The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  There were arrivals in the Savoy house team as well as departures. In March 1919 Signor Arturo Giordaneo had been appointed second in command. Originally from the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo he had recently run the Berkeley Restaurant in Piccadilly. Everyone called him Arthur; everyone loved him.

  Among Arthur’s many American guests later that spring was the much talked about novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his exuberant new wife Zelda. This golden couple appeared to their friends to have ‘just stepped out of the sun’. Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise had been published in New York at the end of March, and a week later Scott and Zelda had been married. They were honeymooning in Europe. Having signed her graduation photograph with the challenge

  Why should all life be work, when we can all borrow, Let’s think only of today and not worry about tomorrow

  the 19-year-old Zelda was enchanted by London. As she watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace she was particularly charmed by the sight of’the town hall with redskins walking around it’.

  Expressions of love both old and new filled the corridors and staterooms of the hotel. Lord Lambourne, mourning the death of his wife, appeared nightly in the Grill wearing a withered brown twig in his buttonhole. The twig had been part of Lady Lambourne’s wedding bouquet fifty years earlier. Harry Houdini, the Handcuff King, the greatest magician on earth, was welcomed back to England after an absence of six years and came directly to check in at his old room at the hotel. He had devised a new show called Goodbye Winter, Welcome Summer to add to the ‘Vanishing Elephant’ stunt and the familiar straitjacket escape. Audiences loved the way the fur-clad girl disappeared before their eyes only to be replaced at the sound of a pistol shot by another garlanded with flowers.

  Staff were still discussing how just before Christmas Mr Jackson Gordon, a wealthy entrepreneur in the middle of financing a revolutionary process that would reclaim waste paper, had found time in his busy day to have a manicure in the hotel’s beauty parlour. Mr Gordon had looked long into the ‘largest and deepest of blue eyes’ of the ‘unusually beautiful’ manicurist and begged her to become his wife. The ceremony took place in Holy Trinity Church, Tulse Hill, with a honeymoon in Bournemouth, and, as reported in the Daily Express, the new Mrs Jackson was lavished with diamonds and pearls, and the manicure department at the Savoy was renamed ‘Cupid’s Parlour’.

  Not all Savoy staff were satisfied by the financial bonuses that came their way, The tip-pooling or tronc system was subject to such unfair distribution that the waiters and kitchen hands had gone on strike almost a year earlier, with the cashiers doubling up to serve at table and the housekeepers bending over potato peelings in the kitchen. The youths who worked as messengers and rush-abouts, the Savoy Button Boys, saw what was happening and wondered if they would have the courage to join the protest. What they minded about more than their wages, however, were the disgusting leftovers that were given them in their lunchtime break. What they would have given to be let loose on the guests’ pastry trolley!

  New opportunities for employment were opening up at the Savoy and in hotels and offices up and down the country, with the innovation of time-off accompanying the job, while offices were attracting thousands of domestic servants who craved a profession that combined independence and competitive salaries. Disillusionment had been spreading at the prospect of a future life spent in service, particularly among the younger generation, and many had become infinitely more skilled since the outbreak of war as illiteracy rates diminished even among the poorest in the country. During the war a hunger for news and for maintaining links with the men who were away had encouraged the skills of reading and writing in a population avid for communication. Corner shops sold a bottle of ink, a pen, writing paper and a packet of envelopes for a total of threepence, thus providing the necessary ‘equipment’ for staying in touch. And in the trenches a similar process of self-education had taken place as letter-writing habits were established among the ranks of new conscripts.

  In 1919 the passing of the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act had been designed to return women to the jobs they had left while men were away at the war, thus freeing up the men’s jobs that the women had occupied. Demobilisation was all but complete by February 1920, with only 125,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors still waiting for their release papers, out of a total of four million who had served in the armed forces. With women’s reluctance to give up their new independence and men unwilling to return to domestic service, the Act was proving difficult to enforce. Four hundred thousand servants had spent four years of freedom from domestic employment: they included cooks, maids of all sorts, butlers, grooms, chauffeurs, gardeners and gamekeepers, all of whom had been singled out by Lord Kitchener’s long finger. Servants had been drafted to work on farms, in factories and in transport. Many women had joined the Women’s Land Army and the Red Cross, happy to escape the fate of T. S. Eliot’s

  damp souls of housemaids

  Sprouting despondently at area gates.

  Women’s enjoyment of wearing the trousers had contributed to the new sense of freedom, although the older generation was wary of where the habit might lead. Barbara Cartland’s gardener feared the worst. ‘Oi reckons if women start a-looking like men, we’ll soon have ’em thinkin’ like men, and then they’ll be a-bossing us like men.’

  Victoria Sackville had bombarded her old friend Lord Kitchener repeatedly during the war with complaints about the depleted service she was receiving at Knole. ‘Do you not realise, my dear Lord K, that we employ five carpenters, and four painters and two blacksmiths, and two footmen and you are taking them all from us!’ she had expostulated in 1914. She was having to make do with parlour maids and as she told the Chief of the Defence Staff, certain of his sympathy, she had ‘never thought I would see parlour maids at Knole!’

  Lady Randolph Churchill had employed ‘footmaids’ to replace the absent footmen, giving them most desirable uniforms of ‘blue livery jackets, striped waistcoats, stiff shirts, short blue skirts, black silk stockings and patent leather shoes with three-inch heels’. Dinner conversation chez Lady Randolph was often patchy and attention wandered, particularly after the lady guests had withdrawn and the men were left alone not only with the port and cigars but with these distractingly alluring improvised attendants.

  At the end of the war most of the servant-dependent upper and middle classes felt they had made do for long enough and were keen to return to being served. They were unprepared for a change of attitude. On their return from the war, however, servants were either in a position to bargain or had realised that the prospect of domestic employment was no longer obligatory. They now had a choice.

  One of the dwindling group of servants who clung to pre-war standards was Eric Horne. Veteran butler and former servant to the highest in the land, Eric was a strict observer of the clean-shaven rule observed by all the best butlers. A moustache would have been quite inappropriate – unhygienic for one thing, and a privilege reserved for officers. But the half-dozen columns regularly given over in The Times personal advertisements for servants did not surprise him. People were desperate for servants of all sorts, including cook-generals, between maids, valets, menservants, scullery maids and cooks, and above all for dependable and experienced butlers such as himself.

  In the first issue of the Lady for 1920 a notice for a combined mother and daughter position appealed to any widows with an older child who could share the cooking and housekeeping. Owing to the establishment’s lack of a chauffeur or butler, or indeed any male servant at all, the mother-daughter team were required to have the skill to drive a bad-tempered donkey and its cart to the local village twice a day, in order to deliver and collect the children from school.

  There was however a strong reluctance to accept live-in jobs and the market was overcrowded with women wishing to be cha ladies. The growing antipathy to a life-long career in service had, in Virginia Woolf’s view, begun well before the war. The change had been gradual, and n
ot as definite as if ‘one went out, as one might, into a garden and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg’. The 1914–18 interlude helped to deepen and define this shifting process so that by the end of the war change was already deep rooted.

  The old employers and upholders of pre-war behaviour joined Eric in detecting a new and unwelcome stubbornness in their new staff. Lady Londonderry wrote to the Evening Standard in December 1919 to express her disappointment in the attitude of ex-service girls whose wartime experiences seemed to have ruined them for domestic service. The formidable Lady Londonderry, founder of the wartime Women’s Legion, a voluntary organization for women set up in 1915, had found that these girls had become so exalted by the flattery showered upon them for jobs well done in the war that they had become ‘unsuited for the humdrum of housework, expecting housing, food and warmth at double the wages, and will not learn from the old experienced servants who are fast disappearing’. Punch had recently carried a cartoon headed ‘Insubordinate Maid’ picturing a young, inexperienced but sympathetic mistress saying ‘Would you like to go out this afternoon, Mabel?’, to which Mabel replies in an insolent tone, her nose tilted upwards in undeniable arrogance, ‘I am already going out, Madam.’Without so much as a by your leave, huffed Eric.

  The sort of person now attracted to domestic service did not meet the standards Eric had been accustomed to all his working life. One brief spell of employment immediately after the end of the war had come to an end when Eric himself could not tolerate the snuffling cook. ‘If there is anything I detest’, Eric explained, ‘it is to sit down to a meal with a person who snuffles over their food.’To make things worse, the cook’s uncle’s niece had been an actress, a talent which the cook thought flowed through her own veins. She would ‘rave out the Soldier’s March’ from some old opera in a most off-putting manner.

  Not only had staff become disillusioned with the demands placed on their time by a life in service, but the calibre of the employer had plummeted too. Eric was fiercely disapproving of those who had made financial capital out of the war. He found that his favourite saying, ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a soused mackerel’, described the new regime perfectly. He felt a revulsion towards ‘the newly rich’ who had ‘filled their pockets while Tommy was fighting’, declaring with foreboding that for generations ‘they will not get the stains off their hands’. And he felt a wave of nostalgia at seeing ‘the old usages and traditions of gentleman’s service ... die with the old places, where so many high jinks and junketings have been carried on in the old days’.

  Employers also offered lamentably unimaginative incentives to potential staff, including the use of the plumbed-in family bathroom (a famously tight-fisted dowager required her maid to bathe in the water that the dowager had just vacated), the opportunity to leave off the maid’s hated mob cap, and the addition of the prefix ‘Miss’, lending the employee a little respect rather than the more familiar unadorned Christian name.

  Recruitment of servants often took place in the hallways of smart shops like Fortnum & Mason where the chef, delivering his weekly order, would make it known that there was a vacancy at his house, and women looking for work would come to enquire about opportunities. In the North of England there were hiring fairs where girls who were prepared to work in the house or on the land would be inspected by farmers, and subjected to the qualifying question ‘Do you milk or bake?’ The servant class had their own employment agencies, referred to by the job-seekers themselves as ‘slavey markets’. Here too insolence and contempt were on the rise. Eric fell into conversation with one man and his wife who were leaving the world of domestic service. The man amused Eric by remarking that he thought ‘some of the gentry ought to be boiled’, although personally Eric preferred the option of baking them alive.

  A few faithful servants had returned to their pre-war work, among them another butler, Henry Moate, who had reappeared in the life of the Sitwell family, swimming into their midst ‘whale-like’, according to Osbert, in December 1918. Sir George Sitwell was cheered at the return of the old butler who brought with him ‘the assurance of the past’. Before the war Moate had been an invaluable servant to Sir George as well as the devoted caretaker of the three children, writing long letters to Osbert, the elder son, while he was away, miserable, at boarding school.

  As well as Moate’s devotion to the Sitwell family, there was another reason for his return. Moate missed his Scarborough friends and in particular the company of the splendid Mr Follis, the grandest hairdresser in town. The two men had shared an on-off relationship for several decades. Sometimes they were close enough friends to attend a fancy dress ball together dressed respectively as Leonardo da Vinci and Captain Cook. On other occasions they vowed never to speak to one another again, while mutual black eyes revealed the occurrence of a never quite explained tiff. Lady Sitwell had invited Moate for Christmas after his demobilisation and his reunion with Mr Follis was a celebratory affair. Late on Christmas Eve Lady Sitwell was lying in bed and talking to Osbert when they were alarmed to hear a noise outside her bedroom door. The door opened and an enormous, wildly swaying figure appeared in the doorframe. ‘My Lady, have mercy on an erring lamb,’ Moate implored her with perfect mock dignity and composure, before wobbling round to face the other way and rejoining Follis in the cellar.

  Some former butlers had become close to the men they served in the hardship of the trenches. Herbert Buckmaster, no longer happy in the companionship of his wife Gladys Cooper, had founded Buck’s Club at the beginning of June 1919. The idea behind the club was to provide a specific place where the close friendships made in the trenches could continue. The club was in Clifford Street, just off Savile Row, and served sandwiches and oysters during the day, and after the theatre sausages and drinks were available until 2.00 a.m.

  One day a letter came from Buckmaster’s wartime manservant, Mr Hunstone, who was feeling his way gently through the subtle shift in the nature of the relationship. Equals they were not, but barriers had been loosened and in a letter thanking him for a gift the manservant permitted himself the use of a formerly unusable word. ‘I shall appreciate the cigarette case always for it will serve as a lasting link to the times both pleasant and otherwise we experienced in France. I often think of those times not with envy of course but for once I found friends whose memory I shall always cherish.’

  But in the same letter the servant Hunstone also asked for the address of Buckmaster’s groom. Barriers may have loosened but those of similar backgrounds still stuck together. A return to the old servant-master relationship meant abandoning a sense of equality born out of shared hardship. So the bond lingered on. Barbara Cartland became accustomed to getting into taxicabs with upper-class young men who were clearly on extremely friendly terms with the driver. They had fought side by side. As the partition in the taxi was slid back, so the class barrier between the men was dissolved, leaving Barbara feeling that she had been excluded from an elite society.

  Echoes of war could assail one anywhere: there was no forgetting. Barbara’s grandmother’s butler had become a Major, decorated with the DSO, and a peer of her family’s acquaintance deliberately sought out limbless veterans as members of his domestic staff – the more limbless and disabled, the better – insisting they displayed their medals over their valet’s or footman’s uniform.

  Eric Horne had been a highly regarded butler for over fifty years but now found his circumstances wholly altered. Most recently he had been working for ‘a noble family’ who had been financially ruined during the last four years. Eric had enjoyed this job so much that for the whole last year he had worked without any wages. He found himself taking on duties that he would never have considered part of the position of senior butler before the war. He had to understand lavatory ballcocks, repair and glue furniture and have a working knowledge of carpentry and painting. He even had to take up the carpets in the house, beat the dust from them and lay them back in place. The job was a heavy and
long one with sixteen hours on his feet – something of a challenge for Eric, who was well beyond his allocated three score years and ten. He wondered to himself, in the diary he had now been keeping for several decades, ‘what would the Trades Unions think of this little lot?’

  Because he liked the family he did the jobs willingly but in the end when the indoor staff was reduced from twenty-five to three and numbers on the estate fell by the same proportion, the position became impossible. Eric found himself unable to find work, despite a strong network of friends in service, and the placing of advertisements in the Morning Post. There was less call for a butler of his experience, age and, it must be said, occasional intransigency. He began to imagine he had become something of a combined threat and irritant to younger staff, even though in his early days of employment he had taken instruction without complaint. In one early job he had scrubbed the silver coins from a gentleman’s trouser pocket in case they had become contaminated with germs. At least he wasn’t as badly off as a friend of his who had ended up in the workhouse. This old man kept a coat left over from a more affluent era in Eric’s brother’s shop in the Fulham Road. Whenever the old butler came out of the workhouse he would come straight to the shop and put on his smart coat and imagine himself back in the old days.

  Eric had already noticed a shift in what could only be called the ‘class’ of employer who could afford his wages in the years leading up to the war. After the war he became increasingly pessimistic at the effect the economy was having on the grand houses of the gentry. ‘The way things are going’, he gloomily predicted, it will not be long ‘before they are all turned into institutions or schools or perhaps hotels’ and ‘homes for the weak minded’.