SERVANT REVOLT

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 August 1931, Page 7

SERVANT REVOLT

GOOD DAYS PASSED A form of female entertainment which has arisen the last two decades is the “hen luncheon party,” where the hostess entertains her women friends and men are taboo. It has existed for years in America, probably because most of the menfolk are away all day at their offices, and m recent times has sprung up in England, possibly for the same reason, writes “An’ Edwardian” in the Daily Telegraph.” . When 1 asked a lady friend what women talked about at these parties, she answered, “A little of politics, a lot of gossip, and—need you ask—the servant problem, the nightmare of every unfortunate woman who has to run a house, especially if there is a prospect of her having to deal with a union in future!”

• If the servant problem is not so acute as it was immediately after the war, it has certainly become chronic, and is likely to remain so, especially as regards women under-servants. Girls seem to object to any form of domestic service. Wider education and much propaganda has produced this state of affairs. Many a girl believes, quite unreasonably, that domestic service is domestic servitude, and that even when her work is done she cannot, as in other forms of employment, consider herself her own mistress. The idea of having only one evening a week off, instead of every evening, appals her. It is diflicult to keep servants contented in a large town, but far more difficult in the country, especially it there does not happen to be a motorbus service to the nearest place where they can go to the "pictures” or gaze in shop windows. Yet in my early days the prospect of domestic service in a large country house never suggested the complete boredom that it apparently does now; moreover, there was ample material to draw upon. The daughters of the v game-keepers, gardeners, or some other dependents upon a large estate almost invariably went into domestic service.

If an under-housemaid or scullerymaid left, it was in the natural order of things that her place should be taken by a member of one of the families on the property. There was no question of serfdom, although this custom might have been called a relic of feudal times, and I am sure the girls themselves were perfectly happy. The keeper's son and the gardener’s son became in due course their father's understudies; grooms and footmen, too, were provided in the same way. Generations of this form of service produced what were known as old family servants —a class, alas! rapidly becoming extinct. They regarded their calling as an honourable one, and fulfilled their responsibilities accordingly; and men and women who had served .their employers faithfully became their friends and their children’s friends and were rewarded in .heir old age by an adequate pension and a rent-free cottage on the estate. When I was a child of 10, my hero was the retired gamekeeper who hud served my father and grandfather fifty years. At 75 he was still hale and hearty, and would take me for long walks, and it was from him that I learned the ways of beasts, all about bird life and birds’ eggs, and how and where to look for them. The butler had been my grandmother’s, footman, the housekeeper her maid. In most county families a similar tale could have been told. There was so much more domesticity, so much more family life, in those days. Family prayers were a matter of course. Such customs created a happy atmosphere in the household; there was not the discontent among the staff so often to be met with nowadays. Perhaps that is the reason servants were far kinder to each other than they are now.