On The Shelf: A London Year

A London Year: 365 Days of City Life

in Diaries, Journals and Letters

Edited by Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison

Not since Hibbert and Weintraub edited The London Encyclopedia has there been a book that has taken London history and served it up in so enjoyable, usable and entertaining a package. Taking entries from letters, diaries and journals written by over 200 people, from Tudor times to nearly the present, editors Elborough and Rennison break them down by date and offer them up in daily entries covering the 365 days of the year. Often, days have more than one entry and it's amusing to hear the different voices of diarists who have lived in the same place across the centuries.

By turns chatty, introspective, informative, superfluous, descriptive, evocative and nonsensical, A London Year is a big, doorstop of a book that should be kept at the bed or fireside and dipped into at intervals as a treat. You'll want to devour it at one sitting, but I urge you to instead savour it's contents a bit at a time - and then go back to the beginning and start again. Otherwise, the book may prove addictive. This is truly a Christmas present of a book for everyone who loves London, even if that person should happen to be yourself.

Here are just a few entries from A London Year to whet your appetite:

William Bray, Diary, 1757

To Drury Lane Theatre: King Lear by Garrick. Agreed with the barber for shaving me at 6s. a quarter.

Lord Byron, Journal, 1813

Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter Change. Such a conversazion! - There was a 'hippopotamus,' like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the 'Ursine Sloth' hath the very voice and manner of my valet - but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again - took off my hat - opened a door - trunked a whip - and behaved so well that I wish he was my butler . . . .


Frank Hurley, Diary, 1916

All London is excitement on account of a Zeppelin raid which took place in the small hours of this morning. Four Zeppelins participated and two were brought down. Late at noon, a German seaplane dropped a bomb just in front of Harrods.

Noel Coward, Diaries, 1951

Went to the Tower Pier at six to go on a yacht party up the river. Very grand and enjoyable, particularly coming back and looking at the South Bank, which looks like a dog's dinner, and the North Bank - floodlit - which with St. Paul's, Somerset House, The Houses of Parliament, etc., was breathtakingly lovely. Felt tears spring to my eyes when one of the ship's crew nudged me and said, "How's this for `London Pride', eh?'"

Charles Greville, Diary, 1830

I went yesterday to the sale of the late King's wardrobe, which was numerous enough to fill Monmouth Street, and sufficiently various and splendid for the wardrobe of Drury Lane. He hardly ever gave away anything except his linen, which was distributed every year Theses clothes are the perquisite of his pages, and will fetch a pretty sum. There are all the coats he has ever had for fifty years, 500 whips, canes without number, every sort of uniform, the costumes of all the orders in Europe, splendid furs, pelisses, hunting coats and breeches, and among other things a dozen pair of corduroy breeches he had made to hunt in when Don Miguel was here. His profusion in these articles was unbounded, because he never paid for them, and his memory was so accurate that one of his pages told me he recollected every article of dress, no matter how old, and that they were always liable to be called on to produce some particular coat or other article of apparel of years gone by. It is difficult to say whether in great or little things that man was most odious and contemptible.

Sir Roy Strong, Diary, 1969

I arrived early at 115 Ebury Street . . . . in a flat painted all over in a particularly awful shade of 1940s green. But he did have good pictures by Mathew Smith and Graham Sutherland. It had never crossed my mind what kind of party this was to be but that began rapidly to dawn on me as not a woman appeared and twenty men gradually filled the room. I left as soon as I could decently extricate myself, appalled at the sight, amongst other things, of all those bottles of cosmetics ranked above his dressing table.

Nathaniel Bryceson, Diary, 1846

Old Walker, proprietor of the hotel, 33 Dean Street, Soho, corner of Queen Street, has had his house lately pointed down and painted, and has this day had a square lamp fixed, lit with gas which till now has been a round one with tin top and lit with oil, and which was no doubt the original one put up when the house was built, which is about 160 years. This is an alteration which I am both surprised and displeased at as the house preserved its ancient look so like hotel and tavern of the 17th century. The proprietor thereof is very old both in years and fashion, wearing at all times a black suit with breeches and black stockings, and as I have heard saw Margaret Nicholson attempt to stab George III.

Evelyn Waugh, Letter to Nancy Mitford, 1955

I knew a woman who could not bear to say `W.C.' for the London postal district because of its indelicate associations and always said `West Central.'

R.D. Blumenfeld, R.D.B.'s Diary, 1900

Yerkes, the projector of the new Charing Cross, Euston, and Hampstead electric underground, said to me that in spite of the opposition which he meets at every turn he proposes to go ahead with it. He has secured the backing of some large American financiers to the extent of $30,000,000, and he predicted to me that a generation hence London will be completely transformed; that people will think nothing of living twenty or more miles from town, owing to electrified trains. He also thinks that the horse omnibus is doomed. Twenty years hence, he says, there will be no horse omnibus in London. Although he is a very shrewd man, I think he is a good deal of a dreamer.

Sydney Smith, Letter to the Countess Grey, 1834

I am better in health, avoiding all fermented liquors, and drinking nothing but London water, with a million insects in every drop. He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women and children on the face of the globe.


Dickon Edwards, Diary, 2005

After viewing Mr. Nicholson Senior's art at the RA, I sit in Borders Books Café, Charing Cross Road. The café is now a Starbucks, so I only use it if the one in Foyles (still an independent family business) is full up. And then, as I do in all Starbucks, I only ever order tea. Tea drinking as a revolutionary act, I like to think. The joke's on me, as their tea is revolting. Clever, very clever . . . . .

 

A London Year, Frances Lincoln, ISBN 9780711234499

On The Shelf: Across The Pond

In Across The Pond: An Englishman's View of America, author and literary critic Terry Eagleton skewers Americans relentlessly - but it's okay, because Eagleton gets around to other nationalities, as well. Especially his own (British, as the title of the book implies).  Eagleton sets a wry tone in his introduction, where he writes, " . . . the discerning reader will note that when I make large generalizations about the British, Irish and Americans in this book, my comments must occasionally be seen as involving a degree of poetic license and a pinch of salt." From there we embark on a tour de force of political incorrectness that's by turns either oddly refreshing or startlingly at odds with what one personally knows to be true.

Eagleton compares the Americans to the British early on while setting forth one cause for the divide in our national characters: "Henry James thought that America lacked mystery and secrecy, that its landscapes were all foreground, but found just such an air of enigma in Europe. This was not, he considered, by any means wholly to its credit. Civilisations which prize the mannered, devious, playful and oblique generally have aristocratic roots, since it is hard to be mannered, devious and playful while you are drilling a coal seam or dry-cleaning a jacket. And aristocratic social orders, as James was to discover, can be full of  suavely concealed brutality. A dash of American directness would do them no harm at all. A culture of irony requires a certain degree of leisure. You need to be privileged enough not to have any pressing need for the plain truth. Facts can be left to factory owners." Of course, this example supposes that British aristocrats make up the whole of the English population. Or at least that part of it which is playful and/or enigmatic. And surely the UK has at least one or two plain talking dry cleaners available to them in a crisis?

In an attempt to rationalize American zeal, willingness and industry, the author writes, "It was a communal act of willing that brought America about in the first place. The nation itself is the work of the will. It is not just a country like any other but a project, a vocation, a mission, a destiny, a spiritual enterprise. Nobody thinks this about Belgium. It is not the case with Wales, Slovenia or the United Arab Emirates, which some Americans might suspect is a movie company. Britain is not the work of the will. The British never planned their empire, for example. It just fell into their laps in a fit of absent-mindedness. They awoke one morning to find that they were governing India, even though nothing had been further from their thoughts. They did not particularly savour the prospect, but it seemed churlish not to get on with it." One can just about hear the Wellesley's turning over in the respective graves now.

As Eagleton warned in his introduction, much salt was pinched in the writing of this book and oddly enough, the majority of it falls on the British Isles, rather than on America, as the title would suggest. "Like comedy, the British are traditionally suspicious of the success ethic. Unlike Americans, they are not an affirmative nation. Among their national icons are a ship that sank (the Titanic) and a calamitous military defeat (Dunkirk). Defeat is what the British are particularly good at. They are maestros of utter disaster. No doubt there are bunkers deep below Whitehall where intensive seminars in how to screw up are secretly conducted. Glorious defeats, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, are almost to be elevated over stupendous victories. The British are not particularly heroic, but brave out of necessity. Unlike Americans, the only kind of heroism for which they have a sneaking admiration is one forced on you when the odds are hopeless and your back is to the wall. After such sporadic bursts of self-sacrificial glory, they resume their normal, grumpy, unheroic existence until the next catastrophe happens along. They need the occasional hardship in order to show what stuff they are made of, and suspect that American civilization is too easy and flaccid in that respect. The States may be full of virile, chisel-jawed, bestubbled types, but all those stretch limos and Jacuzzis are fatally weakening. This is ironic, since quite a few Americans see the British themselves as effete. This is largely because their accents can sound vaguely gay, rather like their prose styles."

Wellington continues to roll, Churchill's moaning aloud and I'm left wondering exactly what England ever did to Eagleton to deserve such treatment. Perhaps Across the Pond would have been funnier if it had been based on truths. Even stereotypical truths. Like this one:

"An American friend of mine once confessed to me that he found a certain philosopher rather standoffish. I told him that he had the word almost correct: it wasn't standoffish, it was Scottish. Scottish men tend to smile less than American men do, a fact that can easily be mistaken for churlishness. In fact, a male Scot will probably smile only faintly if he meets you after a twenty-year absence and you are his mother."

Now, that's funny.

Published by W.W. Norton and Company, Hardcover ISBN: 9780393088984

On The Shelf: London Villages

In London Villages: Explore the City's Best Local Neighbourhoods author Zena Alkayat breaks down London's current sprawl into 30 villages and introduces readers to each via a short description, maps, photos and five highlighted places of interest in each neighborhood. These are further broken down into areas of the City: central, north, south, east and west.  All of the usual suspects make an appearance: Shepherd Market, Camden Passage, Queen's Park, Little Venice. What truly sets Alkayat's guide apart are the newly evolved villages introduced to the reader, some of which are still works in progress, and her discovery of overlooked gems in well loved areas.

Zayat's chatty tone allows the reader to feel as though they are getting inside information from a local, with all the "need to know" details thrown in for good measure. Here's Zayat's take on Turnham Green (near Chiswick Common): "Though situated a little north of Chiswick's main attractions, Turnham Green has established itself as the commercial heart of the area. To the south runs an incredibly scenic stretch of the Thames dotted with rowing clubs and pubs for walkers. Inland, Palladian villa Chiswick House attracts vast numbers of tourists, as does Hogarth's House . . . For Londoners, the rather upmarket Chiswick car boot sale operates on the first Sunday of every month from the school on Burlington Lane, and the area's centuries-old brewing heritage means there are plenty of historic pubs to enjoy. Frustratingly, there's little to get excited about along Chiswick High Road itself, dwarfed as it is by standard high street restaurants and chains but offshoots Turnham Green Terrace and Devonshire Road lay claim to a stronghold of independent retailers. On Turnham Green Terrace, a number of delis have made the street a destination for fans of fine food, and Foubert's Café (a local institution since 1980) is famous for its Italian ice cream. Devonshire Road, meanwhile, offers clothes boutiques, gift shops and the ramshackle Strand Antiques at number 46." One of the five highlighted places of interest chosen by Alkayat includes Fosters' Bookshop on the High Road: "The Foster family has run this tightly packed antiquarian store since 1968 and continues to acquire and sell a choice selection of rare books and first editions, together with volumes of local history and more general Penguin paperbacks and illustrated children's novels." I don't know about you, but I can't wait to head to Turnham Green some first Sunday soon.

Other places I'm looking forward to visiting thanks to Alkayat include:

The Prince Alfred & Formosa Dining Room (Little Venice): "The Prince Alfred's original snug rooms, snob screens and decorative tiles make it one of the best examples of a late Victorian pub in London. The ornate bar is adjoined to the intimate Formosa Dining Room, which enjoys repeated recommendations in Michelin's Eating out in Pubs guide."

Jane Bourvis (Golborne Road): "Walking into this vintage bridal shop feels like wandering to Miss Haversham's dressing room. Dozens of antique lace dresses hang from the ceiling, corsets weigh down rails, and every available surface is topped with trinkets, strings of pearls and wind-up music boxes."

Cannon & Cannon (Brixton Road): "Cannon & Cannon can sort cheese and charcuterie board dilemmas with minimal fuss. Its selection of British cured meat (sourced from as close as Kent and as far as the Scottish Highlands) is matched by a stellar range of artisan cheese. Pair with the deli's chutneys and pickles and wash down with pale ale from Bermondsey's Kernel Brewery."

Virginia (Clarendon Cross): "Clarendon Cross's concentration of eccentrics and artists may be thinning these days, but long serving establishments such as Virginia keep the area's unconventional personality alive. Virginia Bates opened up shop in 1971 and is renowned in the upper echelons of the fashion industry for her incredible collection of antique apparel from the 1850s to the 1930s."

London Villages should be on every Anglophile's shelf. For visitors to the City, it will be indispensable when either planning your next trip or in order to learn more about the history of London. For locals, London Villages will no doubt keep that age old question, "What should we do this weekend?" at bay for months to come.

London Villages by Zena Alkayat with photographs by Kim Lightbody

 and illustrated maps by Jenny Seddon is published by Frances Lincoln

 in paperback, £9.99. 192 pages, ISBN 9780711234666

One The Shelf - Jeeves And The Wedding Bells

Author Sebastian Faulks was approached to write a sequel to the Jeeves and Wooster books of P.G. Wodehouse by the Wodehouse estate, which emphatically maintained since the announcement was first made that the story would be “faithful to the history and personality of Wodehouse’s characters.” Even so, as one who has read and relished these books for years, I have to say that I began this new installment with more than a modicum of doubt as to whether Faulks could pull this off. These were, after all, big shoes to fill, whether they belong to employer or valet. Anticipating the state of his reader's minds, Faulks addresses these doubts in his Author's Note, saying at the outset, "What I tried  . . . to do was give people who haven't read the Jeeves books a sense of what they sound like; while for those who know them well I tried to provide a nostalgic variation - in which a memory of the real thing provides the tune and these pages perhaps a line of harmony."

In keeping with the musical metaphors, I'll tell you now that Jeeves and the Wedding Bells was a well played comic concert worthy of not a few well timed guffaws. It was delightful to find Jeeves and Wooster in a new storyline after all this time. New might not be the proper word; after all, Wodehouse himself employed several tried and true plot devices that became recurring threads in several books - bright young things getting engaged, bright young things falling out with their intended mates short of the altar, Bertie being buttonholed into patching things up between the lovers, Jeeves sorting out the results of Bertie's mucking about, hidden identities, Aunt Agatha, cash strapped aristocrats and the appearance of at least one stately pile. All of these, and the Drones Club, make welcomed reappearances in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, in which we find Bertie and Jeeves swapping roles - Jeeves assumes the identity of Lord Etringham, while Bertie pretends to be Jeeves’ manservant Wilberforce as they wend their way down to Sir Henry Hackwood's Melbury Hall in Dorset so that Bertie can help a pal with affairs of the heart. . Note: Georgina Meadowes, to whom Bertie recently lost his own heart whilst in Cannes, is also in residence. And is engaged to someone other than the Wooster chappie.

Now that we've got all of our Wodehousian ducks in a demented row, here's an excerpt from Jeeves and the Wedding Bells at the point where Bertie gets his first glimpse of Melbury Hall: "I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say old Sir Henry had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by a bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture. This ancient Hackwood had stinted himself on neither grounds nor messuages. The ensemble reached as far as the eye could see, taking in deer park, cricket pitch, lawns and meadows as well as walled kitchen gardens and a stable block that could have quartered the Household Cavalry. The staff needed for such a place must have drawn on every household in Kingston St. Giles and I could see that whoever signed the yearly cheque to the electricity company would need a tumblerful of something strong to nerve him for the task."

Not too shabby, what? This Faulks fellow seems to have gotten the tone right. In fact, his Bertie Wooster seems a tad less dim than he tended to come across in Wodehouse's original books. Some, in other reviews, have complained about this slight deviation. However, it's my belief that Bertie simply had to evolve over time, even if that time were just a month, or even a year, in the imagniary world of P.G. Wodehouse. How often can one have the same tricks played upon their person without ever coming out the wiser? Dare we say that there's a time in every clubman's life when he's simply got to get with it?

The reader might also notice just the slightest variation in Bertie's interactions with the beloved and all knowing Jeeves, but this does not dim the cadence of their conversations. Here's a sample of the dialogue that comes just before Bertie is set to wait at table at dinner at Melbury Hall that night. Bertie is concerned that his cover will be blown by being in such close proximity to the inhabitants of the house:

"It is a fact of life, sir," he said, "that in the course of a large dinner party those at table barely notice those who wait on them."
"Unless they make an ass of themselves."
"Indeed, sir. Otherwise, the company tends to take the service for granted and to be absorbed in its own conversation."
"That sounds a bit ungrateful."
"It is the way of the world, sir, and not ours to question. Might I for instance ask you who waited on you last time you stayed at Brinkley Court?"
"Seppings?"
"No, sir. Mr. Seppings was indisposed. It was Mr. Easton, a young man from the village."
"I didn't notice."
"Exactly, sir."
I pondered this for a moment. "It's still a blood-curdling prospect."
"I understand your trepidation, sir. Remember, however, that your disguise has been unremarked thus far. Then, to make assurance doubly sure, as it were, it might be advisable to alter your appearance in some small way."
"A false beard?"
"No, sir. The footman you are replacing -"
"Hoad? The gargoyle?"
"Mr. Hoad also has a pair of side-whiskers."
"Are you saying the whiskers naturally go with the cork-screw and the folded white napkin?"
"They are more frequently worn by the serving classes, sir."
There are times to take offence, but this was not one of them. I left my high horse unmounted - though tethered pretty close. "What else?"
"If you were to part your hair centrally, sir . . . It is surprising how much difference such a small alteration can make."
"Anything further? An eyepatch? A kilt and sporran?"
"Nothing so drastic, sir. I think that if you were to wear my reading glasses for the evening the disguise would be complete without being histrionic."

As you can see, the game is again afoot. I suggest that you refrain from peeking at any further reviews before reading Jeeves and the Wedding Bells lest the handful of nitpickers poison your mind against this enjoyable effort by Mr. Faulks, who is emphatically not P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is dead. Faulks is alive. So are Bertie and Jeeves. Enjoy.

 

 

Author Sebastian Faulks

 

 

 

ISBN-10: 1250047595 - Hardcover $14.94

Publisher: St. Martin's Press (November 5, 2013), 256 pages

On The Shelf

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the

Nineteenth Century to Modern Times

by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton 2013)

Even if you've been researching daily life in England for years and believe that you know all there is to know about servants by this time, I'm here to tell you that you don't. And you certainly have never had the subject presented in such an entertaining manner. Lethbridge's book is not so much an overview of bygone grandeur and servitude as it is an in-depth and personal look at the people who lived below stairs. Where did they come from? Why did they go into service? What did they think about their `betters' and the other servants in the house? Along with solid facts and figures, Servants sparkles with wit, wisdom and the words of the servants themselves.

As Lethbridge writes - "In 1900 domestic service was still the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain: of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants, a majority of them as single-handed maids in small households." The author goes on to introduce the reader to various servants and to provide insight on their backgrounds: "The extent to which Britain’s poor were stunted by disease and malnourishment was made fully apparent after the outbreak of the Second Boer War, when recruiting offices reported that a majority of the working-class recruits were unfit for active service, their diet consisting for the most part of little more than the `staples’ of bread, dripping and tea . . . . Lillian Westall found work as a maid-of-all-work almost impossible: just carting buckets of hot water up and down stairs needed almost the strength of a grown man – and a single maid in a small household would need to carry an estimated three tons of water a week. “This sort of work needed the stamina of an ox and years of semi-starvation meant I hadn’t this sort of strength.”

 Lethbridge allows the reader to hear the voices of the aristocrats, as well: "The `odd man,’ a vital fixture on an estate, was a manservant who never quite made the grade required to be a front-of-the-house type and was therefore used for pretty well everything, from carrying heavy luggage to helping with the cleaning. Huge houses could sustain great numbers of the very old and the very young and with their work went the rituals of their particularity, the vital necessity of which no-one thought of questioning. Lady Diana Cooper, who grew up at Belvoir Castle, Rutland, remembered the `gong man’ whose only job was to summon the household to meals by walking the corridors three times a day banging a gong: `He would walk down the interminable passages, his livery hanging a little loosely on his bent old bones, clutching his gong with one hand and with the other feebly brandishing the padded-knobbed stick with which he struck it.'"

Servants provides a peek behind the green baize door with examples of just how extensive, and invisible, the below stairs machinery was - at Belvoir Castle there were at least three lamp and candle men who labored continuously at snuffing wicks, filling lamps and cleaning and de-waxing glass – a full time job. That the great families of England took these labours for granted is made clear, as are the instances in which the same families often declared their loyalties to those who served: at Badminton House, seat of the Duke of Beaufort, the lamp man was totally blind and felt his way expertly about the corridors – and was still doing so in the 1920s. Servants is peppered with further anecdotes that illustrate the peccadilloes and peculiarities of the upper classes, all of which make for an engrossing read.

 Halfway through the book, Lethbridge brings us to the early 20th century and to the events - Great Wars, the Industrial Revolution - that would sound the death knells for England's Stately Homes. Slowly, the great estates were losing ground and the previously, seemingly unending line of servants waiting to staff them grew thin. The grandest of these estates were the last to feel the effects.

 

"At Chatsworth, where thirty indoor staff were employed throughout the 1930's, the only real change in the running of the house after the war was the jettisoning of the ancient role of Groom of Chambers, whose job of looking after the drawing rooms and writing tables was taken over by footmen. Lady Hambleden, born into the Herbert family and brought up at Wilton House before her marriage in 1928, remained almost untouched by the shift, so noticeable in most large houses, from male to female front-of-house staff, from butler to parlourmaid: `We did have quite a lot of staff: there was a butler - I think most people had butlers. I can only think of one person who had parlourmaids and everybody rather noticed it.'

 

"On the Rothschilds' estate, at Waddeston in Buckinghamshire, the gardeners still sent the vegetables to the kitchen door every day in a specially constructed pony cart painted in the Rothschild racing colours of yellow and blue, the coachman who drove it dressed in a matching livery and cockade. At Woburn Abbey, the eleventh Duke of Bedford maintained until his death in 1940 not only a household of at least sixty indoor servants to attend solely to his wife and himself, but two separate, fully staffed residences in Belgrave Square, including four cars and eight chauffeurs; the Woburn parlourmaids were all Amazonian at over five foot ten, as had always been the Bedfords' stipulation."

Whilst it may seem odd to us in the 21st century that so vast an army of servants was necessary to see to the needs of two people, Lethbridge provides many examples that show that, amongst the aristocracy, this was the norm, rather than the exception to the rule.

 

"In the house where Doris Winchester worked, the servants were so numerous that they ate more than twice the daily quantity of their two elderly employers: `If they had roast pheasant in the dining room and there was just the two of them they had one pheasant and I had to do five pheasants for the servants' hall.'"

 

"Holland House was so vast that when George (Washington, a footman) first arrived he was instructed to go to the front door as people had been known to spend `days' searching for the servants' entrance in the maze of courtyards and passages behind. Waiting on Lady Ilchester (we lived there alone) was a butler, a footman, and odd man and second footman, housekeeper and four maids, a stillroom maid, a cook, two kitchen maids and tow scullery maids, a chauffeur, nine gardeners, a lady's maid, a night nurse and a day nurse. The odd man was so old that he was unable to do any heavy work. `When I look back over my three years and a half years at Holland House,' wrote Washington, 'I can see now there was something particularly sad, almost unreal, about them. We were propping up something that belonged to another age, trying to pretend that what had passed still existed or even if it didn't that if we tried hard enough to keep the old order of things going, it might come back.'"

 

The old way of life did not come back, but new ways of life intruded further upon the old order, a case in point being income tax and death duties - "In 1930 a correspondent wrote to The Times: `The result of any increased taxation in my individual case is that I shall have to reduce my servants by half. I now have eight dependent upon me and in order to require good and faithful servants I have made large inroads on capital."

Modernization also intruded upon the aristocracy, who were more often than not slow to embrace it, as in the case of electricity, which many either chose to ignore or else disguised beneath echoes of the past -

 

"This taste for concealing new technology trickled down into the new houses of the middle classes, where the wireless, for example, was often hidden inside an especially constructed cabinet . . . . Sometimes the staff themselves were part of the pretence, maintaining an illusion of elaborate labour where technology had in reality made it redundant. At Flete House, in Devon, the footmen had to remove all the electric table lamps every morning and bring them back in as soon as it grew dark . . . . When electricity was finally installed at Woburn in the late 1920's, the Duke of Bedford believed his guests would be so unaccustomed to this new form of illumination that he had black and white plaques made especially to go above all the switches, inscribed with the explanatory words `Electric Light.'"

 
Both World Wars also served to upset the old order of things by forcing women into traditionally male work, thus opening doors that led to new employment opportunities for those women who would otherwise have settled for a life in service. Lethbridge uses one of these modern women as an example

 

" . . . In 1939, Celia Fremlin, employed by the new social research group Mass Observation, embarked on a job (for investigative purposes) as scullery-maid for an elderly woman living, bed-bound, in a huge London house. Fremlin's first experience was a surreal experience: That night her aged ladyship had decided to sup on a cup of Benger's food (a malted milk drink, rather like Ovaltine) and a digestive biscuit. So like a vast machine set in motion, the eight members of the staff were mobilized as if for a full-time dinner party. First the housekeeper (1) had to come down to the kitchen to tell the cook that this was to be the menu tonight. Then I, the scullery maid (2) was dispatched to fetch the new tin of Benger's from the store-room, and the special enamel saucepan. I handed them to the kitchen maid (3) who took the lid off and handed the tin to the cook, together with the other necessary apparatus. The cook (4) then set to work making the Benerg's. Now the footman (5) came into action. He went to the butler (6) for the key to the cupboard which contained her ladyship's silver tray. The butler gave him the key and waited while he took out the tray. Then the footman put the tray on his trolley and wheeled it to the kitchen, where the Benger's and digestive biscuit were now standing in state awaiting him. He put them on the tray and wheeled it off to the hall. Here the tray was taken by the head housemaid (7). She took it up to her ladyship's landing and knocked on her ladyship's door. It was opened by the lady's maid (8) who took the tray and disappeared." Fremlin summarized the experience for her employers by writing, "It was like watching a hundred-ton crane picking up a safety-pin; like watching a huge sweet factory producing one peppermint bulls-eye; a vast machine that has forgotten how to stop working."

 

One can't help but wonder of the bed-bound peeress was Lady Ilchester herself.

 

Gradually, the scarcity of good servants began to trickle down to houses of all classes. So prevalent and recognizable did the servant problem become that Elizabeth Dashwood, writing as E.M. Delafield, made a living out of writing a weekly column about them for Time and Tide under the heading Diary of a Provincial Lady. These articles would later be collected and published as a book under that title. As Lethbridge points out, so universal had this problem become that it supplied content for several novelists of the day including Lettice Cooper (The New House) and Mary Wilde (A Housewife in Kensington).

 

From the 1930's onward, refugees began to fill the ranks of the servant classes in England - Austrians, Germans Czechs, both male and female. Many of them, like parlormaid Rachel Perlmutter , a character portrayed in the latest incarnation of Upstairs, Downstairs, were over qualified for their positions, having themselves come from the professional classes in their native countries and often having had servants of their own before entering England. During the Second World War, many of the great houses were requisitioned by the government and the number of servants in homes of any size, large or small, were restricted by the government. With male and female servants having been restricted or having left to fight or take up war work on the home front, evacuees often found themselves expected to sing for their suppers, so to speak, taking up the work that still needed to be done in the houses, the kitchens, the gardens and the farms. The old order would never be the same again.

 

Afterwards, those who took up service, whether as cooks, lady's maids or butlers gradually came to be seen as professionals who were hired through word of mouth, through classified ads or through the many domestic service registry offices that were cropping up around the country. Lethbridge follows the evolution of the those who serve right up to the present day where, quite naturally, the book ends. More's the pity, as Servants was as engaging as any work of fiction whilst proving itself a 'keeper' for my research shelves.  

 

 

Lucy Lethbridge has written for a number of publications, including as writing articles for the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and the Times Literary Supplement and is also the author of several children's books, one of which, Who Was Ada Lovelace?, won the 2002 Blue Peter Award for non-fiction. She lives in London.