Sideboard laid for Breakfast, Russian Style, When a meal is served after the Russian fashion, all the responsibility of supplying food to those at table falls upon the attendants. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, 37; Horn, The rise and fall of the Victorian servant, 172. Stephen Mennell, All manners of food: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present. In this room, servants could gather away from the eye of the employers, gossip and jokes could be spread and even more dangerous, theft could be committed. What are the Duties of a Waitress. Like sergeant-majors and school prefects, the upper servants were enrolled to enforce the rules when the staff was outside of the gaze of their employers. Chapter 4 . An advised breakfast would include porridge, haddock, bacon and fried potatoes, brown loaf, toast, and honey; an omelet, crumpets, sardines, toast and preserves; cold tongue, apples; kippers, tongue toast, hot rolls; buttered eggs, potted meat, scones. In mansions, servants and employers were separated by what was termed the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ system which made servants mostly invisible to their employers. Everyday life for a domestic servant in Edwardian townhouses was often far removed from the splendour of their surroundings… Share on Facebook; Share on Twitter; Share on Whatsapp; Email to a friend; This competition is now closed. This recollection mystifies the downstairs of the house: it was invisible and inaccessible. Family – Master, mistress, and one child. The rooms were well furnished in good taste to give the greatest possible comfort. Rosina Harrison, Rose my life in service. Finally, this article shows that servants were not passive recipients of authority. Domestic service differed according to the wealth of employers―some struggled to employ one maid while others maintained more than they needed―and their social standards as the middle-class mistresses would have more frequent contacts with their maids than their upper-class counterparts.13 In return, different types of households had different spaces for eating for their servants. Autobiographies, like any piece of historical evidence, must be placed alongside other types of evidence, such as employers’ accounts and domestic manuals. Winifred Foley, a maid-of-all-work in the 1930s, recalled that,44. Scadden only used the women’s first name in her work. Luton: WEA Luton Branch 1977; Katherine Henderson 1987, ‘Had I but know’. Llandysul: Gomer 2013; Rosina Harrison, Rose my life in service. 8 a.m. – Have kitchen breakfast while family breakfast. London: Routledge 1994, 14. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990, 18; Siân Pooley, ‘Domestic servants and their urban employers: a case study of Lancaster, 1880–1914’, Economic History Review, 62, 2 (2009), 405–429. For example, Elsie Oman worked as a maid-of-all-work for a family who ran a bed and breakfast.50 While before the war, the family had servants to run the business, during the war, the mistress and her daughter ran the business alongside Elsie and they ate their meals together in the kitchen. William Parkes, Domestic duties: or, Instructions to young married ladies on the management of their households, and the regulation of their conduct in the various relations and duties of married life. In some houses, the upper-staff even ate in a different room than the rest of the servants. London : Century in association with the National Trust, 1989. A: Smells, sights, colours, nothing very coherent. Leonora Eyles Murray, ‘The Trouble about Domestic service’, Nineteenth Century and After, 109: 647 (1931), 79-87. Chapter 4 . Edwardian Britain had large numbers of male and female domestic servants, in both urban and rural areas. Therefore, the furnishing of the servants’ hall mirrored the social hierarchy within the house.32. London: Routledge, 1994. Prominently in view from the table was the all-important clock, the function of which was to enforce punctuality, which was at the core of servants’ experience. London: G. Bell and sons, ltd 1916; Domestic service problem’, Western Morning news, Monday 4th June 1923, 7; Leonora Eyles Murray, ‘The Trouble about Domestic’, Nineteenth Century and After, 109: 647 (1931), 79-87; ‘Domestic servants’, The Scottsman, Thursday 4th June 1931, 16. As employers wanted to enjoy some privacy and designed kitchens to be separate from the rest of the house, they created a contentious and worrying space where employers did not belong. Moreover, many kitchens were not much bigger than ten to twelve square meters in old Victorian villas.41 Their small size made it difficult for servants to sit down to eat their meal when most of the kitchen space was occupied by cooking and washing up. The Care of the Dining-Room. Stephen Mennell, All manners of food : eating ad taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present. Styles of Serving Meals. The middle class is defined here, following Benjamin S. Rowntree, as the households employing at least one servant.14 Employing a servant facilitated the household access to leisure which was at the core of middle-class identities since the early nineteenth century.15 Moreover, the presence of an ‘other’ in the household helped to establish one’s middle-class status by opposition.16 This broad definition encompasses a variety of middle-class households, from well-off families to those at the margin who struggled to keep up appearances, as well as those who employed a servant as part of their business such as boarding houses.17 Therefore, within the middle class itself, servants experienced different relationships with their employers and ate in different types of spaces. Pamela Horn, Life below stairs in the twentieth century. London: Routledge 1994, 222-228; Selina Todd, ‘Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950’, Past & Present, 203, 1, (2009), 191-192. London: Pan 2011; Nancy Sharman, Nothing to steal : the story of a Southampton childhood. Dorothy Burnham, Through dooms of love. Beer is served at all Servants' meals, including Breakfast, at the Butler's discretion. Chapter 6. Though WWI did not break the tradition or need for servants, post-war housewives had long been admonished by women’s journals … Barnsley: Pen & Sword History 2015; Anne Kynoch, The King’s seat. The long, slow, and heavy meals of the mid-nineteenth century had disappeared by the Edwardian era: now hostesses preferred their dinner parties swift and filling (though this was taken to the extreme by Gilded Age hostess Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who would hurry her guests through eight or nine courses in forty minutes), most likely to make time for evening entertainments. September 20, 2019 at 10:26 am . Oxford University Press 2007, 18. However, we know very little about servants’ mealtimes as historians have been over-reliant on sources written by the middle classes which passed over issues around what and where servants ate. This article also draws on Foucault’s well-known argument that power is not defined by the individual or institution that holds it, but, rather, is an abstraction comprised in a system of rules and methods which define and control those who are subject to it.11  Conceptualizing power in these terms allows us to reflect on the role of spaces in defining servants’ inferior status at mealtimes when the employers were absent. For the same reason, there was no need to decorate with attention the servants’ hall. A Guide for Edwardian Servants - The Up to Date Waitress - a 1908 Book by Janet McKenzie Hill, Sponsored by the Alexander Palace Time Machine, Schaffer Collection of Russian Art Treasures, Hagia Sophia Drawings by Grelo 1680 and Loos 1710. Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. An Edwardian Maid Do not overlook the role of Edna the maid. Anne Kynoch, The King’s seat. It was strange to be considered not fit to eat in the same room as other human beings. London: Virago 1977, 37-52; John Burnett, Useful toil : autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s. Bourdieu shows how the upper classes distinguish themselves not purely on the basis of their economic capital but by using their economic capital to acquire cultural capital. London: Regency Press 1981. Conditions were often dreadful in the kitchens of the middle-class houses which further stigmatized servants as inferior beings. They play into a long tradition of servants’ humour that emerged in Edwardian Britain as servants increasingly contested the outdated paternalistic and deferential relationships of domestic service while lower section of the middle class could afford to employ a maid. Serving Breakfast, English Fashion. The Up-to-Date Waitress - written by Janet McKenzie-Hill; who was born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1852 and was a famous author, cooking instructor and lecturer on domestic science. Finally, James Scott defines everyday resistance as the actions of subaltern groups that are not as ‘dramatic and visible as rebellions’ or as other forms of collective and organised resistance, but instead are quiet and dispersed.12 This concept helps us to think about the defiance of servants against employers in their spaces for eating without over-stating the extent of servants’ rebellion. Time: the History of the middle Ages to the 1920s ’ and ‘ fished the kipper into ‘ servant. On a fear of a marginalized Group own words 1800-1950 Moran, Aprons and silver:!, 23 ( 1916 ) pp.528-37 the food is served after the conquest design of country... But one or at edwardian servants' meals two maids are kept food items like ice creams, chips, fries, and! 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