“1892: Miss Fanny Hicks is forced to tell the Trade Union
Congress in Glasgow that trousers made for Queen Victoria’s grandson the Duke
of York (later King George V) were made in a Soho sweatshop where typhoid fever
has broken out. Miss Hicks then discloses that Davies & Son (the Duke’s
tailor) is a subcontractor of the sweatshop. The scandal of the Duke of York’s
Trousers is recorded in The Pall Mall Gazette and compounded by the mysterious
death of the Duke’s brother and heir apparent Prince Albert Victor in January
1892.”
“Davies & Son found itself in the centre of a royal
Savile Row tailoring scandal in 1892 when trade union whistle-blower Miss Fanny
Hicks told the Glasgow Congress that trousers intended for the Duke of York
(the future King George V) had been made in a sweatshop in Mayfair’s Woodstock
Street. Miss Hicks alleged that Davies & Son had outsourced the prince’s
trousers and waistcoat to the sweatshops behind Bond Street where minors had
recently died of scarlet fever. Furthermore, she claimed Davies & Son had
also outsourced a uniform intended for Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence and
Avondale to the self same workshop. Prince Eddy had ostensibly died of
influenza complicated by pneumonia at Sandringham House in January 1892. But
the Pall Mall Gazette made the link between infected garments and the death of
a man once removed from the throne of Great Britain. Another victim was the
youngest daughter of Davies & Son customer Sir Robert Peel. Good came from
the scandal of the Duke of York’s trousers for which, incidentally, Davies
& Son was exonerated.”
Davies & Son is the oldest independent tailor trading on
Savile Row.
Thomas Davies set up shop at No 19 Hanover Street in 1804, a
year after his late brother founded the eponymous bespoke tailor on Cork Street
in 1803. It was an era when the landscape of the fashionable West End of London
was still under construction. The Prince Regent had yet to command John Nash to
build Regent Street as a wide, colonnaded boulevard between Soho and Mayfair.
Work had not commenced on the world’s longest, grandest covered shopping arcade
Burlington Arcade and it it would be another 42-years before Henry Poole opened
the first tailor’s shop on Savile Row. Davies, whose silhouette painted in
black ink and preserved in the company archive has been reinstated as part of
the trademark, was clerk to banking dynasty and army agents Greenwood, Cox
& Co. He was responsible for the commission of army uniforms so it stands
to reason that when he took the reins of his brother’s firm that he had a
ready-made naval and military business during the Napoleonic Wars. We know that
Admiral Lord Nelson was an early customer of Davies & Son and also
patronised hatters James Lock & Co and Meredith of Portsmouth; the firm
that became known as Gieves Ltd and, later, Gieves & Hawkes. EST 1803 SAVILE
ROW Bespoke Tailors The Hanover Street house was decorated in fine late
Georgian style with stucco ceilings as elaborate as royal icing and a filigree
mahogany staircase that snaked upwards to the four floors above. Arbiter of
fashion George ‘Beau’ Brummell and his follower the Prince Regent favoured
tailors Meyer, Weston and Schweitzer & Davidson. But we know Davies had an
elite civilian clientele from its earliest years. When the firm was forced to
leave Hanover Street in 1979 a bill dated 1829 was discovered issued to twice
Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel who founded the modern police force. When
Davies & Son first felt sufficiently confident to claim they dressed ‘all
the crowned heads of Europe’ is unclear because all but one of its customer
ledgers did not survive. But by 1915 the firm proudly display HM King George
V’s Royal Warrant on the company’s letterhead flanked by the crests of the
Emperor of Russia, the Kings of the Hellenes, Spain, Denmark and Norway and
Queen Victoria’s third son Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught. The letter also
tells us that Davies & Son had a shop at No 16 Place Vendôme in Paris
opposite The Ritz hotel. Queen Victoria’s grandsons the Princes Eddy and George
were the first British royal customers to patronise the firm in the 1880s.
Davies & Son found itself in the centre of a royal Savile Row tailoring
scandal in 1892 when trade union whistle-blower Miss Fanny Hicks told the
Glasgow Congress that trousers intended for the Duke of York (the future King
George V) had been made in a sweatshop in Mayfair’s Woodstock Street. Miss
Hicks alleged that Davies & Son had outsourced the prince’s trousers and
waistcoat to the sweatshops behind Bond Street where minors had recently died
of scarlet fever. Furthermore, she claimed Davies & Son had also outsourced
a uniform intended for Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence and Avondale to the self
same workshop. Prince Eddy had ostensibly died of influenza complicated by
pneumonia at Sandringham House in January 1892. But the Pall Mall Gazette made
the link between infected garments and the death of a man once removed from the
throne of Great Britain. Another victim was the youngest daughter of Davies
& Son customer Sir Robert Peel. Good came from the scandal of the Duke of
York’s trousers for which, incidentally, Davies & Son was exonerated.
Davies, Poole’s and Meyer & Mortimer put their outworking factories in
order, Fanny Hicks was exposed as a union firebrand stirring up trouble and
Angelica Patience Fraser - the tailors’ Florence Nightingale – embarked on a
new crusade to end ‘sweating’ as well as to curb the drunkenness and vice that
was virulent in the tailoring workshops of Soho and Oxford Street. Neither did
the scandal deter the Duke of York who was still a Davies & Son customer
when he acceded to the throne in 1910 and remained so until his death in 1936.
One of the most poignant photographs in the Davies & Son archive shows King
George V and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia at Cowes’ Royal Regatta in 1910 with
their eldest sons the Prince of Wales and Tsarevich Alexei. The royal cousins
are near identical and wear matching blazers and flannels tailored by Davies
& Son. Within eight-years the Tsar and his immediate family would be
executed by firing squad in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The Prince
of Wales would reign for less than a year before abdicating the throne for the
love of twicedivorced American Wallis Simpson. Another controversial customer
from early 20th Century Russian history was the infamous bisexual Prince Felix
Youssoupoff who recorded a 1903 visit to Hanover Street in his 1953 memoir Lost
Splendour. The prince’s bulldog Punch tore the seat out of a fellow customer’s
trousers. Prince Felix would be remembered as the man who shot the ‘mad monk’
Rasputin’ in 1917 and inadvertently speeded the downfall of the Romanov dynasty
and the collapse of the Russian Empire. Another exotic customer in 1902 was the
Maharaja of Cooch-Behar who ordered a tan goatskin motoring cap and two pairs
of matching gauntlets. Establishment figures such as Liberal Prime Minister Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman also patronised Davies. Richard Walker’s Savile Row
Story (1988) gives a curious insight into King George V’s relationship with
Davies & Son. The King, like his father Edward VII before him who made a
point of visiting Henry Poole on Savile Row socially, did not request that
Davies wait on him at Buckingham Palace. ‘The firm created a room for his
exclusive use and fitted it with panels and a tube-like hosepipe, which
communicated with the tailors upstairs’. Presumably the fifth floor salon
reserved for royal customers to entertain their lady friends the previous
century had been decommissioned. In 1935 the last of Davies family relinquished
the business and it was taken over by a cabal of cutters who continued to run
the company until 1996. Between World War I and World War II, Davies dressed
heroes Field Marshal Lord Alexander of Tunis, Field Marshal Haig and spymaster
Colonel Edward Boxshall as well as villains such as founder of the British Union
of Fascists Sir Oswald Mosley. United States President Harry Truman was
tailored by Davies after World War II as was President John F. Kennedy’s father
Joe. Like most establishment tailors in the West End excluding Huntsman and
Anderson & Sheppard, Davies & Son did not dress show business
professionals before World War II. After VE Day in 1945 Clark Gable, Bing
Crosby, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. visited Davies & Son on
Hanover Street. Echoing many tailors who survived the privations of war and
clothing rationing, Davies & Son would have to adjust to the fact that (in
their own words) ‘our business was built on the clothing requirements of the
aristocracy of Europe and Great Britain. Today our business is mainly with the
affluent and famous abroad’. When Davies changed its address to 32 Old
Burlington Street (now Anderson & Sheppard) in 1979 many historic records
were transferred to the Westminster Library and only a minimum of the shop
fittings from Hanover Street were salvaged. No 19 Hanover Street is still
standing but any original features are hidden by the interiors of a wine bar.
Should you wish to see an interior comparable look at Browns restaurant on
Maddox Street housed in the former Victorian showroom of Wells of Mayfair: a
tailor now incorporated into Davies & Son. With 90% of business transacted
overseas after the war, Davies & Son’s cutters joined the rest of Savile
Row aboard the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth for transatlantic trips to New
York and, from Grand Central Station, all over the United States. Davies still
travels frequently to France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Korea, Japan and,
in the US, to New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington and
Boston. Responsibilities on trips are now shared between owner Alan Bennett,
senior cutter Patrick Murphy and senior salesman Graham Lawless. Mr Bennett has
a formidable record in bespoke tailoring and is one of the very few members of
the ‘50 Club’ who have worked for as many years or more on the Row. His
training includes studying at the London College of Fashion and apprenticeships
with Huntsman, Kilgour, French & Stanbury, Dege & Skinner and Denman
& Goddard. Mr Bennett traded under his own name before saving Davies &
Son from closure in 1997. He relocating the firm to No 38 Savile Row. Since the
acquisition, Davies & Son has incorporated historic West End bespoke
tailors such as James & James (who in turn bought-out the Duke of Windsor’s
tailor Scholte), Wells of Mayfair, Watson, Fargerstrom & Hughes and royal
and military tailor Johns & Pegg who hold the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal
Warrant. In addition to being a traditionalist Mr Bennett is one of the Row’s
most creative cutters. In recent years he has collaborated with Guy Hills
cutting suits made from Hills’s directional Dashing Tweeds cloth collections.
It was he who sold Michael Jackson an Ambassadorial coatee in the 1990s giving
the late king of pop one of his most iconic costumes. A new chapter was opened
in Davies & Son’s story when former Huntsman head cutter Patrick Murphy
joined Mr Bennett and Mr Lawless at No. 38 Savile Row in 2015. With so many
once great names in Savile Row’s history sold to overseas investors and
focusing increasingly on ready-towear, the few remaining firms in independent
ownership gain authenticity and respect for maintaining standards and
tradition. Tailors promising to revolutionise the Row or introduce modernity do
not fool connoisseurs of bespoke tailoring. The aforementioned trust cutters
and tailors who have practised the craft man and boy such as Messrs Bennett,
Lawless and Murphy at Davies & Son
“The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide To
Chivalry.” By Brad Miner
At a time of astonishing confusion about what it means to be
a man, Brad Miner has recovered the oldest and best ideal of manhood: the
gentleman. Reviving a thousand-year tradition of chivalry, honor, and heroism,
The Compleat Gentleman provides the essential model for twenty-first-century
masculinity.
Despite our confusion, real manhood is not complicated. It
is an ancient ideal based on service to one’s
God, country, family, and friends—a simple
but arduous ideal worthy of a lifetime of struggle.
Miner’s gentleman stands out for his
dignity, restraint, and discernment. He rejects the notion that one way of
behaving is as good as another. He belongs to an aristocracy of virtue, not of
wealth or birth. Proposing neither a club nor a movement, Miner describes a
lofty code of manly conduct, which, far from threatening democracy, is
necessary for its survival.
Miner traces the concept of manliness from the jousting
fields of the twelfth century to the decks of the Titanic. The three masculine
archetypes that emerge—the warrior, the lover, and the
monk—combine in the character of the
"compleat gentleman." This modern knight cultivates a martial spirit
in defense of the true and the beautiful. He treats the opposite sex with the
passionate respect required by courtly love. And he values learning in the
pursuit of truth—all with the discretion, decorum,
and nonchalance that the Renaissance called sprezzatura.
The Compleat Gentleman is filled with examples from the past
and the present of the man our increasingly uncivilized age demands.
Edmund Burke's famous pronouncement that "the age of
chivalry is gone" was perhaps premature. Sure, ten thousand swords did not
leap from the scabbards of the French nobility to defend Marie Antoinette, but
such a betrayal did not mean that "the unbought grace of life, the cheap
defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise"
was forgotten in Britain, or America. More than two centuries later, the spirit
of chivalry has not been entirely eradicated from the human heart, even in our
pacifist, feminist, postmodern age.
While teaching both college and high school students, I have
found nothing to electrify a classroom as much as the topic of chivalry, which
I always introduce with the simple question, "Is chivalry dead?" The
reasons for student interest are straightforward: young women are curious to
see how men used to treat women in a more mannered and moral age, and young
men, for their part, are painfully aware that in many respects they are less
manly than their forefathers. These students have usually been given little
instruction by their parents and teachers on what it means to be a man or a
woman. Perhaps no other image, then, can appeal to them as much as the knight
on horseback who will, for the sake of honor, fight any man, and still bow in
deference to every lady.
And yet, the story of chivalry has not gotten out. Maurice
Keen, Richard Barber, and Georges Duby have written excellent academic histories
of chivalry, but these works are aimed at a scholarly audience and make no
attempt to explore the relevance of chivalry for our own time. Medieval
narratives, especially Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, are often tough reading and
Hollywood blockbusters like last summer's King Arthur or A Knight's Tale from a
few years ago are utter disappointments. But now Brad Miner, an executive
editor at Bookspan and former literary editor for National Review, has given us
The Compleat Gentleman, an attempt to trace the chivalric tradition from
medieval times to our own and to return contemporary manhood to its moorings in
this gentlemanly tradition.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, lawless young men on
horseback roamed the countryside in search of a fight. They threatened any
semblance of order, and especially threatened women. Gradually, these young men
became less dangerous by accepting the code of knighthood. They promised to
display certain virtues: loyauté, prouesse, largesse, courtoisie, and
franchise. In return, they might gain property by marrying the daughter of a
lord. Or they might make a considerable fortune and win glory by testing their
mettle in frequent tournaments. Miner offers interesting snapshots of the
knight's training, the knighting ceremony, and tournaments. These last, in
particular, were crucial to the development of chivalry, having "the dual
virtues of providing both a means of testing a knight's prowess and of
expiating his violent energies." And Miner reminds us that tournaments in
the heyday of chivalry were not celebrated in the fashion of the confined
jousts of either Scott's Ivanhoe or cinematic lore, but rather in the form of a
mêlée, a massive battle lasting all day and often engaging hundreds or even
thousands of knights. Injuries were frequent, and death was not uncommon.
While Miner offers the basic outlines of medieval chivalry,
he fails to recount certain facts and anecdotes that might do more to win our
hearts. For example, as courtly philosophy began increasingly to shape the
ideal of knighthood, a knight could be barred from tournaments for any
unchivalrous behavior, including deserting his lord in battle, destroying
vineyards and cornfields, or repeating gossip about a lady. Can we imagine a
sporting event today in which players who had "talked trash" about a
girl would not be allowed on the field? Who would be left to play? Miner makes
excellent observations on William Marshal, "the flower of chivalry,"
but most of his other character sketches amuse more than they impress. Other
knights should have appeared in this book. Consider Maréchal Boucicaut who
while in Genoa running the government of Charles VI, once bowed to two
prostitutes, whom he did not know. His page said, "My lord, they are
whores." Boucicaut responded, "I would rather have saluted ten whores
than to have omitted saluting one respectable woman." Another good lesson
for a culture that too often treats respectable women as "ho's."
* * *
Miner classifies the chivalrous man as part warrior, part
lover, and part monk, and addresses each aspect of this ideal in separate
chapters. A reformed pacifist who prefers his sons to be Galahads rather than
Gandhis, Miner clearly sees that a post-September 11 America is no place for
milquetoasts. We are living in a fallen world and bad men want to do bad things
to us. We must be ready to respond in kind: "a gentleman really must face
the reality of violence and not reject it, but like any warrior he will turn to
violence only as a last resort."
The chapter on the lover is not nearly as inspiring. Miner
does a good job of explaining how troubadours and assertive ladies with
questionable sexual histories, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, could establish
the quasi-religion of courtly love. He is also forthright about the difficulty such
love poses to all contemporary moralists who want to adopt chivalry as a model:
knights and ladies were often adulterers, most famously Guinevere and Lancelot.
But Miner never mentions Wolfram von Eschenbach, the 13th-century Bavarian
knight who tried in his Parzival to reconcile courtly love with marriage. Nor
does he say anything about the reforms of the 14th and 15th centuries, that
sought to turn weak-willed knights into true gentlemen. And most curious of
all, he ends a chapter about love with a discussion of women in combat.
According to his rather strained logic, the true gentleman respects women and
gives them what they want. If she is strong enough and willing, then today's
"woman warrior" should be allowed to fight alongside today's
chivalrous man.
Miner's treatment of the gentleman is likewise far from
"compleat." He does relate the history of the gentleman, the
successor to the knight, from the Renaissance onward, but unfortunately he
sandwiches this chapter between his first chapter on the knight and his three
chapters on the warrior, the lover, and the monk, which all return to medieval
themes. As a result, he never shows any of the improvements or adjustments that
the culture of the gentleman made on the original model, especially with regard
to sexual mores. And too often he considers gentlemanly advice books as a true
reflection of how actual men thought and acted. Such a selective use of sources
is understandable for the Middle Ages, but the historical record is far richer
in modern times. His handling of the 18th century is particularly lacking: he
focuses on Lord Chesterfield's letters to his illegitimate son, a work which
Miner himself tells us was considered by Samuel Johnson to "teach the
morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master." Only by confusing
the century of Washington and Hamilton and Burke with the letters of
Chesterfield could one conclude that the "heroic aspect of the gentlemanly
character would begin to be lost in the mystification of manners." Miner
actually gives no more than a passing mention to America's greatest gentlemen,
the Founding Fathers. And he seems to think little of manners generally. The
muddled section on politesse hardly recommends good manners at all but instead
insists, "nobody has better manners or finer suits or more skill in debate
than the devil himself."
Finally, Miner overlooks one vital aspect of modern
manliness altogether. His tripartite knight roughly corresponds to the medieval
conception of the three orders in society: oratores (those who pray),
bellatores (those who fight), and laborares (those who work). Yet he
substitutes lovers for workers, leaving no place in his scheme for what most
gentlemen do in modern times: work hard to provide for their families. Calling
for a return to the warrior ethic in these times is certainly warranted. But in
practical terms, not all of us can serve in the military. And as Adam Smith
knew and American history has shown, an industrialized power firm in its will
and purpose will always prevail over a less developed enemy.
Despite its flaws, Brad Miner's book is a good introduction
to chivalry and one hopes it will inaugurate a rich discussion over the
qualities of true manliness. For that, we owe him our courteous thanks.
Ours is an age of
conflicting messages. Human progress is simultaneously thwarted and thriving,
technology both connects us and isolates us. And when it comes to masculinity,
some cry it’s a toxic social construct that must be eradicated, yet it is
concurrently celebrated in every big-screen depiction of superhero saving the
world from destruction.
In 2004, Brad Miner wrote a non-partisan though deeply
traditional interpretation of heroic manliness entitled The Compleat Gentleman:
The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry. It is assiduously researched, soul
inspiring, and quite literally a call to arms. Miner and his sons are all
practicing martial artists, and he sees physical prowess and being “combat
ready” as intrinsic qualities of any gentleman, who by definition is prepared
to summon the courage to confront evil and to sacrifice himself for others.
Having recently discovered the book, I was immediately
curious what relevance it may still hold to any but that small minority that
binge-watches Game of Thrones on Saturday night and then attends services the
following morning. Wouldn’t new cultural concerns, such the rise of social
media, with its fake news and public shaming; #MeToo, the wage gap, and equity
across the gender spectrum; free speech vs. punch-a-Nazi (that’s anyone who
disagrees with you); and the teaching of white
privilege/supremacy/colonialization made notions of gentlemanliness and
chivalry more antiquated than ever?
I reached out to Mr. Miner and found that, like any true
traditionalist, he hadn’t changed much, even if the world around him has.
* * *
Fourteen years after The Compleat Gentleman, has the call
for chivalry and gentlemanliness become hopelessly quixotic, or is it needed
now more than ever?
Brad Miner: Early on in the book I acknowledge that there is
a quixotic character about all this, but I also assert that it has always been
so. Thoreau, who is among America’s most overrated icons (only slightly less
odious than his buddy Emerson), wrote that “the mass of men live lives of quiet
desperation.” Maybe so, although I doubt it. But few are, or ever were,
chivalrous. They may have intelligence, good manners, and humor — and those are
fine qualities — but few will be willing to lay down their lives for others.
Increasingly, the active life is succumbing to the passive
life. Social bonds are weakening, military enlistments are declining. If the
trend of turning inward continues, we will be a diminished people. However,
there will always be men — and women — who will seeks something better, higher,
and more fulfilling.
So much has changed since the book came out. If you were to
sit down and write the book today, how would all the social changes affect your
thinking on chivalry and the role of the contemporary gentleman?
BM: Well, as to what I might change, the answer is nothing.
The point of my book was to identify the aspects of chivalric and gentlemanly
behavior that are not rooted in any particular time and place; that, with
allowances for cultural change, are the same in 2018 as they were in 1118.
You’ve said our current president is much closer to a cad
than a gentleman, and many think he’s far worse than that. Likewise, #TimesUp
and #MeToo are exposing the worst side of male behavior. We seem to be in an
indeterminate state in which there are shreds of the old chivalry but not
enough to exert the controlling influence on men’s baser behaviors that it used
to help curtail, and an imagined future of gender equity in which men no longer
behave badly. Can you comment on this current limbo-like state?
BM: We’re not in “limbo” any more than in any previous
moment in history. It’s our perennial existential predicament. If there is a
difference between now and a time when chivalry was assumed to be among
humanity’s highest ideals, it’s that in those other eras many men aspired to be
chivalrous; now far fewer do. But never believe that chivalrous men were ever
more than a minority. It takes courage to be a compleat gentlemen, because it
is always countercultural. As Chesterton wrote, there are an infinity of angles
at which a man falls; only one at which he stands upright.
In your book you describe the compleat gentleman as always
combat-ready and physically able and willing to defend good against evil. How
would you update your assessment of this in this age of polarized
self-righteousness when who the bad guys are has become more subjective than
ever. Could your views about “be ready to defend against evil” be
misinterpreted?
BM: It’s true that chivalry is above all the worldview of
fighting men. In my book, however, I acknowledge that not all compleat
gentlemen are necessarily combat-ready. There are other ways a man can fight.
But as to the thuggishness to which you refer, it bears no similarity to
chivalry, given that in the incidents of violence by fascists right and left of
which I’m aware, seem, in every case, to be expressions of cowardice.
As to my words being misinterpreted, that goes with the
business of writing. And, as Antonio tells Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice,
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
The current state of boys and young men continues to be
troubling. They exhibit far more social pathologies than girls and far
underperform in scholastic achievement, including college enrollment. The right
says our culture has become too feminized, while the left says antiquated
“toxic” ideas about masculinity are the problem. What are your thoughts?
BM: Any man – from his teens into his thirties – who
succumbs to “feminization” deserves his fate. I’m neither a psychologist nor a
sociologist, but if I were assigning a bird-dog researcher to nose out an
answer, I first give him the scent of passivity. That’s a good place to start
in the matter of violence too. Many boys now come through American schools being
taught that their masculinity is toxic. It’s up to parents, fathers especially,
to reject this. I think it’s entirely compatible with the development of young,
chivalrous men that they should learn to smile through the stupidity – to
listen to the nonsense and to reject it without engaging in too much
confrontation. Take what is good; reject what is bad.
I write a lot about restraint in The Compleat Gentleman,
even calling it the great “lost virtue.” Martial skills, sports, hobbies,
reading that challenges the mind, lively conversation, and lasting friendships
will sustain a young man through good times and bad. And I’d be remiss if I did
not suggest that religious faith is also very important.
Third-wave feminism has also advanced significantly, aided
by social media. And yet there are reports that anxiety and neurosis among
young women is at a record high. How would you characterize the trade-offs
we’re seeing as the old patriarchy and its courtesies continues to evaporate,
replaced by a kind of bureaucratic chaperone chivalry (affirmative consent,
chaperones during male-female business meetings) in the guise of gender
equality?
BM: I must say this is the first time I’ve encountered the
term “chaperone chivalry.” It’s an interesting turn of phrase, except I’m
unclear what you mean by it. In my chapter on “The Lover,” I did my best to
think through the implications of the obvious and ongoing changes in the
relationship between the sexes. It’s clear to me that feminism has been good
for some women – perhaps most – and bad for others. It’s also clear that sex
roles have changed, for good or for ill. But it’s also clear that there are two
sexes and that they are different. If feminists of whatever wave wish not to
acknowledge those differences and, therefore, to reject the deference and
support of good men, that’s their right.
Besides the cliché of being a doorman whenever a lady is
near, what are things that a man can start doing right now to make himself more
gentlemanly and chivalrous?
BM: He should stop thinking so much about himself. He should
drop to one knee and thank God for giving him life, and he should swear never
to act dishonorably.
The Queen’s last remaining corgi has died, it has been
reported. Willow, who was almost 15, was put down after suffering from cancer,
making it the first time the monarch has not owned a corgi since the end of the
second world war.
Willow was the 14th generation descended from Susan, a corgi
gifted to the then Princess Elizabeth on her 18th birthday in 1944. The Queen
has owned more than 30 dogs of the breed during her reign.
It was reported in 2015 that the Queen had stopped breeding
corgis because she did not want to leave any behind after she died.
She still has two dogs, Vulcan and Candy, which are
informally known as “dorgis” – a cross-breed between a dachshund and a corgi
introduced to the royal household when Princess Margaret’s dachshund Pipkin
mated with one of the Queen’s dogs.
Vulcan and Candy appeared alongside Willow on the front
cover of Vanity Fair in 2016, shot by Annie Leibovitz to celebrate the Queen’s
90th birthday.
Willow was the last surviving corgi to have appeared
alongside the Queen and the actor Daniel Craig in the 2012 London Olympics
opening ceremony James Bond sketch. Willow, Monty and Holly had greeted the
secret agent as he arrived at the palace to accept a mission from the Queen.
The dogs ran down the stairs, performed tummy rolls and then
stood as a helicopter took off for the Olympic stadium, carrying Bond and a
stunt double of the Queen. Monty died a couple of months after the sketch was
filmed, and Holly was put down in 2016.
Buckingham Palace has declined to comment on Willow’s death,
saying it is a private matter.
The Queen has been very fond of corgis since she was a small
child, having fallen in love with the corgis owned by the children of the
Marquess of Bath. King George VI brought home Dookie in 1933. A photograph from
George VI's photo album shows a ten-year-old Elizabeth with Dookie at Balmoral.
Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret would feed Dookie by hand
from a dish held by a footman. The other early favourite corgi during the same
time was Jane.
Elizabeth II's mother, at that time Queen Elizabeth,
introduced a disciplined regimen for the dogs; each was to have its own wicker
basket, raised above the floor to avoid drafts. Meals were served for each dog
in its own dish, the diet approved by veterinary experts with no tidbits from
the royal table. A proprietary brand of meat dog biscuits was served in the
morning, while the late afternoon meal consisted of dog meal with gravy. Extra
biscuits were handed out for celebrations and rewards.
Crackers (24 December 1939, Windsor – November, 1953) was
one of the Queen Mother's corgis, and nearly a constant companion; he retired
with the Queen Mother to the Castle of Mey in Scotland. In 1944, Elizabeth was
given Susan as a gift on her 18th birthday. Susan accompanied Elizabeth on her
honeymoon in 1947. The corgis owned by the Queen are descended from Susan.
Rozavel Sue, daughter of Rozavel Lucky Strike, an international champion, was
one of the Queen's corgis in the early 1950s.
The Queen has owned over thirty corgis since her accession
to the thrones of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms in 1952.
The Queen's fondness for corgis and horses is known even in
places such as Grand Cayman; when Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the
island in 1983, government officials gave her black coral sculptures of a corgi
and a horse as a gift, both made by Bernard Passman.
Sugar was the nursery pet of Prince Charles and Princess
Anne. In 1955, her pups, Whisky and Sherry, were surprise Christmas gifts from
the Queen to the Prince and Princess. Pictured with the royal family, the corgi
Sugar made the cover of The Australian Women's Weekly on 10 June 1959. Sugar's
twin, Honey, belonged to the Queen Mother; Honey took midday runs with Johnny
and Pippin, Princess Margaret's corgis, while the Princess lived in Buckingham
Palace. Heather was born in 1962 and became one of the Queen's favourites.
Heather was the mother of Tiny, Bushy, and Foxy; Foxy gave birth to Brush in
1969.
The corgis enjoy a privileged life in Buckingham Palace.
They reside in the Corgi Room, and continue to sleep in elevated wicker
baskets. The Queen tends to the corgis in her kennel herself. She also chooses
the sires of litters that are bred in her kennel. The corgis have an extensive
menu at the palace which includes fresh rabbit and beef, served by a gourmet
chef. At Christmas, the Queen makes stockings for pets full of toys and
delicacies such as biscuits. In 1999, one of Queen Elizabeth's royal footmen
was demoted from Buckingham Palace for his "party trick of pouring booze
into the corgis' food and water" and watching them "staggering
about" with relish.
In 2007, the Queen was noted to have five corgis, Monty,
Emma, Linnet, Willow, and Holly; five cocker spaniels, Bisto, Oxo, Flash,
Spick, and Span; and four "dorgis" (dachshund-corgi crossbreeds),
Cider, Berry, Vulcan, and Candy. In 2012, Queen Elizabeth II's corgis Monty,
Willow, and Holly appeared during the brief James Bond sketch when Daniel Craig
arrived at Buckingham Palace for a mission to take the queen to the 2012 Summer
Olympics opening ceremony. Monty, who had previously belonged to the Queen
Mother, and one of her "Dorgis" died in September 2012. Monty had
been named for the horse whisperer and friend of the queen, Monty Roberts. As
of November 2012, it was reported that Elizabeth owns two corgis, Willow and
Holly, and two Dorgis, Candy and Vulcan. It was reported in July 2015 that the
Queen has stopped breeding corgis as she does not wish any to survive her in
the event of her death. Monty Roberts had urged Elizabeth to breed more corgis
in 2012 but she had told him that she "didn't want to leave any young dog
behind" and wanted to put an end to the practice.
The dogs have traditionally been buried at the royal
residence, Sandringham estate in Norfolk, at which they died. The graveyard was
first used by Queen Victoria when her Collie, Noble, died in 1887. In 1959, the
Queen used it to bury Susan, creating a cemetery for her pets.However, Monty
was buried in Balmoral estate.
On several occasions, the Queen or her staff have been
injured by the corgis. In 1954, the Royal Clockwinder, Leonard Hubbard, was
bitten by Susan upon entering the nursery at the Royal Lodge, Windsor. Later in
the same year, one of the Queen Mother's corgis bit a policeman on guard duty
in London.
In 1968, Peter Doig called for the royal staff to put up a
"Beware of the dog" sign at Balmoral after one of the corgis bit the
postman. In February 1989, it was reported that the royal family had hired an
animal psychologist to tame the dogs after they developed a habit of nipping
them and the staff. In March 1991, the Queen was bitten after trying to break
up a fight between ten or so of her corgis. She had to have three stitches to
her left hand. John Collins, the Queen Mother's chauffeur, had to have a
tetanus injection after he also tried to intervene. In 2003, Pharos, a
tenth-generation offspring of Susan, was put down after being mauled by
Princess Anne's English bull terrier Dottie. Anne arrived at Sandringham to
visit her mother for Christmas and the corgis rushed out of the front door as
they arrived. It was reported that "Dottie went for Pharos, savaging the
corgi's hind legs and breaking one in three places."
The royal corgis are known all across the world and are
closely associated with the Queen. The corgis have had numerous items dedicated
to them, in particular being the subject of many statues and works of art.
Because of the Queen's fondness for the Welsh Corgi, an increased number of
corgis were exhibited in the 1954 West Australian Canine Association's Royal
Show.Queen Elizabeth II’s crown coin KM# 1135, made of copper nickel of size 33
mm, issued during her Golden Jubilee year, shows the Queen with a corgi.
David Bintley takes a look at Louis XIV's impact on
classical dance
September 2015 marks the 300th anniversary of the death of
King Louis XIV of France and this documentary looks at how Louis XIV not only
had a personal passion and talent for dance, but supported and promoted key
innovations, like the invention of dance notation and the founding of the
world's first ballet school, that would lay the foundations for classical
ballet to develop.
Presented by David Bintley, choreographer and director of
the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the documentary charts how Louis encouraged the
early evolution of ballet - from a male-dominated performance exclusive to the
royal court to a professional artform for the public featuring the first female
star ballerinas. The film also looks at the social context of dance during
Louis XIV's reign, where ballets were used as propaganda and to be able to
dance was an essential skill that anyone noble had to have.
As well as specially shot baroque dance sequences and
groundbreaking recreations of 17th-century music, it also follows Bintley as he
creates an exciting new one-act ballet inspired by Louis XIV. Danced by 15
members of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, The King Dances features an original
score by composer Stephen Montague, designs by Katrina Lindsay and lighting by
Peter Mumford and receives its world premiere on television directly after the
documentary.
Louis XIV, the King of France from 1643 to 1715, was a
ballet enthusiast from a young age. In fact his birth was celebrated with the
Ballet de la Felicite in 1639. As a young boy, he was strongly supported and
encouraged by the court, particularly by Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, to take
part in the ballets. He made his debut at age 13 in the "Ballet de
Cassandre" in 1651. Two years later in 1653, the teenage king starred as
Apollo, the sun god, in The Ballet of the Night or in French, Le Ballet de la
Nuit. His influence on the art form and its influence on him became apparent.
His fancy golden costume was not soon forgotten, and his famous performance led
to his nickname, the Sun King. In the ballet, he banishes the night terrors as
he rise as sun at dawn. His courtiers were forced to worship him like a god
through choreography. They were made clear of the glory of King Louis XIV and
that he had absolute authority both on and off the dance floor. The ballets
that young King Louis performed in were very different from ballets performed
today. The form of entertainment was actually called ballets d’entrées. This
refers to the small divisions, or “entries,” that the ballets were broken up
into. For example, Le Ballet de la Nuit, comprised over forty of such entries,
which were divided into four vigils or parts. The whole spectacle lasted 12
hours.
Throughout his reign, Louis XIV worked with many influential
people in his court dances. He worked alongside poet Isaac de Benserade, as
well as designers Torelli, Vigarani and Henry de Gissey, which made fashion and
dance closely interlinked. Possibly his greatest contribution to the French
court was bringing composer/dancer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Louis supported and
encouraged performances in his court as well as the development of ballet
throughout France. Louis XIV was trained by Pierre Beauchamp. The King
demonstrated his belief in strong technique when he founded the Académie Royale
de Danse in 1661 and made Beauchamp leading ballet master. King Louis XIV’s and
France’s attempt to keep French ballet standards high was only encouraged
further when in 1672 a dance school was attached to the Académie Royale de
Musique. Led by Jean-Baptiste Lully, this dancing group is known today as The
Paris Opera Ballet.
The king was very exacting in his behavior towards his
dancing. In fact, he made it a daily practice to have a ballet lesson every day
after his morning riding lesson. As the French people watched and took note of
what their leader was doing, dancing became an essential accomplishment for
every gentleman. Clearly ballet became a way of life for those who were around
King Louis XIV. If one looked at the culture of seventeenth-century France, one
saw a reflection of an organized ballet that was choreographed beautifully,
costumed appropriately, and performed with perfect precision.[according to
whom?] Louis XIV retired from ballet in 1670.
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Perhaps one of the most influential men on ballet during the
seventeenth century was Jean Baptiste Lully. Lully was born in Italy, but moved
to France where he quickly became a favorite of Louis XIV and performed
alongside the king in many ballets until the king’s retirement from dance in
1670. He moved from dancer for the court ballets to a composer of such music
used in the courts. By the time he was thirty, Lully was completely in charge
of all the musical activities in the French courts. Lully was responsible for
enlivening the rather slow stately dances of the court ballets.[3] He decided
to put female dancers on stage and was also director of the Académie Royale de
Musique. This company's dance school still exists today as part of the Paris
Opera Ballet. Since dancers appeared in the very first performances the Opera
put on, the Paris Opera Ballet is considered the world’s oldest ballet company.
When Lully died in 1687 from a gangrenous abscess on the foot which developed
after he stuck himself with the long staff he used for conducting, France lost
one of the most influential conductors and composers of the seventeenth
century. However, Lully did not work alone. In fact, he often worked in
collaboration with two other men that were equally influential to ballet and
the French culture: Pierre Beauchamps and Molière.
Pierre Beauchamps
Beauchamps was a ballet-master who was deeply involved with
the creation of courtly ballets in the 1650s and 1660s.However, Beauchamps
began his career as the personal teacher to Louis XIV. Beauchamps is also
credited with coming up with the five fundamental foot positions from which all
balletic movements move through. Beauchamps techniques were taught throughout
France in secondary schools as well as by private teachers.[5] Contemporary
dancers would astonish Beauchamps at their ability to have 180-degree turnout.
Beauchamps dancers wore high-heeled shoes and bulky costumes which made turnout
difficult and slight. One of the first things that Lully and Beauchamps worked
together on was Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, which they called
opéra-ballet. The opéra-ballet is a form of lyric theatre in which singing and
dancing were presented as equal partners in lavish and spectacular stagings.
The Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, one of their first and most famous
collaborations, consisted of excerpts from court ballets linked by new entrées
stages by Beauchamps. Customarily, King Louis and courtiers danced in the court
ballets; however, in this new form of entertainment, the opéra-ballet, all of
the dancers were professionals. Beauchamps not only collaborated with Lully,
but he also had the great privilege to partner with Molière during his
lifetime.
Beauchamps also originated the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation,
which provided detailed indications of the tract of a dance and the related
footwork. Starting in 1700, hundreds of social and theatrical dances were
recorded and widely published in this form. Although this has been superseded
in modern times by even more expressive notations, the notation is sufficiently
detailed that, along with contemporary dancing manuals, these dances can be
reconstructed today.
Molière
Molière was a well-known comedic playwright during that time
period. He and Beauchamps collaborated for the first time in 1661, which
resulted in the invention of comédie-ballet. His invention of comedies-ballets
was said to be an accident. He was invited to set both a play and court ballet
in honor of Louis XIV, but was short of dancers and decided to combined the two
productions together. This resulted in Les Facheux in 1661. This and the
following comédie-ballets were considered the most important advance in baroque
dance since the development of Renaissance geometric figures.[6] One of the
most famous of these types of performances was Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which
is still performed today and continues to entertain audiences.[1] The idea
behind a comédie-ballet was a combination of spoken scenes separated by
balletic interludes; it is the roots for today’s musical theatre. Many of
Molière's ballets were performed by Louis XIV. According to Susan Au, the
king's farewell performance was Molière's Les Amants magnifiques in 1670. Not
only were these types of performances popular in the courts, but they helped
transition from courtiers being the dancers to using actors and professional
dancers, soon to be known as ballerinas.[1] The comédie-ballets helped to bring
understanding between the court and the commoners as the transition from court
ballets to a more common place ballet occurred.
With Molière writing the dialogue and directing, Beauchamps
choreographing the ballet interludes, and Lully composing the music and
overseeing the coming together of all the dancers and actors, these three
giants of men worked together to create many beautiful pieces of art for King
Louis XIV.
Ballet originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the
15th and 16th centuries before it had spread from Italy to France by an Italian
aristocrat, Catherine de' Medici, who became Queen of France. In France, ballet
developed even further under her aristocratic influence. The dancers in these
early court ballets were mostly noble amateurs. Ballets in this period were
lengthy and elaborate and often served a political purpose. The monarch
displayed the country's wealth through the elaborate performances' power and
magnificence. Ornamented costumes were meant to impress viewers, but they
restricted performers' freedom of movement.
The ballets were performed in large chambers with viewers on
three sides. The implementation of the proscenium arch from 1618 on distanced
performers from audience members, who could then better view and appreciate the
technical feats of the professional dancers in the productions.
French court ballet reached its height under the reign of
King Louis XIV. Known as the Sun King, Louis symbolized the brilliance and
splendor of France. Influenced by his eager participation in court ballets since
early childhood, Louis founded the Académie Royale de Danse (Royal Dance
Academy) in 1661 to establish standards and certify dance instructors. In 1672,
Louis XIV made Jean-Baptiste Lully the director of the Académie Royale de
Musique (Paris Opera) from which the first professional ballet company, the
Paris Opera Ballet, arose. Lully is considered the most important composer of
music for ballets de cour and instrumental to the development of the form.
Pierre Beauchamp served as Lully's ballet-master, the most important position
of artistic authority and power for the companies during this century. Together
their partnership would drastically influence the development of ballet, as
evidenced by the credit given to them for the creation of the five major
positions of the feet. The years following the 1661 creation of the Académie
Royale de Danse shaped the future of ballet, as it became more evident to those
in the French Nobility that there was a significant need for trained
professional dancers. By 1681, the first of those who would now be called
"ballerinas" took the stage following years of training at the
Académie, influenced by the early beginnings of codified technique taught there.
The King Who Invented Ballet, BBC4
The programme is riveting, blending monstrous extravagance
and social history
Louis XIV may not have created ballet, admits David Bintley
of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, but he was ballet’s first icon, as The King Who
Invented Ballet (Sunday, BBC4 8pm) explains. Louis loved to dance, and his
nickname “le Roi Soleil” seemed assured when as a 14-year-old the monarch
appeared at the climax of a 13-hour spectacle, dazzling in gold, representing
the sun dispersing the night’s blackness.
Follow that. And he did, creating the Grand Siècle which saw
France’s apogee, its acknowledged greatness — but also bankruptcy, a legacy
that would destroy his descendants.
Other creations included the Académie Royale de Danse and
the school of the Ballet de l’Opéra where students still bow and curtsy to
adults by royal decree.
The king gave up dancing after 75 roles in court spectacles
but his influence continued and ballet spread to public theatres, with women
also taking part. Above all, Louis established a style of grace and nobility,
epitomised by the famous portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud in which the king is in
fourth position, one leg forward, toes turned out.
Bintley was starstruck by Louis as a boy and his film
combines history, dance, spectacle — a beautiful book of costume designs for
his famous 13-hour allegory shows werewolves, an anthropomorphic chessboard,
fantastics and grotesques — and music: years of research and informed guesswork
are used to recreate the original orchestration for a recording. Locations
include Versailles, Paris and Birmingham, where Bintley prepares his new
ballet, The King Dances, inspired by Louis’ apotheosis as Sun King.
The programme is riveting, blending as it does politics and
culture, monstrous extravagance and social history. It leads into a complete
performance of Bintley’s ballet, whose premiere was greeted with a mixed
reception in June. But some aspects — lighting ranging from Stygian to
dazzling; Stephen Montague’s score easily combining baroque and modern — work
especially well on TV.
Servant tourism: how TV made us fetishise 'below stairs'
culture
British stately homes and hotels are cashing in on our
fascination with scullery maids and butlers. Is it because we love Sunday night
drama, or do we just want to understand the jobs our ancestors did?
Harry Wallop
Mon 31 Oct 2016 17.25 GMT Last modified on Tue 19 Dec 2017
20.59 GMT
ITV’s big autumn hit Victoria featured an impossibly pretty
Queen Vic, a brooding Albert and plenty of gorgeous sets and costumes. But
unlike most other depictions of royalty on screen – including Peter Morgan’s
Elizabeth II spectacular The Crown, which launches on Netflix this week – below
stairs in Victoria featured as heavily as the political machinations in the
drawing room.
Critics, most of whom lauded the show, raised eyebrows at
the love-in between the monarch and her minions. One said it “felt more
obligatory than it did organic”.
Daisy Goodwin, the creator of the show, insists the
servants’ quarters were not added to keep focus groups or producers happy. “It
was entirely my decision to add a below-stairs plot,” she says. “I keep hearing
people say that the ITV executives forced me into it. Not at all. In fact, I
had to slightly fight to keep the servants, because their storylines kept being
cut back. I thought from the beginning that you need to have a counterpoint to
what is going on upstairs.”
The accusations are understandable. Downton Abbey, which
gave as much weight to the butlers, footmen and maids as to the aristocrats
they served, was one of this decade’s biggest hit, both in the UK and the US.
A bit of spice behind the green baize door, mixed with some
gentle class tension, appears to be a foolproof formula for TV gold, and one
that stretches back to the early 1970s with ITV’s .
Yet the trend for fetishising servant culture has spread
beyond the small screen; the National Trust and English Heritage – both of
which reported record visitor numbers last year – are investing heavily in
highlighting the servants’ quarters in many of their properties, while the gift
shops increasingly reflect our fascination with domestic service over
aristocratic lifestyles.
Visit Blenheim Palace, Sir John Vanbrugh’s masterpiece in
the Cotswolds, and you can pick up a wide selection from the Below Stairs
product range, including the butler’s scented candle with notes of cedarwood,
frankincense and citrus. It has the aroma, the box explains, of “waxed wooden
floors and a freshly laid fire in the butler’s pantry”. If that doesn’t take
your fancy, there’s a House Maid’s lampshade brush, or perhaps the Valet’s
clothes brush made from scented pearwood and is “suitable for cashmere”.
This autumn, our servant obsession appears to have moved up
another gear. The Sir John Soane Museum in London opened a Below Stairs
exhibition in September, featuring artwork created by modern designers as a
response to the museum’s recently restored Regency kitchens.
The Pig at Combe, a new boutique hotel in Devon, has just
opened a private dining room for 14 people in the original Georgian kitchen,
which features a range, cast-iron pans hanging from the wall and flagstones on
the floor. The hotel pitches the room as a “below-stairs experience” featuring
Mrs Beeton’s recipes – though you would struggle to find quinoa, one of the
ingredients on the menu, in her guide to household management.
Daisy Goodwin says she is not surprised consumers want to
explore life below stairs. “There’s a couple of things going on. There is a
revisionist view of history; it’s political correctness, possibly,” she says.
“But there is also people’s genuine interest. I am always obsessed with the
smell of the past. Nothing takes you faster back to the 19th century than
seeing how hard it was to do your laundry, or how women had to deal with their
periods.”
There is another reason why the historical pendulum has
swung from the drawing room to the scullery: consumers are statistically more
likely to have domestic servants than great landlords in their ancestry. At a
peak before the first world war, there were an estimated 1.5 million people in
domestic service in Britain, compared with 560 members of the House of Lords –
and we are more aware than ever, thanks to the glut of genealogy websites and
historical records online, which category we fall into.
This is certainly true for the visitors at Audley End, a
fabulous Jacobean property in Essex, owned and run by English Heritage. Here
you can admire a Holbein, a Hilliard miniature or a Canaletto, as well as the
Robert Adam library in the main house. But the bigger crowds can be found in
the servants’ wing, which includes a laundry, where children are allowed to
turn the mangle, and a kitchen, from where the smell of bread is emanating and
on the day I visit “Mrs Crocombe” issuing orders and criticising “Sylvia”, the
second kitchen maid, for her slow apple peeling. Of course, both are actors.
There are five in the house, all playing servants from the year 1881 and
refusing to come out of character.
Tess Askew, 80, is visiting as part of the group from the
Swanton Morley WI in Norfolk and is trying to engage Mrs Crocombe in a
discussion about a microwave. The cook, in turn, pretends to be baffled about
this “modern appliance” – an act that tickles the tourists.
Askew says the appeal of touring the old laundry and
kitchens is partly seeing the lovely shelves of copper pots and jelly moulds,
and partly “being housewives – we’re interested in how they used to do it”.
“There is a retro-chic about housework,” says Lucy
Lethbridge, the historian and author of Servants: A Downstairs View of
20th-Century Britain, “usually among people who don’t have to do it very much.
If you really have to clean, you don’t have much sentimentality about using
lemon juice on your windows, or making your own beeswax polish.”
Many of the visitors at Audley End have researched their own
family histories. Don Crouch, 58, a retired civil servant from St Albans, who
is visiting with his wife and a friend, says: “A lot of people look back at
their ancestors and have more connection with downstairs than upstairs life.
Even fairly wealthy middle-class people are not well heeled enough to relate to
upstairs life.”
His wife, Judith, has researched her family back to the
1780s and discovered her ancestors were drovers, labourers and sawyers. “I do
find the class thing very interesting. I come from working-class stock.
Although I maybe have gone up a little bit in the world, this,” she says,
pointing to Mrs Crocombe, “is more what I would have experienced if I had been
around then.” She works for the V&A, but is admiring the fine porcelain pie
dishes.
Some historians, however, worry that though the
reconstructions of servants’ lives here and at other stately homes are well
researched, they can mislead modern audiences.
Dr Lucy Delap, a Cambridge lecturer whose specialism is
domestic service, says that in the great houses – be they the Buckingham Palace
of ITV’s Victoria or the real-life Audley End – the servants “were quite well
paid, and their conditions were quite easy when compared to the majority of
servants working in one- and two-person households. They didn’t have a green
baize door and time off in the afternoon, and didn’t have rustic-looking
wheelbarrows to move apples around in.”
Delap is a fan of Audley End and other heritage days where
you can pick up the dolly or iron and feel the weight of a pre-electric
domestic appliance, but too often people fail to realise how back-breaking the
work was. “Being a servant was all about getting up early, working until
midnight and getting chilblains,” says Delap. “People don’t think of it in
those terms, because of the likes of Downton and Victoria. These romantic
depictions of domestic service really efface the idea that this is a site of
precarious, exploitative labour.”
I ask Askew if, born a century earlier, she would prefer to
have been a member of the domestic staff or one of the Braybrookes, the
aristocratic family who owned Audley End. “I’d like to think I’d be down here
with what was really going on. I wouldn’t like to be up there with people
curtseying to me. I like this kind of life,” she says.Some historians suggest
below-stairs life is possibly back in fashion because it represents a golden
era compared with today’s uncertainties. Lethbridge says: “It is an age, seen
through rose-tinted spectacles, when we imagine the classes mixed in a
paternalistic, co-dependent pyramid. The leisured class were at the top,
supported by the labour of those at the bottom, who were in turn looked after.
Maybe there is something in that highly regulated certainty that is attractive
to us now.”
Most people do not, of course, connect the domestic servants
of Victoria or Downton with today’s equivalent: the eastern European cleaner
with no paid holidays, or the Deliveroo-rider handing over your evening meal. Or,
for that matter, staff in large country houses – now often a hotel.
The most famous of these is Cliveden House, the Italianate
pile owned by the Astor family and scene of legendary parties and the Profumo
scandal. It is now owned by the National Trust but leased to one of Britain’s
smartest hotels, which employs 150 staff to service the 48 rooms. If you book
The Butler Did It break – which starts at £350 per night, per person – you can
enjoy a private tour with the house butler, 53-year-old Michael Chaloner.
Disappointingly, he stopped wearing tails a few years ago, but he is full of
stories of famous guests, including Charlie Chaplin and Michael Jackson, as he
shows you around the bits of the house that are usually off limits. This
includes the amazing view from the roof, the Lady Astor suite (yours for £1,200
a night) and the below-stairs area.
Here, the historic bells used to summon staff are mere
decoration. Most of the service corridors and former servants’ sitting rooms
are turned over to the operations of a fully functioning modern hotel, with
waiters and chefs scurrying past the stacks of firewood used in the great hall,
and unused foldaway beds.
“A lot of the Americans don’t like seeing this bit,”
Chaloner says. “But a lot of Brits do.” Below stairs, as Lethbridge points out,
is so often a reminder of class, something “rotted deeply into our national
psyche and our sense of ourselves”.
Chaloner adds: “I think people care about the staff a little
bit more nowadays. When I first came here in the early 90s, people came here
for their £1,500 lunches, the fattest cigars, and the most expensive brandies.
They didn’t care two hoots about the people serving them. But now people are
interested in the people who work in the hotel. The staff are part of the
deal.”
In the lobby of the hotel, there is a small selection of merchandise
on sale, including the DVD of Scandal, the film of the Profumo affair; The
Lady’s Maid: My Life in Service by Rosina Harrison, a former maid of Nancy
Astor; and scented candles. I tell him I’m disappointed there isn’t a butler
version.
“What would it smell of? Boiled cabbage, old socks and body
odour?” he laughs. “I am under no illusions about how grim life was below
stairs back then.”
Being a servant was
all about getting up early, working until midnight and getting chilblains
• This article was amended on 1 November 2016. An earlier
version said the original 1970s series of Upstairs Downstairs was broadcast by
the BBC. It was made by LWT and shown on ITV.
Servants: the True Story of Life
Below Stairs, BBC Two, review
Michael Pilgrim reviews Servants: the True Story of Life
Below Stairs, Dr Pamela Cox' new BBC Two series exploring the lives of
servants.
Dr Pamela Cox explores the secret history of servants at the
beginning of the 20th Century for her new BBC Two series, Servants: The True
Story of Life Below Stairs.
Dr Pamela Cox explores the secret history of servants at the
beginning of the 20th Century for her new BBC Two series, Servants: The True
Story of Life Below Stairs. Photo: BBC
The prodigious 19th-century letter writer Jane Carlyle had a
frightful time with her servants. She went through 34 in 32 years. Hardly
surprising since they were that breed of hired help known as the maid of all
work, the sole domestic in a middle-class household.
One such, Mary, had the misfortune to give birth in a back
room of Jane’s Chelsea house. Feet away, Jane’s husband Thomas Carlyle was busy
taking after-dinner tea, the great essayist seemingly unperturbed.
This was not good. As Servants: the True Story of Life Below
Stairs (BBC Two) explained, Mrs Carlyle was seen to have failed to keep her
employee on the path to righteousness. There was no choice. Mary had to go.
Servants was presented by the academic Dr Pamela Cox. Given
that Cox’s grandmothers were in service and that she teaches at Essex – a
university not renowned for its right-leaning views – one might have expected a
rant. Certainly, the picture painted was far from the gentle Farrow & Ball
ambience of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, but it was not without
affection.
Cox started her three-parter at Erddig, North Wales. In the
19th century, the estate employed 45 staff labouring for 17 hours a day. They
had to shift three tons of coal a week, enough for 51 fireplaces and five
ovens. Six hundred items of clothing were laundered a week and 60 pairs of
boots polished daily. A laundry maid could be paid as little as £700 a year –
at today’s prices.
The work was meticulous, repetitive and exhausting. Which
makes you think that they have a secret underground room at Downton full of
whirring German white goods doing all the work. Little else explains why the
staff never look tired or sweaty.
None the less, Erdigg represented the paternalistic end of
domestic service. Its owners hung what were known as loyalty portraits of their
staff in a hall. The photos were charming, but the typed poems pasted beside
them sounded more the sort of thing you’d write about a beloved puppy, than
about the people who starched your shirt and blacked your footwear.
Though enlightened enough to acknowledge the staff, the
family were witheringly dismissive of those who displeased them, as the clunky
verses for Mrs Hale, a ladies maid, made clear: “Black was her dress, her face
austere, and when she for Brighton did leave, no one here a sigh did heave.”
Not what you’d call a positive reference for a future master, even if it does
rhyme.
It wasn’t just a question of us and them. Servants themselves
were graded into a complex hierarchy, governed by arcane rules, presided over
by the butler, cook and housekeeper, the last a portly, dragonish figure who
only had to jangle her keys to evoke fear in low-ranking hall boys.
The sense of benevolent orderliness, of people content in
their allotted station, is, of course, a cosy Victorian fabrication, just like
the conventions of Christmas. It is a myth that even now bathes us in warm
nostalgia and persuades us to buy National Trust tea-towels. Cox’s cheerful
pursuit for her subject suggested she even enjoyed the myth a bit herself,
despite better intentions.
"Below Stairs" is a study of servant portraiture
in Britain and is illustrated with works by Hogarth, Gainsborough and Stubbs.
Continuing the examination of traditional domestic life explored in the films
"Gosford Park" and "Remains of the Day", "Below
Stairs" is also the subject of a BBC Four documentary. Featuring portraits
of all ranks of servant the book illustrates the shifting organisation of
households through the centuries, and the highly complex relationships between
employers and employees. Traditionally, portraiture in Britain has concentrated
on recording the upper classes and the celebrated. Instead, "Below
Stairs" explores the representation of the servant, be it in a grand or
modest household, in the country or in the town, at the royal courts or at
colleges and clubs. This groundbreaking selection of paintings and photographs
tells a fascinating story about power, class and human relationships spanning
over 400 years of social and economic history.
While 'upstart' butlers may make news, servants have largely
been invisible in the history books. In art and fiction, however, they have
long been an iconic presence, writes Alison Light
Alison Light
Sat 8 Nov 2003 01.30 GMT First published on Sat 8 Nov 2003
01.30 GMT
Down ill-lit corridors the servant scurries, disappearing
into darkened chambers, hurrying back to the kitchens or the courtyards, a blur
on the edge of vision. Servants form the greatest part of that already silent
majority - the labouring poor - who have for so long lived in the twilight zone
of historical record. In the servant's case, though, anonymity often went with
the job.
In mid-to-late 19th-century Britain, when live-in service
was at a peak, servants' labour was meant to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Relegated to the basements and the attics, using separate entrances and
staircases (their activities muffled and hidden behind the famous "green
baize door"), they lived a parallel existence, shadowing the family
members and anticipating their needs - meals appeared on the table, fires were
found miraculously lit, beds warmed and covers turned back by an invisible
hand.
In the grander households the lower servants were often
unknown "above stairs". The writer Vita Sackville-West recalled that
at Knole her mother was supplied with a list of first names from the
housekeeper before she doled out seasonal gifts. More conveniently, servants
were often hailed by their work titles such as "Cook" or
"Boots", or, if their own names were considered too fancy, given more
"suitable" ones: "Abigail", "Betty", "Mary
Jane" were all in vogue at one time. Deportment and body language, the
bowed head, the neatly folded hands, all prevented servants from "putting
themselves forward", though few employers were like the Duke of Portland
at Welbeck, who expected his staff to turn their faces to the wall if they
encountered the family.
Few, that is, except for the royal family, some of whose
archaic practices were revealed last week by Paul Burrell in his book A Royal
Duty (including the Sunday task of ironing a £5 note for the Queen's church
collection). Royal servants have long been a source of fascination because of their
proximity to rulers who were otherwise remote. Such relationships often caused
friction at court, as when Queen Victoria allowed her Hindustani teacher, or
Munshi, the 24-year-old Abdul Karim, to take his meals with the royal
household. The Windsors may expect a feudal level of fealty from their staff
and, as the self-styled "keeper of Diana's secrets", Burrell is one
in a long line of upstarts who has overstepped the mark. Yet the history of
domestic service, even at its most mundane, suggests that it has always been a
job like no other, involving unusual intimacies and frequently encouraging both
employers and their charges to invest in a fantasy of friendship.
From medieval times, litigious servants have sought redress
in the courts (legal records offer some of the earliest evidence of their
lives). But historians have long found servants to be awkward customers. Their
numbers alone make a history of service daunting (in 1900, there were still
more people working in domestic service than in any other sector barring
agriculture). Though they were legion, so much about servants was singular.
They were legally seen as dependents but in principle were free to leave. Their
hours of work, time off and wages were often unregulated and the perquisites,
or "perks" of the job, such as the quality of their board and
lodging, varied enormously. Working in comparative comfort behind closed doors,
deferring to employers and perhaps silently envious of them, the figure of the
servant represents all that is the opposite of the articulate, organised or
collectively minded. Feminised, indoor and intimate, domestic service is
usually excluded from more heroic accounts of the making of the English working
classes.
Yet domestic service was not simply a throwback to a
pre-industrial world. The ideal of service was the cornerstone of 19th-century
life, informing the language and structure both of public institutions and
family life. The Victorians elevated dependence into a moral and social good.
The idea of serving others (perhaps in the new civil "service" or as
a "servant" of a bank or indeed, in the "services") was
strengthened indoors by an evangelical Christianity. Domestic servants drew
satisfaction and self-respect from their devotion to duty, though few were so
inspired as Hannah Cullwick, Arthur Munby's maid and scullion in the 1860s. Up
to her elbows in grease and muck, she welcomed the filthiest chores, as her
diaries record, partly as a test of her humility and of her faith in a
salvation achieved by hard work. But "being drest rough & looking
nobody", also gave her the freedom to "go anywhere and not be
wonder'd at".
Service could mean betterment, though rarely did a servant
rise far above her station (Cullwick eventually married her master but she
obstinately resisted playing the lady). In Merlin Waterson's The Servants Hall
(1980), which describes 250 years of domestic history at Erddig, the Yorke
family's modest country house on the Welsh marches, we learn that Harriet
Rogers preferred to be a lady's maid and housekeeper than remain at home on an
isolated farm. The Yorkes encouraged her reading and broadened her horizons but
she remained single all her life and quietly put away her numerous Valentine
cards. Servants made choices, though not in circumstances of their own
choosing. If we fail to recognise this, they remain typecast as trouble makers
or arch conservatives, as rogues or dupes or victims.
Servants haunt the 18th- and 19th-century domestic novel,
conjuring up the fears and fantasies of their employers. As Daniel Defoe's
diatribe of 1724, "The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd",
testified, the unruly servant was a sorcerer's apprentice who could send not
just the kitchen but the whole social order spiralling into anarchy. In Jane
Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), when Fanny Price returns home to Portsmouth
from her posh relatives, her first sight is of Rebecca, "a trollopy
looking maid" who is "never where she ought to be". Rebecca's
sluttish ways speak volumes about the moral impropriety of the family. Like
Samuel Richardson's Pamela before her, Fanny is herself a servant morally
worthy of a better station in life (Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is one of her
descendants). Her social climbing will reform but not threaten the upper
classes. She looks forward to generations of middle-class mistresses whose
superiority depends on keeping others firmly in their place.
It's almost impossible for us to see service except through
an optic of class antagonism or exploitation. Yet the attachments between
servants and their employers were often complex. No man, as they say, is a hero
to his valet - certainly not Charles Darwin, whose butler, Joseph Parslow,
douched and dried him everyday for four months, while Darwin tried hydropathy
for his chronic diarrhoea and nausea. Parslow, who numbered among his many
tasks donning leather gaiters to gather flower spikes from ditches or ferrying
plant specimens back from Kew Gardens, often cradled Darwin like a baby in his
arms. Thomas and Jane Carlyle got through servants at a rate of knots (one was
dismissed by him as a "mutinous Irish savage"). Prostrated by
headache, Jane was often comforted by another maid-of-all-work, Helen Mitchell,
who rubbed her cheek with her own and soothed her mistress with companionable
tears.
Servants might be officially invisible but they were central
as providers, especially when their employers were at their most needy. The
English upper classes have frequently recalled cold childhoods warmed only by
confederacies with the servants. Rudyard Kipling's first memories, in Something
of Myself , were of his Portuguese ayah and the Hindu bearer, Meeta, who held
his hand and eased his fear of the dark. "Father and Mother" were
associated with painful partings. Service, in other words, has always been an
emotional as well as an economic territory. The valet, the housekeeper and the
girl who emptied the chamberpots all knew this as they stepped over the
threshold of someone else's house.
In most painting, as in literature, servants appear in
supporting roles. But an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery -
"Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants' Portraits" - gives faces to
some of those whom history has effaced. British art frequently followed the
Italian convention in which a servant, a page or secretary, a horse or dog,
might be included to enhance the stature of the principal subject. Literally so
with Van Dyck's portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria painted in 1633; she was
quite tiny but standing next to dwarf Jeffrey Hudson added several cubits to
her height.
Servants were among the first commodities to be displayed,
along with the fashionable silks and porcelain, in small-scale
"conversation pieces", family portraits from the 1720s. There are
also plenty of walk-on parts for servants in genre paintings: pretty dairymaids
in tidy farmyards, grooms exhibited with prize hounds in sporting scenes,
ruddy-faced, fleshy cooks amid the slaughtered meat. Only rarely does a tremor
of personality disturb these still lives.
"Below Stairs" concentrates on individual
portraits of servants that have survived thanks to their employers' affection
or caprice. The majority are "loyalty" portraits, meant to be
exemplary and instructive, testifying to the benevolence of the masters as much
as to the virtues of their staff. Erddig's enlightened squires had individual,
informal portraits painted of the whole household, from the lowly
"spider-brushers" to the cook, coachmen and gardeners, often with
humorous scrolls attached detailing their lives and work. Loyalty portraits
were popular too with the university colleges, museums, banks, clubs, hotels
and other institutions. Paintings elevated trusty employees to the status of a
symbol.
In their accompanying catalogue, curators Giles Waterfield
and Anne French rightly warn that such portraits are anomalous. Only large
establishments were likely to commission costly pictures and most British
servants worked for the ever-expanding middle classes in far humbler
situations. Rather than the butler or the housekeeper, the typical domestic in
the 19th-century home or lodging-house was the "maid-of-all-work" or
"slavey", like Dickens's "Marchioness" in The Old Curiosity
Shop , whose half-starved existence comically belies her inflated title.
Usually a young girl, often straight from the workhouse, such general servants
came cheap (until the 1940s the majority of Barnardo's girls went straight into
other people's kitchens).
Life-size or full-length, looking you straight in the face,
it's a shock to encounter sympathetic images of people so often caricatured,
reduced to cartoon or grotesquerie. Artists aimed at more than mechanical
likenesses, "mere face-painting", as William Hogarth dubbed it. Bored
with their patrons, painters were sidetracked by the servants whose faces were
free of cosmetics and whose figures were less inert than those hampered by the
trappings of wealth. George Stubbs's portrait of Freeman, the Earl of
Clarendon's gamekeeper, for instance, shown moving in for the kill, is a force
in his own right. Elderly servants, unlike their employers, didn't need to be
flattered: the woodcarver with his spotted neckerchief, the weary housekeeper
and the messenger at the Bank of England are given all their blemishes and
wrinkles.
Loyalty portraits frequently commemorate long service and
nothing is dearer to the conservative imagination than the image of the old
retainer. Yet at the great houses, where the rewards for long service were most
enticing, the speed at which servants could be hired and fired was often
breathtaking. Even at Erddig there were clear limits to liberality. Elizabeth
Ratcliffe, a lady's maid in the 1760s, was a talented artist who could put her
hand to a mezzotint as easily as to her mending, but after one of her successes
her mistress wrote to her son vetoing further exploits lest "I shall have
no service from her & make too fine a Lady of her, for so much say'd on
that occasion that it rather puffs her up". There are almost no portraits
of ladies' maids in British art. Since the maid often dressed in the mistress's
cast-offs, her Ladyship was afraid, perhaps, of being upstaged.
In reality, though, most servants have always been comers
and goers, migrants arriving in the city and hoping to send money home, moving
on to marriage or a better place. Ultimately, the servant portrait is poignant
because it's a contradiction in terms. Its subjects, who often in life couldn't
call their souls their own, are proudly dressed in a little brief authority.
But even the most amiable portrait of the servant is always a portrait of the
master.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, photography took over the
loyalty convention, with group portraits of uniformed servants, often
displaying their badge of office - a broom, a saucepan or a garden fork -
formally posed outside the house. Such photographs remind us that live-in
service does not belong to the distant past (I have one such memento of my
grandmother in her days as a skivvy). Servants' testimonies, like those in the
sound archives at Essex University, are often full of bitterness and shame. In
her autobiography, Below Stairs (1968), Margaret Powell remembers how deeply
humiliated she felt when her mistress told her to hand newspapers to her on a
silver salver: "Tears started to trickle down my cheeks; that someone
could think you were so low that you couldn't even hand them anything out of your
hands."
Between the wars, as other employment became available,
women, and particularly the young, voted with their feet. The decline of
live-in service revealed just how hopelessly dependent many employers were. In
the 1920s, for instance, Lytton Strachey's sisters, Pippa, Marjorie and Pernel
(the former dedicated to women's suffrage, the latter principal of Newnham),
had to ask their younger relatives to turn on the oven on the servant's day
off. Dependence was often a matter of pride rather than practical incompetence.
Opening the front door was especially unthinkable since servants were the
gatekeepers to the outside world. Well into old age, Siegfried Sassoon, in
impoverished isolation at Heytesbury House, kept up a façade of grandeur by asking
visitors to come by the servants' entrance.
Of course there were people who remained a lifetime in other
people's families, who were unstinting and generous and who believed what they
were doing was worthwhile. Julia and Leslie Stephen's cook, Sophie Farrell, who
was passed around Bloomsbury circles for many years, went on signing herself
"yours obediently" to "Miss Ginia" (Virginia Woolf) all her
life. Others were snobs who missed their privileges and the kindness of their
employers. Once the old models of rank and deference collapsed, lives
foundered; Frank Lovell, for five years head footman at Erddig, made a new
start as a chauffeur just before he joined up in 1914 but the war years left
him adrift. Disappointed and unsettled, he drowned in 1934, leaving his wife
and young son believing it to be suicide. Servants often found it hard to
adjust to a more democratic world.
But so did their employers. Although socialists and
feminists might campaign for the poor, plenty assumed that housework was beneath
them or that others were more suited to it. Margaret Bondfield, minister of
labour in 1931, annoyed fellow Labour party members by refusing out-of-work
Lancashire mill girls unemployment benefit if they turned down domestic
training. The feminist Vera Brittain, whose unconventional household was shared
with her husband and Winifred Holtby, her friend, depended on the servants, Amy
and Charles Burnett, for years. It didn't prevent Brittain from bemoaning the
lot of "the creative woman perpetually at the mercy of the 'Fifth Column'
below stairs". Writers and artists wanted uninterrupted time and their
servants duly emancipated them. Grace Higgens, for instance, "the Angel of
Charleston", made it possible for Vanessa Bell to be a painter, cooking
and cleaning for her for more than 40 years. "Ludendorff Bell", as
her son Quentin called her, kept up the Victorian habit, nonetheless, of
starting every day by giving her orders to the cook, who stood waiting while
her mistress sat at the breakfast table. For all the photographs and portraits
Bell made of Grace, they could never be pictured side by side.
By the 1950s, few British women expected to "go
into" service but that is hardly the end of the story. In the last decade
or so the domestic-service economy - an army of cleaners, child-minders,
nannies and au pairs - has been rapidly expanding (Allison Pearson's recent
apologia for the career woman, I Don't Know How She Does It, goes guiltily over
the old ground of the mistress victimised by a manipulative underling). In this
country much of the cooking and cleaning is done by low-paid casual workers,
often migrants, in private houses as well as in hotels, offices and schools.
Racial assumptions, as well as class feelings - as Barbara Ehrenreich and
others have argued - are fostered by this division of labour.
All of us begin our lives helpless in the hands of others
and will probably end so. How we tolerate our inevitable dependence, especially
upon those who feed and clean and care for us, or take away our waste, is not a
private or domestic question but one that goes to the heart of our unequal
society. We rely constantly on others to do our dirty work and what used to be
called "the servant question" has not gone away. The figure of the
servant takes us not only inside history but inside ourselves.
· "Below Stairs" is at the National Portrait
Gallery, London WC2, until January 11. Alison Light is writing a book about
Virginia Woolf's servants, to be published by Penguin.
Servants' Hall: A Real Life Upstairs,
Downstairs Romance (Below Stairs)
Margaret Powell's Below Stairs became a sensation among
readers reveling in the luxury and subtle class warfare of Masterpiece
Theatre's hit television series Downton Abbey. Now in the sequel Servants'
Hall, Powell tells the true story of Rose, the under-parlourmaid to the Wardham
Family at Redlands, who took a shocking step: She eloped with the family's only
son, Mr. Gerald.
Going from rags to riches, Rose finds herself caught up in a
maelstrom of gossip, incredulity and envy among her fellow servants. The
reaction from upstairs was no better: Mr. Wardham, the master of the house,
disdained the match so completely that he refused ever to have contact with the
young couple again. Gerald and Rose marry, leave Redlands and Powell looks on
with envy, even as the marriage hits on bumpy times: "To us in the
servants' hall, it was just like a fairy tale . . . How I wished I was in her
shoes."
Once again bringing that lost world to life, Margaret Powell
trains her pen and her gimlet eye on her "betters" in this next
chapter from a life spent in service. Servants' Hall is Margaret Powell at her
best―a warm, funny and sometimes hilarious memoir of life at a time when
wealthy families like ruled England.
What the Butler Saw: 250 Years of the Servant Problem
by E. S. Turner
This is a lively foray into a world where a gentleman with £2,000 a year was betraying his class if he did not employ six females and five males; where a lady could go to the grave without ever having picked up a nightdress, carried her prayer bookor made a pot of tea. It is the story of the housekeeper and the butler, the cook, the lady's maid, the valet and the coachman. Their duties are described in detail, and the story is told of the strife and even pitched battles that ensued between servants and the served. Here is social history from a fascinating angle, packed with droll information lightly handled, with many a moral for our own times.
Servants: A Downstairs View of
Twentieth-century Britain Paperback
by Lucy Lethbridge
Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain is
the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served.
From the butler, the footman, the maid and the cook of 1900 to the au pairs,
cleaners and childminders who took their place seventy years later, a
previously unheard class offers a fresh perspective on a dramatic century.
Here, the voices of servants and domestic staff, largely ignored by history,
are at last brought to life: their daily household routines, attitudes towards
their employers, and to each other, throw into sharp and intimate relief the
period of feverish social change through which they lived.
Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and
brilliantly observed, Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of
twentieth-century Britain; an authoritative history that will change and
challenge the way we look at society.
