Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid

by Moran, Mollie

  Besides Mrs Jones, the cook-housekeeper, there was Mabel, the head housemaid. She oversaw all the female servants and took care of catering, accounts, recruitment, linen and stores. Under her was a nice girl called Irene, the housemaid, and another housemaid whose name escapes me. They cleaned, dusted, tended fires, cleaned silver, laid and tended table and generally assisted other staff.

  Mr Orchard, the butler, was responsible for waiting at table, food and drink, answering the door and overall supervision of all the male servants in the house. Alan, the frisky footman, was under him and attended the door and carriages, helped at table, cleaned silver and valeted. John, the hallboy, was their dogsbody. There was also Mr Thornton, the London chauffeur, and his son Louis, the second chauffeur, and Mr and Mrs Brown, the caretakers, who lived in the mews house behind the big house and looked after the property when it was vacant.

  Mrs Stocks, when she’d been alive, had had a lady’s maid, and Captain Eric had a valet, Mr Bratton. Mr Orchard acted as Mr Stocks’s valet. Then there was me and we were soon to be joined by another kitchen maid.

  In total there were fourteen staff to look after two men. Fourteen!

  I learnt the rules fast. A strict hierarchy governed us all downstairs and was way more rigid and enforced than upstairs. Mabel, the head housemaid, and Mr Orchard, the butler, were obsessed with class and were more conservative and opposed to change than any of the gentry. They were the ones I came to fear, not Mr Stocks. Just one look from them told you whether you were in line for a roasting or not.

  Everyone was obsessed with bettering themselves and climbing to the top spot, either as butler, housemaid or cook, and, as is often the way with life in cities, people looked after number one.

  As the days passed I quickly realized that Mabel, all buttoned up in black, was another old maid and lived for bossing us about, and Mr Orchard was downright peculiar and a proper fussy old snob. Mrs Jones and Mr Orchard ate breakfast and lunch with us, but when it came to dinner they always dined together separately in the housekeeper’s drawing room with the door firmly shut.

  It was a couple of days before Mr Orchard deigned to speak to someone of my level. ‘And how are we finding it, Mollie?’ he asked one morning over breakfast, peering at me over the top of his wire-rimmed specs. He used to drink his coffee just so, with one little finger cocked out. His jet-black hair was always perfectly greased down either side of an immaculate centre parting. The parting was so straight you could have used it as a runway. He was tall and spindly and the waistline of his smart black trousers seemed to creep higher and higher each day. He can only have been in his thirties, but his snooty demeanour made him seem ancient to me.

  ‘Are we listening and learning all we can?’ he continued.

  Silly old picky knickers.

  He really thought he was the gentry and not their butler! Still, I suppose everyone likes someone to lord it over. I expect he thought I should be thankful he was bestowing me with his attention, but I didn’t need his company to feed my ego.

  ‘Oh yes, thanks,’ I said, working my way through a plate of bacon, eggs and sausage. Thankfully the food here was excellent and breakfast was always eggs and bacon, which was just as well as come eight a.m. I would be ravenously hungry. It wasn’t a patch on what Mr Stocks would be tucking into shortly. He had kedgeree, bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding and porridge. He didn’t even eat it all and sometimes the food came down with just a couple of mouthfuls gone. More fool him. Total waste if you asked me. Rest assured there wouldn’t even be a crumb left on my plate.

  As I wolfed it down like a woman possessed, Mr Orchard narrowed his eyes like a cat and his pinched face took on a supercilious air.

  ‘You know, Mollie,’ he said, smiling imperiously and delicately placing his coffee cup back in the saucer, ‘we’re not common servants here. We don’t work for middle-class doctors or bank managers.’ At the mere mention of the middle classes he wrinkled his nose as if a dog had just come and defecated on the pavement of Cadogan Square and he’d trodden in it. ‘Places such as that just have a maid of all work. We are domestic servants to the gentry and you would do well to remember that.’

  ‘What’s Mr Stocks like?’ I asked, wiping my bread round the plate to get the last drips of egg off. So far he was just a shadowy mystery figure and I’d yet to even catch a glimpse of him.

  Mr Orchard’s face suddenly lit up.

  ‘Oh, Mr Stocks is a fine gentleman through and through,’ he gushed. ‘He has breeding and class we can never imagine. He is a most refined and educated man.’

  ‘But what’s he really like?’ I urged. ‘What’s he talk about?’

  Mr Orchard looked down at me through his wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘The butler hears nothing,’ he said through thin lips.

  As he wittered on I realized that, to him, Mr Stocks was a god and his role on earth was to serve him. He genuinely believed the upper classes were morally and culturally superior. It was so different in them days. Proper rules of behaviour were dictated by the upper class, who led society in understanding the rules of manners, such as table manners, appropriate ways to dress, the correct way to speak, including the words to use and their pronunciation. Even the rules of courtship and marriage came from the upper class. The vast majority of people in powerful positions were privately educated members of the upper classes. They saw themselves as rulers and keepers of British culture, and were not to be challenged by those below them. This rigid social order was overwhelmingly accepted and rarely questioned.

  It certainly wasn’t here in the basement of Number 24 Cadogan Square. Mabel and Mr Orchard had it engrained in them so deep that if you cut them in two, Mr Stocks’s name would run through them.

  I said nothing and, heeding my mother’s advice, for once managed to ‘keep my trap shut’.

  Mr Stocks, as it later transpired, was indeed a nice old boy, a real gentleman, but in any case he didn’t intimidate me. Why should I have been intimidated? I wasn’t inferior to him. You may find it hard to believe that a fourteen-year-old scullery maid from the sticks would really not feel intimidated, but I genuinely didn’t. Maybe the blood that flowed in my veins was the same as feisty Granny Esther’s, but to me, humans are all just humans. Underneath the clothing, be it apron or double-breasted suit, we’re all just two legs, two arms, a head and a heart.

  As a scullery maid, I may have been at the opposite end of the social class to Mr Stocks and even five rungs below Mr Orchard, but we all still had the same bodily functions at the end of the day.

  You have to wonder. The intricacies, the work, the etiquette that surrounded this small, privileged enclave of London – it would seem preposterous today. Fourteen of us all there to serve two men, I ask you! The butler, the footman and the hallboy didn’t have that much to do in my opinion. They just hung about all day, cleaning silver and opening doors. In a way, the servants made work for each other. The housemaids had to clean our bedrooms, the staff ate most of the food that was cooked and we created most of the mess. In their own right, Mr Stocks and Captain Eric didn’t require much looking after, but what else did they have to do? They didn’t work, after all, and it was all about social standing. Looking back, of course, it was unfair. They were only considered bright because they had the money and time to further their education and make themselves more refined. I daresay I could have formed a whole load more opinions had I been given the opportunity to carry on at school or go to university, but by nature of birth I was born into the working class and that was that.

  My grandfather had owned the local village shop; Mr Stocks’s grandfather had bought this house in Cadogan Square, Woodhall in Norfolk and a number of other large country properties including Shibden Head brewery and Shibden Hall in Halifax. The Stocks family had made their money from coal-mining and, later, brewing. Mr Stocks, educated at Eton and then Cambridge, would never, ever have to sleep in a hut like my father or scavenge the countryside for pigeons for the pot.

  But what go
od would it do moaning about it? Besides, what could I, a fourteen-year-old scullery maid, do about it any case? Relegated to the basement and hidden away behind a green baize door, I was just there to make Mr Stocks’s and Captain Eric’s lives as comfortable as possible. Thanks to a separate entrance and back stairs, they never actually had to even see me. I could lead a totally parallel existence to them. Myself and everyone else were there to anticipate his and Captain Eric’s every need. Meals appeared on tables, fires were miraculously lit, beds warmed, covers turned and front steps left gleaming. Not that I begrudged him. He was only living the life expected of the gentry.

  But times were changing outside on the rarefied streets of Kensington and Chelsea. A seismic shift of a magnitude that few of us could even imagine was on its way. Little did I, Mollie, sniffy Mr Orchard, cantankerous Mrs Jones or blue-blooded Mr Stocks upstairs, delicately picking at his kedgeree, know, but this little world of ours was about to be blown apart. Soon it wouldn’t matter if the front doorstep was sparkling or what staircase you used. Dark forces were brewing. Forces that were to irrevocably alter our way of life forever.

  British fascist supporters and the anti-fascist opposition were clashing across the East End and in the centre of London. Large numbers of Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe were arriving in the UK and were settling in London. Hitler had taken control of the German Workers’ Party, which he renamed as the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, and bestowed on himself the title of Führer. His speeches, in which he condemned Jews, Communists, democrats and capitalists, were arousing people’s injured national pride. By 1931 he was gaining in power and popularity. Even here in London a local Nazi group had been established and its membership was growing rapidly.

  These powerful events in Germany were to shape all our lives in ways none of us could have foreseen. But for now a new change, albeit on a smaller scale, was coming my way.

  My homesickness was cured in an instant with the arrival to Cadogan Square of a lovely lass by the name of Flo Wadlow. Friendships formed between women are some of the most magical on earth. They are lasting, meaningful and can sustain us through the longest hours. We all need a woman in our life, someone we can gossip long into the night with, spill out our hopes, dreams and ambitions to. Someone to giggle over first kisses with and confide our darkest fears in. And so it was with lovely Flo and myself.

  We had no idea back then, when she nervously pushed open the bedroom door, what a wonderful journey we would go on together. The friendship we formed when I was just a lowly scullery maid at Cadogan Square and she a kitchen maid has lasted eighty years. Who would have thought it? Eighty years! We still chat regularly on the phone and Flo, now a hundred years old, is planning a visit from Norfolk, where she still lives, to Bournemouth. I can’t wait. We still giggle and laugh like we did back in the old days and we both still have all our marbles and relatively healthy bodies. Not bad for a couple of old scullery maids, eh?

  We’ve lived through so much that I’d say we’re a part of history. We were both in the crowds in London, cheering at the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary, we gawped at the fascist MPs on their soapboxes in Hyde Park, admired Wallis Simpson when we saw her in London, waved off King George VI’s coffin and between us cooked for royalty and politicians.

  Back then we never dreamt we’d live to ninety-six and one hundred years old. In 1931 we had rather different preoccupations than we do today. We’re more likely to discuss Scrabble moves than moves on cute errand boys, but the laughter and the friendship remains as strong as it ever was. The blood, sweat and toil we shared in domestic service bonded us forever.

  Mrs Jones was right in one respect, though – all we did care about was boys, dresses and dancing, and I recognized a kindred spirit the minute she timidly opened the bedroom door one evening after dinner service. Flo had a kind face, with intelligent blue eyes, framed by clouds of soft dark hair.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m the new kitchen maid. Looks like I’m sharing with you then.’ Her soft Norfolk accent immediately gave her away.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ I said with a grin. ‘I’m from Downham Market. Where you from?’

  ‘Wells-on-Sea,’ she said, grinning back. ‘But I moved up to London aged sixteen when I got a job as a scullery maid not far from here.’

  At nineteen, Flo was five years older than me and more experienced. She’d done her dues scrubbing doorsteps and was now trying her hardest to learn all she could so she could make cook.

  ‘What they like here then?’ she asked as she unpacked her small case and sat down on the iron bed opposite me.

  ‘Oh, they’re all right really,’ I said, smiling. ‘Ones to watch out for is Mr Orchard, the butler, and bossy Mabel, the head housemaid. Watch your bum when Alan the footman’s about too,’ I warned. ‘He’s got more hands than an octopus.’

  Her eyes shone with glee as she giggled.

  ‘And the cook’s a bit temperamental too,’ I added. ‘You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her.’

  Flo opened her case.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Let me help you.’

  Together we finished her unpacking. She had some beautiful dresses, even some silky evening ones like I’d seen the smart ladies wear out on the streets of Knightsbridge.

  ‘You’ve got lovely clothes,’ I sighed wistfully, thinking of my one good dress.

  ‘I make them,’ she said. ‘I bought a sewing machine from the Brompton Road. It’s easy, I can run you up a couple if you like.’

  My heart soared. ‘Really?’ I gasped. ‘You’d do that? Oh, that’d be smashing.’

  Our eyes met and a current of understanding flowed between us.

  ‘Course, Mollie,’ she smiled. ‘We’ve got to stick together, us Norfolk girls.’

  Seems Flo was used to odd sorts after her four years in domestic service. ‘Do you know, in my first job I wasn’t allowed to be called Florence, my full name, as they already had a parlour maid called Florence, so I suggested they call me Georgina – my middle name,’ she said as she tucked herself down under her eiderdown and flicked off the light.

  ‘And did they?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the lady of the house reckoned it was too much of a mouthful and too smart for just a scullery maid in any case, so they called me Ena. Got me in no end of trouble as they kept calling me Ena and me not being used to it thought they were talking to someone else and ignored them. They must have thought me a proper ignoramus.’

  My dear friend Flo Wadlow, the kitchen maid I worked with at Woodhall and Cadogan Square, in her uniform in a previous job. She was my partner in crime and a gentle, kind and loyal friend. We met in 1931 and we’re still friends to this day.

  I shook my head. ‘Well, I’ll call you Flo if you don’t mind, and I’m Mollie.’

  ‘I’d like that, Mollie,’ she giggled.

  ‘Have you ever been to a dance before, Flo?’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. I could see her eyes shining in the dark. ‘In my last job the boss had a big house in the countryside in Kent and I was allowed to go to the village dances. The village boys loved girls from the big house so they taught me to dance. Not that I told my mum, Mollie. You know what mothers are like. I mean, what wicked things you can get up to at a dance.’

  I nodded, even though in truth I had no idea.

  ‘Will you teach me to dance?’ I whispered.

  ‘Course,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you the Palais Glide if you like. It’s all the rage, you know.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I laughed. ‘You’re a bit with it, aren’t ya?’

  As our giggles filled the dark, I started to feel a little less homesick. Life was looking up.

  Flo quickly became my sidekick and, now that I had a confidante, there was no looking back. With Flo to giggle and lark about with, scrubbing the front steps didn’t seem half so bad. I could even handle that old toad Mrs Jones now that I had Flo on my side. Every morning we went
about our business, humming and whistling, and we’d take bets on what mood Mrs Jones would be in.

  ‘I reckon black this morning,’ I said one day not long after Flo’s arrival.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Flo. ‘Her niece is visiting this morning so she may be all sweetness and light.’

  Soon after breakfast Mrs Jones came down and a look at her face told me I’d won. She was red as a beetroot and her chubby fingers were feverishly wringing a tea towel. ‘Boss has a dinner party tonight so you silly girls had better stop your tittering and pull your fingers out,’ she shot.

  One wink from Flo and we both dissolved into fits of giggles.

  ‘I mean it,’ she blustered, slamming her fist down on her trusty tome, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. ‘It’s Mrs Lavinia so it’s got to be just right. No mucking about today.’

  Poor Mrs Jones. She dreaded dinner parties.

  Every day at ten a.m., after breakfast, Mr Stocks would come down. As soon as Mrs Jones heard the heavy thudding of his boots down the staff passage, her mouth would tighten and she’d disappear off into the housekeeper’s sitting room with him to go through the day’s menus. If she came out smiling and a normal colour it meant he was dining out and we were saved a job. If she came back the colour she was this morning, it meant only one thing: all hands on deck.

  Usually the boss just had lunch parties – probably preferred it at his age – but every so often his late wife’s sister, Mrs Lavinia, would come to stay so she could do the London season, and everything had to be just so.

  Personally, I loved it when he had lunch and dinner parties as the atmosphere in the kitchen would become charged with electricity, but I daresay to Mrs Jones it made the day a whole lot harder. Dinner parties in those days weren’t like dinners now. There was none of this casual cooking in front of your guests and pouring your own wine. The moment Mr Stocks’s guests’ cars pulled up in Cadogan Square, the footman, Alan, would appear, on his best behaviour, and with a lightness of hand and deferential manner, show them through to the drawing room for cocktails served by Mr Orchard at his most obsequious.