Below Stairs: Domestic Service Remembered in Dublin and Beyond, 1880-1922

By Mona Hearn

A hundred years ago sevants underpinned middle- and upper-class life in Ireland, and domestic service was the major source of employment for women before social conditions changed utterly after the First World War and labour-saving appliances took their place. Two generations on, the domestic servant is an almost extinct species. This book examines an area of life which has never been adequately reflected in Irish literature, labour or social history. The author of this pioneering study bases her work upon interview sources, government reports, royal commissions and census returns, as well as household accounts, inventories, family papers, contemporary newspapers, diaries and reminiscences. She discloses and interprets the little-known world of life below, and occasionally above, stairs: the conditions and lifestyles of its inhabitants; their recruitment, training and duties; the wages paid, clothes worn and food eaten; the freedoms conceded, the privations endured. Below Stairs, Domestic Service Remembered in Dublin and Beyond, 1880-1922, affords unique views of the lives of the ordinary and extraordinary, of rulers and the ruled. It prepares the ground for interpretations of a forgotten age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Release date: Nov 4, 1993
• ISBN: 9781843514510

Book preview

BELOW STAIRS

DOMESTIC SERVICE REMEMBERED

IN DUBLIN AND BEYOND

1880–1922

MONA HEARN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

TO MY MOTHER

— Contents —

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

One Masters and Servants

Two Entering Service

Three Conditions of Service

Four Life in Irish Country Houses

Five A Career in Service

Six Decline in Service

Appendix

Index

Plates

Copyright

— Introduction —

One hundred years ago domestic servants were a familiar part of everyday life in Ireland; today they have virtually disappeared. The prospect of ‘managing’ without a servant was unthinkable to middle-class householders in the early 1900s. Yet, within a couple of generations, that change occurred, and had a profound effect on the social life of the country. Now the domestic servant is but a fading memory to the older generations.

In the last century and the early years of this century most young girls, and some boys, from the lower social classes went straight from school to service, sometimes the very next day. They joined the ranks of what was by far the single largest occupational group for women; in 1881 48 per cent of employed women in Ireland were in the domestic class. There was a steady decrease in the number of domestic servants from then on, but domestic service was only surpassed by manufacturing industry in 1911. It was still the second largest employer of women with 125,783 female indoor servants.¹ Indeed any account of the employment of women in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries must afford a prominent place to domestic service.

The importance of domestic service as an occupation which not only affected the whole life of those engaged in it but also impinged, in an intimate and special way, on the lives of those employing servants, has never been adequately reflected in literature, legislation, labour or social history in this country. The main reason for this neglect was probably lack of knowledge about domestic service and certainly an absence of a comprehensive view of the industry. The work place of the servant was the middle or upper-class home, and the home in Ireland and Great Britain was a private haven into which no outside interference was tolerated or indeed contemplated. Significantly, a bill: ‘to regulate the hours of work, meal times and accommodation of domestic servants and to provide for the periodical inspection of their kitchen and sleeping quarters’ which was presented to parliament in 1911, never became law.² In 1918, when there was widespread disquiet about the scarcity of domestic servants, the Ministry of Reconstruction in England set up a Women’s Advisory Committee on the Domestic Service Problem. The committee made certain recommendations on the organization of domestic service which were unacceptable to the Marchioness of Londonderry, who found herself unable to sign the report. She said: ‘I regard any possibility of the introduction into the conditions of domestic service of the type of relations now obtaining between employers and workers in industrial life as extremely undesirable and liable to react in a disastrous manner on the whole foundation of home life.’³

The vast majority of Irish servants were children of small farmers, estate workers, the semi-skilled and the unskilled. The girls, unlike the daughters of the middle and upper-classes, were expected to earn their living until they got married. The lack of alternative employment in Ireland meant that they had a very limited choice; in fact the choice facing them was usually service or emigration. Those who emigrated very often entered service in their adoptive country. Because service was usually the only choice available it became the traditional haven for women from rural Ireland and from many towns and cities. This in turn added its own momentum, so that positions as servants were sought automatically without consideration of alternatives which might, in some cases, particularly at the end of the period, have in fact existed, in factories, shops or offices. Mothers and fathers anxiously looked for ‘situations’ for their daughters, and to a lesser extent for their sons, as the time for leaving school approached. Help was sought from neighbours, shopkeepers, teachers, clergy and roundsmen, someone was bound to know someone who was looking for ‘a little girl to help with the housework’. These first places were often poorly paid but were regarded as an opportunity to learn and perhaps save a little money for the uniform needed for ‘gentlemen’s places’. One former servant who left school at eleven years of age, went to work for a farmer to mind a child who had a cleft palate. She was treated as one of the family, called the farmer and his wife ‘daddy and mammy’, but got no pay. She then went to another farm near home where she had board and lodging and ‘they dressed her’, but she had no regular wage; she got ‘a couple of pounds now and again’. It was only after these two experiences that she got a ‘proper job’ as a scullery maid in a ‘big’ house in County Meath.⁴

Domestic service appealed to parents, especially as a career for daughters, as it offered board and lodging as well as wages, and was an easy way to make the transition from father’s house to the world of work. It was also acceptable to the ideology of the time which considered the home – albeit someone else’s home – the natural place for a girl or woman: the work was what any woman would do in her own home. It was also the obvious destiny for those without families of their own – those from orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories. Finally, a fate, approved by parents and endorsed by society, was accepted by girls, over much of the period, as their natural role in life. Having accepted service, most girls were prepared to be happy and contented with their lot.

Taking up a ‘situation’ as it was called for an indoor servant was a more traumatic step than taking up a position in most other industries. It involved a complete break with home, friends and a familiar way of life; it entailed living in a dependent and subordinate position in the home of people who were not only strangers, but who were also of a different social class with different habits, values and lifestyle. Many humorous stories are told to illustrate the difficulties experienced by mistresses when untrained girls were exposed to a way of life of which they were totally ignorant. There are few accounts which highlight how harrowing and bewildering an experience this must have been for young girls. Former servants said that they were very lonely; one, from the country, said that in her first place in Dublin she ‘cried for a week’.⁵ The Women’s Advisory Committee reported that young girls under sixteen years of age should not enter service because ‘it is unsuitable for a girl to live in other people’s houses, as she has not reached the age at which she is capable of readily adapting herself to new conditions’.⁶

The employer’s household embraced the servants’ whole life. Absolute loyalty to master and mistress was expected. Apart from some limited free time, the servant was always available to see to the wants and comfort of his employer. The total control of servant by master, which was in fact reinforced by legislation, meant that the domestic servant had little discretion over the day-to-day conduct of his life. To what extent domestic servants may have adopted the outlook and values of their employers and may have become estranged from those of their own social class is a fascinating question but one which is extremely difficult to answer. It is one of the reasons sometimes advanced to explain why trade unionism failed in its efforts to attract domestic servants. Samuel and Sarah Adams, who had worked as servants for fifty years, in their book The Complete Servant, advised young servants that:

as their mode of living will be greatly altered, if not wholly changed, so must be their minds and manners. They should endeavour to discard every low habit and way of thinking, if such they have; and as there will be set before them, by those of superior rank, and cultivated understanding, the best modes of conduct and the most approved behaviour, they will wisely take advantage of the opportunity which Providence fortunately presents to them to cultivate their minds and improve their principles.⁷

The usefulness of the experience gained by domestic servants in helping them afterwards to run their own homes is often given as an advantage of domestic service. The contrary view is also expressed, namely that the style and standard of living in the employer’s house made it difficult for the domestic servant to adjust to the harsh reality of a working-class home and, perhaps, a subsistence wage.

Only a minority of servants in Ireland worked in country houses, yet this world has shaped our image of life below stairs. The reality for the vast majority of servants was very different. Country houses, however, provided the model for the staffing of much more humble homes. The dress, duties, conditions of service and treatment of servants in these houses were adapted by the middle classes to suit their own more modest households, and elements were clearly discernible even in the one-servant home.

Notes

1 Census of Ireland, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911.

2 Pamela Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (London & New York 1975), p.159.

3 Ministry of reconstruction. Report of the Women’s Advisory Committee on the domestic service problem, together with reports by sub-committees on training, machinery of distribution, organization and conditions, p.31 [Cmd 67], HC1919, XXIX, 37.

4 Former servant at Tara to author, 12 April 1980.

5 Former servant, Farrell Street, Kells, to author, 12 March 1980.

6 Report of domestic service sub-committee on training, p.11–17.

7 Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant (Lewes 1989), p.20.

— One —

MASTERS AND SERVANTS

Employers ranged from the nobility and gentry employing up to nineteen or twenty servants, to members of the lower middle classes who had that ‘little girl’ to help with the housework. By far the largest number of employers had one general servant. A typical example was C.L. Doyle who was a sorting clerk in the GPO in 1911. He lived with his wife and two sons in a small house, 157 St Helen’s Terrace, Clonliffe Road. He was forty-eight years of age and was earning approximately £146 a year. He and his wife kept a boarder which gave him a higher income and he was able to employ a young girl aged eighteen from County Meath.¹ Most of Mr Doyle’s neighbours could not afford a servant and in fact a colleague of his, James Blake, also a sorting clerk, living ten doors away at number 167, had no servant.² He had a family of eight children and could obviously not afford to rear a large family and keep a servant. A government report in 1899 on the wages of domestic servants drew attention to this: ‘the larger the family, the less can the head afford to pay until some of the younger members become self-supporting’.³ Charles Booth, a sociologist who investigated the life of the poor about the turn of the century, also found that less affluent homes with few members were more likely to have servants than larger households.⁴

A minimum salary of about £150 a year was required to afford a servant.⁵ In 1912 a select committee of the commons investigated the wages and conditions of employment of post-office clerks in Ireland; the clerks earned between £104 and £114 a year and were described by the committee as having ‘a moderate standard of living’. The annual cost of rent, food and fuel for a clerk’s family in an Irish provincial town was reckoned to be £103.10.0–£108.10.0. Those advocating higher wages pointed out that this did not allow for the education of children. Neither they nor the committee mentioned the employment of a servant;⁶ it was taken for granted that this was not an expense occurred by those earning £110–£120 a year. When it is considered that keeping a servant cost at least £25 a year, it is evident that an income of £150 was necessary before a family could afford one. This meant that a skilled man who earned about a £100 a year could not employ a servant; national teachers could not afford a servant, neither could a policeman. Of course some people with very low incomes hired a young girl at a small wage and made savings by reducing the quantity and quality of the food supplied.

Many people, especially from the lower classes, earning much more than £150 a year, and some with earnings from boarders and financial help available from other working family members did not have servants. While a certain income was necessary before a servant could be employed, if this was available, the middle class was much more likely to have a servant than the lower middle class. Social class, which was determined mainly by the position and salary of the head of household, was the single most important factor affecting the employment of servants. Upper-class and most middle-class families had servants; at this period the style of living of these classes required the employment of servants. An article in The Irish Homestead in 1915 discussed the responsibilities of a middle-class man earning £400 a year. These were seen as:

obligation to live in a better house, provide domestic help, clothe wife and children, as well as the wage earner himself according to the standard of his social status: educate (sometimes prolonged and expensively) his children, pay higher rates and taxes, and altogether incur a greater lease of life responsibilities than may fairly be said to be incurred by the average manual workers.⁷

Wives and daughters of the better off members of society were not expected to do their own housekeeping; daughters were usually not taught housekeeping skills but they were expected – it is not clear how – to acquire the ability to ‘manage’ servants. A former mistress said that when she got married in 1913, at the age of twenty-eight, she was totally unable to train a maid as she knew nothing about housekeeping. When she went to a registry office to interview a maid she was so ignorant about the procedure that the servant, probably taking pity on her, told her the questions she should be asking.⁸

In Dublin in 1911 98 per cent of the upper-class, most of the middle class (71 per cent) and 23 per cent of the lower middle class had servants. The two lowest classes, the semi-skilled and the unskilled, did not generally keep servants.⁹

TABLE 1

Percentage of different social classes employing one and more servants in 1911 (number of employers in brackets)

As might be expected, the higher the social class the more servants employed. Some of the higher professional class, living for example in Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares, had large staffs of six or seven servants. Mr Justice John Ross, then a high court judge, who lived with his wife and grown-up daughter at 66 Fitzwilliam Square in 1911, had six servants: a butler, footman, cook, two housemaids and a chauffeur.¹⁰ Sir Charles Cameron, who in 1911 was medical superintendent officer of health and held other public health positions for which he was paid £1000 a year, lived at 51 Pembroke Road, and employed four servant.¹¹

The middle and upper-classes lived in large houses and this increased their need for servants. Houses in 1911 were often poorly planned and were usually devoid of labour-saving appliances. The style of living of the upper-classes was elaborate and friends were entertained lavishly: this standard of living was absolutely dependent on the availability of servants. Thus these people usually employed servants as a matter of course, they may have debated about the number of servants they should have, but that was the only consideration: servants were a requirement of their station in life. If they had children, they employed more servants, generally specialist servants such as nursery maids, nurses and governesses.

On the other hand, the employment of a servant by the lower middle class and indeed some of the middle class was in response to a need – such as help with children. Members of the lower middle class were more likely to have a servant if they had a young family – the number having a servant at all was, of course, low. A young girl was employed to mind the children or do the housework and help with the children. If the family was large, they did not have a servant, the older children looked after the younger ones. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many families had adult female relations living with them; women rarely had a home of their own until they married or perhaps inherited their parents’ home. In lower middle-class homes these women, if they did not work outside the home, obviously helped with the housework and made the employment of servants unnecessary. The middle