Connected to the electricity network

There used to be a time when having mains electricity was a selling point for a house.

These advertisements appeared in The Times of 18 September 1935.  As you can imagine, many of the advertised properties for sale are rather large with rambling gardens and situated in the Home Counties.  Each would need a whole battalion of servants to keep them in good working order - you could pick and choose a domestic servant from the small ads that covered pages 2 and 3 of the same newspaper.  Running hot water would make life a lot easier for housekeepers and maids.  The lady of the house wouldn't need anyone to boil up water for her morning bath anymore; she could just turn on the tap and out it would come.

I find it quaint that, even in 1935, people felt they had to mention the existence of an electricity connection.  I wonder when they stopped mentioning it.  It would also be interesting to learn when electricity in working-class houses finally became so common that people didn't need to mention it any more. 

Life without a telephone

A recent house move left me without a landline connection for a whole week - and all this despite meticulous advance planning.  

The problem apparently was located in a local exchange but the company (not) providing me with a telephone connection kept assuring me that their computers showed my telephone was connected and working.  They never took me seriously when I tried to convince them that their computers were wrong and I was right.  The fact that these numerous "service" calls were conducted via my mobile phone failed to make any impression on them.  If they took the simple expedient step of ringing my landline number, they would soon find out that the line was as dead as a dodo and their computers in need of a serious overhaul.  Luckily they saw the error of their ways by the end of the week and my telephone now works perfectly.

A few days after full service was restored, I received a phone call from a very nice lady in customer relations: she was ringing to check that my telephone was working properly - she rang on my landline phone.  If only they had done this on day one, in the fashion of the early telephone operators who used to make daily telephone calls to subscribers to check if the lines were working.

I'm not a fanatic telephone user - neither mobile nor landline - but I must confess to feeling isolated and cut off from the rest of society during my telephone-less week.  Not just cut off in the sense that I was unreachable by phone for a week but in the sense that, without a telephone connection in the society that I live in, you're not considered fully part of that society.  Many public bodies and services ask for your landline number first; a mobile number is useful but a landline presupposes a fixed address with a householder who is registered in all the correct places.  So with a landline connection, you feel more 'permanent' and an established member of the community.  When people ring your number, they know precisely in which building you are located.  I had to rely on mobile telephony but never felt really safe with it - units might run out during a long phone call, the battery could go flat, I could lose the charger, or quite simply forget to take the phone with me when leaving the house.

What made our grandparents feel permanent and 'connected' to their communities before the telephone became commonplace?  Or did they not need to feel connected?  As an experiment, going cold turkey with telephone use could tell us all a lot about how we view our own personal use and need of the telephone (in a similar fashion to going a whole week or month without television or Internet).  But we can never experience pre-telephony life in this way - what has been learned cannot be unlearned.

The communication practices of the Victorians ... spiced up with a scandalous divorce

I have trawled through a handful of etiquette manuals, looking for advice to readers on telephone use.  All in vain.  The British publications pointedly avoid any mention of the new invention, even those published in later years after 1910.  The contents of these manuals are oh so predictable – visiting, invitations to balls/dinners/teas, weddings, funerals.  It seems these were the core events in one’s social calendar and members of the monied classes had to be able to negotiate their way through this minefield.  These were fixed, long established rituals which people observed in order to maintain the traditions of their class.  (Whether these were ‘invented traditions’ à la Hobsbawm is a subject for another thesis.) 

Why should lords and ladies incorporate the upstart telephone into their routines and upset tradition?  The people who read conduct manuals were probably the ones in a position to own a telephone, but that doesn’t mean they would use the instrument to conduct their social affairs.  It might be useful for ringing up one’s business premises or for ordering coal, but such an instrument, ‘tainted’ as it were by business matters, was inappropriate for inviting guests to dinner.  I think remnants of this attitude are still visible today.  There are some aspects of social business that you just don’t conduct over the telephone: wedding invitations, for example, or ‘Dear John’ letters.  I’ve never heard of a ‘Dear John’ telephone call or of someone being notified of a forthcoming wedding by telephone.  Well, they might, but they always send a fancy card by post later.

Lady Colin’s manual is no different to all the others of the era.  It makes no mention whatsoever of the telephone.  It is as if it didn’t exist.  She readily acknowledges, however, that modern life is hectic and that there is little time to devote to letter writing.  How much time she would save if she used the telephone. 

Regarding domestic use, telephone companies said it was alright to ring up traders to order supplies for the household.  Not so Lady Colin.  She advises writing a short letter, and even provides an example: “Mrs. Maitland will be obliged by Mr. Scott sending her 6lb. of tea.”  Admittedly, this method is not as speedy as a phone call, but if you can send a boy round to the shop with the note, you would still get same-day service.  And you would avoid the unpleasant necessity of having to actually converse with tradespeople.  Good houses had separate tradesmen entrances for deliveries, out of sight at the back of the building.  So we don’t want to invite tradesmen directly into our parlours via the telephone.

The writer makes further mention of post cards.  Towards the end of the century sending postcards became a popular form of communication among ordinary people.  Postage for a card was cheaper than a letter and with multiple deliveries in many large towns, it was possible sometimes to send a card and receive a reply on the same day.  You could say that post cards were to Victorians what Twitter is to us today.  Space was limited (you couldn’t add an extra sheet, as with letters) so messages had to be concise.  Lady Colin, however, advises against them for personal matters: post cards are only to be used for business transactions. 

Privacy was a major concern for these people.  Post cards entering and leaving a house would be seen by servants and the information written on them freely visible to all and sundry.  Even more paranoid, to my mind, is Lady C advising letter writers not to write their return address on the backs of envelopes.  Why?  Because servants at the receiving end would know who was writing to their employers.  Compare this with today’s business correspondence: every bill or official letter I receive is blazoned with the sender’s full details. 

I written a lot about communication and correspondence but very little about the telephone.  That’s okay because we are gradually building a picture of how people at the turn of the century communicated with each other and what attitudes they held towards each method.  Given what we now know about, say, letter writing or postal services, it’s easy to envisage how difficult it was for promoters of the telephone to convince the public of its utility. 

I suspect that the telephone eventually caught on, not so much because people realized it was a good communications device, but rather because the other means of communication deteriorated. 

A final comment about the author – Lady Colin was a victim of the hypocrisy and double standards of the day.  Wikipedia has all the sordid details and there’s also information here written by Lady Colin’s biographer.

Her divorce proceedings caused great agitation in high society and the same society ostracized her for her transgression.  Instead of quietly retiring into obscurity, Lady C took to writing and journalism and mixed in literary and artistic circles.  How fitting then that she should edit a book dictating good manners to the people who vilified her.  

Lady Colin Campbell.  Etiquette of Good Society.  London: Cassell and Company, 1893.

Victorian call centres

Victorians had qualities which mark them out even to this day: thrift, hard work, a practical nature, a mentality of self-help.  Such qualities, I believe, are borne out of the nature of their society; there was no social security network, for example, to go to when they fell on hard times.  If there was no family to help, then people in distress would have to rely on their own resources.

Widows were especially vulnerable.  Losing a husband meant they had to become the breadwinner overnight.  For women of the lower classes, going out to work was not so remarkable and it was relatively easy to earn money.  The major forms of employment were domestic service or factory work.  For the middle class woman, however, paid employment was simply not an option.  The most she could hope for was a position as governess or companion to old ladies.  Both meant living in and a drop in social status.  And the money earned would have been peanuts.

One highly practical solution for such widows was the practice of giving them a sewing machine as a present.  This was not charity and allowed the widow to become self-sufficient.  Working from home, the widow maintains respectability, and performs a task considered appropriate for women.  She could receive orders for new garments or domestic textiles, or take in alterations.

But why bother with a sewing machine?  Close needlework ruins your eyesight (remember, they only had gas or oil lamps then) and you get a hump back bending over your work.  Some projects would take days or weeks to finish.  A much better alternative to the donated sewing machine is – wait for it – a telephone. 

A writer identifying herself (I think we can safely assume the writer is female) as “Self Help” sent in a suggestion to an 1884 periodical,[1] saying that the gift of a telephone connection to the central exchange is an inordinately better income generator than a sewing machine.  Here are some of the ways the widow can exploit her telephone (and simultaneously exploit her friends):

1. Send out flyers to her lady friends that she can now order goods on their behalf from local traders, who are also connected by telephone.  They might order the following: flowers, fish, theatre tickets, coal, wine.  The writer believes that traders would be willing to pay the widow 10% commission for all orders she puts their way.
2. She could allow merchants and their employees to use her telephone for business purposes.  They pay a few pennies to the widow and telephone the office to say they would be an hour late. 

Given a choice, I would opt for the telephone.  It’s much easier than labouring over a sewing machine that’s not even electric.  Turning your front parlour into a one-woman call centre has a lot going for it – intense networking with friends and local business people; no commuting every day; being at home to look after children.

This idea surfaced during the telephone's first decade in Britain.  It shows amazing entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking on how to put a new technology to good use.

I still maintain that the technological practices and gadgets that we consider ultra modern and super digital are not in the slightest bit new or original – they are merely faster/bigger/cheaper versions of what the Victorians did before us.

---

[1] Work and leisure: a magazine devoted to the interests of women.  London: F. Kirby, 1884.

Franz Göll’s cultural capital

Reading an account of Berliner Franz Göll’s life (1899-1984), I imagine him as a bit of a dandy.  He was quite a clothes horse; he bought fedora hats (nine of them in the space of seven years), gloves, bow ties and all the accoutrements of the middle class lifestyle that he aspired to.  But it is not Göll’s sartorial elegance that impresses me – he was after all a bachelor and could indulge himself as he pleased – but rather his trips to the cinema.  The numbers are impressive.  Beginning in 1919 he went to the cinema 19 times (once every 2.7 weeks).  Over the years this increased until 1926, when he made 74 visits to the cinema, once and sometimes twice a week!  Another diarist of the Weimar era (Klemperer) reports that every day 2 million Germans visited the cinema.

I tried to imagine myself doing what Göll did; visiting the cinema at least once, maybe twice a week.  Without a television at home and perhaps no radio, the cinema would be my only source of entertainment and information.  News reels, of course, would have lent an air of currency to a visit.  Did they change the programme so frequently that I could see a different film every time?  Even by visiting cinemas in other neighbourhoods?  And were the films so good that I would be prepared to fork out for an evening’s entertainment something from my modest wage?  

In comparison, today’s cinematic offerings are not that appetizing and the complexes throughout the city all show more or less the same films.  (If you’re lucky, you might find an alternative, non-Hollywood picture house tucked away in some back alley that shows European productions, but this would be an exception.)  

I can only think that Göll was trying to increase his share of cultural capital.  When he wasn't visiting the cinema, he attended concerts, operettas, and theatre - comedy and heavier stuff.  I don't think he spent many evenings at home after work. 

Would I want to go to the cinema every week, or even twice a week?  I don’t think so, even if the films shown were Oscar-winning material and my favourite genre.  I couldn’t keep it up for a whole year and would give up after a month.  What was it that kept Göll motivated?  It might have been a novelty in the beginning but surely not after seven years.  Göll kept a film diary but sadly this has disappeared; we’ll never know which films he saw and what his impressions were.  

A postscript - Göll died in 1984 but stopped writing his journals in 1982.  Why did he give up his writing, something that he had been doing for sixty-six years?  One possible reason could be the colour television be bought a couple of years earlier.  Could be coincidental, but I think not.

Fritzsche, Peter.  The Turbulent World of Franz Göll.  An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century.  Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Heard, but not seen – invisible technologies in the home

Our homes are filled with no end of technologies, simple and complicated.  Most people, however, would rather not see these devices, or at least have them disguised in some way in order to blend in with the furnishings.  Here are just some examples.

Light switches and electrical sockets come in functional white plastic but also a multitude of other colours and materials to suit; Georgian brass, for instance.

In the days when domestic telephones came attached to a cable, you could buy one in any colour of the rainbow.  You could always find the right one to match the wallpaper.  Today’s cordless versions are usually lost somewhere under a pile, so the colour is largely irrelevant.

Televisions that came in wooden cabinets, so that when the doors were closed, it looked like a drinks cabinet.  Today’s fancy screens that are mounted on living room walls resemble modern art.

Radios too were housed in cabinets.

Let’s not forget the current fashion for retro style products – candlestick telephones, wartime wireless sets, fridges that look like they came straight out of a 40s American diner – the latest technology but dressed up like an antique.

There are still many housewives from the old school who cover their ‘black boxes’ with pretty lace cloths and other fripperies so that they blend in more.  A small digression here: one of the reasons why my friend Margaret got divorced was because her ex didn’t like her putting table cloths on top of his new two-metre-high stereo loudspeakers.  He said it ruined the sound effect.  She said they were an eyesore.  Anyway …  Household technologies are not meant to be seen for what they really are.

You may also recall a post that gave homemakers instructions on how to make decorative telephone screens, with matching covers for the telephone directory.  Useful though these items were, they were too ugly to be on public display.

In the same era in Weimar Germany, Walter Gropius advocated a concealment of domestic technologies.  Yes, water, electricity, heating, telephones and suchlike are vital but we should not be confronted with evidence of their presence.  In a Bauhaus home these functions should be invisible.  “One wants to be served, but the presence of the servant should not be allowed to make us feel uncomfortable.”

Walter Gropius, Paul Schultze-Naumberg.  “Wer hat Recht? Traditionelle Baukunst oder Bauen in neuen Formen.”  Uhu, no.7 (April 1926)

Redslob's string telephone

Cultural historian Edwin Redslob (1884-1973), like Walter Benjamin, wrote a retrospective of his childhood years, where he talks of the arrival of new technologies in his family.  (Also described here.)

He remembers the coming of electric light into his home.  Up until then, the family used kerosene lamps in all the rooms.  A line of them was set up in the hallway, ready for use once it became dark.  Despite the smell and inconvenience, kerosene lamps are intimately tied in his memory with hearing his father read.  After supper, father would read out loud to the family, while other members would draw or work on their stamp collection, under the dim, but warm, glow of the lamp.  These were “cosy hours” in Redslob’s childhood memories.  In contrast, electric lighting was “unpleasantly bright.”  The light illuminated too much – not only did it light up the room well, but it also dispersed the cosiness of old, like bright sunshine dissipating morning mist.  Electricity was expensive for the family in the beginning and it seemed counterproductive to dim the light bulbs or use a lamp shade.  His father, however, maintained the tradition of a kerosene lamp for use in his own study.

Redslob also remembers his first encounter with the telephone.  These were of the kind that were affixed to the wall and you used a crank handle to call the exchange.  Accompanying his father to the bank one day, the clerk showed the boy the new telephone and said he could make a telephone call.  Young Redslob was confused – he didn’t know anyone he could call, nor what he should say.  The clerk suggested he ring the local hotel to ask if Director Müller had arrived from Berlin.  The boy spoke into the telephone and a hotel porter told him that indeed the director had arrived.  Once outside in the street, Redslob sneaked away from his father and ran to the hotel that he had just telephoned.  It took him at least five minutes.  He was amazed at the time difference between telephoning the hotel and running to the hotel to speak to the porter in person.

His father bought him a toy telephone – two cardboard boxes joined with a piece of string.  It kept Redslob and his brother amused for hours.  They climbed up their garden trees and tried to hold a telephone conversation, but without much success of course.  Simple face-to-face conversation was much easier, he observes.  But he still enjoyed his new ‘telephone’; in common with most boys, he liked it because it was modern and technical.

An American in London

Arthur Warren.  London Days.  A Book of Reminiscences.  Little, Brown, 1920.

Arthur Warren was the long-standing London correspondent for the Boston Herald.  In 1920 he published his reminiscences, London Days, where he discussed a variety of subjects: his memories and impressions of Tennyson, Gladstone, Parnell; his struggle to become a journalist, and suchlike.

Warren first set foot in London in 1878, as a naïve 18-year-old fresh off the boat from New York.  He begins his narrative with ‘First glimpses of London’ with predictable references to Dickensian atmosphere, fog and gas lamps.  This theme continues throughout – presumably he thinks this is what his readers expect/want to read.

As you read through London Days, it soon becomes clear that Warren enjoys what I can only describe as a masochistic enjoyment of past hardships.  He maligns contemporary passengers on transatlantic voyages who enjoy on-board luxuries like deckchairs, barber shops, electric bells and good dinners.  Warren had none of these on his first Atlantic crossing, and he spent the entire voyage being seasick in his cabin.  His depiction of the austere conditions on his own ship bring to mind Ahab’s Pequod, for reasons I know not.

Another aspect of past life that he enjoyed was the absence of speedy travel.  In the days before the internal combustion engine and electricity (then the only thing electric was the telegraph), Warren enjoyed going places – slowly and leisurely – and he laments the loss of this “charm.”  “We were not in a hurry then.”  He sees the slow pace as something that made London a “more livable place.”

Strangely, one hardship of London life that he finds intolerable is the lack of heating and hot water in public and private buildings.  He finds English buildings damp and chilly, and everyone suffers from rheumatism.  American homes, on the other hand, are warm and dry.  A heated building is such an exception that the fact is advertised.  In this respect he has a point.  Many advertisements of the era for hotels, for example, stress the fact that bedrooms and public rooms are heated.  Today, this strikes us as peculiar and a modern analogous ad might read 'All rooms equipped with beds.'

He engages in the national pastime of bashing London architecture (nothing new here).  “Could anything be uglier than the National Gallery?” he asks rhetorically.  For him, “the Methodist mountain in Westminster is frozen pudding.”   

Warren demonstrates a touch of nationalistic chauvinism.  He thinks London’s buildings are the worst in Europe, apart from those in Germany.  Communications are poor, as the telephone is “almost unknown to-day” (1920) in comparison to New York’s statistics.

If life in London was so abysmal, you might wonder why he spent his entire adult life working there.  I think the answer lies in the fact that his job allowed him to rub shoulders with the great and the good of British society.  A few of the names that he drops include Lord Tennyson, Gladstone and Lord Kelvin.  He was acquainted with some of the notables he writes about; with others he barely knew them.

Even with a primary text such as this, written during the era under examination, one must be ultra cautious.  In theory, Warren should be writing objectively, since he is a journalist.  We see that the reality is somewhat different.  The author earns his living as a wordsmith and needs all his skills in rhetoric and presentation.  Let us not forget as well that Warren wrote his book when he was sixty.  How have the intervening forty-odd years coloured his judgement and memory?

In the end, I ask myself why Warren could find nothing positive to say about his environment in 1920.  Were things really that bad, even two years after the end of World War I?

Why was he more nostalgic about the past?  How can people look back at the past and see it only through rose-tinted spectacles?  Once you have tasted the present and experienced the material comforts that new technologies afford, how can you still yearn for the time before?

“Berlin Childhood Around 1900”

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin began writing his memories of childhood life in Berlin at the turn of the century.  His collection was only published after his death.

One cannot in any way describe Benjamin’s account as an autobiography, to do so would be a slight.  It is more an assembly of portraits or vignettes of places, objects and experiences that made a lasting impression on the writer.  He devotes one such essay to the telephone, hence my interest.

Benjamin maintains the illusion of freshness that comes from a child describing something new and wondrous in his home, but at the same time tempers this with the experience and maturity of adulthood.  These two aspects of his narrative merge together seamlessly.

In his discussion of the telephone, Benjamin orders household objects into a hierarchy.  In the beginning, items like chandeliers, potted palms, and fire screens enjoyed pride of place in the front rooms of his family’s home.  With the passage of time, however, these “died a natural death” and were displaced by newer objects.  The telephone, previously “exposed to die” could now make its appearance in the front room, which was now cleaner and brighter.  The rooms are now occupied by a younger generation (who presumably understand and tolerate the new technology better than their elders) who have brought the telephone in from the wilderness of the dark hallway.

Benjamin remembers how the telephone was condemned in the beginning to sit between the dirty-linen hamper and the gas meter in a corner of the back hallway (not even the front one).  Like dirty washing and the gas meter, obviously the telephone was seen as a necessary evil, and not one that you would be proud for your visitors to see.  Its promotion to the front room shows spectacular social mobility in the upwards direction.

How did Benjamin’s family react to the telephone’s ringing?  Well, he recalls the curses and threats his father directed towards operators.  If the British press is anything to go by, then complaints against telephone companies and their employees seem to be a European norm and nothing new in the early days of telephony.  Benjamin’s school friends would also ring him at midday and wake up his parents from their siesta.  This did not go down very well with the parents but Benjamin himself questions how this new technology was changing cultural practices.

The ringing of the bell increased “the terrors of the Berlin household.”  The young Benjamin needed great effort to master all his emotions, fumble his way down the dark passage, and “quell the uproar.”

It is rare to read someone’s first impressions of a new technology, even rarer to find an account given with such articulation.

p.s.

Browsing through Berlin Childhood I found another piece entitled “The Larder.”  Expecting to read rhapsodies about home-made jams and hams hung up to dry, I was proven pleasantly wrong.

Benjamin describes how his sneaks into the pantry for a secret feast.  His allusions to illicit rendezvous and sensuous experiences are deliciously naughty (no pun intended) but also just a little disturbing, if you remember that he is talking about childhood memories.  Nevertheless, the images conjured up are delightful.  Here’s a small taster (again, no pun intended) as the boy Walter silently enters the pantry: “my hand slipped through the crack of the barely opened cupboard as a lover slips through the night …”

Walter Benjamin.  Berlin Childhood Around 1900.  tr. Howard Eiland.

Brown's hotel and Bell

I came across an advertisement for Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street, which appeared in an 1887 book about the London season.

I’m always fascinated by old ads: not only is the language quaint and decidedly un-commercial, but they state things that today we would find self-evident.  This ad mentions, for example, the availability of electric lights in all rooms, lifts and telephones.  (Remember, this is 1887).  Just to clarify, there was no extra charge for the electric light.  As an aside, when ads cease to mention the unique selling point of telephones in bedrooms, then we can safely assume that telephones have become invisible and taken for granted.

Compare Brown’s with the Midland Grand Hotel (St. Pancras) which threw open its doors in 1873.  Despite its luxurious fittings and decor, the building had no running hot water or plumbing.  A battalion of maids had to run upstairs with buckets of hot water for the guests’ baths, and down again to empty chamber pots.  If I were a hotel maid, I would much prefer to work at Brown’s. 

I have also read (unverifiable) accounts that Alexander Graham Bell stayed at the hotel on his first visit to Britain to demonstrate his new invention.  It is also said that the first telephone call in Britain was made from the hotel by Bell.  I shall take this with a fistful of salt until I can find a source.  No end of famous personalities are connected with Brown’s and much is made of the Kipling connection (there is a suite dedicated to him).  If, however, the historical connection with Bell is correct, then the hotel management seems a bit bashful about it.

Cheese, telephone wires, and crochet patterns

John Garrett Leigh discusses state telephones in the Economic Review of January 1912. Like other contemporary writers, he acknowledges that Britain is way behind many other countries in adoption of the telephone.  As such, Britain also lags behind when it comes to social cohesion.  The penny post and telegraph have gone some way to strengthening social bonds and the telephone seems to be a “dominating influence.”

He gives his article an international aspect by analysing social use by nation:

America – children use it to ring up friends and ask about homework

Switzerland – housewives ring friends and exchange crochet patterns

And how do British housewives use their telephones?  They ring up their grocers to order meat and cheese.

But British grocers were cunning.  With a telephone order, the customer wasn’t in the shop to inspect the quality or freshness of the food.  So the grocer sent over inferior produce which the housewife would have refused to touch, had she been in the shop in person.  After a while, though, the grocer learned his lesson (he probably lost many customers as a result of some dodgy cheese) and started treating telephone customers the same as those who walked into his shop.  

Leigh reminds British grocers that being scrupulously honest in their business dealings has great ethical value.  I think this was probably the very last time that someone spoke about ethics in the same breath as business conduct.

p.s. A small detail: Leigh’s article appeared in the month when the telephone service was nationalised and taken over by the General Post Office.

The visions of a clairvoyant

It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose – a review about a crackpot clairvoyant who ‘sees’ through telephone wires. 

Vincent D. Turvey was a regular clairvoyant and seer who had visions.  In addition, he developed a new skill in “phone-voyance” in 1903.  One day he telephoned a friend and had a vision of the room where the friend was sitting.  Turvey was able to describe not only the room but also the characteristics of a second person in the company of the friend.  We are led to believe that the friend failed to mention the presence of this person.

I do admit to being an ignoramus where clairvoyants are concerned but I fail to see any substantial difference between Turvey’s two types of seership.  He himself makes the differentiation.

In case you are keen to learn more, Turvey wrote a book about his talents in 1911 (cashing in on the new technology?) and even more surprisingly, it has been reprinted in recent years by several publishers (cashing in on books no longer in copyright?)  Amazon has a selection – a gift idea for next Christmas perhaps?

Brightening the home, lightening domestic labour

In 1922 the Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health published an article entitled “The brightening of the home, and the lightening of domestic labour by electrical means” authored by C. H. Wordingham, CBE, electrical engineer.

The title alone was enough to make me curious, but also the date.  I would have thought that by 1922 the householder wouldn’t need to be sold on the benefits of domestic electricity.  But then, old habits die hard.  The writer is trying to sell electricity as a healthy alternative to gas and oil; remember that the article appears in a journal promoting public health.

There is the ready admission that the cost of appliances is still high, though prices will drop in time.  While appliances are still “mysterious” to the man in the street, in time they will become as familiar as coal scuttles and scrubbing brushes are today (i.e. then in 1922).

The article was at pains to point out the health hazards in using old technologies in the home, and thus persuade householders that electricity would be better for them.  Using gas or oil for lighting produced noxious gases and soot which damaged curtains, furnishings and books.  Rooms had to be redecorated frequently; the grime settled everywhere and after a short while a room would become dark and dingy.  Servants had to be paid to clean and wash ornaments and textiles.  Additionally, spending time in such a room took its toll on occupants’ lungs and skin.

Household dust has never ceased to be a problem.  Maids in the 1920s merely redistributed it with their feather dusters instead of removing it completely.  One solution is a “little piece of mechanism” (it is not explicitly named as a ‘vacuum cleaner’) that removes particles and traps them in a bag.

A reverse of the above appliance (presumably a hairdryer?) dries “long fair tresses” after a hair wash and is a “boon” appreciated by mothers.

Let’s not forget too the small appliances that make life more palatable: toasters, kettles, curling tongs or bed warmers.  Yes, the author admits, these are luxuries.  But the today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s essentials, such as the telephone or motor car.  (This is as true now as it ever was.)

The writer asserts that servants had come to embrace electrical appliances (makes their job easier?)  Further, knowing how to operate new technology means they can demand more in the market place.  They now have technical know-how.  The writer further concedes that less and less people (i.e. women) are content to enter domestic service.  There was easier work in shops, offices and factories.  (If I had a choice between a job on a production line and cleaning someone else’s oriental rug, I know what I would choose.)  And since good domestic help was becoming rarer to find and more expensive, it sometimes worked out better to do your own cleaning, with the aid of new domestic appliances.

The National Grid came into existence in the decade after this article so power supply would certainly have been patchy.  Combined with expensive appliances, few households at the bottom end of the social ladder would have had an electricity supply.  They managed as they had done before with existing methods.

The article claims that once people learn about labour-saving devices there is no going back, they insist on having them and follow the easiest route in carrying out domestic chores.  How true!  I’ve always had a vacuum cleaner around the house to clean up messes.  So when my old vacuum cleaner finally gave up the ghost, it was a nightmare having to learn to sweep with a brush and dustpan.

The power of electricity and labour-saving devices in the home brings another issue to the forefront: that of what to do with the time saved.  Nobody sits around in their clean home, twiddling their thumbs wondering what they can do next.  On the contrary, there seems to be even less free time available.  Ruth Schwartz Cowan¹ demonstrates that new domestic technologies didn’t lighten the housewife’s load; she ended up working just as hard and just as long as in the ‘good old days.’  Cowan’s thesis is that with the new technology, the housewife no longer needed help from family members to do the chores (the weekly wash used to be a family event) so she ended up doing all the housework alone.  What is more, extra demands were made of her.  People changed their clothes more often and that meant more frequent washing and ironing.  Everyone assumed that since the housewife now had a washing machine, having to wash more clothes wouldn’t be a problem.  The assumption that labour-saving devices create more free time is a fallacy; we merely find more occupations to fill the gap.

This is one factor why I think that the time-saving features of telephone calls led to a greater sense of ‘speeding up’ in life because with the time saved, the caller would have filled his time with other duties.  If he sat around unable to do anything until he received a reply (as would be the case if he had sent a note or telegram), then what would have been the point in using a quicker technology?  Using technologies like these, either in the home or in business, means getting more done in the same amount of time.  Whether this leads to more efficiency is debatable. 

Those that use a new technology, never revert willingly to the old ways.  Once you’ve discovered the joys of telephoning, you forget all about the art of writing letters.

¹More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.

How railwaymen made their coffee in the pre-Starbucks epoch

Not really connected with the social history of telephones, but this anonymous railwayman (c.1901) describes how he made his lunchtime coffee.

“Railwaymen’s coffee was a mixture of coffee and chicory but I believe it was a species of bark.  A percolator was not necessary in its production.  Water was made hot in a beer can and coffee dumped in and boiled for a minute or two.  Then condensed milk was dumped in (Goat Brand), stirred into the brew and sugar added.  I can still smell it.  That kind of coffee isn’t made any more.  Progress killed it.”

Presumably he drank the contents of the beer can before using it for boiling water.  His most telling comment for me is his last one about 'progress' - not always welcomed with open arms by everyone. 

p.s. On his fourteenth birthday he passed his telegraph examination; his wages rose immediately to 8 shillings a week.  He was sent to work in Earl's Court station to man the telegraph circuits, telephone exchange and record the comings and goings of trains through the station. 

Source: W. MacQueen Pope, Give Me Yesterday, 1957.

The Condition of England

C. F. G. Masterman held a somewhat pessimistic view of how mankind was using new technologies.  He was not alone in observing a marked "speeding up" of life, but he also commented that a wasteful lifestyle was becoming fashionable.  The raised standard of living, however, did not mean more comfort but rather more ostentation.  In this way, it was difficult for those on low incomes to keep up with a lifestyle that was slowly becoming the norm.

"But life will be no happier and no richer for such an acceptance; it will merely have become more impossible for those who […] are unequal to the demands of such a standard.  And the same is true of the multiplication of meals; of the rise in the price of rent in certain districts in London, for example, because every one wants to live there; of numberless exactions and extortions which have grown up in a society whose members are ‘like wealthy men who care not how they give’."

Masterman denigrates the new car owners for "driving abroad in furious guise," breaking the speed limit, and destroying English rural tranquility.  He attributes their behaviour to the motorists' need to alleviate boredom.  The competition in consumption won't stop until everyone (that can afford it) has a car, house, abundant food, clothes, flowers, etc. etc.  In this respect, he likens the race to consume with the armaments race.  He concludes, of course, that such an obsession with material possessions does not bring happiness, nor does it make for a better economy.  (Hasn't Masterman read 'The Fable of the Bees'?)

One only needs to glimpse at Masterman's background (social-family connections, political involvement, wartime activities, and so on) to understand why he wrote what he did.  By way of example, he moved into a working-class London tenement to learn first hand what conditions were like.  After such an 'experiment,' no wonder he freely censures middle class profligacy.

This is why I believe Masterman is not merely objecting to technology on the grounds of being opposed to 'progress' and all things new.  His objections to this rampant consumerism and affinity for materialism are based on moral considerations.

C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England. 1909

G. M. Young, on motor cars and trains

Talking in 1952, the historian of Victorian Britain, G. M. Young, remembers his life as a young man in Britain in 1902, the year of Edwardian VII's coronation.

“The political changes, the social changes, yes, even the scientific achievements of the Victorian age had left the outer fabric of our life very much what it always had been.  Trains went faster, of course, but not very much faster, and the station fly still clopped-clopped to the country inn with straw on the boards – I suppose to keep your feet warm.  The motor car was a toy … and the aeroplane, well, that, of course, was a fairy tale: something for H. G. Wells to write stories about."

Young sees no earth shattering changes following the appearance of so many new technologies: life went on as before.  He was also old enough at the time (20) to appreciate the realities surrounding these new achievements.  In criticism, one could charge Young with forgetfulness that comes with advancing years, in his account of his past youth.  Was he viewing his past through the lens of nostalgia? - most people after middle age do seem to go on about 'the good old days.'  I like to think this is not the case.  We cannot imagine life without our motor cars, or telephones, or microwave ovens, or whatever.  And when we try to picture such a life, we feel we are reverting to a primitive state.  I think that we transfer this feeling to past generations and wonder at how they could possibly manage in the pre-tech era.  There is a tendency to inscribe past technological achievements with too much 'revolution' where none existed.  

Unknown to us, our predecessors did manage and quite well, too.  For them, horse-speed was quick enough for their needs.  If they needed, say, one hour to get across town, instead of today's ten minutes, then they set off in good time.  As and when new technologies appeared, people gradually assimilated them into their social practices - assuming, of course, they had the inclination, opportunity, and the money to do so.  Otherwise, they carried on as they had done before; old and new ways proceeded in tandem.


Young believes that England then was a good country for gentlemen to live in.

"And it all rested on two things – an income tax so moderate that it was hardly felt; and an unlimited supply of cheap efficient domestic service.  Pull those pillars down and that social hierarchy topples.  That also we could not foresee …" [my emphasis]

But putting it bluntly, this all boils down to money (again).  Low taxes and cheap servants ensuring life is comfortable means, yes, a good life for the privileged.  I am struck by the reference to cheap domestics.  It reminds me of the Postmaster General's explanation of the new telephone's slow dispersal: 'we have so many messenger boys ready to take messages, that's why we don't need a telephone.  The Americans, on the other hand, have no domestic servants, so they do need a telephone service.'

"The Soul of London"

Ford Madox Ford wrote The Soul of London (published 1905) to set down his impressions of London.  Much more than a mere travelogue, Ford evokes a London that is both familiar and alien.  In his own words, he wanted his account to be more than just "encyclopaedic, topographical, or archaeological."  

I found Ford's narrative enlightening for several reasons.  He lived and experienced the times under scrutiny in my thesis, and as such, can provide another dimension to the social milieu.  His writing verges on the poetic: he gives us his 'impressions' of the 'facts'.  Finally, in Soul one can easily detect those tendencies and early signs of change that later came to be known as Modernism.

Some extracts follow:

On the automobile

"... to come from any distance, say by a motor car, is to fly too fast for any easy recognition of the gradual changes from country to town.  […]  It is not so much that the speed is very great, there is always the statutory limit, a sort of nightmare; but the motorist is too low down as a rule, the air presses against the eyes and half closes them; he has a tendency to look forward along the road, to see more of vehicles and of pedestrians than of the actual country or the regiments of buildings.  He grows a little aloof, a little out of sympathy; he becomes more intent about keeping a whole skin on himself and on his car than about the outer world."

“This is doubtless no more than a matter of time, of ‘getting used to it’, or of thinking of distances, as it were, in terms of the motor car.  One has been accustomed to drive on a bus from Kensington to Piccadilly Circus in the half hour.  One has seen the tall flats by Sloan Street for some minutes, Apsley House for some more minutes [...].  These things have their familiar aspects.”

On the tram

“What the automobile is to the comfortable classes the electric tram is becoming to the poorer.  It is a means of getting into town.  It does not, however, produce the same psychological effects.  For one thing, the speed is not so great, and you have not the least anxiety as to what it may choose to run into; if you want to see things you are at a greater height, your range of sight is much longer.”

Retailing: chain stores vs. local traders

“Yet in many places within the Administrative County the tendency is all towards ‘localising’, or towards remaining separate centres.  In Hampstead, for instance, the older residents buy most things of the local tradesmen, and newer families imitate them for sentimental or for social reasons.  In poorer neighbourhoods this is much more the case.  […] And the people of the poorer suburbs do their shopping in their own High Streets.  Where great local emporia have not crushed out altogether the ‘local tradesman’, shoppers with string bags still nod at the greengrocer and the oilman when passing or when making their purchases.”

London's diversity, speed, ubiquity

“London, with its sense of immensity that we must hurry through to keep unceasing appointments, with its diffuseness, its gatherings up into innumerable trade-centres, innumerable class districts, becomes by its immensity a place upon which there is no beginning."

Vignettes also appear that 'humanise' Ford's London: the labourer whose hobby is teaching his chaffinches to sing; the wife of a cripple who made matchboxes at home to earn money, a home where all the wooden fittings had been chopped down for firewood.

Ford's account is, of course, highly subjective (can any piece of writing be otherwise?) but I see it giving us a good impression of the spirit of the times.  Some paragraphs convey the quaintness of an Edwardian London that has long since disappeared (talk of horse-drawn trams, for instance).  Yet other descriptions leave us shaking our heads and muttering, 'Some things never change.' 

The cost of domestic servants

More thoughts on the costs involved in getting a telephone installed at home.

Yesterday's post on "the telephone tangle" referred to Hastie's idea about having two lines into businesses and homes, to ensure better chances of connection.  In real terms, this was a luxury that few could afford.  Even London business people, for whom the telephone was a boom, were slow to adopt the new technology; they had other lines of communication.  To put things into perspective, let's compare some prices.

Annual subscription charges
c.1879 - £20
1896 - £18 (Glasgow)

1897 - c.£14 (London)
1904 - £34 (Glasgow)

I haven't reached the stage yet where I can conduct analytical research into how much a telephone connection would have cost the Victorian gentleman.  The figures above were gleaned from various articles and give only a very rough idea.  


Looking now at servants' annual wages, we can build up a general picture.

Pageboy/Footboy, unliveried - £8-18
General female servant - £12-18 (without allowance for tea, sugar, beer!)
Butler - £60-80
[figures are suggested wages, derived from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1888 edition]


By comparing amounts, we see just how much a family was prepared to lay out for a butler (and from a certain social level and above, everyone had one) but out of that group, few households had a telephone connection.  Secondly, there is little substantial difference between a telephone subscription and a lowly servant's wage.  Why not just have the subscription?  My cynical answer is that a telephone can't sweep the floor or fetch coal.

When looking at Victorian domestic arrangements, we see that householders were slow to instal plumbing, for instance, or change from coal to gas.[1]   It was as cheap, or cheaper, to keep a domestic to do household chores in the old way, rather than pay to make the changeover.  Who cares if the servant had to work harder?  I think it is precisely this mentality that was also applied to the telephone.  These people were not so quick to adopt every new gadget and technology that came along, when they could manage fine with the old ways (unlike today).  Not so much a fear of change per se, rather an attitude of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'


My conclusions?  If you could afford to keep a servant, then you could afford to have a telephone.  But few who could afford a phone, got one.


[1] Peter Williams "Constituting class and gender: a social history of the home, 1700-1901." In Thrift, Williams, Class and Space: The making of urban society. 1987



p.s. I have yet to come across a late C19 drama, musical, story, etc. (in which the telephone is a prominent feature) that depicts a servant answering the telephone.

"To any telephone girl"

Of course you heard me well enough and knew
I asked for Gerrard 2166;
The trouble is you never seem to fix
Your mind on what you undertake to do.

I cannot tell what system you pursue,

Nor how, within the space of twenty ticks,
Those simple numbers you contrived to mix
And put me on to 6122.

I give it up; nor will I toil and fret
Such depths of human frailty to probe;
I merely state your methods would upset
The standard equilibrium of Job,
To whom such sore vexations were unknown
As you and this infernal telephone.

Hansard Watt

Published 1911, Pall Mall Magazine

Telephone screens

One further aspect that I wish to address in this thesis is that of the telephone (as artefact) in its domestic setting.  In which rooms of the house was it kept, where was it stored (on a writing desk, sideboard, its own table, etc.), how did it fit in with the rest of the decor - such questions as these can reveal much about social attitudes.  As a 'piece of furniture' or as a piece of technology,