When he published that advertisement, Dawes intended to tell the true story of domestic workers in the United Kingdom – from the peak of the sector in the mid-nineteenth century to its progressive decline after World War I. If, by some mischance, they happened to meet, she was not to talk to them, but curtsey and disappear as quickly as possible. Under the rules of the mansion, which were strictly enforced, she was never to be seen by any of the family. At those early hours, she worked by the light of a single candle which she pushed ahead of her as she moved across the stone flags on her knees. As her granddaughter told Dawes, she had to get up at 4am to scrub the stone floors of the dairy with cold water and churn butter until her arms ached. This image is far from the experience of Elizabeth Simpson, born in 1853, who also began working as a maid at the age of 10 in a mansion in the county of Yorkshire. Michelle Dockery from ‘Downton Abbey’: ‘I don’t like the label of guilty pleasures’ Everything seems to be where it should be, both objects and people: everyone happy in their rightful place.
ENGLISH LAUNDRY ABBEY TV
Neither TV show offers a glimpse of the suffering of servants, as reflected in the testimonies in Dawes’s book. This British historical drama, which first aired in 2010, paints an idyllic picture of the life of a Victorian family and their servants, in line with its predecessor, the 1970s TV show Upstairs, Downstairs.
ENGLISH LAUNDRY ABBEY MOVIE
Its launch coincides with the premiere of Downton Abbey: A New Era, a new movie based on the popular TV show Downton Abbey. The Spanish publishing house Periférico has published it for the first time in Spanish with a translation by Ángeles de los Santos.
The story of Harriet and Ellen appears in the book Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of Upstairs, Downstairs Life by Frank Victor Dawes, a late British journalist who in 1972 published an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph in which he asked people who had worked as servants to send him letters recounting their experiences. She had to scrub bare-boarded floors with a mixture of soft soap and silver sand that left her hands and forearms raw. As a newcomer, she had the toughest tasks. I do think I should have been laid up if it was not for the Cod Liver Oil I am taking.” Two decades later, history would repeat itself with her daughter Ellen, who at the same age became the eighth of eight maids in another house in the British capital. In 1879, shortly after starting work at the age of 10 as a servant in a mansion in a suburb of London, Harriet Brown wrote in a letter to her mother: “I am up at half-past five and six every morning and do not go to bed till nearly 12 at night and I feel so tired sometimes I am obliged to have a good cry.
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