The Lost Art of Domestic Service

When the editors of this magazine asked me to do a piece for them on domestic service, they came, if I may say so, to the right man, for it is a subject on which I can be really informative. In the matter of domestic service, I have run the gamut of the emotions, as you might put it, sometimes up to my waist in butlers and footmen, at other times doing the thing on a more modest scale, not because there was no money in the old oak chest to pay the weekly envelopes but owing to a lack of applicants for the vacant posts. In London between the Wars, the Wodehouse staff consisted of a valet, a parlormaid, two housemaids, a scullery maid, an odd-job boy and a butler whose "Dinner is served" was like the note of a dignified dove calling to its mate. On my return to America, the establishment dwindled to a cheerful old lady from down the road, who had got her training on a duck farm and when announcing the evening meal preferred to use the formula "Come and get it," adding, as she withdrew, "If you want anything, holler." And I may say at once that her methods suited me to perfection. I had hated the pomp of London, but I loved the chumminess of Long Island. It may seem odd, coming from one who has written so many Jeeves stories, but I hope never to see another butler, and the last thing I want about the home is a valèt.

The extraordinary thing about valets is that they are always eating but never put on weight. Mine was a slender young fellow without an ounce of superfluous flesh, but this, if you will believe me, is how he passed (continued on page 152)Domestic Service(continued from page 139) the day when he was not looking after my socks and shirts. He rose at six-thirty and at seven was having coffee and buttered toast. Eight o'clock saw him breakfasting, the meal consisting of cereal, cream, eggs, bacon, jam, bread, butter, tea, more eggs, more bacon, more tea and more butter, finishing up with a slice of cold ham and a sardine. At eleven, he had his "elevenses"--coffee and bread and butter. At one, luncheon, with every form of starchy food and lots of beer. At three, a snack. At four, another snack. At seven, dinner, probably with floury potatoes and certainly with more beer. At nine, another snack. At ten-thirty, he retired to bed, taking with him a glass of milk and a plate of sandwiches, in case he got peckish in the night. And yet he remained from start to finish as slim as a string bean. Curious.

The celebrated Beau Brummell, by the way, had a valet on whom he relied for unusual services.

"Tell me, Mr. Brummell," someone said to him once, "which of the English lakes do you admire most?"

The Beau rang the bell. His valet appeared.

"Oh, Robinson."

"Sir?"

"Which of the English lakes do I admire most?"

"Windermere, sir."

"Ah yes, Windermere. Thank you, Robinson."

America has never taken kindly to domestic service, so it is to England that one's thoughts automatically turn when the subject crops up, for it was there--before it expired with a low gurgle--that the institution came to full flower. The peak was reached perhaps in the 19th Century, but employers did not do themselves any too badly in the early days of the 20th. Come with me to Welbeck Abbey and let us see how the Duke of Portland was making out around the beginning of the Edwardian era. His income was $20,000,000 or so a year, and he considered that home was not home unless you had

A steward

A wine butler

An underbutler

Twenty footmen

Two page boys

A head chef

A second chef

A head baker

A second baker

A head kitchenmaid

Four underkitchenmaids

A vegetable maid

Three scullery maids

A hall porter

Six hallboys

A kitchen porter

Eight odd-jobmen

and

Fourteen housemaids.

These in addition to more engineers, governesses, librarians, resident chaplains, firemen, night watchmen, coachmen, grooms and gardeners than you could shake a stick at in a month of Sundays. In the matter of putting on the ritz, The Duke of Portland was probably topped by some of his predecessors; but all the same, you can't call that sort of living squalor.

Domestic service in a house like Welbeck Abbey, where the staff had their own billiard tables, ballroom, skating rink, theater and pianos, must have been very pleasant for those below stairs, but a grimmer picture presents itself as one descends in the social scale. We now come to the prosperous middle class, and there is only one word to describe them as regards their dealings with their employees. They were stinkers. Most middle-class houses were staffed from orphanages. There was apparently a loophole in the Emancipation Act of 1833, by means of which you were allowed to keep anything coming out of an orphanage that you could catch on the first bounce. And when an orphan entered a middle-class home, it was not long before he found himself wondering why Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had given such prominent billing to the slaves who worked under the guidance of Simon Legree.

One would prefer not to dwell on the treatment of domestic servants by the middle classes in the Seventies, Eighties and even up to the time of the First World War. They kept them in damp basements and dark attics. They made them work 16 hours a day. They allowed them only one evening off a month; and if on that one evening the poor peon happened to return a few minutes late, she found herself locked out and had to spend the night in the coal shed.

There were employers who went about the house turning off the gas to stop their maids' reading in bed and even intercepted their letters at the front door in an effort to discover if they were carrying on clandestine affairs or trying to get a better job. Visitors were not permitted, caps and uniforms were obligatory, deductions from wages were made for breakages and a groveling respect was demanded. The head of the house was always "Your master," the children had to be addressed as "Master George" or "Miss Mabel," and even the six-month-old baby was "Master Percy." I am not sure about the dog. It may or may not have been addressed as "Master Fido." The 16-hour day was spent in answering bells and carrying coals and bath water up flights of steep stairs. It was difficult for employers to persuade their servants that they had never had it so good.

Not that they didn't try. There is something pathetic in the records that have come down to us of the efforts made by the employing classes to instill contentment with their lot into the cooks and housemaids of those bad old days. One writer, who, according to him, wrote "with the aid of divine guidance," had this to say:

"The rich cannot do without servants any more than servants can do without the rich. God has arranged that they shall mutually help each other. There is no sphere in life in which we may not glorify God by being serviceable to others. Servants are situated in the very sphere intended by their Creator and should not fail to answer that end. Let us always strive to honor and glorify God by faithfully performing the duties allotted to us."

This must have come as a comfort to many a housemaid as she carried the coals upstairs for the tenth time that day.

God, it appeared, strongly disapproved of the restlessness that drove household workers to go off and look for another place. A periodical called The Servant's Magazine printed a slogan "suitable for hanging in a cook's quarters." It ran:

Never Change Your Place

Unless The Lord Clearly Shows You

It Will Be

For Your Soul's Good

One doubts if it had much effect on the cooks who hung it on their walls. They were good cooks, as cooks go; and as cooks go, they went.

In the smaller houses, the semidetached villas of the suburbs, living conditions were a little better, but there the trouble was the loneliness. Owners of suburban villas could afford only one maid--a cook-general she was called--who was probably a girl of 14 or thereabouts, anxious to get some fun out of life and depressed by finding herself marooned in a small house where it was made clear to her from the outset that she was not to look on herself as a member of the family. There was a novel published over 60 years ago called Mord Em'ly that dealt with a girl of the cook-general class employed by three maiden ladies who lived in Lucella Road, Peckham, which is one of the lowlier suburbs of London. It gives a good idea of what the suburban cook-general had to go through.

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"A whole day would pass and nothing happened in the house and in the road nothing of greater moment than the rare appearance of a four-wheeled cab. The youngest sister complained of Mord Em'ly's singing, which disturbed her elder sisters' literary labors, and at the same time pointed out to Mord Em'ly that it was not considered good form for a general servant to whistle. Mord Em'ly spoke to the girl next door, and the girl next door, on learning that her mother was a charwoman, dropped the acquaintance and told the other girls in the road, so that when by any chance Mord Em'ly saw any of them they stared very hard over her head."

It is scarcely to be wondered at that when Mord Em'ly heard of an opening in a jam factory, she grabbed at it. And all over London, thousands of other Mord Em'lys were leaving domestic service for factory life. In the mid-Thirties, in an area covering three quarters of the County of London, there were, according to the author of The New Survey of London Life and Labor, only two servants to every hundred people.

To my mind--I throw it out merely as a suggestion--the root of the whole trouble was that servants were called servants.

In a sense, we are all servants, whether we work in a posh office or a dark basement; but to the sensitive mind, there is something revolting in the word. When an editor asks me to write an article, as it might be on the lost art of domestic service, I touch my hat and say "Yes, sir," but I should hate it if I were described as a servant. I prefer to look on myself as the help.

What a boon America's invention of that word has been. It does away with the stigma attached to doing the dusting and washing up and preserves the self-respect. If England had adopted it 200 years ago, the sceptered isle would be in better shape today as regards securing the assistance of the cooks, housemaids and cook-generals who are in such short supply. Mord Em'ly might have become quite fond of Lucella Road, Peckham, if she had been called the help.

Unquestionably, employers of household labor are having a sticky time at the moment; but what of the future? Going by the form book and taking into consideration the shrinkage there has been in the last half century or so, one would say that before long the entire race of domestics would die out; but Dr. Michael Young, in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy, thinks otherwise. He predicts that domestic service will be re-established.

Here is how he figures it out. The time, he says, is approaching when merit will be all that matters in the world--not blue blood nor money, just solid merit--and two thirds of the population will by then be a pretty brainy bunch, up-and-coming and equal to anything. But the other one third, the complexities of modern civilization having become too much for their poor weak heads, will be unemployable in the ordinary economy, and the only thing they will be fit for will be doing the chores for the gifted two thirds, thus releasing the latter's energies for higher things. This backward one third will be enrolled in a Home Hop Cops, with fixed wages, hours and conditions.

It sounds all right, but I am not sure I like the idea. Through no fault of my own, I am not very bright, and I am certain to be among the first to be flunked in the examination (which will presumably separate the brainy from the dumb) and told to become a member of the Home Help Corps. I see myself as a sort of Mr. Clean, constantly called on at a moment's notice to do the dirty work. ("Your kitchen sink not working. Professor? Clogged up, you say? We'll soon fix that. Where's Wodehouse? Send for Wodehouse. Oh, there you are, Wodehouse. Well, snap into it, don't just sit there. Get your tweezers or whatever you call them and hurry off to this gentleman's address.")

But wait. A ray of sunshine steals through the clouds. Glancing again at Dr. Young's book, I see that all this is not going to happen much before 1999. By that time, it is quite possible that, as my 88th birthday falls next October, I shall not be around. Oh, goody, goody.