Rescued by the Milkman

When I began to research the lives of twentieth-century domestic servants, I was surprised by the number of servants’ memoirs that had been published in the second half of the century. It seemed that readers in the 1970s, with Upstairs, Downstairs and The Forsyte Saga on the telly, couldn’t get enough of tales featuring mob caps, liveried footmen and butlers bowing at the waist and murmuring, ‘Madam will see you now.’

The memoirs were as varied as you would expect, but whereas most of those who had worked in grand country houses remembered the old days of jugging hare and servants’ balls with nostalgia, some butlers’ recollections were slightly more risqué. Ernest King in particular, writing in the 1950s, was daringly indiscreet – in his inimitable butlerese – about his time with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (he disapproved of the Duchess); later on he worked for the newly-wed Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip and sniffed at the small household economies that marked the modern royals. But by far the most successful of these former servants-turned-writers – in fact, for a short time a one-woman publishing phenomenon – was the former cook Margaret Powell, whose irrepressible voice contrasts vividly with the gentility of so many of her fellow memoirists. Born into working-class poverty on the south coast before the First World War, 14-year-old Margaret had no money to take up the grammar-school place she was offered and went instead into domestic service, as her mother had before her. Though she worked her way up through the ranks from kitchen maid to cook, Powell always railed against her servitude and secretly read Marx, G. K. Chesterton and George Eliot in her garret bedrooms. Eventually she married, raised two sons and then returned – money was short – to labour again at wealthier women’s housework as a charlady, the post-Second World War version of the maid-of-all-work. But post-war Britain was a different world – and with characteristic vigour Margaret Powell seized the new opportunities it presented. She went to evening classes, got a degree, and continued reading voraciously. In 1969, with the help of the professional writer Leigh Crutchley, Margaret Powell found a perfect outlet for her shrewd intelligence, her joie de vivre and her skills as a storyteller and social observer. By the time she died in 1984 the bestselling Below Stairs, her recollections of life in service, had been followed by The Treasure Upstairs which described her experiences as a charlady, and another memoir, Climbing the Stairs. A fourth book, Servants’ Hall, recalled the story of her friendship with a parlour-maid who actually married (unhappily) the son of the house where they both worked. She also compiled a cookbook, and wrote a romantic novel – set among servants in a big house. Service had been drudgery, but Margaret Powell now put those years to good use, producing books that were spirited, unsentimental and enlivened by honesty and dry wit. One of the many delightful things about her is her clear-sightedness. She had no pretensions and no delusions, viewing most of her employers with contempt – sometimes even with pity. She saw how the world worked and realized that even if she was powerless to change it, she could at least get its measure. ‘We always called them “them”,’ she wrote in Below Stairs: ‘“Them” was the enemy, “them” overworked us, and “them” underpaid us, and to “them” servants were a race apart, a necessary evil.’ But in the 1920s, when she started work, maids like Margaret had some leverage: servants were in short supply after the First World War and employers had to watch their step lest they lose them. On one occasion in Bexhill-on-Sea the teenaged Margaret simply walked away from the rude old lady who employed her, abandoning her, in her bath-chair, on the sea front. But she was poor, and she had to earn her living; being a kitchen maid was Margaret’s introduction to the lives of people who could afford to throw away more food after one meal than the Powell family would see in a month. Nothing escaped her well-sharpened powers of observation, and she moved from household to household, watching and learning. There was the rackety, sad, overdressed woman in Hove, an ageing beauty with a much younger husband, who liked Margaret to sit on the edge of her bath while they discussed the day’s menu. Then there were the Cutlers in South Kensington: Mr Cutler left the house carrying an umbrella every morning at 10 for a never quite defined job in the City, returning at 4 in the afternoon; his hobby was shooting elephants. Mrs Cutler devoted herself to charity:

All these people interested themselves in charities, they were all on this board and that board. If you read the papers you would see Lady this, and Mrs that, had a stall here and a stall there. Mrs Bowchard used to make cakes for the stall Mrs Cutler ran for helping fallen women. Mrs Cutler was very keen on helping the fallen women, from a distance . . . she could be generous when she wasn’t involved.

Like all servants Margaret knew how class worked and what distinguished a real lady from an aspirant. That kind of useful knowledge about finely tuned social calibrations gave servants a sense of power: she soon realized that Lady Gibbons in Kensington, married to a recently knighted colonial officer, was maintaining appearances she couldn’t really afford and was therefore mean with it. There was only one family with whom she was really happy – the Downalls. They behaved to their servants with generosity and consideration (taking the trouble to buy them Christmas presents, for example, that weren’t simply rolls of cloth with which to make new uniforms) and they encouraged Margaret to borrow books from their library. But Margaret knew that the only escape from service was marriage. All women servants knew it, though the usual twelve-hour day with a half-day off once a week left little time for courting. ‘On my day off I used to go to the nearest cinema and get all my romance second-hand. It took a lot less energy. I often thought I wouldn’t have had the strength if a marvellous lover had swum into my life. I couldn’t have done anything about it.’ And as she ruefully observed, with her size 9 feet and hands red-raw from scouring pans with sand and boiling water, she wasn’t Clara Bow. ‘Fattish, on the plain side, with big hands and bigger feet’ is how she described herself. Potential husbands consisted chiefly of visiting tradesmen or other servants. Chauffeurs were the most sought after – ‘hundred-per-cent men in leggings’ – butlers being too pompous and valets, though the friendliest when gossiping over tea in the kitchen, a touch camp. Eventually she was rescued by a milkman whom she married just before the Second World War. Despite the difficulties, the hours, the bad treatment, Margaret Powell made herself a career of which she was rightly proud, and she achieved a daunting degree of culinary expertise. Those rows of copper pans and hair sieves, saddles of mutton, mountains of suet, snipe savouries and fiddly aspic dishes were of little use in the hard-pressed years after the Second World War; but nowadays, a mastery of the lost skills of traditional English cooking would be enough to make Margaret Powell a television celebrity.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Lucy Lethbridge 2007