Let us remind you when the next issue is out, and keep you updated on news & events. Mollie Moran worked in a house on Cadogan Square, London in the 1920s where the servants’ hall had ‘small windows covered in bars that looked out on to a sparse well between the houses and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling’.24 Doris Haze recalled that ‘All our meals were served in the servants’ hall, the windows of which looked out into the area, so dark that the electric light was on almost all day.’25 The gloomy atmosphere was reinforced by the choice of paint for the room. Family – Master, mistress, and one child. Finally, this article shows that servants were not passive recipients of authority. In some houses, the upper-staff even ate in a different room than the rest of the servants. London: Chatto & Windus 1969; Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Life as we have known it. Serving Breakfast, English Fashion. A long table was its main feature, as well as a window that would let in enough light for the tasks that needed to be accomplished. London: Pan 2011; Winifred Foley, A child in the forest. Noel Streatfeild, The day before yesterday: firsthand stories of fifty years ago. Really it was very poor, very poor; there was absolutely no comfort.’27 Margaret Powell also described a servants’ hall furnished with ‘misshapen wicker chairs which had once graced their conservatory and weren’t even considered good enough for that now.’28 Employers followed the advice of domestic household manuals which argued that the ideal servants’ hall was to be furnished with ‘very simple’ or ‘plain’ furniture.29 Kerr in his book The gentleman’s house argued for ‘all private rooms to be equal to those of a similar class of persons in their own homes- perhaps a little better, but not too much.’30 He added that ‘elegance, importance, and ornament would be quite out of place’ in the servants’ quarters. To move beyond the romantic myths around domestic service that are perpetuated in sources written by the middle class, this article is based on an analysis of fifty-four servants’ autobiographies.7 Such sources do, of course, pose some problems. Home. Edwardian Life Servant's Rules. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1954), 70. For example, the 1916 enquiry into domestic service by the Women’s Industrial Council made little mention of servants’ meals, brushing it aside as ‘not many complaints on this head[ing]’.5 The 1919 report of the Advisory Women’s Committee on the ‘domestic service problem’ highlighted that ‘It is sometimes stated that the differentiation in the quality of the food for the dining room and that for the servants’ hall or kitchen is another class distinction which leads to a spirit of bitterness’.6 However, it did not come back to address this problem in the subsequent pages of the report and focused instead on training and work hours. Brighton: Queenspark Books 1980; Dorothy Fudge, Sands of time : the autobiography of Dorothy Fudge. 8 a.m. – Have kitchen breakfast while family breakfast. Stroud: Amberley 2010, 226. The numerical importance of female servants determines the focus of this paper on women’s autobiographies. Serving Meals without a Maid - A Guide for Edwardian Servants - The Up to Date Waitress by Janet McKenzie Hill. Serving Dinner, Russian Fashion. The application of the rules was facilitated by the layout of the house. Never let your voice be heard by the ladies and gentlemen of the house, except when necessary, and then as little as possible. In contrast, this article has shed light on these spaces using servants’ autobiographies. It follows, then, that, where this fashion is adopted, a full staff of trained household employees is needed, if the wants of those at table are to be properly supplied. The compromise style of service is, as its name implies, a "let down" from the formality of the Russian service and a "let up" to the arduous duties expected of the head of the house at a table served after the English fashion. London: J. Murray 1865, 76. Serving Dinner, Russian Fashion. The cook was the one who knew how to navigate the many cupboards, or store and larder rooms in country houses, giving her control over this space and allowing her to sometimes rebel against the employers. The meal itself was served in the order of the servants’ position. Most of these houses had an ‘upstairs’ where the family lived and a ‘downstairs’ where the kitchen, the servants’ hall and the rest of the servants’ quarters were located.18 Sometimes, the servants lived in one wing and the family occupied the rest of the house.19 The servants’ hall and the whole system of upstairs-downstairs embodied a class boundary that divided servants from their employers. Servant’s Hall: The servant’s hall was a common room where the work staff congregated, ate their meals, performed small but essential tasks, like mending, darning, polishing, ect. Before the eighteenth century, servants lived in closer proximity to their employers and even ate at their table.20 However, as domestic service became a female-dominated occupation whose members came increasingly from lower social ranks, employers started to set barriers between their family and their servants. McKenzie-Hill graduated from the Boston Cooking School where Fannie Farmer was assistant principal. Horn, The rise and fall of the Victorian servant, 199. Bath: C. Chivers, 1978; Samuel Mullins & Gareth Griffiths, Cap and apron : an oral history of domestic service in the Shires, 1880-1950. New York: Random House 1995. These acts of rebellion can be found in numerous autobiographies. In contrast, in smaller households, the spatial division between servants and employers was often limited so that servants simply ate in dingy kitchens instead of a specific room. As a consequence, a maid might suffer from this ambiguous relationship in which she would sometimes be a companion and other time a stranger. Fanny Louvier is a second year DPhil student in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford. London: Hainemann 1972; Mollie Moran, Aprons and silver spoons: the heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s kitchen maid. Brighton: Queenspark Books 1980. ‘Supper’ was usually taken at 9 o’clock, after most of the work had been finished. London: Virago 1977, 37-52; John Burnett, Useful toil : autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s. Despite the grandness of these houses, the servants’ halls were squalid, dark, damp, and decked out with shabby furniture, which emphasised the servants’ place at the bottom of the social hierarchy within the house. Servants were not, however, passive recipients of authority but had some agency. An Edwardian Maid Do not overlook the role of Edna the maid. Bassingbourn: Archives for Bassingbourn & Comberton Village Colleges 1981. The employers could summon their servants whenever they needed by ringing a bell; the rest of the time they expected never to be disturbed by the presence of a servant. Meat composed maximum of the menus be it breakfast, lunch or dinner. How shall we ever know if it’s morning if there’s no servant to pull up the blind? Edward Higgs, ‘Domestic Servants and Households in Victorian England’, Social History, 8:2 (1983), 208. Todd, ‘Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950’, 191-192. The silver had to be clean, the water cans brought in and the lamps trimmed before 4 pm when she headed to the servants’ hall for tea. Chapter 7. Oxford: Clio, 1982. To her horror, Margaret Powell realised that she had thrown the kipper into ‘the pig bucket under the sink’. Barnsley: Pen & Sword History 2015; Anne Kynoch, The King’s seat. London: Penguin Books 2013. Chapter 5. We had a very spoiled life, I suppose: It was like England in Edwardian times - servants, meals cooked, beds made. Elsie Oman, Salford stepping stones. University of Essex, I-CEM project, 1901 Census for England and Wales. With or without guests, the daily routine for a family at its country house was unalterable, due in part to the servants, whose meal-times were rigid, and in part to Edwadian era tradition. Since ‘it was covered in tea leaves and some other nasty bits and pieces’, she gave it a rinse only to drop the kipper ‘into my bowl of washing-up water and soap suds’. Dinner is the meal for which this formal service is best adapted, and even at dinner it should not be carried out Middle and upper-class women relied on servants to run their homes smoothly. Barnsley: Pen & Sword History 2015. Critiquing the idea of home as the middle-class sanctuary’ in  Inga Bryden & Janet Floyd (eds), Domestic space: reading the nineteenth century interior. Perhaps the best way to give directions for serving a meal is to present a representative menu, and tell how to get it before those who are seated at table. Just imagine trying to serve a similar meal to a full room without a well-versed team. Swinton: Neil Richardson 1983. Even at the table, servants were in constant contact with authority. Upstairs, an Edwardian home was a picture of elegance, sophistication and serenity, filled with social engagements and lavish dinner parties. These amazing drawings prove that the mosaics of Hagia Sophia were uncovered for almost 300 years after the conquest. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. The food is served "from the table." Were they altering the meals for upstairs, receiving visitors including male ‘followers’ or even committing theft in this space that they could neither control nor see?61 Jean Hunt recalled that when she was visiting her grandmother as a child, she would stand at the top of the kitchen stairs, listening ‘to gales of laughter coming from down in the kitchen.’62 Instead of considering the upstairs-downstairs system as a tool for social distinction, Jean Hunt saw the kitchen as a strange but attractive world where maids were free to do as they wanted. A: Smells, sights, colours, nothing very coherent. At eight o'clock each morning, your Lady's Maid or Valet will wake you with your Early Morning Breakfast Tray. The English style of service breathes hospitality rather than formality., It allows of personal attention, on the part of those sitting at the head and foot of the table, to the needs of those about them. Towards the beginning they were associated with more of outings but it slowly reached the Edwardian dining table. Chapter 2. They play into a long tradition of servants’ humour that emerged in Edwardian Britain as servants increasingly contested the outdated paternalistic and deferential relationships of domestic service while lower section of the middle class could afford to employ a maid. The timetable of housemaid Lavinia Swainbank was the following in a stately home in Windermere in 1922: She had to finish her morning task before 8 am when breakfast was served in the servants’ hall.33 Then, she had to hurry to make the bed, lay the fires, clean the bedrooms and bathrooms and put her afternoon uniform before lunch was served in the hall at 1 pm. Care of the Pantry. The Dining-Room and the Pantry and their Furnishings. Frank Victor Dawes, Not in front of the servants : a true portrait of upstairs, downstairs life. Finally, James Scott defines everyday resistance as the actions of subaltern groups that are not as ‘dramatic and visible as rebellions’ or as other forms of collective and organised resistance, but instead are quiet and dispersed.12 This concept helps us to think about the defiance of servants against employers in their spaces for eating without over-stating the extent of servants’ rebellion. It also examines the social symbolism that servants and employers attributed to these spaces. London: Hainemann, 1972. Her education meant that she was not only able to write her autobiography but that she may have wanted to write about domestic service to distinguish herself from public discourses on servants depicting them as uneducated and passive workers. Cheltenham: Thornhill 1991. Luton: WEA Luton Branch 1977. Sian Pooley in her study of domestic service in Lancaster between 1880 and 1914 highlighted that most service relationships were not based on strict boundaries between the servants and the family but were interwoven by emotional and kinship links.47 Even when servants were not part of the employer’s family, links could be less formal than the accounts of ‘invisible’ domestic servants in grand upper-class households let us imagine. To watch a meal served upstairs in the grand dining room is to visit a time and place when manners, decorum and tradition were prized values. Authors, for example, could be trying to reach a personal equanimity with their past or attempting to please their modern audience.8 These problems, however, are not insurmountable. Llandysul: Gomer 2013; Rosina Harrison, Rose my life in service. The long, slow, and heavy meals of the mid-nineteenth century had disappeared by the Edwardian era: now hostesses preferred their dinner parties swift and filling (though this was taken to the extreme by Gilded Age hostess Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who would hurry her guests through eight or nine courses in forty minutes), most likely to make time for evening entertainments. The stiffly dressed male servants who bring the food to the dining room, serve each dish French style, onto the plates of the diners. London: J. Murray 1865. in its entirety unless there be more than one waitress for each eight covers at table, since nothing appears upon the table save the centrepiece (at dinner, a bonbon dish or two is allowable) and the articles that compose the individual covers. Domestic service differed according to the wealth of employers―some struggled to employ one maid while others maintained more than they needed―and their social standards as the middle-class mistresses would have more frequent contacts with their maids than their upper-class counterparts.13 In return, different types of households had different spaces for eating for their servants. September 20, 2019 at 10:26 am . New York : Harper 1838, 184. When a meal is served after the Russian fashion, all the responsibility of supplying food to those at table falls upon the attendants. The kitchen was not only segregated from the employer’s quarters, but it was dominated by the cook. Bath: Chivers Press 1983; Dorothy Burnham, Through dooms of love. The meat or fish just as it is taken from the oven or kettle, except for its garnish, is set down before the "head of the house," who carves it and selects the portion desired by each. A Guide for Edwardian Servants. Funded by the ESRC, her research uses a sample of French and British female servants’ autobiographies to compare personal experiences of domestic service between 1900 and 1940. They ate in front of an open drawer in which they could hide their hot meal in case the employers came in the kitchen. Eating in the ‘tiny kitchen’ on her own compared to the ‘living-room’ of the employers was a daily experience of the authority and social hierarchy in service. Autobiographies are prone to error, misremembrance, and deliberate falsification. Chapter 4 . Cheltenham: Thornhill 1991; Hastings Local History Group, Hasting voices: local people talking about their lives in Hastings and St Leonards before the Second World War. If you have any questions please get in touch with. The main meal – ‘dinner’– was taken at around midday, while ‘tea’ was a very light meal served at around 4 o’clock. Servants used the spatial segregation to their advantage to cover their acts of everyday resistance. London: Pan 2011. Inquiring readers, from now until the U.S. airing of Downton Abbey, this blog will explore the facets of living in an English country house during the Edwardian era, and drawing upon the similarity and differences between the Edwardian and Regency eras. Winifred Foley, A child in the forest. Francis Ellen Darwin, ‘Domestic Service’, Nineteenth Century, 2 (1890), 286-96; Agnes Amy Bulley, ‘Domestic service: a social study’, Westminster Review, 135 (1891), 177–186; Maud Churton Braby, ‘The Servant Problem’, English Review, 23 (1916), 528-37; Christina Violet Butler, Domestic service: an enquiry by the women's industrial council. William Parkes, Domestic duties: or, Instructions to young married ladies on the management of their households, and the regulation of their conduct in the various relations and duties of married life. London: Routledge, 1994. Despite my former longing for an Edwardian feast, I’ll likely leave the past to the past and enjoy the time traditionally spent changing out courses and fussing with "removes" with friends and family instead. This article has drawn a more detailed picture of servants’ space for eating by retrieving servants’ voices. Chapter 1. Pamela Horn, The rise and fall of the Victorian servant. Rosina Harrison, Rose my life in service. After the fish came the entrée, which might consist of vol-au-vent, mutton cutlets or sweetbreads served with champagne or claret. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain; What was life like as a 19th-century servant? More broadly, this article has emphasized the importance of listening to the marginalized voices of servants to understand what it meant to work as a live-in domestic servant, toiling, eating and sleeping under the same roof with limited opportunity for privacy and freedom. Home. Bourdieu shows how the upper classes distinguish themselves not purely on the basis of their economic capital but by using their economic capital to acquire cultural capital. Daisy England, Daisy Daisy. Chapter 3. The middle class is defined here, following Benjamin S. Rowntree, as the households employing at least one servant.14 Employing a servant facilitated the household access to leisure which was at the core of middle-class identities since the early nineteenth century.15 Moreover, the presence of an ‘other’ in the household helped to establish one’s middle-class status by opposition.16 This broad definition encompasses a variety of middle-class households, from well-off families to those at the margin who struggled to keep up appearances, as well as those who employed a servant as part of their business such as boarding houses.17 Therefore, within the middle class itself, servants experienced different relationships with their employers and ate in different types of spaces. Elizabeth Flint, Kipper stew. Only the upper class could afford to employ men servants while the main employers of servants, the middle class, recruited female workers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, 37; Horn, The rise and fall of the Victorian servant, 172. Chapter 8. Christina Violet Butler, Domestic service: an enquiry by the women's industrial council. Instead of cooking a new batch of rice, she quickly scooped up the rice and served it as if nothing had happened. Here's a great article with an actual catalog from the Schaffers - before ALVR was opened - offering Faberge and Imperial treasures for sale in New York. Bath: Chivers Press 1983. While the dark kitchen in the basement was a symbol of rejection by the employers, it also was a place that allowed various levels of insubordination, such as altering employer’s food, since employers rarely ventured there. 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Focus of this paper on women ’ s quarters, but it slowly reached the Edwardian.! In hastings and St Leonards before the Second World War paper on women ’ s autobiographies of life! Into context were uncovered for almost 300 years after the conquest had large numbers of male and female servants! On news & events millions of Muslim worshippers prayed under Christ, the rise fall...