‘Not fit to eat in the same room as other human beings’: spaces for eating in British servants’ autobiographies, 1900-1939

Domestic service was a female-dominated occupation and the main provider of employment for working women in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.1 In 1901, thirty-five percent of the female working population was in domestic service. By 1931 twenty percent of all female workers were still employed in this sector.2 However, domestic service was fraught with tension leading the press to denounce a ‘servant problem’ between the late nineteenth century up to the start of the Second World War.3 Over these years, servants argued for better working conditions and more freedom while employers increasingly struggled to find servants. As spaces for eating in domestic service were negotiated as part of an increasingly difficult service relationship.4 Eating in the employer’s home was a peculiar practice compared to most workers who went to the canteen, the tea shop or simply enjoyed a packed lunch outside and then went back home for their dinner. Servants’ position was at the boundary of public and private spaces: they ate in a house, but not their own; at work, but still within the domestic sphere. However, we know very little about servants’ mealtimes as historians have been over-reliant on sources written by the middle classes which passed over issues around what and where servants ate. For example, the 1916 enquiry into domestic service by the Women’s Industrial Council made little mention of servants’ meals, brushing it aside as ‘not many complaints on this head[ing]’.5 The 1919 report of the Advisory Women’s Committee on the ‘domestic service problem’ highlighted that ‘It is sometimes stated that the differentiation in the quality of the food for the dining room and that for the servants’ hall or kitchen is another class distinction which leads to a spirit of bitterness’.6 However, it did not come back to address this problem in the subsequent pages of the report and focused instead on training and work hours.  

To move beyond the romantic myths around domestic service that are perpetuated in sources written by the middle class, this article is based on an analysis of fifty-four servants’ autobiographies.7 Such sources do, of course, pose some problems. Memory is not infallible. Autobiographies are prone to error, misremembrance, and deliberate falsification. They are also written in a different context to which the events depicted occurred, and thus subject to the public discourses of that context. Authors, for example, could be trying to reach a personal equanimity with their past or attempting to please their modern audience.8 These problems, however, are not insurmountable. Selina Todd has highlighted that working-class women’s autobiography was a less established genre and thus female writers ‘cannot draw as easily upon a range of existing, strong literary devices and narrative structures that can conceal ambivalence and ambiguity.’9 Moreover, historians who work with autobiographies never just work with them. Autobiographies, like any piece of historical evidence, must be placed alongside other types of evidence, such as employers’ accounts and domestic manuals. Finally, these sources represent the only way to access the voices of a marginalized group. The alternative is hardly less problematic. For by overlooking autobiographies we are over-reliant on evidence from above and thus reproduce the power structure of domestic service that silenced them.  

To reveal the role of spaces for eating in servants’ experiences of domestic service, this article also draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and James Scott. Bourdieu shows how the upper classes distinguish themselves not purely on the basis of their economic capital but by using their economic capital to acquire cultural capital. The latter manifests itself in an acquired cultural taste, which encompasses everything from artworks to eating and that prioritizes the aesthetic over the functional.10 Bourdieu’s approach helps us to understand how employers designed their own spaces for eating and those of their servants. This article also draws on Foucault’s well-known argument that power is not defined by the individual or institution that holds it, but, rather, is an abstraction comprised in a system of rules and methods which define and control those who are subject to it.11  Conceptualizing power in these terms allows us to reflect on the role of spaces in defining servants’ inferior status at mealtimes when the employers were absent. Finally, James Scott defines everyday resistance as the actions of subaltern groups that are not as ‘dramatic and visible as rebellions’ or as other forms of collective and organised resistance, but instead are quiet and dispersed.12 This concept helps us to think about the defiance of servants against employers in their spaces for eating without over-stating the extent of servants’ rebellion.  

Servants worked in a variety of households and their relationship with their employers varied accordingly. Domestic service differed according to the wealth of employers―some struggled to employ one maid while others maintained more than they needed―and their social standards as the middle-class mistresses would have more frequent contacts with their maids than their upper-class counterparts.13 In return, different types of households had different spaces for eating for their servants. Servants’ spaces for eating in country houses and large townhouses were different to those of smaller middle-class suburban villas. The middle class is defined here, following Benjamin S. Rowntree, as the households employing at least one servant.14 Employing a servant facilitated the household access to leisure which was at the core of middle-class identities since the early nineteenth century.15 Moreover, the presence of an ‘other’ in the household helped to establish one’s middle-class status by opposition.16 This broad definition encompasses a variety of middle-class households, from well-off families to those at the margin who struggled to keep up appearances, as well as those who employed a servant as part of their business such as boarding houses.17 Therefore, within the middle class itself, servants experienced different relationships with their employers and ate in different types of spaces.  

Drawing on servants’ memoirs and the theoretical framework presented above, this article studies the location within the home, the furnishing, the light and even the smells of servants’ spaces to recreate the material experience of servants. It also examines the social symbolism that servants and employers attributed to these spaces. Finally, this article shows that servants were not passive recipients of authority. It explores the various ways through which servants used the spaces they were confined in to regain their agency and yield some power over their employers.

In the suburban villas of the middle class, there was not enough space to run an upstairs-downstairs system. Nor, generally speaking, was there enough money to employ generally more than one or two maids, which made a large servants’ hall unnecessary.37 These constraints did not mean, however, that distinctions were not enforced. While some employers ate with their servants before the First World War, during the interwar period a decrease in artisan household where servants and employers shared tasks and an increasingly rigid system of class divisions meant that most employers made their servant eat in the kitchen while the family took their meals in the dining-room. In some lower-middle-class households, employers who did not have the luxury of having a kitchen and a dining room would only allow the servant to eat after they had finished. Like the servants’ hall in mansions, these spatial divisions were implemented to underline the inferior social status of the servant compared to the employers.  

Conditions were often dreadful in the kitchens of the middle-class houses which further stigmatized servants as inferior beings. Middle-class employers increasingly struggled economically during the interwar which meant that the distinctions were often sharper between the front of the house where they strived to maintain their social status and the back rooms, especially the rooms for servants, for which there was no money left in their limited budget.38 Therefore, despite the modernization of kitchens during the interwar period, in middle-class houses, they were still often badly ventilated and smelly, with old pieces of furniture and no chairs to sit for a meal or rest.39 Ethel Beaumont described her first place as a cook-general in the 1920s where ‘the … house was exceptionally nice – for the owners. The rooms were well furnished in good taste to give the greatest possible comfort. But the kitchen – there was only a wooden table and two wooden chairs, one backless. There was no fire to sit by, merely a coke boiler and a gas-stove’.40 The lack of chairs and other furniture signaled to servants that their well-being did not matter to their employers. Moreover, many kitchens were not much bigger than ten to twelve square meters in old Victorian villas.41 Their small size made it difficult for servants to sit down to eat their meal when most of the kitchen space was occupied by cooking and washing up. However, the design of the kitchen itself was servants’ most significant issue. A cook working in London in 1918 endured conditions where ‘there is no means of fresh air, and only the smell of cooking and drains’.42 Bad smells were trapped in small kitchens due to the fact that employers feared that aerated kitchens might lead the stench to reach their own quarters.43 Therefore, the kitchen’s design created an unhealthy but also stigmatizing environment for servants: they were relegated in a fetid and over-heated underworld so that their employers could enjoy some fresh air in their nicely furnished rooms.  

Winifred Foley, a maid-of-all-work in the 1930s, recalled that,44

Eating in the ‘tiny kitchen’ on her own compared to the ‘living-room’ of the employers was a daily experience of the authority and social hierarchy in service. Winifred Foley was an educated woman who passed with success her exam to go to a secondary school at fourteen years old but had to enter domestic service after her family encountered economic difficulties. Her education meant that she was not only able to write her autobiography but that she may have wanted to write about domestic service to distinguish herself from public discourses on servants depicting them as uneducated and passive workers. Her account reminds us that not all servants accepted the hierarchy of domestic service as the servant problem grew in strength through the first half of the twentieth century. Servants were a diverse group of people, ranging from orphans coming from workhouses to rural migrants and daughters of the urban working-class, with various degrees of education and awareness of the inequalities in service.  

Winifred Foley might also have been hurt at the time by the spatial segregation because she worked for a Jewish family where she felt treated as an ‘equal’ and ‘not a servant’.45 She did housework alongside her mistress whom Winifred Foley described as ‘a bit of a Momma to me’, but she did not eat with the family.46 Her situation highlights that the spatial differentiation within the middle-class home was particularly difficult to navigate among the lower echelons of the employers’ class. Sian Pooley in her study of domestic service in Lancaster between 1880 and 1914 highlighted that most service relationships were not based on strict boundaries between the servants and the family but were interwoven by emotional and kinship links.47 Even when servants were not part of the employer’s family, links could be less formal than the accounts of ‘invisible’ domestic servants in grand upper-class households let us imagine. Lucy Delap put forward the accounts of some Edwardian lower-middle class employers like that of Mrs Dora Bucknell who thought that she was ‘democratic’ in the treatment of her maid and often worked alongside her in the house.48 During the First World War, distinctions in lower-middle-class households were even less clear-cut.49 As employers struggled to balance their budget and dealt with the daily problems of war rationing, some built closer relationships with their maid. For example, Elsie Oman worked as a maid-of-all-work for a family who ran a bed and breakfast.50 While before the war, the family had servants to run the business, during the war, the mistress and her daughter ran the business alongside Elsie and they ate their meals together in the kitchen.  

This familiarity, however, did not mean that all distinctions were abolished. For example, Mrs Bucknell’s servants ‘always ate the same food as the family’ but separately from the employers in the kitchen.51 She justified the distinction as a way ‘of giving them some respite from the family, rather than to create social distance’. Similarly, in a second household Elsie Oman worked for during the war, the mistress and her two sisters helped the maid with the cleaning and ate alongside her, but they still maintained distinctions at Christmas.52 They received their guests in the dining room while Elsie Oman had to stay in the kitchen. As a consequence, a maid might suffer from this ambiguous relationship in which she would sometimes be a companion and other time a stranger. Therefore, spaces for eating were more emotionally charged for employers and employees in lower-class households where both lived in greater physical proximity.

This article has drawn a more detailed picture of servants’ space for eating by retrieving servants’ voices. These spaces were used to underline the hierarchy between servants and employers in the household. In mansions, servants and employers were separated by what was termed the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ system which made servants mostly invisible to their employers. Despite the grandness of these houses, the servants’ halls were squalid, dark, damp, and decked out with shabby furniture, which emphasised the servants’ place at the bottom of the social hierarchy within the house. In contrast, in smaller households, the spatial division between servants and employers was often limited so that servants simply ate in dingy kitchens instead of a specific room. The lack of spatial division complicated the relationship between servants and employers as they could sometimes spend time together in the house during the day but eat their meals separately. Servants were not, however, passive recipients of authority but had some agency. In both big and small households, servants could use to their advantage the spaces that were designed to hide them by hiding in return their own acts of rebellions from the employers.  

While autobiographies might exaggerate the frequency of such transgressive acts, employers were nevertheless constantly worried about what servants were up to in the kitchens. Were they altering the meals for upstairs, receiving visitors including male ‘followers’ or even committing theft in this space that they could neither control nor see?61 Jean Hunt recalled that when she was visiting her grandmother as a child, she would stand at the top of the kitchen stairs, listening ‘to gales of laughter coming from down in the kitchen.’62 Instead of considering the upstairs-downstairs system as a tool for social distinction, Jean Hunt saw the kitchen as a strange but attractive world where maids were free to do as they wanted. Its hidden character made it an area of the house that was not under the control of Jean’s grandmother but in the hands of the maids. This recollection mystifies the downstairs of the house: it was invisible and inaccessible. Employers rarely ventured in servants’ spaces for eating, except in some lower-middle-class households, and therefore, many knew very little about them. In contrast, this article has shed light on these spaces using servants’ autobiographies. While employers and domestic manuals simply described a system of spatial segregation, servants’ accounts allow us to reconstruct the physicality of these spaces as well as their complex power dynamics. More broadly, this article has emphasized the importance of listening to the marginalized voices of servants to understand what it meant to work as a live-in domestic servant, toiling, eating and sleeping under the same roof with limited opportunity for privacy and freedom.