“Hats off to Lethbridge, for so touchingly and comprehensively chronicling those lives that history, like the snootiest of employers, has neglected for so long”
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

No aspect of the twentieth-century home has spoken quite so eloquently to the traditional English idea of the ordered life as the keeping of servants. From the ostentatious luxury of the Edwardian rich to a middle-class housewife eking out a modest budget in order to keep a house-parlourmaid, the servant was the marker of social success.

Millions of unseen, unheard domestic staff toiled in kitchens, parlours and country houses at the turn of the century, stirring eggs so that the yolks would be perfectly centralised, ironing shoelaces and blacking grates. The average maid carried an estimated three tons of water up and down stairs every week.

The stories of below-stairs workers are the untold history of the last century, their fortunes a barometer of the twilight years of the landed estates, the development of new technologies, the changing place of both men and women and the radical changes in everyday life over the last 100 years. From the quintessential liveried servant of 1900 to the self-service of the 1970s, these are stories of aspirations, ideals, hope and disappointment across the classes.

Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed, this book offers a fresh and intimate insight into this invisible population, their voices coming off the page to tell us what their lives were really like. It is the most authoritative and comprehensive account yet of those who worked behind the scenes of twentieth century Britain.
 

BBC Meet the Author: Lucy Lethbridge on the life of servants

GUARDIAN BOOKS - review

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