Charlotte Moore

Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain, by Lucy Lethbridge – review

As well as having to perform countless heavy chores till all hours, servants were expected to be invisible. Charlotte Moore is fascinated by the daily’s grind

issue 16 March 2013

The first illustration in this absorbing survey of domestic service in 20th-century Britain is a group photograph of the household servants at Erdigg, the Yorke family home in Wales. Each holds an emblematic item; the housekeeper is defined by her bunch of keys, the butler holds a wine bottle and corkscrew, the footman, in full pantomimic rig down to his buckled shoes, bears a salver for the calling cards that formed an intricate and arcane method of communication amongst the upper orders. The picture was taken in 1912. It is expressive of a system governed by age-old rules and unshakable hierarchies. How unimaginable that only two years later the outbreak of war would initiate the great dismantling of this system.

On the last page of illustrations is a photograph taken in 1959, when the dismantling was almost complete. It shows the Duke of Bedford, master of Woburn Abbey, at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

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