The Rest Is History - 300: The Real Downton Abbey

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Edwardian Britain: Domestic service is at its peak. However, as Britain modernises, things were about to change. Tom and Dominic are joined by Lucy Lethbridge to discuss conservatism, universal aunts, and the relationship between master and servant. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Oh, Mrs. Patmore, have you heard news? The young master's come back from the First World War, and he's had his knackers shut off. Oh, now, Daisy, we'll be having none of that talk. Not when you've got 748 dirty pots to scour before bedtime. Wise words, Mrs. Patmore.

Oh, Mr. Carson, I didn't see you there. There'll be no talk of knackers at Downton Abbey. His lordship would not approve. And anyway, young master hasn't had his knackers shot off. He's paralysed below at waste. Not so, Carson. Lady Mary! Cousin Matthew has made a miraculous recovery.

Just in time to propose marriage to me in the Christmas special. That is wonderful news, my lady. And I just hope he doesn't then die so he can stop being on ITV and go to Hollywood. Amen, Carson. But Dominic Sandbrook was, of course, authentic dialogue from Downton Abbey, the ITV smash hit drama that was a huge success all around the world. And it dramatized the world of the Edwardian stately home, didn't it? So upstairs, the Earl of Grantham and his family, including the beautiful Lady Mary, and below stairs with Daisy, the scullery maid who we heard there mrs patmore the myopic cook and carson the um stentorially splendid butler well uh first of all hello everybody secondly

i am so so sorry whether you you like downton abbey or whether you hate it um i hope you're still listening um we will be having stern words the rest is history about that about that corner so tom you're a great downton abbey fan aren't you it started i think in 2010 do you know do you know you're a great fan as well i believe of the historian simon sharma aren't you tom do you know what simon sharma said about downton abbey did he not he said it was a steaming silver terrine of snobbery, servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia. So he likes it too. Yeah, yeah, clearly. I mean, that's absolutely clear.

I have to confess, I don't want to alienate our listeners, but I'm not a massive admirer of Downton Abbey. I think I may have described it to you in a text as one of the worst things I've ever seen. Yeah, you did. But I mean, the ludicrous plots and the hopeless sentimentality of it, it just ticks all my boxes.

However, I am aware that it's not necessarily an accurate portrayal of what life was actually like in an Edwardian stately home. And, Dominic, do we have someone who could perhaps lift the veil on what life was actually like? We do indeed. We do indeed. Because of course, as you said, there's this enduring fascination with the world of the country house, and in particular, the hierarchical ordered Britain by the historian Lucy Lethbridge.

And this came out about 10 years ago. I reviewed it at the time. I thought it was wonderful. And we are very honoured, Tom, to have with us on the podcast Lucy Lethbridge herself. Lucy, welcome to The Rest Is History. Thank you for having me. What did you make of Tom's Downton Abbey, may I ask? Well, I sit somewhere between the two of you i was also slightly addicted to it but also deplored the kind of saccharine coating that it had and and the agenda i think that it

embodied which was to um resurrect the idea that the aristocracy were essentially benign and their servants were sort of happily codependent because i don't think really that was very true but it was fun because lucy that idea although it's um julian fellows isn't it who's uh i mean he's very into that kind of idea conservative peer i think he is indeed i mean with a conservative conservative peer and there aren't actually that many of them um the idea that he's drawing on is actually one with quite ancient roots in Britain. The idea that a lord and his servants form a kind of feudal community. And it goes right the way back to Middle Ages and names, titles of servants are like butlers, like footmen. I mean, they go right the way back to

the Middle Ages. Indeed, yes. But the Victorian and Edwardian household is a sort of recasting of what used to be the kind of rather rollicking entourage that you would get in a medieval feudal household right up to the 18th century, which would be mostly men servants, in fact. I mean, there were very few women domestics. Most of your entourage would be men. And I think it's a response to social anxiety and to industrialization. You get this desire to absolutely fix the hierarchy, and you fix it very visibly by having lots of servants in uniforms behind a green bay's door. And it's a very obvious

pantomime of the feudal order. But I think that that appears at a time when there's a lot of anxiety about class. There's a lot of new people stepping into the old estates. There's a lot of new rich, there's a lot of new middle classes. And so this is a necessary, as it were, it's necessary to pretend that these households have the deepest roots, that they're locked into a kind of chivalric ideal. But the actual stately homes, the Downton Abbey equivalents, you do get a sense from your book that servants who are working for these houses, they grow up on the estates, they go and work in the big house, they retire to almshouses. I mean, they are living their lives entirely framed by the great house, aren't they?

Yes. And what's interesting about it is that it is both, in a sense, a rather privileged kind of job to have once you've got your feet under the table, as people used to say, you know, about their daughters, to try and get their feet under the table of the big house. You ate better than you had never, ever eaten before. You were fairly looked after. You were fairly comfortable. You would certainly be more comfortable than you'd be at home. But of course, you weren't free. I mean, the rules about followers, for example. I mean, the chances of getting married if you worked in a big house were probably greater than if you worked in a middle class house, because you met more men, because there were male servants in the household and visiting male servants. But still, it was frowned on. And if you did get

married, you'd probably be sacked. So it's like a sort of unmarried priestly caste looking after this inner sanctum of the family. But we're not talking about a niche thing, are we? So to pull the camera right back. So Tom started with his extraordinary Downton Abbey rendition. And that starts, I think, in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic, doesn't it? So it's Edwardian. And the Edwardian period is the one, it's the upstairs, downstairs world for older listeners. It's what we regard as the sort of, you know, the high point, I suppose, of the master-servant relationship. And at that point, you say in your book, there are one and a half million servants in Britain,

which is the single largest occupational group. There are more servants than there are anything else. That's an extraordinary fact. I think that's women, isn't it? It's for women, occupational group, certainly. I've got a stat here because I copied this out. In 1900, domestic service was the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain. Of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants.

But of course, by the time the Edwardian, the sort of acme, as Dominic was saying, the sort of acme of what we see as the kind of the great estates, the great country house, servanted households, they were already on the decline. They'd sort of peaked and they were struggling to hold on. And having servants and having very ostentatious servants was part of a way in which you showed that you were hanging on because already women were beginning not to want to go into service because they had so many other choices. The job opportunities were expanding for women. Well, you see that even in Downton Abbey, don't you think, Tom? Right from the beginning, it's a world embattled by change. Yes. But the detail in your book at the beginning, which you open with,

is the idea that actually the superfluity, if you're very, very wealthy, if you're very, very entitled, is the entire point. And there are so, you know, no one ever says, we've got too many servants. They just kind of invent strange titles for them. And you have the brilliant details of the incapacity of even kind of brilliant men like Lord Curzon to cope with the lack of servants. There was lots of stories of, you know, people, you know, log, someone needs a log on the fire, and they're sitting right next to it and their foot is an inch away from the log basket but they still ring a footman to come and do it for them do you remember the story of lord curzon there were many stories told about lord curzon

but uh he was you know as you know supposed to be tremendously clever but he was staying in a country house and the servants had gone to bed and he couldn't open his bedroom window. He didn't know how to open the bedroom window. So he simply picked up a log and smashed it. But that's a bit like, we did a podcast about the life of the young Winston Churchill. Of course, he grows up and comes of age in this, exactly this era. And Churchill famously said, he couldn't cook and he said, I can boil an egg. I've seen it done. But nobody couldn't. and he said i can boil an egg i've seen it done but but there's a but nobody couldn't and there's a bit we describe him after the second world war so it's late we're talking about the 1950s and he's sitting disconsolately on his bed because he doesn't know how to get dressed yes that's right he's just so used to other people dressing him um i and i think that

lack of practical skills becomes a sort of hallmark of the gentleman, of course, as well, doesn't it? Is that you are someone who doesn't soil your hands with anything useful. And the servants, of course, the more servants you had, the more that you develop this cult of labor intensiveness. So labor intensive things had value. And it's only when wealthy or middle class people have to work themselves, have to do the stuff themselves after the Second World War, that the idea of convenience and mod cons and so on actually becomes something desirable. Because what I hadn't appreciated, and I learned from your book, was that throughout the late Victorian Edwardian period and after the First World War, of course,

labor-saving devices are being invented and are being used in America on the continent of Europe. But in Britain, it becomes an absolute badge of honor that the servant girls will continue to have to rub their hands absolutely red and raw with all the scrubbing and polishing and everything. And that the whole point of the dinner parties is to be as complicated as possible. Oh, yes. And we have that slight cult, which I think still lingers today. You know, the cold house.

You know, there's something very posh about a cold, uncomfortable house, isn't there? It has an aura of class for us. A distrust of central heating, which is too suburban. Yeah, and shabby, you know. Nothing must look too new. Everything has to look as if it's been around for a very long time and requires a lot of dusting. Yes, and so the point is that it has to be difficult for the servant. So there's this extraordinary detail that George V, of whom Dominic is a big admirer, that he goes around taking photographs of all the rooms in his various palaces so that he can make absolutely sure that after it's been cleaned by the housemaid, everything is put back in place. And if it isn't, there will be all kinds of trouble.

I think that's absolutely reasonable, Tom. It's completely normal behaviour. But I think that is the psychology, isn't it? If you have enormous amounts of money and enormous numbers of people to do things for you, what would generally be a whim or a foible becomes a necessity. So, I mean, you get that with sort of diva celebrities, don't you, who want to bathe in Perrier. This is exactly how Tom behaves when we go on the rest of his history. Like we do live shows, his riders calling for only blue M&Ms. The flowers, the M&Ms.

Yes, exactly. So the most common kind of servant is a woman. So I was trying to work out from the figures in your book. I get the sense my maths may be wrong here, but in 1901 or so, there were about 20 women to one male servant. That would be about right, wouldn't it? The male servant would be a butler or a footman. Well, the male servant is generally the preserve of the grander households by this

time. Over the 19th century, you see this increased feminization of domestic labor. Because in the 18th century, as I say, most servants, apart from people working in dairies and so on, would have been men. And why is that change happening? Well, I think with the Industrial Revolution, I think there's less work on the land for women who would naturally be part of a sort of farming household. And also, I think that there's a slight change in the attitude towards men in service. Men in service becomes like the emasculated figures. They're rather joke figures, the butler, the footman, they're lackeys, they're flunkies, they're supporting a conservative system that is by now

despised by their fellow working class. but but butlers specifically i mean they are splendidly impressive figures i mean right the way up to the figure of carson in in downton abbey you have the wonderful story of lord haldane who was minister of war at the time being mistaken for a butler and and not feeling embarrassed about this at all because he was such an impressive figure so it was quite a compliment it's actually actually quite flattering. Well, except that there was this very odd thing, which I think you get with butlers, is that, and which Kazuo Ishiguro captures very well in The Remains of the Day, I think, is that they are almost gentlemen, but not quite. And again, you get, I mean, the whole servant and master relationship in this period

is about these minutely calibrated vocabulary about class, which really only an initiate can speak. So that to the untutored eye, the butler looks like a gent. But to the people who know that a gentleman would never wear a striped trousers and a dark jacket at the same time, he isn't quite. And his whole, the mode of speaking that's adopted by butlers, which is a kind of weird butlerese. And if you read butlers' memoirs, they all speak in it. You can hardly believe that there isn't some sort of school for them to learn how to speak in this very lugubrious, ponderous way. But it's an affectation of the part of Familius, which is reflected in the servant's hall with the butler carving the roast.

And it's a sort of dim reflection of what's happening in the drawing room, but not quite. And that is caught very well in Downton Abbey, isn't it? The way in which the hierarchy below stairs is at least as stratified as the hierarchy above stairs. And also the fact that these servants often tend to be incredibly conservative themselves well i'm jumping ahead here tom but there's a story in lucy's book in the 1970s about these people who pitch up at blenheim palace the duncans and they get into trouble with the other servants because they have a dinner party and they've invited some of the lower servants still in the 70s that was a fascinating

i i came across jenny duncan um who had been a lady's maid to one of the duchesses of marlborough and she'd married i think the current duke's great-grandfather so he was very old this was in about 1970 and they went with her to blenheim to find this kind of floating galleon of an Edwardian household still existing. I mean, astonishing. Yeah, incredible. And I suppose really the only one that still survives today is Buckingham Palace, where you likewise get that slight sense of hierarchy among the servants. I'm sure. I would imagine so. Well, they have a lot of footmen, don't they?

I mean, people don't have footmen anymore, surely. They might have butlers. No, you wouldn't have. I mean, I think, yes, you wouldn't find footmen outside some sort of theatrical. Actually, you'd make a brilliant footman, Tom. I think, you don't think I'd make a good butler? I think I'd be a better butler. I think you're a footman. You're too kind of roundish. No, a butler is quite round. A butler is sturdy. No, a butler's tall tall and granite like footman needs to be over six foot yeah well i can wear heels um so lucy let's talk about the so most of the servants in this period are i was about to say women but actually a lot of them are

i mean they are girls because the average age to start is about 14. Is that right? So that's two years after the statutory school leaving, school age is raised to 12. Yes. Why do you, so you go into service, is it a default or is it a choice by your parents from different options? At 12 or 13, 14, that you wouldn't have had any options really. And then you would, I mean, at that sort of age, you would go in as a tweenie, which is a tiny little maid of all work. And I mean, I did find records of, you know, little girls who were so malnourished that they would collapse under the weight of carrying pails of water up and downstairs and so on. I mean, and they really were children,

which again, is part, I think, of that slightly infantilizing thing about when you start in service very early, you are the household, the butler, and by extension, his employers, who you might never even meet, are in loco parentis. Well, you have this terrible you you quote this guy's that there's terrible comments servants like birds must be caught when young yes molded right so they would they they leave their parents you so you've left your parents and then you were working from i mean you were working from what six till ten at night well i constantly well i think um i mean the hours are never set which is one of the reasons why factory work ended up being more popular than

service because of the hours were set but on the whole you were up to light all the fires that was the first job which was pretty backbreaking in a big house, but there would maybe be four of you doing it, but you'd be up at six, yes, lighting the fires, heating the water for the baths and getting the range ready for breakfast. And yes, so you're up in the freezing cold with the dawn and you probably work. Well, you'll probably work until you're told that your work is over i mean that's that's the truth i don't think there were any set hours and that would be after dinner so that would be you'd work you'd work well into the night yes well and certainly if you were a kitchen maid you'd be working the night because you'd have all the washing up to do yeah as as evinced in my brilliant yesition of Downton Abbey, Dominic.

And is it true that if you saw, so you could go for months, if not years, without laying eyes on the master and mistress of the house, and if you did see them, I mean, obviously you didn't say, so you didn't say, good morning, my lord, good morning, my lady. You sort of withdrew or turned your face to the wall. Is that really true? Well, I think in some houses you were made to turn your face to the wall. At Woburn, they didn't put in electricity. The Duke of Bedford didn't put in electricity until 1930. And one of the reasons he didn't put in electricity is he was so traumatised

at the thought of all these workmen who might not realize that they couldn't. They weren't supposed to catch his eye if they encountered him. That's how I feel about the rest of history producers. So so they. Yes. And the Duke of Bedford, I believe, is he the chap who he can't. He believes it common to travel with a bag. So his bags, his suitcase has to travel in its own car, with its own chauffeur and its own footman. That's right.

Is that right? That's brilliant. So we've basically been talking about the super rich so far. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, perhaps we could talk about what it was like to be a servant to a more middle-class household and then look at the process by which this whole kind of extraordinary Talk about what it was like to be a servant to a more middle class household. And then look at the process by which this whole kind of extraordinary infrastructure just started to collapse and crumble over the course of the 20th century.

So we will be back very soon. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Thank you. My brains are becoming soft by constant contact with the lower classes. I am sick of the timid, spiteful servant mind. That was sworn foe of the rest is history, modernist, novelist,

and embodiment of evil, Virginia Woolf. And Lucy Lethbridge, the author of Servants. That's not unusual, is it? Because in your book, you quote another modernist writer, Catherine Mansfield, who fires her cook. She says her cook is evil. And when she's fired her cook, her cook agrees with remarkable grace, I have to say, to go. And Mansfield then writes, how blessed. It's dreadful enough to be without servants, but to be with them is far more dreadful.

I cannot forget that dishonest, hateful old creature down in the kitchen. Now she will go and I will throw her bits to the dustman and fumigate her room and start fair again. So actually, here you have two modernist writers, literary intellectuals, and they're talking of their servants with, frankly, unbridled contempt. How common is that? Because there are also people who actually, in a weird way, love their servants, aren't there? Yes. I mean, the servant relationship, like all relationships, is different in every single family or in every household.

But I think there is this chafing feeling, certainly in Virginia Woolf and Catherine Mansfield, a rather surprising horror above the physicality and the close presence of someone they felt so intellectually awkward with. They don't seem to be able to bridge that gap. Well, they think they're beneath them, don't they? Let's be honest about it. That's what they think. Yes. And they, I think, are sort of almost guilty about it. That's what they think. Yes. And they, I think, are sort of almost guilty about that. You know, they feel they should be bigger than this, but they can't do it because actually, they're just old fashioned snobs. You have a brilliant account of a valet called Charles Dean, who flatly refused on principle to consider a job offer from an ex-editor of the communist

newspaper, The Daily Worker. So the kind of the Moibius strip of social complexities and attitudes there is perfect, that the valet is very conservative, refused to work for an editor of a communist newspaper, and the communist newspaper wants a valet. Yes, and the rather sort of grander socialists, the people who had servants but considered themselves rather left wing, often deplored the conservative politics of their servants, without in any way giving any sort of break to them as servants. You know, they treated them exactly like servants. They were still, you know, downstairs and below stairs.

Well, I love the suffragette slogan, my butler votes while I'm talking. That's great, isn't it? But before the break, Tom, you were saying about we should move down the social hierarchy a little bit. So it's not just that middle class people have servants, right? It's also that if you're a foreman in a factory, you might have, I don't know, a cleaner, a laundry woman. Indeed, if you're a particularly grand servant, you will have a servant. So this is woven into all sort of aspects of society,

almost. Is that right? Well, I think it's woven into aspects of society, but it's also woven into the history of women's work, isn't it? So the Roundtree Foundation, one of their commissions on poverty in about 1910, made not having a servant the marker of absolute poverty, and by which they meant that the sort of lowest kind of servant you get might be a child that you'd pay a few pennies to look after your child while you were out working. Yeah. And so again, that kind of amplifies the way in which servants themselves have a hierarchy. That basically, I think you say that both the upper and the working classes agree that the middle classes are awful. And that it's a terrible thing to have to work as a servant for the middle classes. Yes, servants have a surprise.

Even the really sort of feisty servants who wrote the great memoirs of the 1950s have a surprisingly absolute sense that old money equals virtue. You know, people with old money know how to behave to their servants and therefore to other people. It's new money everyone hates. It's, you know, parvenus and nouveau riche. And servants despise them more than anything else. They don't know about tipping. They don't, you know, they've got bad taste.

So that was a theme in the recent series in The Crown where Muhammad Al-Fayed hires Edward VIII's valet to teach him how to be a gentleman. So it's clearly a theme that isn't entirely dead but could we uh start to look now at the the way in which this whole world starts to decline and i guess that again as downton abbey uh illustrates um the first world war is a great period of crisis isn't it because particularly men are starting to being called away to the front but also women are being called to munitions work to become bus conductresses to become all kinds of things that don't involve scrubbing grates and polishing the front door. Yes, I think the First World War is the first nail in the coffin of this pantomime. But it doesn't really put it to death because, of course,

economic depression meant that there was such high unemployment that people had to go back into service but they were no longer going back into service with the same sense that there was a sort of inevitable place in life anymore there were there was a whole new spirit abroad and a lot of the servants um interviews and so on, one reads, talk about with what resentment after 1918, they went back and found that there was no work. They were forced back into service. There's a woman called Jean Rennie, who remembers her mother weeping when she realised that her daughters would have to go back into service in the 1920s in Sunderland. And is that because it seemed the work is

backbreaking or is it the kind of humiliation of having to wear uniforms and curtsy and bow and scrape and all that kind of thing? I think it's the beginning of the end for the age of deference. I think people no longer felt that their place in life was divinely ordained. You know, those old Victorian servants halls where they'd have a big sign saying, know your place, as if this was a biblical injunction. People no longer felt that. So Lucy, do you know a publication that was very outraged by this? The Daily Mail. It was the Daily Mail. So the Daily Mail, worrying about the servant problem,

complaining about the stubborn insubordination on the part of welfare scroungers it is almost impossible to get a domestic servant in this town and it is certainly high time this dull business ceased the streets are full of girls dressed to death who frankly say that as long as they are paid to do nothing they will continue just as they are robust opinions forthrightly trenchant trenchant tom trenchant expressed by columnist in the daily mail dominic what do you make of that yeah unheard of i think you know different times tom different times um uh but but talk about well let's talk about different times actually that is what i wanted to talk about because one of the things that your book captures

is that this world is never ever static so electricity is coming in the motor car which means you have chauffeurs joining the the menagerie and they are kind of looser and easier and more informal and and and glamorous in a way that previous servants weren't but the people who really fascinated me were aunts. Oh, yes. So in other words, you can get your own lady help, as they are called, in the 1920s. And previously, the image of the lady help, there'd been this sort of dependent, this sort of rather miserable drab who's kind of hanging around with you. And then in the...

Yeah, in Room with a View. Yeah, exactly. The sort of washed up spinster. But in the 20s it's like that the lady help is brilliant they can do everything they're a wizard this that and the other and this is the the brainchild of one what's her name gertie mclean is it who who creates this agency can you tell us a bit about what that was for well i think that that is this splendid result of the First World War is the releasing of middle-class women and into, as it were, sort of joyous, well, not joyous singledom, but an acceptance of singledom.

Suddenly, you didn't actually need to be completely dependent on your brother or your father or your male cousin if you weren't married. you could actually, you know, set up in a flat on your own and have a job. And of course, in 1928, you can actually vote. So there's a whole change afoot about what it is for women, slightly more educated women, making a living. And with enormous resourcefulness, they said about filling the gaps where working class women were no longer prepared to step in. So you get these kind of niche jobs appearing rather in the way that we have now, like dog walking or flower arranging, or again, helping people with dinner parties, helping women with dinner parties who didn't know quite what was what. So you could get a universal aunt to tell you where to put the napkins.

So just one last thing about the universal aunts. So Gertie McLean, who runs the universal aunts company, she keeps notes on the different kind of people she has on offer. And Tom, I was going to give you a few options and see which you would go for. So Mrs. Violet Rumpton, fully informed on circuses, pantomime and Toad of Toad Hall. Any good? Well, wait for it.

How about this one? 32-year-old Pansy Trubshaw. She understands cricket and foreign stamps, but not much else. I'm not so interested in foreign stamps, but cricket sounds good. How about this? Elizabeth Pratt Steed. Disciplinarian, firm without being brutal. Can converse on physics, spiritualism, or foreign missions.

That sounds your dream. I'd go for either. This is one of these two so I'd either go for Phyllis Beckett she knows all about footer and white mice guaranteed not to nag

can slide down banisters at a push or Miss Hyacinth Plumber late 30s a dab hand at snakes and ladders but her necklines

are too low and she might need to be pointed in the direction of a modesty vest by a stern so which one are you going for tom so you could well you could you could hire the two yeah you could hire the one who needs to be told off and i think i'd hire the one who likes about same time for born white mice and the deckline woman i think i'd go lucy do you have any recommendations there oh i think the white mouse person, most definitely. Yes, absolutely.

But on this, Lucy, on this theme of highly educated servants who know all kinds of stuff that their employer won't know, probably the archetype of that, I mean, the most famous embodiment of that is actually a man. And that is Jeeves in the P.G. Woodhouse stories. And how the figure of Jeeves, is he, I mean, presumably he's kind of drawing on this kind of tradition, is he? The figure of the manservant, does he have that kind of mystique in the 20s and 30s? Well, I always think that Jeeves is actually a sort of throwback

in a way. I mean, he has the, there's a demeanor of the butler, but he doesn't have the, well, he has a sort of demeanor of civility, doesn't he? But we know that he is not servile. So actually, he's further back than that. the sort of 16th, 17th century, you know, master, the servant of the idol master, you know, the clever, the clever clog servant. It's like a sort of souped up Sancho Panza. Yeah, exactly. Is that basically what it's saying?

Yeah. And so I think actually he is oddly, he's oddly an old throwback in kind of Victorian clothes. But on the politics, Jeeves is really conservative. So Bertie is the person who's always experimenting

with newfangled things, with fancy vases, with silly new ways of wearing a tie. Badly chosen trousers. And Jeeves always, are you proposing

to wear that, sir? You know, Jeeves is kind of, and we'll discuss it here, what's his club called? Is it the Ganey Mead Club? Club, where all the butlers get together and they have a book that they write all the details of their masters. Not the butlers, the valets. They write all the details of their masters in.

So that is true to life, isn't it? Because as you were saying, butlers, manservants, manservants, menservants, I don't know. Anyway, they tend to be positively reactionary sometimes well i think it would be very very difficult to have been not a conservative in service there were a couple of uh interviews i did with people who'd had butlers in the 50s and one of them or actually one who was a butler in the 1950s and 60s and said that he'd been an under butler to a butler who was a socialist and he said it was an agony for him he couldn't get another job because he'd

been a butler for so long yeah but he was a socialist sort of raging class war below stairs in this terrible futility there was nothing he could do about it your kip your kippers you have i mean it's hard to do that but you have this also i mean conversely you have this uh account of a trades unionist i think in poplar uh who's married to his his wife had been a parlor maid and she she always votes yeah he's absolutely he's absolutely fury um and lucy just before we we move on to the final collapse and decline, one other source of kind of educated servants also is fascinating the way it shines a light from the outside on the English middle class household. And the stories of discomfort, you know, people who'd come from comfortable, centrally heated Viennese flats and found themselves in ghastly kind of Victorian villas where they didn't even have toasters. You know, people on the continent had had toasters, electric toasters for 30 years, but they were still expected to use toasting forks and miserable, you know, herrings lunch and um and this again this this slight um sort of penny-pinching frugal cultishness this

delight in eking things out yeah it's quite moving because you've got people who have who'd been they fled germany or austria where they'd you know they as you say they'd had comfortable highly educated very respectable lives and they and they're sort of forced into service. There's one story, a guy, on his first night, he's waiting at table. And his master or whoever says to him, his employer says to him, where did you learn to wait so well? He said, well, I remembered from the days when we used to stay at Grand Hotels how people did it. And you sort of sense how far they've fallen down the ladder, as it were, which must have been, you know, on the one hand, you've escaped a dreadful fate. But on the other, you know, for anybody with a sort of sense of hierarchy, that must have been a terrible comedown. I think it must have been terribly difficult. And they were often, of course, especially the older ones, were really

quite bad at it, especially older men who suddenly found themselves in these positions of service, having been a stockbroker or something, you know, in their 50s. It was very, very hard and very humiliating. And of course, I mean, it wasn't the case with all families. Some families were very kind, notably Quaker families, actually, who really come out of this particular episode very, very well. But the ones who saw themselves as getting, you know, they're getting domestics on the cheap and they never, ever talked to them. They never asked them. You know, they never said, where did you come from? How was it? What's happening? But is that again part of that because i often wonder about that relationship is there a bit of guilt in there do you think or is it just because how could you be

i mean maybe i'm just being naive but you would be conscious of the of the weirdness and because you're conscious these people are human beings with inner lives and histories and do you think there are some sort of employers who just preferred to, you know, they wanted the servants to look away, not to meet their eye, because they actually struggled to engage with them as human being to human being because of guilt. Yes, maybe guilt. In a sense, the relationship does have guilt written into it. I think this is, you know, or embarrassment, perhaps, is sort of awkwardness, embarrassment. And so with the Second World War, and then the Labour government that follows the Second World War, all this stuff becomes a cause of, I guess, heightened embarrassment for employers. And so

the fact that the economy and the new social structure is against them combines with the fact that they feel perhaps that the whole time for this is gone, do you think? I think yes, after the Second World War, it really was the end. And it wasn't the end of people wanting servants. We then had to start recruiting them from abroad, from places like Spain and St Helena and Malta, and places where there was enormous unemployment. But the crucial thing is, it's the end of that assumed relationship of that had for so long been assumed one of birth, you know, one in which you were born to serve and born to rule. And that went.

So you made a point in your book that hadn't really struck me before, that in a way, there's a move to replace one kind of service with another because what you have in the 1950s and 60s is the cult of the housewife of the kind of domestic goddess and you quote and i've seen i mean i've seen the sources myself so i've seen how many of these there are the mass observation program which was a sort of uh for those people who don't know it was a sort of a big program where they would get volunteers to write diaries and to answer questionnaires. So to sort of take the temperature of the country, they would get people to send in housewives to send in what they did in the day. And they too are getting up at six o'clock and going to working until 10 or 11.

I mean, now, admittedly, Tom, you can say maybe voluntarily or whatever but they're not but they're they're doing exactly all the jobs that a servant would once have done but what i was going to say was that they are by this stage allowed to use labor-saving devices so i love the detail that the um the vacuum cleaners are given the name of you know classic names of mechanical housemates yeah kind of poly and daisy and things and you and also of, you know, classic names of... They are mechanical housemates, yeah. Kind of Polly and Daisy and things. And also, of course, you have things like dishwashers. And in your book, you have this brilliant photograph of the Duke of Bedford

at the Ideal Home exhibition of 1959, unloading a dishwasher. But in reality, the Duke of Bedford would never have been unloading a dishwasher. And in most houses, the man, we know, because we know that right up until the 1980s, men never touched their dishwashers or their washing machines. It was always their housewife who was expected to do it.

So could you argue that one form of domestic service, paid, was replaced by another, unpaid? I think you could. And the problem of domestic labour is written into the history of feminism. I mean, what does one do with it? I think you could. And the problem of domestic labour is written into the history of feminism. I mean, what does one do with it? One does one do, you know, the career woman who has to employ another woman to do her cleaning for her. Yeah. But it's seen as a problem for women rather than men. Yes, it continues to be a problem. I mean, because the number of male cleaners,

the percentage is absolutely minuscule. So it is still women's work. And do you think that's a legacy of the feminization of the servant hierarchies in the Edwardian? Well, I think it probably is. I mean, it's a response to industrialization, and it's the separation of home and work for the first time. So you've got all these men going out to managerial jobs and in offices and bureaucracies and pen pushing. And they come back and the home is therefore entirely a shrine to the nuclear family, embodied by Victoria and Albert themselves. And so, that it is a, and so work has to be pushed

out to the edges. And so that's where you get this whole architecture of upstairs, downstairs, green base doors, basement steps, you know, the idea that domestic work is something that is done, but is never seen. But the weird thing is, I mean, the weird thing is, is that no sooner has this world been escaped than it's starting to be romanticised and sentimentalised. So one of the, we've already mentioned it, Upstairs, Downstairs, one of the biggest drama series of what, the 60s? 70s. 70s.

70s. So the age of trade unionism and industrial unrest, and everyone is watching on their television sets, this story of an Edwardian household and their servants. On the topic of Upstairs Downstairs, my favourite story came from an unpublished PhD thesis, which had the revelation that in the first series, which started in 1969, the biggest stars by far, who were Angela Badley, who was the cook, and Gordon Jackson, who played the butler, were given the smaller dressing rooms, whereas the actors who played the Bellamy's, who were in the drawing room, were given the plushiest dressing rooms and that seemed to me a kind of really interesting example of how deeply this idea of sort of upstairs downstairs deference has rotted into the national psyche we don't we we're not even we don't even know it's there so at the time we're

thinking about because i've written about the 70s obviously there. So at the time, we're thinking about, because I've written about the 70s, obviously, and I think at the time when people wrote about Upstairs, Downstairs, they thought it was a sort of escapism. The initial commentary was this is an escapism from the industrial and economic turbulence of the 70s and our anxieties about this newly individualistic age. And so, of course, we are romanticising and looking backwards. And therefore therefore you know

it's a product of of these circumstances but actually when you think about it it's much more deep-seated than that isn't it because then you had the remains of the day which kind of you know rewrote and undermined the romantic image because you it turns out that stevens the butler but but you you also had brideshead revisited well you had Brideshead Revisited so of course which was very very sentimental but then you have as you said at the beginning the massive success of Downton Abbey and those that the recurrence of those things despite attempts to undermine them or to revise them suggests that it's much more deep-seated than just escapism as you say it it speaks to a kind of obsession with hierarchy and with order that must be hardwired into the British soul. I mean, I know listeners who are more

left-leaning will probably be despairing at this, but it's true, isn't it, that people do feel a sort of, I don't know what the word is, do they crave a sense of order or a sense of place? I mean, it's something that we've never really had. So maybe it's easy to romanticise it. And do we always imagine that we are in the drawing room? I mean, does anyone look at Downton Abbey and think, I'd be the kitchen maid? Or do they always think I'd be Lady Mary?

What do you think, Tom? Would you be Lady Mary? I'd absolutely be Lady Mary. No, I don't know about that. No, that riding case. Like Skittles. Yeah, I think, well, given a choice, but obviously

I would be some undergardener. Because I think, I mean, when I think about your book, the thing that, it was 10 years since I read it, and the thing that always stuck in my mind, it's a tiny detail. I think the the the girl or young woman's name is edith or edna weway or something like that yes yes and she talks about washing the the with carbolic soap washing the stuff with carbolic soap day after day so much

that basically her hands become bloodied and blistered and and the worst thing then is she can't allow the bigwigs to see her hands because they are you know to to be disfigured would be would be awful and that is what you don't get in Downton Abbey so even Daisy the scullery maid who is the the kind of the tweenie the one who gets down her hands are not red yeah just that sense of backbreaking of toil and no escape i would have said would be the the frightening thing i'm actually very in downtown abbey very rare that you see that the servants any work housework um yeah so so lucy right at the beginning of you but you have this extraordinary detail from a manual for common sense for housemaids that tables and chairs should be to the housemaid objects of deep interest after her own family and the family of her mistress they should claim the next place

in her affections and that's what you're not getting in Downton Abbey because they're all too busy kind of you know disposing of dead Turkish documents and rushing off with valets and things to actually spend the whole time cleaning furniture and also the feeling, I think, and this is why being a servant was, and probably still is, viewed as an identity more than a job. And that's why it was so complicated for so many, is that it demands such complete sacrifice. Even very kindly employers, they were kindly only in the sense that they were kind to you in the sphere in which you were allotted to be. They didn't want you to come out of it and really flourish. So the idea of, I mean, marriage was the only escape for women servants,

and even for some men servants too. Well, again, I mean, in Downton, the Earl of Grantham is very kind to Carson and to his dog. And, you know, there are things of it that it gets right, I think, kind of. Anyway, Lucy, thank you so much. Such a wonderful book, Servants, a Downstairs View of 20th Century Britain. We should also mention your more recent book on tourists which dominic you and i shamelessly plagiarized didn't we for our episodes on holidays well i mean it was an absolutely brilliant book it was one of my um one of my books of last year if you're interested in social history at all um i think you'll love both of these books so lucy thanks so much thank you everyone for listening

bye- Bye bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's