The Maid's Tale

Born in 1910 Rose Plummer grew up in an East End slum. At the age of fifteen she left the noise and squalor of Hoxton and started work as a live-in maid at a house in the West End. Despite the poverty of her childhood, nothing could have prepared her for the long hours, the backbreaking work and the harshness of this new world; a world that saw servants as almost less than human. This is her story.

'They thought they owned us body and soul - and they did. We weren't allowed to speak to the lady of the house or even look at her. We had to turn to face the wall if we saw her coming along the hall. And the upper servants often treated the lower ones even worse than she did. From six in the morning till eight or nine at night we lit fires, cleaned pots and pans with brick dust and vinegar till our fingers bled and were sacked if we were so much as seen with a boy. And all that for a few miserable shillings a week!'

This is upstairs downstairs as it really was.

Rose Plummer was born in 1910 in Hoxton, one of the poorest parts of London's East End. She left school at fifteen and became a live-in domestic servant in a house in the West End. For the next fifteen years she saw at first-hand what life below stairs was really like. She met her future husband Harry, a footman, just before the start of the Second World War and though there were no children they enjoyed a long and happy marriage. After the war Rose had a number of jobs, but never again in domestic service. She died in 1994.

Tom Quinn is the editor of the Country Landowner's Magazine. He has written several small books for small independent publishers. He has spent the last twenty years interviewing people who worked in domestic service, getting them to tell him their life stories.

Born in 1910 Rose Plummer grew up in an East End slum. At the age of fifteen she left the noise and squalor of Hoxton and started work as a live-in maid at a house in the West End. Despite the poverty of her childhood, nothing could have prepared her for the long hours, the backbreaking work and the harshness of this new world; a world that saw servants as almost less than human. This is her story.'They thought they owned us body and soul - and they did. We weren't allowed to speak to the lady of the house or even look at her. We had to turn to face the wall if we saw her coming along the hall. And the upper servants often treated the lower ones even worse than she did. From six in the morning till eight or nine at night we lit fires, cleaned pots and pans with brick dust and vinegar till our fingers bled and were sacked if we were so much as seen with a boy. And all that for a few miserable shillings a week!'This is upstairs downstairs as it really was.

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