Maids and Mistresses (2007), BBC Radio 4 Extra, 1 Feb. 2015

Maids and Mistresses (2007)
Perf. Christina Hardyment
BBC Radio 4 Extra 1 Feb. 2014

A Radio 4 Archive Hour production from 2007 might seem an odd subject to include on Radio Drama Reviews, but the factual material in this documentary – culled from a variety of sources, including the BBC Archives, oral history collections as well as specially-commissioned interviews – offered a salutary corrective to the representations of life below stairs in the middle of the last century.

From series like Upstairs Downstairs, and more recently Downton Abbey we have become accustomed to believe that the servants' life was hard but basically happy: taken off the streets at a young age, they were given bed and board and well looked-after, so long as they fulfilled their professional responsibilities. In truth, as many of the interviewees recalled, domestic servants in the inter-war years were often unwillingly pressed into service by parents who had little or no understanding of their offspring's desires. Money had to be made; and domestic service was the ideal means to achieve this. Young girls were plucked out of school as young as fourteen and made to live and work in cold, often hostile environments for employers who ruthlessly exploited them. Listening to the testimonies of such women – now elderly – was an uncomfortable experience, as they recalled how they had to get up at the crack of dawn, take pitchers of hot water upstairs to their employers' bedrooms, and wait until the employers had decided to take a bath. The rest of their days would be filled with menial tasks such as scrubbing floors or cleaning the silver.

Some of their employers were generous enough, but the servants were expected to blend into the background, speaking only when they were spoken to. They were even forbidden to hand anything directly over; anything they brought for their employers had to be placed on tables, as if the servants were somehow unclean. No one had the temerity to protest for fear of losing their jobs in a depressed economy.

The situation was only alleviated by the coming of the Second World War, when servants were no longer required and women could go out to work to help support the war effort. Such work increased their sense of self-worth, to such an extent that when the war ended, they avoided returning to domestic service altogether. By the early Sixties there were very few parlor-maids, housemaids, and other menials left.

Maids and Mistresses offered some uncomfortable truths about the level of exploitation in a so-called 'democratic' society that liked to differentiate itself from the so-called 'repressive' regimes in Germany or Soviet Russia, especially during the Twenties and Thirties. Life below stairs might have been celebrated in television programs, but it was far from being as ideal as we might like to believe.

Laurence Raw
9 Feb. 2015