We’ve dived deep into the British Library’s newspaper archive (available on subscription direct and via Find My Past) to find out what British newspapers have had to say about the Woodgrange estate’s Claremont Road since its construction in the late 1870s, and some fascinating stories have emerged.
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| Claremont Road 1913 |
The most significant number of these (more than 10%, or 167) are advertisements for domestic servants, which paint an interesting picture. This article is the first in a series examining how the press has covered this street, focusing on the advertisements for domestic servants.
167 is almost certainly a serious underestimate of those placed for servants in the street. The most prominent local newspaper for nearly all of the period since Claremont Road was constructed, the Stratford Express, for some baffling reason (and despite numerous requests by local historians to fully digitize the paper), only has a handful of years, seemingly chosen at random, digitized and available through this source for examination.
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| Claremont Road c1910 |
Also, somewhat annoyingly, the national publication that has traditionally been the go-to for domestic servants' advertisements—The Lady, first published in 1885—has also not been digitized. Doubtlessly, buried within the pages of these two publications are many more advertisements seeking domestic servants for Claremont Road since its construction.
What follows is what we know and conclude about the lives of domestic servants in Claremont Road, primarily based on press accounts.
Census returns
We have previously examined the number of servants living on the road in our coverage of the 1881 and 1891 censuses (see here and here). In summary, these articles showed that in 1881, 50 (83%) of the 67 houses that had been constructed by then had a live-in servant, and 13 (22%) had both a female domestic servant and a “nurse” (live-in nanny).
A decade later, we examined 98 houses on the street, 80 of which had at least one servant, and 11 had two (typically the second was a nurse). All the servants in both surveys were women who were overwhelmingly young and unmarried.
Houses covered by adverts
For most of the time covered by the newspaper advertisements surveyed, there were approximately 160 houses on Claremont Road (fewer in the first few years, as construction had not been completed), and fewer since 1940, as around 25 houses at the Woodgrange Road end of the road had been destroyed by bomb damage.
Although over 80% of houses in the 1881 and 1891 snapshot census figures reported having domestic servants, we have found newspaper advertisements for approximately only 36% of them (58 houses) for the entire period covered by the survey (from 1880 onwards).
This suggests that either households found their domestics through other means (such as word of mouth, recommendations, agencies, or informal advertisements) or that the more obvious publication sources (Stratford Express and The Lady) offer a rich source of material for future examination once they become available through the British Newspaper Archive.
Approximately two-thirds of the houses on Claremont Road have triple frontages. Not surprisingly, adverts for those houses are disproportionately more likely to have sought domestic help than the double-fronted houses at the street's eastern end. A complete list of houses advertising for servants is included in the footnote. Anyone who would like a copy of the adverts for their home can be supplied with one on request.
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| One of the smaller, double fronted houses at the eastern end of Claremont Road |
Pay
Only about a third of the adverts mentioned pay for the servants, and by today’s standards, the rewards were shockingly low. Almost all the advertisements sought live-in female help, typically for girls or young women in their teens and early twenties. Presumably, these individuals would have been perceived as being cheaper and less likely to get married or pregnant than older women.
The fact that they lived with their employers would have meant that they were at their beck and call almost relentlessly, but also that free board and lodging (and possibly work attire) was a considerable bonus to their meagre wages.
The pay offered to servants in the 1880s was in the region of £10-£12 per year (£1,103 - £1,324 in real terms today, using the Bank of England inflation calculator). Pay offered in the 1890s was more varied, but at current valuations, it was within the range of £862 to £1,675 per annum.
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| A typical 1880s advert- Leytonstone Express 1 Nov 1888 |
The higher pay rates presumably reduced the number of households able or prepared to employ servants. The number of adverts for servants decreased considerably in the decade before the onset of World War One, and it never recovered. We found only two advertisements in the entire post-World War One period—both from 1927. The rates offered were £1,868 and £2,773, respectively.
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| Yarmouth Independent 22 October 1927 - offering the equivalent of £1,868 pa. |
Most of the advertisements we have traced were for full-time, live-in servants, but there were occasional ones for “daily help,” such as the one below. It is from 1891 and offers a maximum of £5 per week (adjusted for inflation) for someone who would have had to pay for their accommodation elsewhere. Another shows a maximum of 30p per week in 1917 (£15 per week at today’s rates), when there were considerable competing demands for women in the wartime workforce.
The hours of the “dailys” were rarely mentioned, but if the 1891 advert was typical, an 11-hour day (8am – 7pm), possibly six days a week, would have seemed likely.
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| 11 hour day for "daily", West Ham and South Essex Independent 25 July 1891 |
Conditions
None of the advertisements provided a job description, so it isn't easy to accurately describe what work was expected or what the hours were. The nearest equivalent is for jobs as “nurses” when it was clear that the job was essentially that of a nanny who would have been employed in addition to a general housemaid.
The advertisement below, from 1888, is presumably for new house occupants, seeking two young women or girls. The nanny was expected to “Take entire CHARGE of Four, and to teach three young children English and music” for £10 per year (£1,103 today)! And for a ”GIRL, about 14, for housework” (no salary mentioned).
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| Essex Newsman 7 Jan 1888 |
A typical housemaid would have been expected to light the fires, carry coal to various rooms in the house, and perform household chores, including clearing up the mess caused by the soot from the fires. In an era before refrigeration, daily shopping was necessary, and most advertisements featured cooking – usually emphasizing “simple” or “plain” cooking.
Washing was an issue and an undesired task for servants (heating the water, transferring it to large vessels, hand washing many and heavy clothes with crude soaps, drying—particularly in bad weather—ironing in the pre-electric iron days, etc.). As recruitment became more expensive and difficult in the first decade of the twentieth century, would-be employers found it advantageous to offer “no washing” as an inducement to potential staff.
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| An early C20th "no washing" advert - Leytonstone Express 5 May 1902 |
This would have coincided with the growth of commercial laundries. There was one between what is now the Fox and Hounds and Forest Tavern on Woodgrange Road (see the faint traces of signage in the photo below) and a larger one on Upton Lane (see the second photo).
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| Laundry to the left of the Fox and Hounds |
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| Substantial Steam Laundry on Upton Lane - 1902 - now a petrol station. Location of Minnie Baldock's campaign on behalf of workers' conditions in 1911 |
The working life for women in these establishments was appalling – see the correspondence between local suffragette leader Minnie Baldock and workers at the Upton Lane establishment in the early twentieth century here.
It is reasonable to assume that the smaller the employer’s family was, the less demanding the work would have been for the servants, so – as with the washing issue – many adverts stressed small family sizes, where appropriate in the early years of the twentieth century, as potential inducements to the girls/young women they were seeking to attract.
Media used and timings of advertisements
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of advertisements accessed were in East London and Essex newspapers. However, the Daily Express became favoured in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when the overall demand had reduced. Presumably, a national newspaper was used to advertise to attract a wider pool of would-be applicants as local sources dried up.
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| Daily Express 14 Feb 1904 |
A couple of adverts were placed when potential employers had a specific requirement. In 1902, the Percy Turner family of 89 Claremont Road felt a little homesick when they advertised in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, seeking a locally based person to work for a Devonshire family.
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| Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 22 May 1902 |
In 1882, Mrs. Allen of 31 Claremont specifically requested a “churchwoman,” and the owners of 24 Claremont advertised in the Catholic Times in 1907, seeking “clerical references.” In 1891, Mrs. Bliss of 52 was quite clear, in an era when the temperance movement was most active, that she wanted “an abstainer.”
News reports
Claremont Road domestic servants were explicitly mentioned in three news reports in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
Suicide
The first case involved 16-year-old Constance Susan Hand, a nursemaid employed by the Berry family of number 56.
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| Eastern Post 2 April 1881 |
It would appear that she had only been employed by the family for two weeks and had received a letter from her fiancé breaking off their engagement. However, the coroner’s court heard that she was pleased this had happened.
On the day of her death, she borrowed 6d from her mother and bought vermin killer from Dyer’s, the chemist and druggist on Woodgrange Road.
She returned to number 56, appeared to have taken the poison, and was found by Mrs Berry, the employer, “convulsed and repeatedly calling on God to help her”. She died an hour later. Mrs Berry described her as a “very quiet, modest young woman”. The court could discover no cause for her suicide.
Railway accident
Six years later, another nursemaid, 24-year-old Ellen Taylor, the daughter of a Kent policeman, employed by Joseph Benton at 87 Claremont Road was involved in a strange, self-generated railway accident.
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| Chelmsford Chronicle 5 Aug 1887 |
While in charge of two of her employer’s children on a train journey to Southend, she tested the carriage's door to ensure it had been adequately closed when they left Liverpool Street. It hadn’t been, and she fell out, sustaining injuries. She was taken to Chelmsford hospital, where her damaged arm was treated, and the family accompanied her back to Forest Gate.
Duped in a theft
The third case was less dramatic. “Miss Rayner,” a domestic servant of 26 Claremont Road, was an unwitting accessory to a theft from an ironmonger’s shop. The shop’s employee, who had duped her, was convicted of theft and given a one-month sentence with hard labour.
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| East End News 3 June 1896 |
Footnote. House numbers placing (sometimes multiple) adverts for servants: 3,6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36, 39, 44, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 82, 84, 89, 90, 9, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 11, 113, 114, 124, 125, 131, 133, 136, 138, 140, 141, 145, 148, 158.
