Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  These were households whose servants actually lived on the premises, in their own quarters ‘below stairs’, over stables or garages, and in attics. A far greater number of families was served by ‘maids’ and charwomen who hired themselves out at an hourly or weekly rate. This varied considerably according to district, the age of the worker, and the amount of unemployment at the time. A shilling an hour was considered very generous indeed. Sixpence or eightpence was more commonly offered. Many young and comparatively inexperienced girls could be found willing to do a whole week’s housework for as little as four or five shillings. There was an influx into the relatively prosperous South East of girls whose families in depressed industrial areas were only too thankful to have one less mouth to feed. They worked as mothers’ helps, runners of errands and general skivvies in return for their keep and a little pocket money.

  Male casual labour was plentiful and cheap. Men called from door to door in the suburbs offering to dig gardens, mow lawns or do any other jobs that could be found or devised. They mostly were honest, if increasingly wretched men, and the woman who peered apprehensively at the latest in the never-ending stream of doorstep petitioners was generally a kindly enough person, embarrassed by the distress and lost dignity of others. But she was also instinctively wary of strangers, having read and heard terrible stories about tramps and gypsies. Itinerant odd-job men therefore encountered a good deal of hostility and needed to keep the price of their labour low enough to counter it. Some had to be content with payment in kind – perhaps a cup of tea and a cast-off coat, in return for half a day’s digging.

  It might be supposed that those people who benefited from the existence of a large pool of cheap labour were grateful for the advantage that even a modest regular salary conferred in terms of the availability of domestic help. Never before had so many enjoyed the social cachet of being able to drop references to ‘the servants’ or, at least ‘the maid’. But their minds seem not to have been easy. If they had been, one might expect to find less evidence in their favourite escapist literature of a preoccupation with servant-master relationships. Why were detective stories populated with quite so many butlers and footmen and gardeners and cooks and chambermaids? They were providers of testimony, admittedly, with which to feed the plot. Servants were always closely questioned by the police or private investigator. They tended, by reason of long hours and closely supervised duties, to be natural discoverers of bodies. They noticed other things as well, including some curious aspects of the private lives of their employers and the unorthodox behaviour of house guests. And yet, as writers in a later, more economical epoch were to demonstrate, witness to such matters could equally well be borne by a very much smaller domestic staff, or even by the suspects themselves. Explanation of those hosts of menials must lie elsewhere than in plotting strategy.

  Press, cinema and theatre, no less than popular literature were pervaded by supposedly upper-class norms. At one time, there were so many plays with the curtain rising to show a parlourmaid pottering around the stage that even London’s undiscriminating audiences began to suffer a sense of déjà-vu. Actors and actresses delivered their lines in the theatre and later in Britain’s first terrible talking films in a standardized combination of gush and drawl that was meant to sound like conversation in society drawing-rooms. Newspapers slavishly reported every detail of the most trivial perambulations of anybody with a title, while in every doctor’s and dentist’s waiting-room in the country there was a Tatler-Sphere-Sketch-Bystander roll-call of that section of the population engaged in permanent attendance at point-to-point meetings and hunt balls. Very white, ethereal females with tasteful gauze neckerchiefs and treble-barrelled names were reverently featured in advertisements for Pond’s face creams. They all looked like members of the Usher family, on loan from the vault. Then there were the Best People’s goings-on in public. Their involvement in night-club raids, their stunts for charity, their bouts of hooliganism on such occasions as Boat Race night, were reported in newspapers in a tone of cheery approbation very different from the comment aroused forty years later by violence in another quarter.

  The true reason for all this obsessive preoccupation with the top layer of the class structure was almost certainly anxiety. People who thought of themselves as middle-class believed that they had nothing to gain from social change and a great many things to lose. As they worried, in their traditional way, about ‘times’ being unsettled, they began first to entertain an exaggerated estimate of their own advantages, then to identify them with the interests of the ruling class (delusions of grandeur are detectable at this stage) and finally to see working class people as envious, unreasonable and vicious, but too stupid, fortunately, to constitute a real menace in any political sense.

  Not even in the great days of Victorian certitude had the ‘lower orders’ been treated with such contempt as they received between demobilization after the first world war and the requirement of new levies for the second. In the literature of entertainment, many writers made no attempt to portray working people save as cringing menials or ill-educated buffoons. It is almost impossible to find a crime novel of the period in which opportunity is not taken to make fun of ‘common’ ways of talking. Even Freeman Wills Crofts, one of the least spiteful of authors, felt constrained occasionally to use the outrageous pseudo-Cockney that thriller writers had evolved as a standard mode of indicating working class speech.

  ‘But lor, guv’nor, it’s easy for lydies as wot ’as lots o’ money to be pleasant. W’y shouldn’t they be?’

  Homely philosophy, sans aspirates.

  And here, conveyed in the same mythical argot by Agatha Christie, is the grief of a female domestic on losing her employer:

  ‘There ain’t a many like her,’ sobbed Alice when the train had finally departed. ‘I’m sure that when Charlie went back on me with that girl from the Dairy, nobody could have been kinder than Miss Grey was, and though particular about the brasses and the dust, she was always one to notice when you’d give a thing an extra rub. Cut myself in little pieces for her, I would any day. A real lady, that’s what I call her.’

  (The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928)

  Alices abounded in crime fiction. They were undersized, had chronic sniffs, and were very easily moved to tears. They frequently broke things and were remarkably obtuse as witnesses. We know what Alices looked like, for they were pictured, week in week out, in Punch cartoons: comical little drabs whose malapropisms and physical clumsiness must have struck the readers of that risible journal as most droll. It seems not to have occurred to them that physical underdevelopment, constant colds, confusion and awkwardness might have been due to living in a wretched home and going short of food and sleep. Such a reflection would have been sordid and there were enough unpleasant things in life without imagining more. Pleasant fancies, on the other hand, were quite in order, as was this speculation about the elderly butler in The Moorcroft Manor Mystery:

  There was something remotely aristocratic about the man. It was not expressed so much in the manner of his speech as in the general atmosphere of him. Most butlers … were rather like that. Perhaps it was their constant contact with gentility, through which they unconsciously absorbed the mental ether of higher spheres, that was responsible … A ghost of a smile flitted across the old man’s face. ‘A good butler, sir, is never out of a situation for long,’ he replied, with quiet confidence.

  Being ‘in service’ was clearly a way of life, even after the great war which had rooted 400,000 servants out of their kitchens, pantries, sewing-rooms, nurseries, stables and gardeners’ cottages. Lynn Brock’s The Deductions of Colonel Gore, a detective story of the mid-1920s, provides interesting evidence of the servant-mistress relationship as it still existed less than half a century ago.

  ‘Flora was my name then, sir, though I had to change it to Florence afterwards, because of ladies I’ve been with not thinking Flora suitable to my station … I’m leaving today, sir, with my wages or without the
m, and my box is packed and ready to go with me … I’m going at eight o’clock, sir, soon as some of my things as were with the washer-woman come back, if you’ll excuse me mentioning them, sir.’

  This passage is shocking in its implication of a body-and-soul subservience. The woman lacked a right to the most elementary possession of all, her own name. Her one freedom – and that was subject to the possible loss of whatever wages were owing – was to pack her box and depart. The reason for her leaving, incidentally, was nothing to do with the terms of her employment; she simply disapproved of certain marital irregularities in the household. Servants did tend to have a more highly developed or at least a more rigid moral sense than their employers (note the apology for mentioning personal laundry).

  Dignity, of the kind we detect in Florence (formerly Flora), is very seldom permitted the menials of crime fiction. They tend to preface every utterance with ‘Please, Mum …’ and panic very readily, despite the religious upbringing suggested by their frequent use of the phrase ‘Lor bless yer, sir/mum …’ The ‘mum’ by the way, is not a familiarity but working-class pidgin for ‘Madame’. Policemen and other investigators seldom get much sense out of them. In any case, their evidence is widely regarded as unreliable because lowliness of station renders them especially susceptible to bribery or threats.

  When James Agate put an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph for a new chauffer-valet in 1932, there were 211 replies. He interviewed the odd eleven before finding one who could drive. Three years later he was without a chauffeur once again and described in A Shorter Ego how he ‘sent round to the Labour Exchange’. One of the applicants, from the depressed area of Durham, said he was willing to accept any wage that was offered and to work for it all hours that his employer required. In 1936, yet another of Agate’s chauffeurs ‘nearly fainted on hearing he was engaged, owing to two and a half months’ semi-starvation’. The ferocity of competition for jobs in domestic service allowed of few ethical niceties. Men seeking appointment as chauffeurs, Agate learned, would do anything to conceal the existence of their wives and children because the post was traditionally occupied by a bachelor. Conversely, it was common for a ‘married couple’ going to a house as butler and cook never to have seen each other previously.

  Sydney Horler had a very low opinion of chauffeurs. He dismissed one, whom he was paying £2 15s a week, on the grounds that he had become careless and insolent. When Horler went to ‘one of the biggest garages in Surrey’ to engage a replacement, the works manager told him: ‘Chauffeurs as a class are the least dependable of all servants. They are rank socialists to a man. They bleed their masters, levy blackmail on garage owners, have no sense of loyalty to their employers, and are generally contemptible. The fact of the matter is that since the War it has become the most difficult thing to find a good chauffeur. Easy money and easy hours are the principle factors in their disgraceful conduct. These causes demoralize them.’ (More Strictly Personal)

  Antipathy towards chauffeurs as a profession is to be discerned in the work of a surprisingly large number of Horler’s fellow writers. For every sympathetic portrait of a chauffeur (generally as a kind of bodyguard-confidant – a reformed criminal or a still grateful other-ranker rescued from No-Man’s-Land by the officer who now employs him) there were a dozen of shifty or sinister character. These were inclined to be morose and contemptuous of authority and might be detected, if watched carefully, in conversation with evil-looking strangers behind the garage or under the bonnet of the car while pretending to trace an engine fault. It was a chauffeur, as often as not, who undertook the abduction of the heroine (‘I have instructions to take you to see Sir Robert at Scotland Yard, miss.’ ‘But surely this isn’t the way to the Yard?’). He also was useful as a courier between one criminal establishment and another. In some stories, he was even employed as an agent to gain access to victims’ houses by way of the servants’ quarters. Violence from a chauffeur was often called for: his speciality was dealing surprise blows with a heavy spanner, a tyre lever or a starting handle.

  A possible clue to the reason for middle-class chauffeur-phobia is to be found in a mystery by Lynn Brock. It is perhaps the only novel in which a chauffeur is permitted the distinction of turning out to be the murderer. The reader is told that the man had been assistant science master at Tenbury Grammar School before the war, in which he ‘ended up with three pips’ and the Distinguished Service Order.

  Nothing is more likely to arouse hostility in someone with the means to employ a servant than the discovery of that servant’s possession of qualities or qualifications superior to his own. This was a frequent embarrassment in the 1920s and early 1930s. Among the huge multitude of unemployed were many men of good education who had failed to get their jobs back after their war service. Others, including teachers and local government employees, had fallen victim to the various ‘economy’ measures dictated by the deflationary policies of the time. In some respects, the fate of these people was more pathetic than that of the workless in the hard core industrial areas. Their poverty was a peculiarly lonely affliction. They lacked the one solace available on Tyneside or in South Wales – the companionship of mass misery. At the inquest on a man found dead on the railway line in the respectable North London suburb of Mill Hill in 1933 it was revealed that he had lost his job the year before but had continued to leave the house every morning at his usual time ever since in order to keep the fact of his unemployment a secret. Had he been able to drive a car (or even if he had not) this man might well have been one of the 211 who replied to James Agate’s advertisement. It was from the pool of professional men without a profession, casualties of business contraction, temporarily embarrassed ex-officers, public school men awaiting an opportunity, that luckier members of the same class recruited their valets, general body servants and chauffeurs. They had not much choice if they insisted, as most of them did, on the applicants being well spoken and of presentable appearance. But a risk inseparable from the engagement of such people was that of their adopting an attitude of familiarity. Many a modestly successful merchant or broker or shopkeeper nursed the dread, in his heart of mock-Tudor hearts, of being suddenly addressed as ‘Bill’ or ‘Cock’ or ‘Old chap’ by a normally taciturn but never quite convincingly respectful man in cap and leggings.

  The heroes of crime fiction were as nearly infallible in their choice of servants as in other matters. The Saint, for instance, had a man of whom Leslie Charteris declared:

  There was only one Orace – late sergeant of Marines, and Simon Templar’s most devoted servant.

  We may be sure that Orace, presumably so chronic an aitch-dropper that he did not rate an apostrophe, would never have embarrassed Mr Templar by sudden revelation of having been to the same school.

  Reggie Fortune’s manservant, Sam, enabled him to have ‘late and lazy’ breakfasts. He could serve the sort of tea that moved an enraptured girl caller to ask ‘But do men always make teas like this?’ And it was into the arms of Sam, not a patient wife, that Dr Fortune subsided limply after battling through a London winter’s day to his rooms in Wimpole Street.

  The various detectives invented by Edgar Wallace contrived to emerge unmarried from adventures that always involved pretty and amiable young women. Not even the intimate association imposed by sharing a flooded cellar or a locked attic persuaded them that female company might be an even better thing out of business hours. Were they, then, misogynists? Not at all. Each had waiting for him at home one of those unobtrusive, reticent and supremely efficient male ministrants who symbolized, perhaps more than any other figure in contemporary literature, the popularly conceived advantages of wealth. John Rhode in Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) provided some simple rules for recognizing the genus:

  Ferguson was so typically the valet and confidential servant that he could not by any possibility have been mistaken for anything else. He was always dressed soberly in black and had a quiet and respectful manner which was entirely natural…

  b
ut this description conveys nothing of the reserved omniscience, the potentially devastating familiarity with ‘the correct thing’, which the manservant of popular fiction was ever prepared to deploy to the greater glory of his master or to the discomfiture of his enemies.

  The most famous servant created by any detection writer is Bunter, Lord Peter Wimsey’s man – if man, indeed, is the word for a being who epitomized everything that Dorothy Sayers considered desirable in a director of worldly affairs. Nowhere does Miss Sayers indulge in lyrical prose at greater length than when the qualities and talents of Bunter are being proclaimed.

  On the morning of the wedding-day, Lord Peter emerged from Bunter’s hands a marvel of sleek brilliance. His primrose-coloured hair was so exquisite a work of art that to eclipse it with his glossy hat was like shutting up the sun in a shrine of polished jet; his spats, light trousers, and exquisitely polished shoes formed a tone-symphony in monochrome. It was only by the most impassioned pleading that he persuaded his tyrant to allow him to place two small photographs and a thin, foreign letter in his breast-pocket. Mr Bunter, likewise immaculately attired, stepped into the taxi after him. At noon precisely they were deposited beneath the striped awning which adorned the door of the Duchess of Medway’s house in Park Lane. Bunter promptly disappeared in the direction of the back entrance, while his lordship mounted the steps and asked to see the dowager.