In 1891, estimates suggested that one in three women worked in domestic service. This applied to those between the ages of fifteen and twenty, country-wide. They were employed as kitchen maids and maids-of-all work (sometimes referred to as ‘slaveys’). They were paid between £6 and £12 a year. ‘Tweenies’, maids who helped other domestics, moving between floors as and when they were needed, were paid even less.
Women servants were cheap and generally more easily dominated and kept in their place. Unlike their male counterparts, they were paid less and typically not employed in rich households. However, the close proximity of mistresses and maids often led to friction and tension. This was especially the case when a mistress’s expectations were high, and the maid was overworked.
Lynn Advertiser, 10 February 1886
Mistreatment of servants was commonplace. A strict hierarchy below stairs ensured that they stayed on the lowest rung of that society. They faced instant dismissal for breaking house rules. If a maid displeased her mistress, her box (containing her all important work clothes, undergarments and possibly a bible and personal items from her home) might be retained. Without a box and a written reference, it was extremely difficult to find another position.
Norfolk & Norwich Assizes,
Bury & Norwich Post, 11 August 1868
In addition to severe scoldings, young maids were vulnerable to being sexually exploited. Giving birth to illegitimate babies was punishable by law. Too often, in desperation, they disposed of their babies in outside privies, ditches and on dung-heaps. When these ‘crimes’ were discovered, they were tried in the courts. Although some were treated with mercy see below, others were imprisoned or hanged.
Norfolk & Norwich Assizes,
Bury & Norwich Post, 11 August 1868
World War One and the societal changes which followed weakened women’s economic reliance on ‘going into service’. This is reflected in the following recollection from Norfolk WI’s 1971 publication Within Living Memory which forms part of our group’s Community History Archive:
A Tweeny’s Recollections, Blakeny 1920
“Like all the girls leaving our villages I started work as a ‘between-maid’. We went straight from childhood to adults in those days. I left school on the 28th of July and started work at the doctor’s house in Blakeny the very next day, on my 14th birthday. No holiday for me.
For weeks I helped my mother make my uniform which consisted of two print dresses, six morning aprons, four caps, four afternoon aprons, two blue check aprons, one hessian apron for scrubbing and a black alpaca afternoon dress. My wages were to be £1 a month which had to be taken home to help pay for my outfit.
Looking back what a pathetic little figure, I must have looked going to my first place. Long coat, hair pinned up in a bun, and my brown paper parcel under my arm containing my uniform. I arrived at the house at 3 o’clock and without more ado was told to change into uniform and was then given my first task to prepare the nursery tea. Laying the table under the eagle eye of Nannie was nerve-racking. I felt she was waiting to pounce on my slightest mistake.
Kitchen tea came next which meant half an hour’s break. At 6 o’clock we started to prepare dinner. I had to prepare vegetables and be general dogs’ body to the cook until twenty past seven when it was “wash your hands, change your apron, straighten your cap and help the parlour maid in the dining-room.” My dislike of parlour work started from that moment. To me it seemed ridiculous for two maids to wait on four people who could easily help themselves.
Dinner over, washing up done there were beds to be turned down, candlesticks and matches to be left in the front hall. In the kitchen oatmeal had to be brought to the boil and put overnight in the hay box [a box filled with was used as insulation to keep food warm]. Supper came next consisting of bread and cheese and cocoa. At 10 o’clock we went to bed, I wished myself back home.
Up at 6 o’clock next morning to light the kitchen range which had to be blackleaded and polished till it shone. The plates to be cleaned with emery paper. Then there were the surgery floors to be scrubbed.
Morning tea had to be taken upstairs at a quarter to eight. Breakfast for the kitchen was at 8 o’clock, for the dining room and nursery at 8.30. After breakfast I had to help the housemaid until noon, then help cook, prepare lunch and afterwards wash up and clean the kitchen floor. The rest of the afternoon was taken up helping the parlour maid clean brass and silver. Tea-time again and so ended my first twenty-four hour as a tweenie.
As time went by, I found a lighter side to service. I had known the garden boy at school as a friend of my brother’s and we had many a laugh over cups of tea on cook’s day off. Our time off was one afternoon and evening a week, every other Sunday afternoon and evening. But if we had visitors to lunch, it meant our time off started at 4 o’clock. Since I had to be in by 9 o’clock it was a short half-day.
Once we were washing all the spare china kept in a cupboard on the landing. When we had finished, the mistress being out or so we thought, we decided to have a bit of fun and ride downstairs on the trays. I went first and just as I landed at the bottom, the mistress came round the hall. I picked up my tray and fled to the kitchen, leaving the others to face the music.
I was feeling a bit rebellious one morning when the mistress said: “Child you’ve left a cobweb in the bathroom, you never look above your nose.” I answered back perky, “I must look above my nose, my eyes are above it.” This was reported to mother as being very rude and when I went home my mother gave me this advice: “If you feel justified in answering back start by saying ‘Excuse my seeming rudeness,’ then you can say what you have to.”
My dislike of parlour work grew, and the last straw came one evening when there was a dinner party for the son home from flying school. While I was holding out the vegetables, he pulled at my apron strings. He grabbed so hard that the button came off my skirt; feeling it slipping off, I put the vegetable dishes on the table and fled to the kitchen. This is the end, I thought, I will not wait at table anymore. I had to stay a year to get a reference, but on my 15th birthday I gave a month’s notice. It was a month of sheer hard work, but the thought of escaping that dining room work kept me going and during that month I found myself a place as scullery maid in the household of Lord and Lady Glamis where I could stay in the kitchen and learn to cook.”
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