Book description
Praise for Lives of the Servants: 'Reading this fascinating book is
likely to unleash almost anyone's Inner Bolshevik…!' Daily Mail '...a
fascinating portrait of the drudgery and servility of a domestic's
life.' The Age '...captures the subtleties of the English class system
to an extraordinary degree.' Midstate Observer 'If the Brothers Grimm
had ended Cinderella where she was being forced to clean the house by
her stepsisters, they might have accidentally been writing Rose
Plummer's biography. The maid's story makes for harsh, heartbreaking,
fascinating reading.' The Daily Telegraph, NZ Born in 1910, Rose Plummer
grew up in an East End slum, where she and fought an unending battle
with hunger and squalor. At the age of fifteen, Rose started work as a
live-in maid, and despite the poverty of her childhood, nothing could
have prepared her for the long hours, the backbreaking work and the
harshness of a world in which servants were treated as if they were less
than human. But however difficult life became, Rose found something to
laugh about, and her remarkable spirit and gift for friendship shines
through in her memories of a now-vanished world. 'Reading this
fascinating book is likely to unleash almost anyone's Inner Bolshevik…!'
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.
