#lucy lethbridge

[thesandpiper]

Servants

Lucy Lethbridge

2013

[poniatowskaja]

There were many servants too who had not been completely bypassed by the political movements of the previous twenty years. When Winifred Foley was reprimanded by her boss for talking to one of the students when she was working as a kitchen-maid in a teacher training college, she gave in her notice and 'sang the Red Flag as loud as I dared among the clatter of the pots and pans and thought of my Dad and all the down-trodden workers of the world and nearly cried.'

Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, pp.234-5

[poniatowskaja]

For a younger generation of house-party guests, these weekends could now be a strain, especially for the newly cash-strapped. For one thing, there was the business of tipping - a minefield for those who enjoyed only a modest allowance. Because it was never done to talk about money, at the less well-off end of the upper class, where young men might even have to consider getting jobs, it was not uncommon to borrow from one servant enough to tip another. Lesley Lawrence dreaded the totting-up of substantial tips on Sunday evening. "The men's would run into pounds and except for  long stay of a week or more, ten shillings was probably usual for women to give to female servants. Single girls could get away with five shillings, and as few of us worked and most were kept pretty short by their parents, in cash though not in kind, it was sometimes difficult albeit absolutely essential, to reserve these sums. Porters and taxis might prove unexpectedly expensive, a loss at games in stakes reckoned in threepences would be disastrous, and a chauffeur instead of your host driving you to the station probably cost you your lunch on the train." According to Mrs J. E. Bratton, her uncle, who was a chauffeur in the 1920s, once lent Winston Churchill half a crown for a taxi to Blenheim Palace: "Still not repaid!"

Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, pp.196-7

[vidoetv-blog]

Vidoe.TV

Opinion Journal: Hope for Puerto Rico

Opinion Journal’s Mary Kissel and Holman Jenkins Jr. on Congress’s plan to save Puerto Rico and how Obama’s regulatory state created an opening for the Trump coalition. Plus, Trump’s healthcare reform vision, and more. Photo: Getty.

Copyright 2016, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

[alexandria1448]

Definition of hell

“Viewed as childlike, dependent, their lives entirely absorbed, by necessity, by the families they lived with, the limits and means of servants’ contentment was often completely bound by the behaviour and character of those who employed them and in whose houses they lived.”

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (2013).

[darkblueyank]

The post-war sales of landed estates drove another blow into the 'sacred trust' that had underpinned the pre-war patriarchy. Successful businessmen or war profiteers who bought country houses from impoverished gentry were often regarded with hostility and confusion by those retainers who went with the house. It was the corporate, bureaucratic officialdom of the new order that grated, 'the impersonal touch, the reluctance for a long chat, the circular letters, the raising of rents to an economic level, and especially the private investigations by secretaries and agents, which they regarded as ungentlemanly spying'.

[darkblueyank]

The spectre of the horrors of war cast such a shadow over veterans that they were often awkward and alienating presences in a bright social world. ‘All was not right with the spirit of the men who can back,’ wrote the journalist Philip Gibbs in 1920. ‘They were subject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure… Many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening.’

[alexandria1448]

Mr. Carson

"The acceptable public demeanour for the job of butler was ponderous, solemn, cautiously avuncular, with a steely discipline concealed behind a pedantic attention to correct procedure."

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (2013).