Introduction

IT’S DIFFICULT FOR people to realize the social and financial changes that have taken place since the 1920s – it seems such a short time ago.

When I tell people what it was like when I went into service in 1923, at first they say, ‘How awful for you.’ Then it suddenly strikes them that it wasn’t very long ago, and they think you’re exaggerating, that it wasn’t like that, that either you had very bad places to work in or that you’ve made it out to be a lot worse than it was. But in fact there have been vast changes since then.

I think what people fail to understand is that although the status of domestic servants has really risen so dramatically, the real reason for the change is the scarcity of domestic servants nowadays. If they were ten a penny as they used to be they’d be treated in the same way as we were. This goes for other workers, too. I don’t think people have changed; it’s events that have altered their attitudes.

When I went into service the very name ‘service’ meant that you’d said goodbye to all personal freedom – the same as it did for men in the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. Like domestic service, these services used to be filled from the ranks of the uneducated and untrained.

Then there were few jobs open to ill-educated girls. Chances for women were coming, I know, but they were for women who’d had an education – whose parents had either been enlightened and had seen that they were educated as well as the boys, or for women who from the moment that they could get hold of their own money had made sure that they educated themselves.

Most of the people I worked for sprang from the middle classes who, when they acquired wealth and rose in the world, adopted all the social standards of the upper classes.

And the upper classes regarded the state of the poor as inevitable. We were always with them and so long as you didn’t attempt to rise in the world – so long as you knew the state you’d been called to – they were even prepared to be gracious and benevolent towards you. So long as they knew that you knew that they were being gracious and benevolent.

I think that they had the same feelings about servants then as wealthy people have now about their possessions – their homes, their cars and all the gadgets that make life worth living. These things need looking after. They don’t want them to wear out too quickly, but if they go wrong or become tiresome they can be replaced.

Servants were not real people with minds and feelings. They were possessions.

Since my book Below Stairs was published I’ve had a number of letters from people who were irate that I wrote in the way I did. They said that their mothers always looked after the servants. A number of older people have said also that they thought about their servants’ comfort and saw that they had a nice room.

Yes, I agree; perhaps they did. But they still looked on their servants as their possessions. The servants must never have a life of their own. The employers were entitled to say to their servants, ‘Oh, what did you do on your day off? Where did you go? Who did you go out with?’ And to expect a truthful reply. But if you were to say to them, ‘And what did you do when you were out last night? Did you have a good evening?’ they would have been horrified. You couldn’t ask such a thing; you had no right.

When I was reading history for my ‘A’ levels recently I discovered that even Disraeli, and he was supposed to have been a Liberal, said that there were two nations. And he meant the rich and the poor.

Well there were two nations when I was fifteen, and now I’m sixty-one I still think that there are two nations in this country, even though things are so much better. Just give us a period of high unemployment and you’ll see what I mean.

Another great change that there’s been is in fashions. When I first went into domestic service, there weren’t the facilities that there are now to buy cheap, but good, ready-made clothes.

Now a lot of the well-to-do openly boast that they buy things from Marks & Spencer or shops like that – buy them ready-made. It’s quite the done thing nowadays. But it wasn’t the done thing in those days.

Then they had everything made for them. We used to make our own (and they looked like it), because bought ready-made clothes were so expensive.

Of course we used to try to copy the styles of the rich and the people that we worked for. And I often used to think that it was we servants who really changed the fashions. Because as soon as we copied or made anything that looked remotely like what they were wearing upstairs they would discard it and get their dressmaker to design something else. Probably we flattered ourselves; perhaps they would have discarded it in any case.

Mind you, this gap that there was was also something to do with being young, because no matter whatever your status in life then, whether you were working, middle, or upper class, no young people were of any importance.

We were never known as teenagers. We were just young – too young to know anything about business or politics or even living our own lives. All we were expected to do was to keep quiet, take advice and let those who had experience and know-how get on with it.

It didn’t just apply to the lower classes. It applied to the well-to-do just the same. Young people’s opinions were not consulted and weren’t expected to be given either without being asked for. They were learning, and when you’re learning you can’t advise because you don’t know. And that applied to all strata of society.

Nowadays everything’s geared to young people. Vast sums are made by firms like the clothing, cosmetics, records, and magazine manufacturers. They make fortunes out of young people. So if these firms are basing their commercial structure on supplying young people with the material things – and if the Government is spending great sums in providing the facilities and opportunities for education – then we shouldn’t be surprised at the type of young people that results.

It’s no good us crying ‘enough, enough’ when youth gets up and tells us how they want to see the world run. Because we’ve made them like that. We’ve made them important.

But when I look back on my life – although the working-class people of my generation had to work hard for a living – I don’t envy young people at all today.

It may seem that they’ve got everything – material things and freedom to live their lives in the way they want to – but they’ve also got the urge and the anxiety of wanting to improve the world; as for us, we only wanted to improve ourselves.

Margaret Powell, 1970