Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain is the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served.
Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed, Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Britain by Lucy Lethbridge; an authoritative history that will change and challenge the way we look at society.
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.
A Perfect Nightmare
In 1935, Denton Welch – then an art student at Goldsmith’s College – was knocked off his bike on a busy road just outside Bromley. He spent over a year in hospital and was permanently weakened...
Read moreBy the Light of the Ptarmigan
When I was a teenager, prowling voraciously round my parents’ bookshelves looking for something to read, I found a row of old books that hadn’t been looked at for at least fifty years. They were...
Read moreDeparted Grandeur
There are few things more guaranteed to provoke a pleasurable wallow in melancholy than a ruin. For me, exiled in Brooklyn, with temperatures rising, the air-conditioner on the blink and police...
Read moreOddballs of New York
When I went to live for a short time in New York in the mid-1990s, a friend gave me a copy of Up in the Old Hotel, a selection of the 1940s and ’50s New Yorker writings of Joseph Mitchell. I shall...
Read moreHow We Lived Then
When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper. It was a neon feast of packets and powders, stuff dehydrated,...
Read moreRescued 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...
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