The Servant Problem Transcript

Caroline: In the autumn of 1919, Agatha Christie left Torquay and travelled by train to London. She had given birth to her daughter, Rosalind, at Ashfield, her childhood home, just a few days before. But now she was on the brink of a new era in her life, and she wanted to start it straight away.

Writing about this time many years later, Christie remembered that she embarked on this trip with three essentials to acquire. Firstly, a flat or house to live in that was convenient for her husband Archie's job in the City of London. Secondly, a live-in nurse to care for the baby. Thirdly, a full-time, live-in maid to care for the flat or house. She also recalled the Christie's liveable but not wealthy financial circumstances, and reflected on how they never took taxis anywhere and carefully budgeted for the purchase of new clothes and shoes. Yet paying for two extra human beings to live with them and serve the family full time was considered a necessity, not a luxury.

Christie found her own 1919 attitude extraordinary when she looked back on it decades later, but it was standard for the time. Even after all of the upheaval caused by the First World War, all but the very poorest married women would expect to have household help of some kind or other. Christie, brought up in middle class comfort surrounded by beloved family retainers, was no different.

But even on that post-birth trip to London, there were hints that the typical household of her childhood was a thing of the past. At an agency for nannies, the first several candidates Christie met with rejected her, not the other way around. They felt that the wages on offer were too low, or were not inclined to accept a childcare job where they would also be expected to take on other housework. The woman who eventually became Rosalind's nurse, Jessie Swannell, accepted the job with the words "it doesn't sound too bad" — not exactly great enthusiasm. Or at least, that's what Christie remembered her saying. Jessie's recollections have not been recorded for us to read.

On this trip to London, Agatha Christie had her first real brush with what had come to be known as "the servant problem". In years to come, she and her fellow detective fiction writers would think and write an extraordinary amount about this social phenomenon, both in the interwar years and beyond. It's at the very heart at this very class conscious genre of fiction.

Join me, won't you, as I attempt to better understand one of the most intriguing dynamics in British social history.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Over the course of her lifetime, Agatha Christie saw the character of British domestic life transform. Much of this change was as a result of the presence, or otherwise, of servants. She was born in 1890 into a household that had a cook, multiple housemaids, and a nurse to preside over the nursery. As a child, she later recalled, the servants felt more real to her than her own family, because they were such a constant in her young life. By the time she was setting up her first proper adult home after the First World War, the process of hiring servants had become much more difficult. And in her later years, the scarcity of reliable, discreet domestic workers wanting to do a residential job at a remote house like Greenway was a major preoccupation. Agatha Christie thought a lot about servants, and you can tell this from her fiction. The life and work of Agatha Christie is the perfect lens through which to view the servant problem.

But what actually was the servant problem? Before we return to Christie and detective fiction, I think we should get that straight. There isn't one easy definition — it would depend on who you asked and when you were asking them. A wealthy person who employed a house full of servants in 1890 might have included under the umbrella term of "servant problem" the insistence by housemaids on leaving to get married, or the eternal difficulty of finding a trustworthy and loyal butler who couldn't be lured away for a higher salary. In the early 1920s, the same type of person would consider the servant problem to be the terrible difficulty of finding servants to employ at all, and the fact that those who were willing to work wanted to live in their own homes and come in by the day rather than occupy tiny attics without bathrooms in their rich employer's house. By 1940 there would be the additional complaint that those servants who were still for hire wanted to be paid so much more than the equivalent rate for the same type of job ten or twenty years before.

Ask the servants, meanwhile, and they might say that the servant problem ran deeper than all of these practical and economic concerns. The role of the traditional live-in servant, whether in a small suburban villa or a huge Downton Abbey style country pile, was an ambiguous one. Their food and lodging was paid for by their employer and they were paid wages too, albeit low ones. The employer was responsible, broadly speaking, for their wellbeing and safety. The servant was not indentured; they could give notice and leave any time. And yet the relationship was always based on a fundamental inequality. Negotiation about shifts, or working conditions, or pay, was unthinkable. Domestic servants were to do what they were told, when they were told, from the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep. All individual will or autonomy was subordinate to the master or mistress's wishes. And if the employer suddenly wished for you to leave, you lost your home and, sometimes, the reputation that was essential to finding another job, in the same instant. Looked at in this light, the whole job of being a servants starts to feel like a "problem".

Alison:  She had nothing good to say about being a servant. She was the lowest of the low. She'd come out of the workhouse and she went as a skivvy, you know, as a maid of all work as the Victorians used to call them at the bottom of the pile and always said she was treated like dirt and had to get up at five. These were the sort of Cinderella stories that I grew up with and they stayed with me.

Caroline: This is Alison Light, a writer of memoir, criticism and social history, and the author of, among other books, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, which is all about the changing role of servants in the twentieth century home, told through the relationship that the writer Virginia Woolf had with her own servants. As you've just heard, Alison's grandmother was a servant with her own perspective on the servant problem, and growing up with this knowledge this helped to shape Alison's own thinking on the subject. What did it really mean to be a servant?

Alison:  I started off thinking about service as a kind of exploitation, really. And then as I went on, I started to think rather more about the give and take of it. And what a very curious position live-in servants in particular were in, you know, how intimate they were. I mean, the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Nellie Boxall, which went on for 16 years or so, was profoundly intimate.

Caroline: Nellie Boxall first went to work for Leonard and Virginia Woolf as a live-in servant in 1916 and remained with them until 1934. She and Virginia had a turbulent and at times difficult relationship, which Alison explores in her book. Virginia wrote a lot about her servants, in her letters, her diary and her fiction, and Nellie was clearly a prominent figure in her life. The servant-mistress relationship was inherently complex, Alison says.

Alison:  The idea of someone who looked after you, your clothes, your wellbeing in all kinds of ways, yet who was not your social equal? That's such a fascinating idea, and I started to see the precarious power, if you like, that servants have. They're always more vulnerable because they can lose their livelihood.

But equally, one of the reasons why I think servants are often seen as troubling and disturbing and potentially even murderous, is because they have this kind of knowledge. They know where the bodies are buried. They know who's sleeping with whom in the country house. They know who can get pregnant and who can't. They wash the sheets, they clean your bathroom.

Some servants in English homes of a more affluent kind used to wear the new shoes in so that the master or mistress didn't have to cramp their feet. These are very intimate tasks. The whole notion of service as a relationship that would take you into some very uncomfortable bits of the English class system, but equally would also be an emotional territory that wasn't so easy to pin down.

Caroline: This intimacy, and the servant problem more broadly, takes on a new dimension when we dig into who exactly these servants were. The precise size of the servant workforce has always been difficult to determine, but one thing that we do know for sure: for at least a century before the First World War, the majority of domestic servants had been women. In 1806, women outnumbered men in service by a factor of eight to one, and by 1850, around 80 per cent of all servants in middle class households were women. The so-called "feminisation of service" was a major media talking point in the latter half of the nineteenth century and keeping a manservant became yet another signifier of class and wealth.

The experience of being a servant was something that hundreds of thousands of women shared. In 1891, 41 per cent of all women in employment in Britain were servants. This had fallen to 24 per cent by 1931, but that still amounted to 1.6 million women. In Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Alison writes that "it's hard to resist the conclusion that the history of service is the history of British women". Being on one side or the other of that servant-mistress relationship was a near-universal experience.

Alison:  It's a huge terrain. Just about every woman in Britain until 1945, it's something like two thirds of the female population had either been a servant or had servants.

Caroline: But although popular culture, including the country house murder mysteries of the 1920s, might give the impression that all servants existed in a Downton Abbey sort of household, this wasn't the case at all.

Alison:  The most common form of servant in most middle class homes was a servant on her own. I mean something like two thirds of middle class homes before and after the First World War had one servant, and a housemaid and cook were the minimum for respectability.

But even fairly, not the most comfortable of the middle class people, a bit further down the scale, clerks and people like that might have one servant. So a lot of the Victorian houses that we have in Britain, they will have a room at the top for a single servant. And of course you can understand it when everything is being lit by coal. The image of the country house, I think has given a distorted view of who servants were, really.

Caroline: By 1914, domestic service was already changing. Although women in Britain still didn't have the right to vote, more and more types of jobs were opening up to them, especially for young unmarried women. Shops, hospitals, factories and offices all offered alternative avenues of employment to domestic service. The First World War accelerated this social upheaval. With millions of men taken out of the workforce by the conflict, women stepped into the vacancies, many leaving their places as servants to do so.

When the war ended in 1918 and the men returned, it was assumed by many former employers that their female servants would rush back to them, eager to reclaim their jobs. But it was not so. A new variation of the servant problem was born that was to perplex the wealthier end of society for the next two decades. Why, given the choice, would a woman prefer to work long hours in a shop or a factory when a cosy place in her old mistress's kitchen was still available to her? And why didn't she want to move back into her old servants' quarters? In other words, why wouldn't everything just go back to the way it had been before?

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In 1925, a woman named Violet M. Firth published a fascinating book titled The Psychology of the Servant Problem. In it, she unites her experiences working as a gardener at a large country house during the First World War with her training in psychology at the University of London. Violet came and went through the back door and took her meals in the servants' hall, and all the time she was listening and talking to the women she encountered there. The resulting book is a polemic addressed to the wealthy people who claimed not to understand why nobody wanted to be their live-in servant anymore.

The problem is not an economic or logistical one, Violet argues, but one of dignity and independence. Domestic service was never just about cleaning or cooking. It was the mode of life that went with it and the servility that was required that loomed large in the minds of those who did these jobs. She writes: "A mistress does not demand of her servant work only, she also demands a certain manner, a manner which shall clearly indicate her superiority and the inferiority of the woman who takes her wages." Some employers took this attitude to the extreme, requiring their servants to turn their faces to the wall as members of "the family" passed by. Others refused to update their houses or introduce labour-saving tools for their servants simply because they preferred the old ways, no matter how inconvenient it was for their employees — perhaps in part because it emphasised their own dominance in the domestic sphere. There are plenty of anecdotes about very wealthy people who nonetheless refused to install electricity or central heating well into the 1920s and even the 1930s because they liked their servants to dash about with candles and coal scuttles instead. This even went on, after a fashion, in the Christie household. In her autobiography, Agatha explains how, even though they had a bathroom with running water, when she was a child her mother still insisted on using a hip bath that the servants had to carry up, fill and empty by hand, because she considered it more sanitary.

The accuracy of Violet Firth's psychological commentary on the servant problem is evident, I think, from the fact that many women were willing to accept lower wages to work in fields other than domestic service. It brought other benefits, like the freedom to live where and how they liked, be with family, and work clearly defined shifts rather than just until the mistress decided you were done. Even those who did return to residential service jobs began to assert themselves against some elements that emphasised their subordinate position. They no longer wanted to wear starched caps and elaborate uniforms, or have their free time monitored and restricted by their employers.

Alison:  One of the ways of thinking of the shift into more modern times is as a shift from a culture of deference to a more democratic culture where people no longer assume that they're going to have a subordinate place.

Caroline: Alison is absolutely right. The attitude shift among servants was part of a wider society change. The 1918 Representation of the People Act had given a proportion of British women the right to vote — those over the age of 30, graduates, or who met certain minimum property requirements. In 1928, this was extended to all women over the age of 21, equivalent to the rights already enjoyed by men. For the 1929 general election, mistress and maid could have walked to the polling station together as equal citizens. Given this change, the turn against the old style of domestic service makes complete sense.

Many women were still keen to do domestic work as their job, but they wanted to live in their own homes and control their own hours, to be a "daily" or a "char" rather than a live-in maid or housekeeper. It was about freedom and self-respect. As Violet says later on: "To be a servant is very painful to one's self resect, and no amount of money will compensate that injury to anyone who has independence of spirit."

Domestic service was in a state of great upheaval, then, just as the golden age of detective fiction got going in the 1920s. Interviewing the servants was a staple of the genre from the start, or even before the start — Philip Trent in Trent's Last Case from 1913 complains about the need to do this and states that he doesn't expect to get much helpful information from them. He makes the blanket assumption that servants are gossipy and inclined to over-dramatise themselves and events. He even says ''an affair like this is meat and drink to the servants of the house," meaning a murder, of course. Readers' familiarity with the propensity for gossip in the servants' hall is taken for granted.

Agatha Christie's first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, also includes an interesting reference to a well-known type of servant: the family treasure or loyal retainer, who never complains and stays in the same household for decades. Dorcas the parlourmaid wears a white cap, still, and presents the throwback image of the Victorian-era model servant of the type it was already so hard to obtain when this book was published. We know that at this time Agatha Christie was actually being rejected by possible nursemaids because of the inferior situation she offered, so Dorcas, I think, is a nostalgic product of her childhood in the 1890s.

That intimacy Alison referred to earlier cuts both ways. Their exhaustive knowledge of household habits makes servants useful witnesses in detective fiction for establishing alibis and exposing anomalies. But their constant, assumed presence can also have another effect.

Alison: I think that the servant can be used in, say, a plot in a detective novel because they're not seen. You don't notice the help. They are faceless, and often nameless and interchangeable. I think one servant said we're just 'live furniture'.

Caroline: G.K. Chesterton was already experimenting with this idea of someone who is so visible they are also invisible in his 1911 Father Brown short story "The Invisible Man". Christie, too, put her own spin on this idea a bit later in her 1934 novel Three Act Tragedy. The same year she produced a radio play titled "Behind Closed Doors", later republished as a short story titled "Miss Marple Tells a Story", about a seemingly impossible murder where a woman is stabbed in a locked room that has only been accessed by a benign-seeming chambermaid.

The lack of proper attention paid to servants by those of a higher class was something that Christie returned to periodically throughout her writing career. It comes up in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Three Act Tragedy, and in the 1942 short story "The Case of the Perfect Maid", when Miss Marple is asked by her own maid, Edna, to investigate the summary dismissal of her cousin Gladys from the service of two spinster sisters. Gladys has since been replaced by a so-called "perfect maid", which immediately puts Miss Marple on high alert. The servant problem is such a fact of life by this time that the hiring of such an improbable paragon raises suspicions. Surely, this maid is too good to be true.

Something a little like this happens in the 1937 Hercule Poirot short story "The Dream", too, albeit with a male functionary. "Greenshaw's Folly", a much later story from 1956 that Christie wrote to raise funds for a new stained glass window at the church she attended in Devon, runs along similar lines, with the addition of an inheritance plot and a will that seems to benefit some servants but not others.

Other writers put their own twist on this type of servant problem story, and one that I particularly like is The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley from 1926. Here, the quote "gentleman" protagonist takes a job as a footman at a country house in order to be able to pay off his debts. He gets said job despite having no experience or references because of the shortage of other applicants, and goes into it with a very partial understanding of what being a servant actually involves. The scene early on where Stephen is given his duties by the butler is very funny, as this privileged young man comes to realise that a footman does a lot more than simply stand around all day.

Berkeley even injects a bit of social commentary in the book by showing us how perplexing Stephen's movement between class roles is for the other guests at the country house party. One, an old buffer of a Colonel, recognises Stephen and his quote "birthright as a sahib", yet cannot bring himself to actually speak on equal terms to someone occupying the role of footman, and thus ends up ignoring that he exists altogether because it is simply easier. This book is a great example of how the servant problem is at the very foundation of the classic mystery novel. Country houses are being closed down and sold off because their owners can't staff them anymore. Where they are able to keep them going, it's not with generational family retainers but with strangers, who they hire without references from sheer desperation. A perfect way for a murderer to gain access to their upper class victim, wouldn't you say?

In fact, making the servant the culprit worked so well that S.S. Van Dine banned it in his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", published in 1928. He wrote:

Servants – such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like – must not be chosen by the author as the culprit... It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted.

Writers even began to joke about this — the title of Georgette Heyer's 1933 detective novel Why Shoot A Butler? is a clear reference to this assumption. Much later, Edmund Crispin was thinking along the same lines when he put an extremely rude and revolutionary butler character in his 1950 novel Frequent Hearses. Writers might make light of it, but to servants it was surely not funny at all. In Dorothy L. Sayers' 1928 novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Peter Wimsey is reviewing the case so far with his friend the Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker when he makes a casual mention of a recent boom in "criminal butlers and thefts by perfect servants". Parker simply replies, "that's a fact". S.S. Van Dine can wave away servant perpetrators in murder mysteries as "too easy", but real life servants could not so easily dismiss this assumption and the unpleasantness that would come with it.

Beyond its relevance as a driver of plot, the servant problem surfaces as a contemporary detail, a reflection of the preoccupations of the time in which these books were written and set. It's a throwaway line everywhere — I particularly liked the busybody character in 1944's Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin who is described as being "not really interested in anything except the servant problem".

Christie's own interest in grappling with the servant problem comes through especially in her post world war two novels. Perhaps this was partly due to the fresh experiences she gained during the war years. Christie's sister, Madge, had turned to domestic work to keep her country house, Abney Hall going. Working with the help of a single kitchenmaid, she maintained a house that had previously had sixteen indoor servants. Agatha, too, turned her hand to a bit of cooking and cleaning, especially during the period after her grandson Mathew was born and she was helping to take care of her daughter, the new mother. The books of the late 1940s and onwards show us the various ways that people grappled with this sea change in their domestic situations.

In 1946's The Hollow, Midge Hardcastle, a poor relation of a well-off family who works in a shop, thinks longingly about the comforts of domestic service where there are not customers being rude to you day in and day out — not that she has the experience to compare what the two jobs are really like. Then in 1950's A Murder is Announced we get one of Christie's most important servant characters: Mitzi, the refugee housekeeper who works at the house at the centre of the novel and fears that when the police come to investigate a murder, they are actually there to take her away. She is a reference, I think, to the thousands of German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian women who came to Britain in the 1930s on so-called "domestic service visas". As the political situation in Europe worsened and the Nazi persecution of Jewish people intensified, the British government came under pressure to accept those fleeing the continent. They were reluctant to do so, but a compromise in some cases was found thanks to the servant problem — if the refugees were willing to take jobs in domestic service, they would be granted visas to live and work in Britain. Once arrived, they could only change job with the permission of the Home Office or, once the war started, risk being interned as a foreign national. Around 20,000 women came to Britain under this arrangement before 1939. Many were treated poorly by their prejudiced new employers, who despite their desperation for servants disliked having so-called "foreigners" in their houses.

Christie also took on the changing nature of domestic service with her 1952 novel Mrs McGinty's Dead, which revolves around the murder of the titular character, who worked as a charwoman. Mrs McGinty is portrayed as utterly ordinary, from a new type of working class woman who had a lodger and cleaned houses by the day to make her living, whereas once perhaps she would have been a live-in cook or maid. While investigating her murder, Poirot stays in a chaotic boarding house run by an impoverished upper class family, who previously employed Mrs McGinty but can now find nobody to replace her. The inepitude of the proprietress, Mrs Summerhayes, at basic domestic tasks is meant to provide an element of humour to the book, but it also shows the reader the invisible yet vital Mrs McGinty played in people's lives. The servant problem is a constant presence in the story, with almost every householder Poirot meets complaining of their lack of staff. The same is true in 1953's After the Funeral, which is full of characters lamenting the good old days of many maids and grumbling that they now have to make do with the occasional woman who comes in by the day.

1953 was also the year in which Christie published A Pocket Full of Rye, in which Miss Marple investigates the death of her former maid, Gladys Martin. To me, this is one of Christie's most moving books. We learn that Miss Marple solves her own servant problem by training young women from a nearby orphanage in the skills of domestic service. They come to her for a period, she teaches them the basics of cooking and cleaning and how to wait at table, and then they move on, often to work in cafes, she says. Gladys was one of her trainees, and so when Miss Marple reads in the newspaper that she had been killed, she feels that she has a responsibility to bring her murderer to justice. It's one of Christie's more nuanced looks at the class system, to my mind.

The premier Agatha Christie novel about the servant problem, though, is 4.50 from Paddington from 1957. This is where Christie allowed her imagination free rein to invent her ideal solution to the problem. That solution is a character called Lucy Eyelesbarrow. Lucy is a highly intelligent and educated woman with a First in Mathematics from Oxford, but instead of pursuing a career in academia or industry, she has become a kind of freelance domestic servant. She is superb at cooking and cleaning and people are so desperate for her services that she is always able to set her own rates. She only takes short term jobs, so never as to stay long with a mistress she dislikes, and she takes holidays whenever she wants. She seems to enjoy her work on these terms very much. All the power rests in her hands: she has such a superb reputation that she will never want for work and need never fear that she will be left unemployed.

Miss Marple employs her to infiltrate a house where she suspects that a murdered corpse has been hidden and Lucy splits her time between detective work and domestic work with aplomb. She's the ultimate twist on the servant of the interwar years — she isn't overlooked, as such, but still, nobody expects her to be sleuthing as well as making souffles. I have my doubts about whether Christie ever encountered a real-life Lucy Eyelesbarrow, but I think it's fascinating that she invented such a character that so perfectly solves the servant problem from both sides. The employers get their dinners cooked, and the cook gets paid handsomely for her skills. In this little dream, everyone is happy.

Lucy Eyelesbarrow was a fantasy. Yet the servant problem that she solved is still with us, albeit in a different form. People in a certain income bracket are still able to outsource their cleaning, or their childcare, or their gardening, to other people. Often people whom they don't want to see or interact with, who come in to work while everyone else is out. The issues around who does this work and why they do it remain.

Alison:  It's a much bigger question all around, Caroline, about why is housework seen as degrading or demeaning?

And why is it not? You know, I mean, in the women's movement, which I was part of in the late sixties, seventies, we were asking, or women were asking for wages for housework. You know, why is that still quite a laughable idea? Why isn't domestic work seen as work? And the one thing that really must be said is that whenever you read these debates in the period right through, from 1850s to 1950.

I think I'm right in saying that no one suggests the men doing the work. It's always seen as women's work or girls' work or domestic science for girls at school. That division of labour is not questioned.

Caroline: These questions have continued to show up in crime fiction, too, long after the original understanding of the servant problem faded from our collective consciousness. In 1994, Ruth Rendell published her novel Simisola, which is partially about the issue of domestic slavery and trafficking. It does feature her regular detective, Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, but is still something of a departure for the series. Speaking of her decision to incorporate themes of servitude and slavery, Rendell said in an interview: "I had reached the point in the Wexfords where I thought, I can’t write any more of these unless I think there’s some way of changing them. So I thought, make them more political."

The servant problem was never really just about starched caps and polished floors. It was about who does what for whom in society, and how they are compensated for their labour. I'll let Alison have the last word on this.

Alison: During the process of writing the book, my husband became very ill and died. And this also meant looking after him, which I hadn't done be that kind of caring before because I didn't have children. And it made me realise how the issue of dependence on others. There are always people who take away your rubbish, who you know if you are lucky, clean your streets, who do the dirty work for you, even outside the house. And you need to be able to live in a culture where you can rely on strangers to take care of you. So that was my polemical point. The dependence was universal and should be respected. Frailty should be seen as something that culture can accommodate.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.
You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/theservantproblem. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Many thanks to my guest, Alison Light. Her book, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, was published in 2007 and is still available from booksellers and libraries, I highly recommend it. Long time listeners of Shedunnit will know that I'm also a big fan of Alison's other books, such as her writing about Agatha Christie in her 1991 book Forever England. There's more information about all her work at her website, alisonlight.org.

This episode marked the beginning of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive, the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year. If you’d like to be part of that and get access to a whole host of audio goodies, including the pilot season of a new project I've made called Today in Murder Mysteries, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.