Category Archives: Britain

by | 25 November 2016 · 2:58 pm

The Psychology of the Servant Problem

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 2733-2769:

The author Ronald Blythe has suggested that in the years after the end of the First World War, a terrible shame and guilt crept over people at the sight of ‘unemployed ex-servicemen and their families, these hordes of shabby young men and women made spiritless, drab and ugly by broken promises, malnutrition and loss of hope’. It produced, Blythe went on, in the middle classes, a ‘contempt for working-class people of a kind quite unknown before the war began’….

Helen Campbell, American author of Household Economics, in 1907 defined one of the central paradoxes of the servant-master relationship, certainly as it was played out in the small home: ‘The condition of domestic servitude allows only the development of a certain degree of ability, not sufficient to perform our complex domestic industries. So there we are. When we find a person able to carry on modern household industries, that person will not be our servant. And when we find a person willing to be our servant, that person is unable to carry on modern household industries.’ Most people preferred not to look closely at the relationship, with its awkwardness and its responsibilities. One woman writer in the early twenties, however, was brave enough to address it full on, and with a refreshing determination to look its contradictions straight in the eye. Under the pseudonym Dion Fortune, Violet Firth went on to became a theosophist, occultist, psychic, a founder of the esoteric society, ‘The Fraternity of the Inner Light’, and the author of now long-forgotten works such as The Goat-Foot God and The Cosmic Doctrine. In the years immediately after the war, however, Firth was also a student of psychoanalysis, practising (under her own name) as a lay psychotherapist in London.

In 1925, she published a remarkable short polemic entitled The Psychology of the Servant Problem, which would be a work of radicalism in any age. Drawing on her years of war work as a gardener for a big country house, Firth examined what lay behind the intractable and inexplicable problem of what domestic service meant to those who had to perform it. She recognised, crucially, that what made service so difficult to define, and therefore to legislate for, was the hazy nature of the relationships in the home. ‘Because I was also a servant and had to come in at the back door, I got to know the minds and feelings of those girls I met during those three years,’ wrote Firth, pointing out that the disinclination of girls to become maids was not a matter only of wages but of something deeper: ‘being a servant is very painful to one’s self-respect and no amount of money will compensate that injury to anyone who has independence of spirit’.

Being a servant was an ‘identity’, not just a job. The Psychology of the Servant Problem was a call to the renewal of education for all women, of all classes, for domestic work to be regarded without sentimentality but with the same respect accorded to any other form of work. Firth actually looked forward to a time ‘when the home-help might freely be able to choose a husband from the family she serves’. The ‘servant problem’, as Firth saw it, was not one simply of demand outstripping supply, or of a failure in the ‘quality’ of the servants available, but of deeply held attitudes, of unexamined habits masquerading as unbreachable social certainties.

Violet Firth was far ahead of her time, grasping the knotty contradictions of domestic labour that were to characterise the theme during the rest of the century. How are women to enjoy the fruits of education and liberation if they are not relieved of the burden of domestic work in the person of another woman? When Frances Marshall, intellectual and Bloomsbury set member, set up home with Ralph Partridge in their first flat in Bloomsbury in the late 1920s, she employed a maid, a ‘frightened, middle-aged spinster’, who came to ‘do for us’: poor shadowy Mabel, one of the lonely civilian casualties of war. Frances took care not to tell her that she and Ralph were unmarried lest her respectable sensibilities be shocked. ‘Who bought the bacon, the butter, the fish? I suspect it was our faithful Mabel. I’ve no recollection of doing it myself.’

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, labor

by | 16 November 2016 · 9:46 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: lych gate, barley-sugar chimney, bloater

Here are some more English words new to me that I found in Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013).

Kindle Loc. 2975:

Designed by a happy lucky-dip [grab bag] of architectural elements taken from all periods – a bit of Queen Anne, some Tudor beams, a stained-glass window over the door, a lych-gate [originally the covered gate into a churchyard (litchfield, from Old English lic ‘corpse’)], a novelty turret or a barley-sugar [corkscrew-shaped (or Solomonic)] chimney – still represented the oldest English ideal of all: the image of the cottage, nestling secure within its own small piece of land.

Kindle Loc. 3019:

Other alternative residential setups included hostels, such as the one where young Bronwen Morris worked as a kitchen-maid, helping to produce three daily meals for ‘young businesswomen’, just off Sloane Square, London. Bronwen was kept busy cleaning the kitchen and peeling vegetables and was later upgraded to the post of cook, producing three large hot meals a day for seventy-two young women who came back for lunch: ‘bacon, bloaters [whole smoked herring] or kippers [split smoked herring] and boiled eggs for breakfast, rabbit stew or rabbit pie for lunch and dinner, or pork, beef with vegetables – also always steam or rice puddings and suet puds‘. By the 1920s there was a proliferation of these residences for girls working as stenographers, typists or clerks or generally what E. M. Forster’s anxious Mrs Honeychurch called ‘messing with typewriters and latchkeys’.

Leave a comment

Filed under anglosphere, Britain, food, language

by | 16 November 2016 · 9:54 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Kedgeree, Koshary

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 3187:

For Helen Mildmay White, whose family lived at Flete House, breakfast was, without fail, ‘bacon and eggs and when there were visitors, four different kinds of eggs and bacon, sausages, kidneys and always a kedgeree, cold ham and cold tongue and scones with butter and Devonshire cream.’

I read this passage a few days after having had my first—very pleasant—taste of an Egyptian dish spelled “koshary” at a restaurant named for that very dish in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. It turns out that British (Anglo-Indian) kedgeree and Egyptian kushari are from the same Sanskrit source, transliterated kichdi in English Wikipedia. Its basis is rice with legumes, like rice and beans in so many other cultures, but the added ingredients vary greatly around the world. A relatively recent addition to the Egyptian version is macaroni.

Leave a comment

Filed under anglosphere, Britain, food, language, South Asia

by | 14 November 2016 · 7:45 am

Air-Raid Shelter Segregation, WW2

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 4030-4038:

While most estates changed absolutely and for ever in the course of the Second World War, a few managed to continue as if nothing had happened. In one large country house, air-raid arrangements in the spacious network of cellars were organised along strict lines of precedence: ‘First cellar: for the elderly owner and her guests; Wilton carpet, upholstered armchairs, occasional tables, a ration of best bitter chocolate, a bottle of expensive brandy, petit-beurre biscuits, thermos jugs, packs of cards, a Chinese lacqueur screen concealing an eighteenth-century commode. Second cellar: for female servants; wicker-work armchairs, an oak table, an old phonograph (complete with horn), a half-bottle of cheap brandy, plain biscuits, tea-making apparatus, a Japanese paper screen concealing sanitary accommodation of a bedroom type. Third cellar: for chauffeur, boot-boy, gardeners and stray neighbours; a wooden bench, wooden table, an electric bell connected with first cellar in case owner should wish to summon masculine moral support; water biscuits. No brandy, no screen.’

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, labor, war

by | 14 November 2016 · 7:36 am

Internment of Foreign Domestics, 1940

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 3986-4009:

There was public hostility to the influx of foreign domestics, however, from many quarters. The National Union of Domestic Workers in 1938 protested that ‘foreign nationals were making the bad conditions in domestic employment even worse’. In the build-up to war, with tension mounting, the refugees began, to many people, to look like the very embodiment of the enemy within – and what is more, they were within the British home itself. Viscount Elibank told the House of Lords that women were well known to be much more effective spies than men: ‘Today this country is ridden by domestic servants of alien origin . . . And many of them are not trustworthy.’ No matter that of the 75,000 Germans living in Britain, 60,000 by this time were Jewish. The Daily Mail led the panic, calling for internment of enemy aliens. ‘We are nicely honeycombed with little cells of potential betrayal,’ warned the paper in April 1939; the ‘paltriest kitchen-maid with German connections . . . is a menace to the safety of the country.’

The government’s internment policy was a muddle. At first categorised as low-threat C-grade aliens, domestics were not included in the first group of foreign nationals to be interned. In May 1940, however, with the tabloids ratcheting up the panic, C-class men were shunted up to B status and herded into holding camps to await transportation to the government’s vast internment camp on the Isle of Man. When the Schotts moved into a more congenial home from the freezing house where they had been working as unpaid domestics, their previous employer informed the police that they were in the country illegally. Sidney was immediately interned and Elsa too was locked up, first in Winson Green Prison and then Holloway, for much of the time in solitary confinement; they were finally sent to the camp for married refugees on the Isle of Man. Women categorised as B-class, particularly domestics working in coastal areas, were forbidden to have in their possession maps, bicycles or vehicles of any kind. Bronka Schneider and her husband Joseph, stranded in the remote Scottish highlands, found the long walks that had been their chief pleasure were now forbidden. They were bitterly hurt when, although they had been given a C-class categorisation, their employers had locks fitted to all the doors, leaving them more or less trapped inside the servants’ quarters.

The panic over the alien in the kitchen turned out to be short-lived, at least in part because the British housewife found herself prepared to take the risk of harbouring a Nazi spy if it meant help with the housework. By the start of 1941, of the 3,000 unemployed refugee women who had registered with the Domestic Bureau in London in November 1940, all but 500 were re-employed. The housewife was to be thwarted however as few of them returned to domestic service. Educated people with languages and clerical skills could now be more productively employed in war work and were much in demand. Mrs Smith, for example, went to work on the German-language newspaper that was run for refugees by the Foreign Office.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Germany, labor, migration, nationalism, war

by | 13 November 2016 · 11:01 am

Roles of British Servants in India

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 1718-1740:

The servant in India conducted his work with a commitment that even in Britain would have been hard to command. The duties, for example, of the khitmagar, or bearer, might include standing behind his master’s chair at mealtimes and stirring his tea, cutting his meat – everything short of actually eating the food for him. By the mid-1920s, even the most self-important pukka sahib found this kind of behaviour a little embarrassing.

Her servants were generally the first people from whom the Raj housewife, if she were curious, learned about India. There were the minutely calibrated differences in religious observance and caste to begin with. Intricate sectarian distinctions meant that each job came with its own religious significance to be carefully respected. The cook (always a man) would not touch pork if he were a Muslim or beef if he were a Hindu. The khitmagar, who had the task of managing the other servants, would not undertake anything but his own tasks; even moving an article of furniture would be beneath him. The work of sweeping, scrubbing or emptying chamberpots was done only by Untouchables; the work of looking after dogs by yet another caste – and often a young child. Untouchables would not handle dead animals, the disposal of which required the services of another group altogether, and the Goddens remembered that ‘if a crow fell dead into our garden or one of our guinea-pigs died, Nitai, our sweeper could not pick up or touch the corpse; a boy of a special sect had to be called in from the bazaar; he put on his best shirt of marigold-coloured silk to do this grisly work’.

Most servants were men, with the exception of the ayah, who was the household nanny, but the cook (khansama) would often have helping him in the kitchen a tunny-ketch, a woman permitted to feed the poultry, grind the spices and cook the rice, attend to the lamps and clean the master’s boots, work considered beneath the dignity of the cook. A musalchi helped with the washing-up, a kind of scullion, described in 1890 by Flora Annie Steel: ‘bearing, as his badge of office, a greasy swab of rag tied to a bit of bamboo’. In most large households, a derzi, or tailor, endlessly stitching at clothes he was mending or copying, might be found sitting on the verandah; then there was the dhobi, who had the never-ending labour of the family’s laundry (and most people changed at least twice a day in the heat, and then for dinner). In those places where there were no telephones, chuprassis were employed to send messages and acted as informal bodyguards, always on the lookout for people going in and out. And because many rural areas had no electricity and therefore no electric fans, there was also the punkah-wallah whose sole duty was to pull the rope that operated the fan, or punkah, day and night to create a cooling breeze. The night punkah-wallah could do it by fixing a rope to a foot and could perform the movement while almost asleep.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, labor, language, religion, South Asia

by | 4 October 2016 · 8:32 am

English Villages as Imaginary Edens, c. 1900

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 1392-1423:

Many social reformers of the turn of the twentieth century, Dr Barnardo among them, abhorred the demoralising and alienating effects of industrialisation and found a solution in the ideal of the healing hierarchies of a rural paradise lost, the essence of England. If housekeeping inculcated the discipline of thrift and the battle against waste, mass production was the very agent of superfluity and excess. The pre-industrial utopia was enshrined in another kind of social ecology, and at its centre was the mutual dependency that had existed between the classes in the imagined manorial village of the past. ‘The village is the expression of a small corporate life,’ wrote Sir Raymond Unwin, the architect of the garden cities of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb, ‘in which all the different units are personally in touch with each other, conscious of and frankly accepting their relations, and on the whole content with them.’

In the new garden cities, lych gates, mullions and gables jostled together in harmonious asymmetry, in contrast to the hastily erected tenement sprawls of industrial cities. Alfred Lyttelton MP hailed the garden city as the model of a community in which ‘the squire and the parson and those who clustered round the parsonage or the mansion lived together harmoniously with no sign of tyranny or patronage on one side, or of servility or loss of independence on the other’. The garden city was a vision of a very English Eden, both radical and reactionary, espousing the ‘practical socialism’, the ‘muscular Christianity’, of its founders, yet at its heart deeply paternalist: it was a heaven of many levels, where public service flourished at the top only if nourished by the wholesome craftsmanship and service of those at the bottom.

In fact, although the English landed estate still exercised considerable rural influence, the English village was already more often than not a hybrid community of cottagers, landlords and incomers. Three miles south of Farnham, Surrey, is the scrubby heathland landscape of a small community known as the Bourne, the subject of George Sturt’s 1912 book Change in the Village. Sturt was a wheelwright by trade and his book describes vividly a world in which the traditional communal economy had been replaced by a commercial one. This had brought, wrote Sturt, a creeping loss of self-respect in the villagers: ‘inferiority had come into their lives’. The Bourne was not an ideal village as the garden-city reformers might have imagined one: there was no benevolent manor, no village green for dancing round a maypole; there was little indication in the Bourne of the happy hierarchies so beloved of the celebrators of ‘Merrie England’. The old crafts and skills of the past had been gradually replaced by piecework for minimum wages which left the villagers too exhausted for the traditional rural festivities that well-meaning outsiders wished them to enjoy. They were resolutely unsympathetic to the ‘self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropist’, wrote Sturt.

The greatest visible change in the Bourne during the early years of the twentieth century was the proliferation of suburban villas that had sprung up on the edge of the village. In the new economy of rural life, it was very often the new villa on which village livelihoods now depended. These middle-class households had gardens that needed tending and ‘even the cheaper villas . . . need their cheap drudges’. Other traditional sources of income were increasingly insecure: machinery was gradually replacing labourers; large laundries were replacing washerwomen working at home. In villages like the Bourne, where there was no big-house tradition, poorly paid and unprotected drudge work was the only domestic service available. Sturt tells of a struggling farm labourer whose daughter paid half the family’s rent from her earnings as a servant girl in a villa. To the argument that working in a middle-class home raised the servant’s aspirations, Sturt had a brisk retort: ‘The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead of setting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind and body, has sidetracked them – has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may shirk these duties and be cultured.’

Some dynamics haven’t changed much over the last hundred years.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, industry, labor

by | 4 October 2016 · 8:10 am

Alternatives to Domestic Service, 1800s

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 1362-91:

Elizabeth Banks was inspired to undertake her 1892 investigation into service to find an answer to the question that vexed the English middle classes: why was it that many girls would do almost anything, even if it meant living off ‘porridge in the morning and watercress in the evening with no midday meal’, rather than undertake the work of cleaning someone else’s home? She visited a young seamstress living in terrible conditions – ‘the unwomanly rags, the crust of bread, the straw and the broken chair’ – in a lodging-house in Camberwell on eighteen pence a week. When the dismayed Elizabeth offered to find her a job as a housemaid, ‘with a nice clean bedroom, plenty to eat, print dresses in the morning, black stuff in the afternoon, with white caps and aprons and collars and cuffs’, she was astounded by the girl’s outrage at the suggestion: ‘“Did you come only to insult me?” she demanded, stamping her feet. “I go out to service! I wear caps and aprons, those badges of slavery! No, thank you, I prefer to keep my liberty and be independent.”’

The servant-employing classes struggled to grasp why so many girls did not appear to be grateful for the opportunity to get their feet under a more comfortable table than the one they had come from. Was not the home a haven both moral and practical, a place of safety? The nineteenth century had been haunted by the spectre of the lost child of the Industrial Revolution: the chimney sweep, the crossing-sweeper, the pickpocket, the match-seller, the five-year-old child who had gone blind sorting buttons in a sweatshop. In the popular imagination they were perceived as orphaned (even if this were not in fact the case), adrift, alone and prematurely aged by malnutrition, poverty and abandonment. The social reformer Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 descriptions of the ‘rookeries’ or London tenements in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London almost single-handedly sparked an age of public health reform. Chadwick’s picture of a world of struggle, suffering and hopelessness was entirely cut off from the comfortable family world of the prosperous; nineteenth-century London, he wrote, was a labyrinth of filthy box-like slums, leading one from the other and ‘reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases rising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions’.

According to Henry Mayhew, in 1868–9 there were 17,000 known tramps in England and Wales and 17 per cent of them were under sixteen. In 1889, of the 192,000 registered inmates of workhouses, 54,000 were under sixteen. Dr Thomas Barnardo, the most celebrated of all Victorian philanthropists and a fiery street preacher, was moved to set up his first home for children when he discovered eleven young boys, barely clothed, sleeping along an iron gutter open to the elements. The annual accounts of Dr Barnardo’s children’s homes contain fearful catalogues of the ailments suffered by those picked up on the streets and given refuge: rickets, knock-knees, goitre, spinal paralysis, deaf and dumbness; and lung diseases like consumption, bronchitis, pneumonia and asthma, which were the legacy of the dust inhaled while working long hours in factories. In 1906, Edith, a five-year-old girl, ‘nobody’s child’, was found by Thomas Barnardo wandering the streets apparently completely unwanted – absolutely nothing at all could be discovered of her origins or parentage. Another, a crippled boy of ten, was referred to Barnardo’s after the boy’s mother, a rubbish-picker, was burned to death by an upturned paraffin lamp.

Efforts were made to contain these wandering, vagrant children by the institution of industrial schools, but the focus of the schools was largely penal and the pastoral work of caring for ‘waifs and strays’ was left to private charities and individual philanthropic endeavours. By 1878, in London alone, there were fifty philanthropic societies dedicated to the welfare of children.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, disease, economics, labor

by | 3 October 2016 · 6:06 pm

High-class Distrust of Labor-saving Innovations

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 162-196:

The most basic technological amenities were not seriously to take root in the majority of English country houses until well after the First World War, and sometimes beyond the Second. In fact the more labour-intensive the house was seen to be, the more it was seen as upholding the values of the old world order. Although there were some significant changes made to English houses in the late nineteenth century, human effort was on the whole considered vastly preferable to modern amenities. Houseguests shivered in the cold of country houses where, recalled Lady Cynthia Asquith, ‘you perambulated long, icy passages in search of the nearest bathroom – if there was one’. Labour was cheap: the servant problem was a problem for the cash-strapped, not the rich. At Beech Hill Park, a vast Victorian house in Epping Forest, there was a hall entirely covered in mosaic that had to be washed with milk by hand every week by five maids; yet there was no telephone in Beech Hill and it was lit entirely by candles until the late 1940s.

A general distrust for new technologies percolated through the classes. Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, wondered why he should install a hot water system in his London house when he could always employ two or three girls to carry the bath water up and down stairs as required. Too much newness became regarded as vulgar: Mrs Loftie, author of books of advice on interior design, warned against gas, a form of lighting which had once been embraced by the fashionable but by the early twentieth century had become too popular and was now associated with trade showrooms and other iniquities. ‘Nothing can compete with the gasolier [gaslight chandelier] in tawdry deformity,’ she cautioned.

In 1912, the Illuminating Engineer expressed the view that gas was a ‘middle-class luxury. It never invaded the marble halls of the West End; and of course, the poor could not get it. It was admitted to the rich man’s kitchens and domestic offices, and its attractions beckoned the workman to his only club, the corner pub. As a domestic light in the fullest sense of the word, it was almost as sure a sign of respectability as the keeping of a gig.’ In grand houses, gas lamps were generally confined to the servants’ hall, where they enabled the staff to work till late at night; gas was considered too smelly and too damaging to antique furniture to be used in other parts of the house. The inimitable patina of age became central to the national idea of Englishness, and to this idea, new technology was often considered positively threatening. The American economist Thorstein Veblen noted in 1892 how the attraction of old-fashioned beeswax candles to illuminate evening dinner parties was suddenly revealed when gas and electric lighting became widely available to the middle classes. The reason was said to be the flattering rosy glow that candles cast, but behind it lay a snobbery about industrial mass production. The lady of a house in Wigmore Street was typical: her new maid, Elizabeth Banks, reported in 1891 that there were gas fittings but her mistress declined to use them, preferring to use candles that her maid had to clean up afterwards. ‘In the halls, on the stairs and in every room of the house, from the kitchen to the fifth floor, candle grease was liberally sprinkled, and my brown paper and flat iron were in constant demand.’

The stateliest homes still relied on lamp men, whose job for generations had been to patrol the corridors of English country houses, lighting and tending the oil lamps or candles that were the only source of light. Lamp men were retainers of the old sort, associated with homes that had no need of flashy modern accoutrements that needed only the turn of a switch. Trimming, cleaning and maintaining the lamps was an arduous daily job: at Erddig in Wales, the Yorkes had forty oil lamps requiring constant attendance, for a dirty lamp created clouds of soot. ‘An Old Servant’, the author of an anonymous little memoir written in the First World War, described ‘strings of soot hanging from the ceiling all over the room; everything was thick with greasy soot’ when a lamp was inadequately cleaned.15 At Badminton House, seat of the Duke of Beaufort, the lamp man was totally blind and felt his way expertly about the corridors – and was still doing so in the 1920s. At Belvoir Castle there were at least three lamp and candle men who laboured continuously at snuffing wicks, filling lamps and cleaning and de-waxing glass – a full-time job. ‘Gas was despised, I forget why – vulgar I think,’ was how Lady Diana Cooper remembered it.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, energy, labor

by | 3 October 2016 · 3:58 pm

Professionalizing Nursemaids, latter 1800s

From Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, by Lucy Lethbridge (Norton, 2013), Kindle Loc. 687-705:

Mrs Panton, who took the brisk view that a new baby is ‘a profound nuisance to its relations at the very first’, recommended outsourcing childcare to professionals at the earliest opportunity. Working-class women, almost certainly mothers themselves (by the end of the nineteenth century it was estimated that the average working-class married woman aged forty had borne between seven and fifteen children) had for generations been the wet-nurses and nursemaids to yet more generations of children. But as the urban middle-class home began to seal itself off from the world of the poor during the nineteenth century, these women became viewed as less than suitable as primary child-rearers. The enormous expansion in the number of toiling little nursemaids, children themselves, who worked in the middle-class home, were testament to the growing distance between the daily life of middle-class parents and their children: there were 5,937 nursemaids employed in 1851; by 1871 the number had risen to 75,491. But nursemaids were the servants of the nannies; and nannies of a more professional type became increasingly desirable, qualifications beyond childminding being sought after.

The establishment in 1892 of the Norland Institute raised the status of their nursery nurse and nanny to the level of educational mentor and moral guide. The Institute’s first principal, Isabel Sharman, observing that ‘nowhere but in England does the child live such a separate and distinct nursery life’, looked to the teachings of the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel to inject some helpful educational play into the rigid routines of the English child. Recruited among girls not quite academic enough to become teachers, Norland students were always to be considered, at the insistence of the Institute’s founder Mrs Emily Ward, ‘gentlewomen’. They would not eat with the servants and were instructed that on arrival in a new home they should place their silver hairbrushes ostentatiously on their chest of drawers to make evident their superiority to the servants’ hall. Norland nurses did not clean, wipe, launder or sweep: their concern was solely the tending of their charges’ moral and psychological development.* Nonetheless, the work clearly crossed into domestic labour, without this being specific, and Nurse Christine Tisdall in 1895 received a glowing reference from an employer in Edinburgh who praised her abilities ‘to perform the duties of a servant in the spirit of a lady and without causing friction in the household’.

* Norland nurses were also responsible, in 1907, for the first crèche for working class children, enabling working women, mainly from the laundry industry, to leave their children all day in professional care. The first crèche was in Hammersmith, London, at the reasonable cost to their mothers of four pence a child or seven pence for two. When they opened a second in nearby Acton, they had 2,436 attendances in six months.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, education, labor