Tracing Your Servant Ancestors by Michelle Higgs

Author:Michelle Higgs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2012-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Postcard of a group of servants with their pet dog, inscribed ‘Best love, from yours ever Molly xxxx Just a friendly group of us all, my best Pall [sic] beside me’, circa 1905. Author’s collection

Clothing

For a female servant, print dresses for morning work and black dresses for afternoon wear were the unofficial uniform, teamed with white caps and plain white or striped aprons. If she worked in the kitchen, the same dress was worn for the morning and afternoon. However, finding the money to pay for such clothing to start a job in service could be extremely difficult, and might mean a burden for her parents or taking a temporary job to save up for them.

Margaret Thomas was one of five children and her father died when she was 4. At the age of 14, she started looking after a baby and doing light jobs, then took a place cleaning knives and boots. In The Day Before Yesterday, she recalled: ‘Eventually I saved enough and got my uniform: print dresses, morning aprons, black dress, afternoon aprons, stiff collars, and cuffs, all packed into a tin trunk, and set off to my first real job. I was just fifteen.’

In Below Stairs, Margaret Powell remembered how in the 1920s her mother had to borrow £2 to pay for the uniform her daughter needed for her first place as kitchen-maid at a large house in Hove, Sussex. She required ‘three print dresses, blue or green; four white aprons with bibs, and four caps; stockings, and black strapped shoes’. As Margaret recalled, ‘Apart from the uniform my own clothes were very few indeed. I was dressed up in a blouse and skirt and a coat that had belonged to my grandmother.’

Being given a dress length was a standard Christmas present for female servants, but it was usually for work, not out of hours and therefore not necessarily a pattern they would have chosen for themselves. In any case, unless they were skilled in dressmaking, they still had to find the money to have the dress made up for them. Even if they could make their own clothes, there was very little free time in which to do it. Clothing might also be given when a master or mistress died and the family went into mourning.

The wearing of caps and bonnets, and even hairstyles, was very strictly regulated, giving rise to much disagreement between employer and servant. Female servants were expected to dress modestly but not to wear clothing above their station. As Anne Boulton advised her housemaid at Thornhill in the 1820s: ‘Let your dress be always neat and clean, but never fine’. (MS 3782/14/83/21, Birmingham Archives and Heritage Service)

Employers could, and did, regulate the amount of decoration and the material their servants’ clothes were made from, and this extended to their off-duty hours. In the 1880s, a large number of newspaper advertisements for servants’ positions started to specify ‘No fringes’. This was a reference to a particular style of hair, the objection presumably

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