Authority, Dependence and Power in Accounts of Twentieth-Century Domestic Service

Abstract

In his collection, London in the Thirties, the photographer, Bill Brandt, includes a picture entitled ‘Parlourmaid and underparlourmaid ready to serve dinner’.¹ This portrays two young women, dressed in maids’ uniforms, standing by a table set with silver, crystal and flowers. The diners they will serve are not shown but we can deduce their class and status from the crystal glasses, the bone-handled cutlery, the silverware, the pictures on the walls and, of course, the servants themselves. The two women are part of the conspicuous consumption that is on display here. Positioned between the pictures and the elegant table settings, they belong to their employers as much as the tableware and pictures. Their matching uniforms, snowy white and starched, their rigid posture and their expressionless faces tell us something of, what Nigel Henderson calls, ‘the uncompromising severity of the social caste system’.² This photograph offers us a glimpse into a forgotten way of life in which one set of people not only serve the needs of another, but remain invisible ‘disappearing into darkened chambers, hurrying back to the kitchens or the courtyards, a blur on the edge of vision’.³ I look at the parlourmaids in Brandt’s photograph and I wonder what is going on behind those wooden faces, what they think, what stories they would tell, and how their sense of self is shaped by the conditions of their existence. Are they contemptuous, or deferential, hostile or filled with admiration for their employers — or a mixture of all? As Alison Light reminds us servants’ experiences, whilst more varied and different than has ever been acknowledged, have remained silent and anonymous, ‘[s]ervants form the greatest part of that already silent majority — the labouring poor — who have for so long lived in the twilight zone of historical record.