It was at one point the most popular job in Britain, surpassing professions such as coal mining and factory work.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the servant class, the hierarchy of different types of servants, and the decline of household service in Britain.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of this three-part mini-series about British Social Class, and more specifically, high society.
[00:00:30] As a reminder, in case you missed them, in part one we talked about the British nobility, how you become a Lord or Lady, and what that actually means in practice.
[00:00:41] In part two, we looked at the most exclusive school in Britain, Eton College. We learned about its history, the countless famous people who have been there, and how it is evolving to the kind of elite that it caters to.
[00:00:56] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about a different part of society altogether, but one without which the British aristocracy could not have survived: the servant class.
[00:01:09] We’ll look at the size of the servant class, what life was like as a servant, the hierarchy of different types of servants, and what caused the decline of household service in Britain.
[00:01:21] OK then, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Lives of British Servants
[00:01:28] If I was to ask you, what do you think the most popular job in Britain was just over 100 years ago, what would you say?
[00:01:38] Perhaps you might think “factory worker” or “coal miner”, maybe you'd say “soldier” or “farmer”.
[00:01:47] It might surprise you to find out that the most popular job in terms of the number of people involved in this profession was none of these; in the year 1901 it was household service, it was working in the house of someone else as a servant.
[00:02:07] Now, wealthy people paying less wealthy people to do things for them has been going on for as long as time, and it is far from being unique to Britain.
[00:02:18] But the scale at which this kind of “household service” existed in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century is quite staggering.
[00:02:30] In 1901, the population of the UK was just under 37,000,000.
[00:02:38] Of this, a whopping 1.5 million so 4% of the total population, worked as domestic servants.
[00:02:49] And if we dig deeper still, and look at young women in particular, the numbers are even more astonishing.
[00:02:58] In 1891, more than one million women aged between 15 and 20 were domestic servants.
[00:03:07] That means that one out of every three young women at the time was living and working as a domestic servant.
[00:03:16] It is astounding to think about, and in this episode we are going to break down exactly who these people were, what they did, and what life was like as a servant.
[00:03:28] So, first, why were there so many people working as domestic servants?
[00:03:34] Well, there were a few factors, both on the supply and the demand side, as an economist might put it.
[00:03:42] On the supply side, there had been wide scale migration from the countryside to the towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution. There was an abundance of labour, people who could work as servants.
[00:03:57] And a lack of other employment opportunities meant that working as a domestic servant was more attractive than you might think.
[00:04:07] This was particularly true for women, for whom other employment opportunities were very limited.
[00:04:15] As a woman, you could work in a factory or in some kind of cottage industry if you were lucky, and if you came from a wealthier family perhaps you could secure yourself a job as a governess or a teacher, but there were really very few respectable careers a young woman could follow.
[00:04:36] Going into household service was seen as a good “stopgap” choice for a young woman with few other prospects, it was something you could do before you got married and started a family of your own.
[00:04:50] Another reason was that housing was expensive, fewer than 10% of people in the UK owned their own home, so the prospect of being a live-in servant and being provided with free accommodation along with your job, well you can understand the appeal.
[00:05:09] And in terms of reasons on the demand side, just as the industrial revolution and economic development had brought people from the fields into the cities, it had created a new professional class, people with a disposable income, people with money to spend.
[00:05:28] These people didn’t want to deal with the boredom and drudgery of doing things like cooking, cleaning and making the bed, so they would hire people to do it for them.
[00:05:40] This is an important point to emphasise, and goes against what many people think.
[00:05:46] See, when you imagine “household servants”, you might think of a house like the one in the TV series Downton Abbey, a huge stately home with a fleet of servants polishing the silver and mopping the floors.
[00:06:01] Of course, some servants did find themselves in this kind of a situation, but many more found themselves waiting not on Lords and Ladies in vast country manors, but on comparatively modest middle or upper middle class British households, households supported by a doctor or teacher’s income, not the income from a huge countryside estate.
[00:06:26] You can see this from the percentage of households in the country that employed some form of domestic servant. It is staggering, and goes from less than 10% at the start of the 19th century right up to an estimated 25-30% of all households by the start of the 20th century.
[00:06:49] In some areas of the country, it was even higher, with 40-50% of wealthier areas of the country employing at least one household servant.
[00:07:01] It really was a lot more common than many people realise.
[00:07:06] Now, let’s move on to talk about the lives of these servants.
[00:07:11] Of course, given the sheer number of people employed in domestic service and the large variety of households in which they worked, there was a smorgasbord of different experiences, and it is easy to generalise.
[00:07:25] The one generalisation that we can confidently make is that life was worse for female servants than for male.
[00:07:34] The pay was lower, job security was lower, there was the constant threat of your male employer making unwelcome advances towards you, you falling pregnant and being cast out on the street.
[00:07:49] And the actual day-to-day of the job was, in most cases, much harder for women than for men.
[00:07:57] Especially in smaller households where there was only one servant, this woman, or in fact girl in most cases, she would be expected to do absolutely everything from dawn to dusk and be paid a pittance in return.
[00:08:15] Cleaning, cooking, washing the dishes, washing clothes, mending clothes, shopping, making the beds, polishing the glasses, making fires, setting the table, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was a never-ending cycle of domestic tasks that would need to be repeated as soon as they were completed.
[00:08:36] This kind of domestic servant would typically have worked 7 days a week, starting work at something like 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finishing until 10 or 11 in the evening.
[00:08:50] And the pay varied, but was extremely low.
[00:08:55] The official British government census put it at £16 a year in 1901 for a general housemaid, which is around €1,900 a year in today’s money.
[00:09:11] As a point of comparison, a typical salary for a “professional” man at the time could have been anywhere from £200 to £1,000, so you can see how comparatively affordable it was to hire someone as a full-time servant for £16 a year.
[00:09:32] Now, where the lives of servants gets a little more interesting, and a little more uniquely British, is in the great stately homes of British aristocrats. Think Downton Abbey or Brideshead Revisited, with all kinds of servants to attend to their master’s every whim and wish.
[00:09:53] There was, of course, the same hard work, monotonous back-breaking labour as in smaller houses, but there was an additional element to it: the hierarchy of the servant class.
[00:10:08] Much like the master of the house was above the servant, there was a very clear pecking order between domestic servants.
[00:10:18] At the top was the butler, who was always male, and the housekeeper, who was always female.
[00:10:26] The butler’s job was to organise the male servants, footmen, drivers, and so on. He was also responsible for the general quality of service, making sure that the silver was polished, the cutlery was set in the right way, the correct wines had been ordered, and he would also be constantly available if his master had a request.
[00:10:49] The housekeeper, on the other hand, was in charge of all of the female staff, the maids and cooking staff, making sure the beds were made, the corridors were swept, fires were made, and so on.
[00:11:03] Becoming a butler or housekeeper was not easy, and would require decades of hard work to move up the ladder.
[00:11:13] Even if you got there, you still had to work long hours for only slightly better pay.
[00:11:20] And if you became a butler or a housekeeper, it was your duty to make sure that everyone below you knew their place, they knew where they sat in the pecking order.
[00:11:33] There were several ways in which this hierarchy was constantly reinforced.
[00:11:39] For starters, at mealtimes, the servants would always eat together. The butler would be seated at one end of the table and the housekeeper at the other.
[00:11:51] Servants would sit in order of seniority, with the most senior male servant sat next to the butler, so everyone knew where he or she stood in the pecking order.
[00:12:03] Nobody would be able to start eating until the butler had sat down, and there are even stories of some households where all the servants would have to stop eating if the butler put down his knife and fork.
[00:12:17] And this is only one example. You might remember from part one that there are different ways to refer to a Duke, an Earl, and different types of nobles. Well, the same differences existed between the domestic servants.
[00:12:34] Both the butler and the housekeeper would be called Mr or Mrs Last Name, both by their employer and other servants.
[00:12:43] So, my name is Alastair Budge, if I was a butler I would be called Mr Budge by my employer and by a maid.
[00:12:53] A valet, the male servant responsible for getting the master of the house changed, would be referred to by his employer simply by his surname, “Budge”.
[00:13:04] Lower servants, on the other hand, would typically be called by their first name, “Alastair”, no surname, just the first name.
[00:13:14] But in larger kind of Downton Abbey style houses it would be rare for these lower servants to ever have any real interaction with their employers; all communication would go through the butler or the housekeeper, so they wouldn’t really be “called” anything, and often their employers wouldn’t even know their names.
[00:13:36] There are even some stories of servants who would be forced to turn around and face the wall when their employer came into a room.
[00:13:46] Now, we heard at the start that working as a servant was the most common job in Britain at the turn of the last century, but this is now no longer the case, there are around 65,000 at the last count.
[00:14:02] What happened?
[00:14:03] Well, a few things.
[00:14:06] Firstly, much like both supply and demand contributed to the boom in domestic service, there were both supply and demand factors that caused it to plummet.
[00:14:18] On the supply side, better employment opportunities meant that people, especially young women, finally had alternatives.
[00:14:28] Starting during the First World War, as women took over jobs that men had traditionally done in places like factories, it started to become abundantly clear that women were just as capable as men, and did not need to be restricted to a life as a domestic servant.
[00:14:47] Secondly, millions more homes were built and home ownership became more affordable. If you remember, one of the major attractions of going into service was because you got a roof over your head. Between the First and the Second World War, home ownership in the UK increased by 400%, so fewer people needed to work as a servant to have a stable place to live.
[00:15:17] And on the demand side, well, in the post-war period, people could now buy machines to do many of the jobs that servants used to do.
[00:15:28] Washing the dishes, cutting the grass, washing your clothes, there were machines that did this simply by pressing a button.
[00:15:37] What’s more, the tax rate increased considerably, reaching 90% in the post-war period, meaning that household budgets for things like servants were limited.
[00:15:49] So, while in 1901 a doctor or an accountant might have employed one or two household servants without it really having any impact on their disposable income, a person doing the same job 50 years later would have considerably less disposable income because they paid a lot more in tax.
[00:16:11] What's more, the amount that they would have to pay for a live-in servant would be considerably higher because of the alternative career options.
[00:16:21] And, as a nail in the coffin for domestic service, there were now plenty of machines that could do the majority of the tasks that a servant would have done anyway at a fraction of the cost.
[00:16:34] The result is the situation that exists today, and that you could argue existed 300 but not 100 years ago: yes, there still are live-in domestic servants, but they are restricted to the very wealthiest in society.
[00:16:52] For most people, the existence of a live-in servant is something that they will experience only in books and on TV, so I want to finish this episode and this mini-series with a few personal recommendations.
[00:17:07] The most obvious one is one I’ve mentioned already and that you have probably seen: Downton Abbey, which is a TV series that follows the life of an aristocratic British family and their servants, but significantly glorifies the servant life and makes it look not so bad at all.
[00:17:26] There’s also Gosford Park, which is a great murder mystery comedy film from 2001.
[00:17:33] But my absolute favourite, which goes a lot deeper into the master-servant relationship and deals with the thorny problem of this complicated hierarchy, both between master-servant and within the servant ranks, as well as the decline of the domestic servant, is called The Remains of the Day.
[00:17:54] It is a book by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was made into a brilliant film starring Anthony Hopkins, so I’d definitely recommend that one if you are looking for something a little more meaty and interesting. Again, the name, both of the book and the film, is The Remains of the Day.
[00:18:14] So, there we have it, the life of British servants, a hundred-or-so year period in British history when literally millions of people, mostly young women, spent their formative teenage years living with a family that was not their own, attending to their every wish, and being paid almost nothing in return.
[00:18:37] When thought about this way, it’s no bad thing that this life is something that most people will only experience on screen.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on British servants, and with that comes the end of this mini-series exploring British social class.
[00:18:57] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the British nobility and how you become a lord or lady.
[00:19:05] And in part two, we talked about Eton College, the most exclusive school in the country.
[00:19:12] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:19:18] What do you think about the British class system? How is it different from the system in your country?
[00:19:25] Was having domestic servants as widespread in your country as it was in Britain?
[00:19:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:34] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of this three-part mini-series about British Social Class, and more specifically, high society.
[00:00:30] As a reminder, in case you missed them, in part one we talked about the British nobility, how you become a Lord or Lady, and what that actually means in practice.
[00:00:41] In part two, we looked at the most exclusive school in Britain, Eton College. We learned about its history, the countless famous people who have been there, and how it is evolving to the kind of elite that it caters to.
[00:00:56] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about a different part of society altogether, but one without which the British aristocracy could not have survived: the servant class.
[00:01:09] We’ll look at the size of the servant class, what life was like as a servant, the hierarchy of different types of servants, and what caused the decline of household service in Britain.
[00:01:21] OK then, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Lives of British Servants
[00:01:28] If I was to ask you, what do you think the most popular job in Britain was just over 100 years ago, what would you say?
[00:01:38] Perhaps you might think “factory worker” or “coal miner”, maybe you'd say “soldier” or “farmer”.
[00:01:47] It might surprise you to find out that the most popular job in terms of the number of people involved in this profession was none of these; in the year 1901 it was household service, it was working in the house of someone else as a servant.
[00:02:07] Now, wealthy people paying less wealthy people to do things for them has been going on for as long as time, and it is far from being unique to Britain.
[00:02:18] But the scale at which this kind of “household service” existed in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century is quite staggering.
[00:02:30] In 1901, the population of the UK was just under 37,000,000.
[00:02:38] Of this, a whopping 1.5 million so 4% of the total population, worked as domestic servants.
[00:02:49] And if we dig deeper still, and look at young women in particular, the numbers are even more astonishing.
[00:02:58] In 1891, more than one million women aged between 15 and 20 were domestic servants.
[00:03:07] That means that one out of every three young women at the time was living and working as a domestic servant.
[00:03:16] It is astounding to think about, and in this episode we are going to break down exactly who these people were, what they did, and what life was like as a servant.
[00:03:28] So, first, why were there so many people working as domestic servants?
[00:03:34] Well, there were a few factors, both on the supply and the demand side, as an economist might put it.
[00:03:42] On the supply side, there had been wide scale migration from the countryside to the towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution. There was an abundance of labour, people who could work as servants.
[00:03:57] And a lack of other employment opportunities meant that working as a domestic servant was more attractive than you might think.
[00:04:07] This was particularly true for women, for whom other employment opportunities were very limited.
[00:04:15] As a woman, you could work in a factory or in some kind of cottage industry if you were lucky, and if you came from a wealthier family perhaps you could secure yourself a job as a governess or a teacher, but there were really very few respectable careers a young woman could follow.
[00:04:36] Going into household service was seen as a good “stopgap” choice for a young woman with few other prospects, it was something you could do before you got married and started a family of your own.
[00:04:50] Another reason was that housing was expensive, fewer than 10% of people in the UK owned their own home, so the prospect of being a live-in servant and being provided with free accommodation along with your job, well you can understand the appeal.
[00:05:09] And in terms of reasons on the demand side, just as the industrial revolution and economic development had brought people from the fields into the cities, it had created a new professional class, people with a disposable income, people with money to spend.
[00:05:28] These people didn’t want to deal with the boredom and drudgery of doing things like cooking, cleaning and making the bed, so they would hire people to do it for them.
[00:05:40] This is an important point to emphasise, and goes against what many people think.
[00:05:46] See, when you imagine “household servants”, you might think of a house like the one in the TV series Downton Abbey, a huge stately home with a fleet of servants polishing the silver and mopping the floors.
[00:06:01] Of course, some servants did find themselves in this kind of a situation, but many more found themselves waiting not on Lords and Ladies in vast country manors, but on comparatively modest middle or upper middle class British households, households supported by a doctor or teacher’s income, not the income from a huge countryside estate.
[00:06:26] You can see this from the percentage of households in the country that employed some form of domestic servant. It is staggering, and goes from less than 10% at the start of the 19th century right up to an estimated 25-30% of all households by the start of the 20th century.
[00:06:49] In some areas of the country, it was even higher, with 40-50% of wealthier areas of the country employing at least one household servant.
[00:07:01] It really was a lot more common than many people realise.
[00:07:06] Now, let’s move on to talk about the lives of these servants.
[00:07:11] Of course, given the sheer number of people employed in domestic service and the large variety of households in which they worked, there was a smorgasbord of different experiences, and it is easy to generalise.
[00:07:25] The one generalisation that we can confidently make is that life was worse for female servants than for male.
[00:07:34] The pay was lower, job security was lower, there was the constant threat of your male employer making unwelcome advances towards you, you falling pregnant and being cast out on the street.
[00:07:49] And the actual day-to-day of the job was, in most cases, much harder for women than for men.
[00:07:57] Especially in smaller households where there was only one servant, this woman, or in fact girl in most cases, she would be expected to do absolutely everything from dawn to dusk and be paid a pittance in return.
[00:08:15] Cleaning, cooking, washing the dishes, washing clothes, mending clothes, shopping, making the beds, polishing the glasses, making fires, setting the table, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was a never-ending cycle of domestic tasks that would need to be repeated as soon as they were completed.
[00:08:36] This kind of domestic servant would typically have worked 7 days a week, starting work at something like 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finishing until 10 or 11 in the evening.
[00:08:50] And the pay varied, but was extremely low.
[00:08:55] The official British government census put it at £16 a year in 1901 for a general housemaid, which is around €1,900 a year in today’s money.
[00:09:11] As a point of comparison, a typical salary for a “professional” man at the time could have been anywhere from £200 to £1,000, so you can see how comparatively affordable it was to hire someone as a full-time servant for £16 a year.
[00:09:32] Now, where the lives of servants gets a little more interesting, and a little more uniquely British, is in the great stately homes of British aristocrats. Think Downton Abbey or Brideshead Revisited, with all kinds of servants to attend to their master’s every whim and wish.
[00:09:53] There was, of course, the same hard work, monotonous back-breaking labour as in smaller houses, but there was an additional element to it: the hierarchy of the servant class.
[00:10:08] Much like the master of the house was above the servant, there was a very clear pecking order between domestic servants.
[00:10:18] At the top was the butler, who was always male, and the housekeeper, who was always female.
[00:10:26] The butler’s job was to organise the male servants, footmen, drivers, and so on. He was also responsible for the general quality of service, making sure that the silver was polished, the cutlery was set in the right way, the correct wines had been ordered, and he would also be constantly available if his master had a request.
[00:10:49] The housekeeper, on the other hand, was in charge of all of the female staff, the maids and cooking staff, making sure the beds were made, the corridors were swept, fires were made, and so on.
[00:11:03] Becoming a butler or housekeeper was not easy, and would require decades of hard work to move up the ladder.
[00:11:13] Even if you got there, you still had to work long hours for only slightly better pay.
[00:11:20] And if you became a butler or a housekeeper, it was your duty to make sure that everyone below you knew their place, they knew where they sat in the pecking order.
[00:11:33] There were several ways in which this hierarchy was constantly reinforced.
[00:11:39] For starters, at mealtimes, the servants would always eat together. The butler would be seated at one end of the table and the housekeeper at the other.
[00:11:51] Servants would sit in order of seniority, with the most senior male servant sat next to the butler, so everyone knew where he or she stood in the pecking order.
[00:12:03] Nobody would be able to start eating until the butler had sat down, and there are even stories of some households where all the servants would have to stop eating if the butler put down his knife and fork.
[00:12:17] And this is only one example. You might remember from part one that there are different ways to refer to a Duke, an Earl, and different types of nobles. Well, the same differences existed between the domestic servants.
[00:12:34] Both the butler and the housekeeper would be called Mr or Mrs Last Name, both by their employer and other servants.
[00:12:43] So, my name is Alastair Budge, if I was a butler I would be called Mr Budge by my employer and by a maid.
[00:12:53] A valet, the male servant responsible for getting the master of the house changed, would be referred to by his employer simply by his surname, “Budge”.
[00:13:04] Lower servants, on the other hand, would typically be called by their first name, “Alastair”, no surname, just the first name.
[00:13:14] But in larger kind of Downton Abbey style houses it would be rare for these lower servants to ever have any real interaction with their employers; all communication would go through the butler or the housekeeper, so they wouldn’t really be “called” anything, and often their employers wouldn’t even know their names.
[00:13:36] There are even some stories of servants who would be forced to turn around and face the wall when their employer came into a room.
[00:13:46] Now, we heard at the start that working as a servant was the most common job in Britain at the turn of the last century, but this is now no longer the case, there are around 65,000 at the last count.
[00:14:02] What happened?
[00:14:03] Well, a few things.
[00:14:06] Firstly, much like both supply and demand contributed to the boom in domestic service, there were both supply and demand factors that caused it to plummet.
[00:14:18] On the supply side, better employment opportunities meant that people, especially young women, finally had alternatives.
[00:14:28] Starting during the First World War, as women took over jobs that men had traditionally done in places like factories, it started to become abundantly clear that women were just as capable as men, and did not need to be restricted to a life as a domestic servant.
[00:14:47] Secondly, millions more homes were built and home ownership became more affordable. If you remember, one of the major attractions of going into service was because you got a roof over your head. Between the First and the Second World War, home ownership in the UK increased by 400%, so fewer people needed to work as a servant to have a stable place to live.
[00:15:17] And on the demand side, well, in the post-war period, people could now buy machines to do many of the jobs that servants used to do.
[00:15:28] Washing the dishes, cutting the grass, washing your clothes, there were machines that did this simply by pressing a button.
[00:15:37] What’s more, the tax rate increased considerably, reaching 90% in the post-war period, meaning that household budgets for things like servants were limited.
[00:15:49] So, while in 1901 a doctor or an accountant might have employed one or two household servants without it really having any impact on their disposable income, a person doing the same job 50 years later would have considerably less disposable income because they paid a lot more in tax.
[00:16:11] What's more, the amount that they would have to pay for a live-in servant would be considerably higher because of the alternative career options.
[00:16:21] And, as a nail in the coffin for domestic service, there were now plenty of machines that could do the majority of the tasks that a servant would have done anyway at a fraction of the cost.
[00:16:34] The result is the situation that exists today, and that you could argue existed 300 but not 100 years ago: yes, there still are live-in domestic servants, but they are restricted to the very wealthiest in society.
[00:16:52] For most people, the existence of a live-in servant is something that they will experience only in books and on TV, so I want to finish this episode and this mini-series with a few personal recommendations.
[00:17:07] The most obvious one is one I’ve mentioned already and that you have probably seen: Downton Abbey, which is a TV series that follows the life of an aristocratic British family and their servants, but significantly glorifies the servant life and makes it look not so bad at all.
[00:17:26] There’s also Gosford Park, which is a great murder mystery comedy film from 2001.
[00:17:33] But my absolute favourite, which goes a lot deeper into the master-servant relationship and deals with the thorny problem of this complicated hierarchy, both between master-servant and within the servant ranks, as well as the decline of the domestic servant, is called The Remains of the Day.
[00:17:54] It is a book by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was made into a brilliant film starring Anthony Hopkins, so I’d definitely recommend that one if you are looking for something a little more meaty and interesting. Again, the name, both of the book and the film, is The Remains of the Day.
[00:18:14] So, there we have it, the life of British servants, a hundred-or-so year period in British history when literally millions of people, mostly young women, spent their formative teenage years living with a family that was not their own, attending to their every wish, and being paid almost nothing in return.
[00:18:37] When thought about this way, it’s no bad thing that this life is something that most people will only experience on screen.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on British servants, and with that comes the end of this mini-series exploring British social class.
[00:18:57] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the British nobility and how you become a lord or lady.
[00:19:05] And in part two, we talked about Eton College, the most exclusive school in the country.
[00:19:12] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:19:18] What do you think about the British class system? How is it different from the system in your country?
[00:19:25] Was having domestic servants as widespread in your country as it was in Britain?
[00:19:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:34] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of this three-part mini-series about British Social Class, and more specifically, high society.
[00:00:30] As a reminder, in case you missed them, in part one we talked about the British nobility, how you become a Lord or Lady, and what that actually means in practice.
[00:00:41] In part two, we looked at the most exclusive school in Britain, Eton College. We learned about its history, the countless famous people who have been there, and how it is evolving to the kind of elite that it caters to.
[00:00:56] And in today’s episode, part three, we are going to be talking about a different part of society altogether, but one without which the British aristocracy could not have survived: the servant class.
[00:01:09] We’ll look at the size of the servant class, what life was like as a servant, the hierarchy of different types of servants, and what caused the decline of household service in Britain.
[00:01:21] OK then, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Lives of British Servants
[00:01:28] If I was to ask you, what do you think the most popular job in Britain was just over 100 years ago, what would you say?
[00:01:38] Perhaps you might think “factory worker” or “coal miner”, maybe you'd say “soldier” or “farmer”.
[00:01:47] It might surprise you to find out that the most popular job in terms of the number of people involved in this profession was none of these; in the year 1901 it was household service, it was working in the house of someone else as a servant.
[00:02:07] Now, wealthy people paying less wealthy people to do things for them has been going on for as long as time, and it is far from being unique to Britain.
[00:02:18] But the scale at which this kind of “household service” existed in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century is quite staggering.
[00:02:30] In 1901, the population of the UK was just under 37,000,000.
[00:02:38] Of this, a whopping 1.5 million so 4% of the total population, worked as domestic servants.
[00:02:49] And if we dig deeper still, and look at young women in particular, the numbers are even more astonishing.
[00:02:58] In 1891, more than one million women aged between 15 and 20 were domestic servants.
[00:03:07] That means that one out of every three young women at the time was living and working as a domestic servant.
[00:03:16] It is astounding to think about, and in this episode we are going to break down exactly who these people were, what they did, and what life was like as a servant.
[00:03:28] So, first, why were there so many people working as domestic servants?
[00:03:34] Well, there were a few factors, both on the supply and the demand side, as an economist might put it.
[00:03:42] On the supply side, there had been wide scale migration from the countryside to the towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution. There was an abundance of labour, people who could work as servants.
[00:03:57] And a lack of other employment opportunities meant that working as a domestic servant was more attractive than you might think.
[00:04:07] This was particularly true for women, for whom other employment opportunities were very limited.
[00:04:15] As a woman, you could work in a factory or in some kind of cottage industry if you were lucky, and if you came from a wealthier family perhaps you could secure yourself a job as a governess or a teacher, but there were really very few respectable careers a young woman could follow.
[00:04:36] Going into household service was seen as a good “stopgap” choice for a young woman with few other prospects, it was something you could do before you got married and started a family of your own.
[00:04:50] Another reason was that housing was expensive, fewer than 10% of people in the UK owned their own home, so the prospect of being a live-in servant and being provided with free accommodation along with your job, well you can understand the appeal.
[00:05:09] And in terms of reasons on the demand side, just as the industrial revolution and economic development had brought people from the fields into the cities, it had created a new professional class, people with a disposable income, people with money to spend.
[00:05:28] These people didn’t want to deal with the boredom and drudgery of doing things like cooking, cleaning and making the bed, so they would hire people to do it for them.
[00:05:40] This is an important point to emphasise, and goes against what many people think.
[00:05:46] See, when you imagine “household servants”, you might think of a house like the one in the TV series Downton Abbey, a huge stately home with a fleet of servants polishing the silver and mopping the floors.
[00:06:01] Of course, some servants did find themselves in this kind of a situation, but many more found themselves waiting not on Lords and Ladies in vast country manors, but on comparatively modest middle or upper middle class British households, households supported by a doctor or teacher’s income, not the income from a huge countryside estate.
[00:06:26] You can see this from the percentage of households in the country that employed some form of domestic servant. It is staggering, and goes from less than 10% at the start of the 19th century right up to an estimated 25-30% of all households by the start of the 20th century.
[00:06:49] In some areas of the country, it was even higher, with 40-50% of wealthier areas of the country employing at least one household servant.
[00:07:01] It really was a lot more common than many people realise.
[00:07:06] Now, let’s move on to talk about the lives of these servants.
[00:07:11] Of course, given the sheer number of people employed in domestic service and the large variety of households in which they worked, there was a smorgasbord of different experiences, and it is easy to generalise.
[00:07:25] The one generalisation that we can confidently make is that life was worse for female servants than for male.
[00:07:34] The pay was lower, job security was lower, there was the constant threat of your male employer making unwelcome advances towards you, you falling pregnant and being cast out on the street.
[00:07:49] And the actual day-to-day of the job was, in most cases, much harder for women than for men.
[00:07:57] Especially in smaller households where there was only one servant, this woman, or in fact girl in most cases, she would be expected to do absolutely everything from dawn to dusk and be paid a pittance in return.
[00:08:15] Cleaning, cooking, washing the dishes, washing clothes, mending clothes, shopping, making the beds, polishing the glasses, making fires, setting the table, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was a never-ending cycle of domestic tasks that would need to be repeated as soon as they were completed.
[00:08:36] This kind of domestic servant would typically have worked 7 days a week, starting work at something like 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finishing until 10 or 11 in the evening.
[00:08:50] And the pay varied, but was extremely low.
[00:08:55] The official British government census put it at £16 a year in 1901 for a general housemaid, which is around €1,900 a year in today’s money.
[00:09:11] As a point of comparison, a typical salary for a “professional” man at the time could have been anywhere from £200 to £1,000, so you can see how comparatively affordable it was to hire someone as a full-time servant for £16 a year.
[00:09:32] Now, where the lives of servants gets a little more interesting, and a little more uniquely British, is in the great stately homes of British aristocrats. Think Downton Abbey or Brideshead Revisited, with all kinds of servants to attend to their master’s every whim and wish.
[00:09:53] There was, of course, the same hard work, monotonous back-breaking labour as in smaller houses, but there was an additional element to it: the hierarchy of the servant class.
[00:10:08] Much like the master of the house was above the servant, there was a very clear pecking order between domestic servants.
[00:10:18] At the top was the butler, who was always male, and the housekeeper, who was always female.
[00:10:26] The butler’s job was to organise the male servants, footmen, drivers, and so on. He was also responsible for the general quality of service, making sure that the silver was polished, the cutlery was set in the right way, the correct wines had been ordered, and he would also be constantly available if his master had a request.
[00:10:49] The housekeeper, on the other hand, was in charge of all of the female staff, the maids and cooking staff, making sure the beds were made, the corridors were swept, fires were made, and so on.
[00:11:03] Becoming a butler or housekeeper was not easy, and would require decades of hard work to move up the ladder.
[00:11:13] Even if you got there, you still had to work long hours for only slightly better pay.
[00:11:20] And if you became a butler or a housekeeper, it was your duty to make sure that everyone below you knew their place, they knew where they sat in the pecking order.
[00:11:33] There were several ways in which this hierarchy was constantly reinforced.
[00:11:39] For starters, at mealtimes, the servants would always eat together. The butler would be seated at one end of the table and the housekeeper at the other.
[00:11:51] Servants would sit in order of seniority, with the most senior male servant sat next to the butler, so everyone knew where he or she stood in the pecking order.
[00:12:03] Nobody would be able to start eating until the butler had sat down, and there are even stories of some households where all the servants would have to stop eating if the butler put down his knife and fork.
[00:12:17] And this is only one example. You might remember from part one that there are different ways to refer to a Duke, an Earl, and different types of nobles. Well, the same differences existed between the domestic servants.
[00:12:34] Both the butler and the housekeeper would be called Mr or Mrs Last Name, both by their employer and other servants.
[00:12:43] So, my name is Alastair Budge, if I was a butler I would be called Mr Budge by my employer and by a maid.
[00:12:53] A valet, the male servant responsible for getting the master of the house changed, would be referred to by his employer simply by his surname, “Budge”.
[00:13:04] Lower servants, on the other hand, would typically be called by their first name, “Alastair”, no surname, just the first name.
[00:13:14] But in larger kind of Downton Abbey style houses it would be rare for these lower servants to ever have any real interaction with their employers; all communication would go through the butler or the housekeeper, so they wouldn’t really be “called” anything, and often their employers wouldn’t even know their names.
[00:13:36] There are even some stories of servants who would be forced to turn around and face the wall when their employer came into a room.
[00:13:46] Now, we heard at the start that working as a servant was the most common job in Britain at the turn of the last century, but this is now no longer the case, there are around 65,000 at the last count.
[00:14:02] What happened?
[00:14:03] Well, a few things.
[00:14:06] Firstly, much like both supply and demand contributed to the boom in domestic service, there were both supply and demand factors that caused it to plummet.
[00:14:18] On the supply side, better employment opportunities meant that people, especially young women, finally had alternatives.
[00:14:28] Starting during the First World War, as women took over jobs that men had traditionally done in places like factories, it started to become abundantly clear that women were just as capable as men, and did not need to be restricted to a life as a domestic servant.
[00:14:47] Secondly, millions more homes were built and home ownership became more affordable. If you remember, one of the major attractions of going into service was because you got a roof over your head. Between the First and the Second World War, home ownership in the UK increased by 400%, so fewer people needed to work as a servant to have a stable place to live.
[00:15:17] And on the demand side, well, in the post-war period, people could now buy machines to do many of the jobs that servants used to do.
[00:15:28] Washing the dishes, cutting the grass, washing your clothes, there were machines that did this simply by pressing a button.
[00:15:37] What’s more, the tax rate increased considerably, reaching 90% in the post-war period, meaning that household budgets for things like servants were limited.
[00:15:49] So, while in 1901 a doctor or an accountant might have employed one or two household servants without it really having any impact on their disposable income, a person doing the same job 50 years later would have considerably less disposable income because they paid a lot more in tax.
[00:16:11] What's more, the amount that they would have to pay for a live-in servant would be considerably higher because of the alternative career options.
[00:16:21] And, as a nail in the coffin for domestic service, there were now plenty of machines that could do the majority of the tasks that a servant would have done anyway at a fraction of the cost.
[00:16:34] The result is the situation that exists today, and that you could argue existed 300 but not 100 years ago: yes, there still are live-in domestic servants, but they are restricted to the very wealthiest in society.
[00:16:52] For most people, the existence of a live-in servant is something that they will experience only in books and on TV, so I want to finish this episode and this mini-series with a few personal recommendations.
[00:17:07] The most obvious one is one I’ve mentioned already and that you have probably seen: Downton Abbey, which is a TV series that follows the life of an aristocratic British family and their servants, but significantly glorifies the servant life and makes it look not so bad at all.
[00:17:26] There’s also Gosford Park, which is a great murder mystery comedy film from 2001.
[00:17:33] But my absolute favourite, which goes a lot deeper into the master-servant relationship and deals with the thorny problem of this complicated hierarchy, both between master-servant and within the servant ranks, as well as the decline of the domestic servant, is called The Remains of the Day.
[00:17:54] It is a book by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was made into a brilliant film starring Anthony Hopkins, so I’d definitely recommend that one if you are looking for something a little more meaty and interesting. Again, the name, both of the book and the film, is The Remains of the Day.
[00:18:14] So, there we have it, the life of British servants, a hundred-or-so year period in British history when literally millions of people, mostly young women, spent their formative teenage years living with a family that was not their own, attending to their every wish, and being paid almost nothing in return.
[00:18:37] When thought about this way, it’s no bad thing that this life is something that most people will only experience on screen.
[00:18:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on British servants, and with that comes the end of this mini-series exploring British social class.
[00:18:57] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the British nobility and how you become a lord or lady.
[00:19:05] And in part two, we talked about Eton College, the most exclusive school in the country.
[00:19:12] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:19:18] What do you think about the British class system? How is it different from the system in your country?
[00:19:25] Was having domestic servants as widespread in your country as it was in Britain?
[00:19:30] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:34] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:41] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
