Authors: Juliet Nicolson
Staff were still discussing how just before Christmas Mr Jackson Gordon, a wealthy entrepreneur in the middle of financing a revolutionary process that would reclaim waste paper, had found time in his busy day to have a manicure in the hotel’s beauty parlour. Mr Gordon had looked long into the ‘largest and deepest of blue eyes’ of the ‘unusually beautiful’ manicurist and begged her to become his wife. The ceremony took place in Holy Trinity Church, Tulse Hill, with a honeymoon in Bournemouth, and, as reported in the
Daily Express
, the new Mrs Jackson was lavished with diamonds and pearls, and the manicure department at the Savoy was renamed ‘Cupid’s Parlour’.
Not all Savoy staff were satisfied by the financial bonuses that
came their way, The tip-pooling or tronc system was subject to such unfair distribution that the waiters and kitchen hands had gone on strike almost a year earlier, with the cashiers doubling up to serve at table and the housekeepers bending over potato peelings in the kitchen. The youths who worked as messengers and rush-abouts, the Savoy Button Boys, saw what was happening and wondered if they would have the courage to join the protest. What they minded about more than their wages, however, were the disgusting leftovers that were given them in their lunchtime break. What they would have given to be let loose on the guests’ pastry trolley!
New opportunities for employment were opening up at the Savoy and in hotels and offices up and down the country, with the innovation of time-off accompanying the job, while offices were attracting thousands of domestic servants who craved a profession that combined independence and competitive salaries. Disillusionment had been spreading at the prospect of a future life spent in service, particularly among the younger generation, and many had become infinitely more skilled since the outbreak of war as illiteracy rates diminished even among the poorest in the country. During the war a hunger for news and for maintaining links with the men who were away had encouraged the skills of reading and writing in a population avid for communication. Corner shops sold a bottle of ink, a pen, writing paper and a packet of envelopes for a total of threepence, thus providing the necessary ‘equipment’ for staying in touch. And in the trenches a similar process of self-education had taken place as letter-writing habits were established among the ranks of new conscripts.
In 1919 the passing of the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act had been designed to return women to the jobs they had left while men were away at the war, thus freeing up the men’s jobs that the women had occupied. Demobilisation was all but complete by February 1920, with only 125,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors still waiting for their release papers, out of a total of four million who had served in the armed forces. With women’s reluctance to give up their new independence and men unwilling to return to domestic service, the Act was proving difficult to enforce. Four hundred
thousand servants had spent four years of freedom from domestic employment: they included cooks, maids of all sorts, butlers, grooms, chauffeurs, gardeners and gamekeepers, all of whom had been singled out by Lord Kitchener’s long finger. Servants had been drafted to work on farms, in factories and in transport. Many women had joined the Women’s Land Army and the Red Cross, happy to escape the fate of T. S. Eliot’s
damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
Women’s enjoyment of wearing the trousers had contributed to the new sense of freedom, although the older generation was wary of where the habit might lead. Barbara Cartland’s gardener feared the worst. ‘Oi reckons if women start a-looking like men, we’ll soon have ’em thinkin’ like men, and then they’ll be a-bossing us like men.’
Victoria Sackville had bombarded her old friend Lord Kitchener repeatedly during the war with complaints about the depleted service she was receiving at Knole. ‘Do you not realise, my dear Lord K, that we employ five carpenters, and four painters and two blacksmiths, and two footmen and you are taking them all from us!’ she had expostulated in 1914. She was having to make do with parlour maids and as she told the Chief of the Defence Staff, certain of his sympathy, she had ‘
never
thought I would see parlour maids at Knole!’
Lady Randolph Churchill had employed ‘footmaids’ to replace the absent footmen, giving them most desirable uniforms of ‘blue livery jackets, striped waistcoats, stiff shirts, short blue skirts, black silk stockings and patent leather shoes with three-inch heels’. Dinner conversation chez Lady Randolph was often patchy and attention wandered, particularly after the lady guests had withdrawn and the men were left alone not only with the port and cigars but with these distractingly alluring improvised attendants.
At the end of the war most of the servant-dependent upper and middle classes felt they had made do for long enough and were keen to return to being served. They were unprepared for a change of attitude. On their return from the war, however, servants were either in a position to bargain or had realised that the prospect of domestic
employment was no longer obligatory. They now had a choice.
One of the dwindling group of servants who clung to pre-war standards was Eric Horne. Veteran butler and former servant to the highest in the land, Eric was a strict observer of the clean-shaven rule observed by all the best butlers. A moustache would have been quite inappropriate – unhygienic for one thing, and a privilege reserved for officers. But the half-dozen columns regularly given over in
The Times
personal advertisements for servants did not surprise him. People were desperate for servants of all sorts, including cook-generals, between maids, valets, menservants, scullery maids and cooks, and above all for dependable and experienced butlers such as himself.
In the first issue of the
Lady
for 1920 a notice for a combined mother and daughter position appealed to any widows with an older child who could share the cooking and housekeeping. Owing to the establishment’s lack of a chauffeur or butler, or indeed any male servant at all, the mother-daughter team were required to have the skill to drive a bad-tempered donkey and its cart to the local village twice a day, in order to deliver and collect the children from school.
There was however a strong reluctance to accept live-in jobs and the market was overcrowded with women wishing to be cha ladies. The growing antipathy to a life-long career in service had, in Virginia Woolf’s view, begun well before the war. The change had been gradual, and not as definite as if ‘one went out, as one might, into a garden and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg’. The 1914–18 interlude helped to deepen and define this shifting process so that by the end of the war change was already deep rooted.
The old employers and upholders of pre-war behaviour joined Eric in detecting a new and unwelcome stubbornness in their new staff. Lady Londonderry wrote to the
Evening Standard
in December 1919 to express her disappointment in the attitude of ex-service girls whose wartime experiences seemed to have ruined them for domestic service. The formidable Lady Londonderry, founder of the wartime Women’s Legion, a voluntary organization for women set up in 1915, had found that these girls had become so exalted by the flattery showered upon them for jobs well done in the war that they had become
‘unsuited for the humdrum of housework, expecting housing, food and warmth at double the wages, and will not learn from the old experienced servants who are fast disappearing’.
Punch
had recently carried a cartoon headed ‘Insubordinate Maid’ picturing a young, inexperienced but sympathetic mistress saying ‘Would you like to go out this afternoon, Mabel?’, to which Mabel replies in an insolent tone, her nose tilted upwards in undeniable arrogance, ‘I am already going out, Madam.’Without so much as a by your leave, huffed Eric.
The sort of person now attracted to domestic service did not meet the standards Eric had been accustomed to all his working life. One brief spell of employment immediately after the end of the war had come to an end when Eric himself could not tolerate the snuffling cook. ‘If there is anything I detest’, Eric explained, ‘it is to sit down to a meal with a person who snuffles over their food.’To make things worse, the cook’s uncle’s niece had been an actress, a talent which the cook thought flowed through her own veins. She would ‘rave out the Soldier’s March’ from some old opera in a most off-putting manner.
Not only had staff become disillusioned with the demands placed on their time by a life in service, but the calibre of the employer had plummeted too. Eric was fiercely disapproving of those who had made financial capital out of the war. He found that his favourite saying, ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a soused mackerel’, described the new regime perfectly. He felt a revulsion towards ‘the newly rich’ who had ‘filled their pockets while Tommy was fighting’, declaring with foreboding that for generations ‘they will not get the stains off their hands’. And he felt a wave of nostalgia at seeing ‘the old usages and traditions of gentleman’s service ... die with the old places, where so many high jinks and junketings have been carried on in the old days’.
Employers also offered lamentably unimaginative incentives to potential staff, including the use of the plumbed-in family bathroom (a famously tight-fisted dowager required her maid to bathe in the water that the dowager had just vacated), the opportunity to leave off the maid’s hated mob cap, and the addition of the prefix ‘Miss’, lending the employee a little respect rather than the more familiar unadorned Christian name.
Recruitment of servants often took place in the hallways of smart shops like Fortnum & Mason where the chef, delivering his weekly order, would make it known that there was a vacancy at his house, and women looking for work would come to enquire about opportunities. In the North of England there were hiring fairs where girls who were prepared to work in the house or on the land would be inspected by farmers, and subjected to the qualifying question ‘Do you milk or bake?’ The servant class had their own employment agencies, referred to by the job-seekers themselves as ‘slavey markets’. Here too insolence and contempt were on the rise. Eric fell into conversation with one man and his wife who were leaving the world of domestic service. The man amused Eric by remarking that he thought ‘some of the gentry ought to be boiled’, although personally Eric preferred the option of baking them alive.
A few faithful servants had returned to their pre-war work, among them another butler, Henry Moate, who had reappeared in the life of the Sitwell family, swimming into their midst ‘whale-like’, according to Osbert, in December 1918. Sir George Sitwell was cheered at the return of the old butler who brought with him ‘the assurance of the past’. Before the war Moate had been an invaluable servant to Sir George as well as the devoted caretaker of the three children, writing long letters to Osbert, the elder son, while he was away, miserable, at boarding school.
As well as Moate’s devotion to the Sitwell family, there was another reason for his return. Moate missed his Scarborough friends and in particular the company of the splendid Mr Follis, the grandest hairdresser in town. The two men had shared an on-off relationship for several decades. Sometimes they were close enough friends to attend a fancy dress ball together dressed respectively as Leonardo da Vinci and Captain Cook. On other occasions they vowed never to speak to one another again, while mutual black eyes revealed the occurrence of a never quite explained tiff. Lady Sitwell had invited Moate for Christmas after his demobilisation and his reunion with Mr Follis was a celebratory affair. Late on Christmas Eve Lady Sitwell was lying in bed and talking to Osbert when they were alarmed to hear a noise outside her bedroom door. The door opened and an
enormous, wildly swaying figure appeared in the doorframe. ‘My Lady, have mercy on an erring lamb,’ Moate implored her with perfect mock dignity and composure, before wobbling round to face the other way and rejoining Follis in the cellar.
Some former butlers had become close to the men they served in the hardship of the trenches. Herbert Buckmaster, no longer happy in the companionship of his wife Gladys Cooper, had founded Buck’s Club at the beginning of June 1919. The idea behind the club was to provide a specific place where the close friendships made in the trenches could continue. The club was in Clifford Street, just off Savile Row, and served sandwiches and oysters during the day, and after the theatre sausages and drinks were available until 2.00 a.m.
One day a letter came from Buckmaster’s wartime manservant, Mr Hunstone, who was feeling his way gently through the subtle shift in the nature of the relationship. Equals they were not, but barriers had been loosened and in a letter thanking him for a gift the manservant permitted himself the use of a formerly unusable word. ‘I shall appreciate the cigarette case always for it will serve as a lasting link to the times both pleasant and otherwise we experienced in France. I often think of those times not with envy of course but for once I found
friends
whose memory I shall always cherish.’
But in the same letter the servant Hunstone also asked for the address of Buckmaster’s groom. Barriers may have loosened but those of similar backgrounds still stuck together. A return to the old servant-master relationship meant abandoning a sense of equality born out of shared hardship. So the bond lingered on. Barbara Cartland became accustomed to getting into taxicabs with upper-class young men who were clearly on extremely friendly terms with the driver. They had fought side by side. As the partition in the taxi was slid back, so the class barrier between the men was dissolved, leaving Barbara feeling that she had been excluded from an elite society.
Echoes of war could assail one anywhere: there was no forgetting. Barbara’s grandmother’s butler had become a Major, decorated with the DSO, and a peer of her family’s acquaintance deliberately
sought out limbless veterans as members of his domestic staff – the more limbless and disabled, the better – insisting they displayed their medals over their valet’s or footman’s uniform.