couldn’t even hand your employer something without it first being placed on a silver salver. I was just 15, I’d recently become a kitchen maid — and I wanted more than anything to run home. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so wretched before or since.
But, like so many other girls in service in the Twenties, I knew I couldn’t back out. My parents and grandmother lived in three small rooms in Hove, Sussex, and there was neither money nor space for a growing girl.
In any case, I knew what my mother would have said — ‘Keep your pride and take no notice.’
It wasn’t as if I didn’t know the difference between the likes of us and what everyone called ‘the gentry’. In the local parks, if any wealthy child wandered up to me, its nurse would say: ‘Come away this instant!’
Mind you, I had a kind of contempt for those children because they couldn’t do what they wanted: they weren’t allowed to dirty their clothes, they couldn’t run in and out of the bushes and they gawped when I climbed on benches.
But when I left school, it was my turn to be thwarted. I’d won a scholarship at 13 and decided I wanted to be a teacher — but that would have meant new clothes and books, which my parents simply couldn’t afford.
For my dad, work in the decorating business had always been slow. I remember once having to queue like Oliver Twist for watery gruel at the town soup kitchen when I was seven. One winter, we’d even burnt all the shelves and banisters just to keep warm.
So, after doing a few odd jobs, I agreed to go into service and turned up for an interview at the imposing Regency home of the Reverend Clydesdale and his family.
His wife looked me up and down as though I were standing in a slave market.
Fortunately, she decided that because I was strong and healthy, I’d do. I was to have £24 a year, with half a day off a week, and do everything the cook commanded.
That seemed fine — until I was given a list of my duties, which seemed sufficient for six maids.
LEFT: Poles apart—Lady Agnes Holland (Keeley Hawes) and Sir Hallam Holland (Ed Stoppard) in the BBC drama Upstairs Downstairs – and Powell’s memoirs have shed yet more light on the subject
When I first met Mrs Cutler, the intimidating lady of the house, I could tell that she disapproved of my name.
Between 5.30am and 8am, I had to clean the flues, light the fire, black-lead the grates, clean the 4ft steel fender and the fire irons, polish the brass on the front door, scrub the 14 stone steps, clean the boots and shoes, bring the cook her tea and lay the servants’ breakfast.
The first time I cleaned the boots, I was pulled up sharply by Mary, the under-housemaid. ‘They won’t do — you haven’t polished the insteps,’ she said. ‘And you have to take all the bootlaces out and iron them.’
The breakfasts I helped prepare for the Clydesdales were enormous: bacon and eggs, sausages, kidneys and either haddock or kedgeree — not one or two of these things, but every one. I couldn’t help thinking of my parents, who had only toast.
But if I commented to the cook about the unfairness of life, she just said: ‘If there weren’t the people who had the money, what would there be for people like us to do?’
After a year of this, I decided to seek my fortune in London, where I found a post in a grand house in Thurloe Square, Knightsbridge.
When I first met Mrs Cutler, the intimidating lady of the house, I could tell that she disapproved of my name. Kitchen maids were supposed to have names like Elsie Smith or Mary Jones; the danger was that a Margaret Langley (my maiden name) would be flighty.
You were considered flighty — and bound to come to a bad end —if you used the slightest little bit of make-up or wore coloured silk stockings instead of brown ones off-duty.
I’ve never been able to understand why. We were the last women to risk having illegitimate babies because we had no means of supporting them. So I kept on the straight and narrow because I was scared.
That didn’t stop me larking around innocently with the tradesmen, though — especially the cheeky errand boys, who pedalled through the streets on bicycles laden sky-high, whistling all the latest tunes. And, like all the other servants, I looked forward to the grand parties upstairs when the guests’ chauffeurs would come down to sit in the servants’ hall.
LEFT: Lower class—Rachel Perlmutter, played by Helen Bradbury, starred as the parlourmaid in Upstairs Downstairs and was most likely treated similar to that of Margaret Powell
There we were, six or seven women whose femininity was so suppressed that we were like female eunuchs.
Suddenly, noses would be powdered, hair styled up, waists pulled in and bosoms stuck out.
Even Flora, the head parlourmaid, and Annie, the head housemaid, both well over 40, would become girls for the night.
The chauffeurs, of course, were delighted to have a bevy of females fluttering around them, and told us scandalous stories about driving their male employers to love-nests. That, of course, was the full extent of the chauffeurs’ knowledge.
They never went into the flats — but, using the royal ‘we’, they’d take us through each encounter in all its amorous detail.
One old Hackney cab driver, who’d previously been a gardener at a big house, even told me about a footman who’d been having an affair not only with the lady of the house, but the master, too.
Still, we had the feeling that whatever people got up to upstairs was their privilege. Not because they were better than us, but because they had money.
It was shortly after I moved to Thurloe Square that the household was plunged into a scene from a Victorian melodrama. Agnes, the under-parlourmaid, got pregnant.
In those days, that meant a slammed door, dismissal with no money, your own home probably closed to you, and no alternative but the streets or the workhouse.
I wished I could help Agnes, who refused to name the father, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do.
It was Gladys, the under-housemaid, who bought her quinine, bottles of the plant extract pennyroyal and Beecham’s pills, which were supposed to be very good at getting rid of a baby. But all they did for Agnes was to make her spend half the day in the lavatory.
Then, on Gladys’s instructions, we lugged hot water up the stairs to fill a hip bath, into which we’d tipped tins of mustard. That didn’t work either.
With dinner parties for 12 or more taking place two or three times a week, I had to help prepare all the food and then wash a mountain of saucepans, plates and dishes.
Next, Agnes tried carrying heavy weights all day. And on her day off, she’d go to Hyde Park and keep jumping off the benches. She even tried shifting massive pieces of furniture, but none of it did any good.
Eventually, of course, she couldn’t hide her condition from Mrs Cutler, and poor Agnes was told to leave at the end of the week, with a month’s wages. I never knew what happened next, but that pay-off made me very suspicious.
A pretty girl, she’d never been the sort who’d dally with any Tom, Dick or Harry. Plus, I knew her lover had bought her some expensive silk underwear. Which meant the father almost certainly had to be Mrs Cutler’s nephew.
He was a handsome man in his early 20s, with such an attractive voice it sent shivers up and down my body. Once, I’d discovered him on the servants’ back staircase, which led only to the maids’ bedrooms.
But even though Mrs Cutler clearly suspected her nephew, she forced Gladys and me to listen to a long lecture on the evils of wanton behaviour. No nice young man would ever suggest such a thing to a girl he hoped to marry, she warned us.
Not that I had any time then for ‘followers’ — as male suitors were dismissively called by the gentry. I was the lowest in the pecking order, and even had to stoop every morning to tie the cook’s shoelaces.
With dinner parties for 12 or more taking place two or three times a week, I had to help prepare all the food and then wash a mountain of saucepans, plates and dishes in the sink, which was made of porous cement and stank to high heaven. For several hours a day, I also crouched in a boot hole laced with spiders’ webs, where I made all the upstairs boots and shoes shine like mirrors.
Living in such close contact with the other servants, a lot of quarrels went on. But a united front was always presented against those upstairs, whom we always called ‘Them’.
LEFT Stick together: Although there were often quarrels between servants, a united front was put on in opposition to ‘them’ upstairs
If ‘Them’ could have heard what we were saying about them, they’d have realised that our impassive expressions and respectful demeanours often hid scorn and derision.
During the two years I stayed in Thurloe Square, I saw very little of London because I was too tired to go out. But no one can be 16 and miserable all the time.
Nor was I truly envious of the lives of those upstairs — though there was one person who did bring out the worst in me.
Miss Susan, the eldest of Mrs Cutler’s grandchildren, was only two years younger than me, almost as tall and had the same colour hair.
But there the resemblance ended because Miss Susan had masses of clothes, a horse to ride and a tennis court to play on. She could also speak French and play the piano.
Everything was done for Miss Susan: the under-nurse used to brush her hair, her bath was got ready, even the toothpaste was laid on the brush for her.
When she came down into the kitchen, I’d be at the sink, clad in a sacking apron, immersed in bowls of greasy water.
And there was Miss Susan, dressed up to the nines, asking for something which I’d immediately have to get for her — though never once did she speak to me directly.
I left domestic service with an enormous sense of inferiority and the ability to cook a seven-course dinner.
At Christmas, when all the servants had to line up and file into the dining room, the adults would peruse us with social-welfare expressions and the children would look at us as though we were beings from another world.
Then we’d deferentially accept the parcels they handed us, containing horrid new uniforms, and mutter: ‘Thank you, Master Charles, thank you, Miss Susan.’
When I finally handed in my notice, I was desperate never to be a kitchen maid again.
So, although I’d never made a meal in Thurloe Square, I lied my way into a new job as a cook on £40 a year. Every night, when I went to bed, I used to pore over Mrs Beeton’s cookery book. Not every dish I made was a success, but I was never found out.
Eventually, I took the only escape route open to a servant: I got married. I left domestic service with an enormous sense of inferiority and the ability to cook a seven-course dinner.
My husband was a milkman, who earned £3 5 shillings a week, so I soon got rid of the seven-course-dinner habit. But the inferiority complex took longer.
I didn’t work again until our three sons were all at grammar school and World War II was drawing to a close. Once again, I was back on the bottom rung, earning tenpence an hour as a daily.
I found the differences from my days in service astounding: big houses that had once had a large staff were now reduced to no staff at all, and often stripped of their possessions.
Most of the elderly ladies I worked for accepted this change in their status with fortitude.
In one house, all they had left of their silver was a large tray. While I was polishing this one day, my employer said: ‘Ah, Margaret, when the silver service stood on that tray and the butler carried it into the drawing room, it used to look a picture of safety and security. We never thought our way of life would change.’
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Some of the ladies, however, still retained their old autocratic ways.
They’d complain bitterly about the ‘sordidness’ of life, and their favourite expression was: ‘The working class are aping their betters.’
I finally decided to tackle my inferiority complex when I realised I had nothing to talk about with my eldest son, who was preparing to go to university. So I started going to evening classes in philosophy, history and literature.
Then, at the age of 58, I passed my O-levels before going on to tackle A-levels.
I do often wonder where I’d be if I could have realised my ambition to become a teacher. But I’m not bitter about all my years in domestic service. For all its faults — and there were many — it gave me the inspiration for a better kind of life.
Adapted from Below Stairs by Margaret Powell, published by Pan on March 4 at £6.99. © Margaret Powell 1968. To order a copy (p&p free) call 0845 155 0720.