A Hierarchy of Wealth

The narrowing of social distance has been accompanied by a considerable narrowing of the (apparent) range of differences in wealth as well, a fact manifested by changes in the use of domestic help. The wages of a working person today are high enough that even the most affluent family cannot afford to hire workers for nonproductive purposes. While hiring someone to help with the farm work may make sense if the additional labor pays for itself,

no one can afford to hire servants or gardeners—the only exception being a few landholding families who hire a woman for several hours a week to clean the house. Not only are the wealthiest households no longer as wealthy as they were in the 1920s, but working people are no longer quite as poor or as desperate for work.

By contrast, in the 1920s a number of households in South Downs employed substantial full-time domestic staffs. Most notable was the household of Edward Freshney, which was served by four women inside the house and a crew of three men who maintained the grounds.^[2] In the 1850s Edward Freshney's father was already a prosperous merchant and businessman in Jackson, and by the time he died in the 1890s he was very wealthy. In addition to his urban business interests, he helped finance the purchase of a number of runs in Canterbury, and he himself had a financial stake in several rural properties. Edward, too, was very successful and acquired several estates. In the 1920s Edward, then over sixty years old, lived on a large farm located less than two and a half miles from the South Downs township, or but a few minutes away by automobile.

The three full-time gardeners cared for six acres of formal grounds consisting of broad lawns, a rose garden, two grass tennis courts, a third court surfaced with tarmac, a pond, and a complex of paths winding through tree-covered plantings of azaleas and rhododendrons. The head gardener received his orders each morning, on bended knee, from Mrs. Freshney. The inside staff included a house maid, parlor maid, cook, and scullery maid. They were up by 6:30 A.M. and served breakfast to the family in bed at 9:00, the food being served on copper trays with small lamps to keep the food hot. Lunch was served to the family at 1:00; the food was first set out in the dining room, whereupon the parlor maid went directly to Mrs. Freshney to announce that “Lunch is served, please, madam.” The staff then retired to the kitchen to eat a meal altogether different from what was served to the family. At 7:00 P.M . the parlor maid went to the smoking room to announce dinner; once the family was seated in the dining room she began serving each person individually from silver trays that had been placed on the sideboard. She remained in the dining room, standing, until the last course was served. The inside staff finished their work at about 9:00 P.M . The house maid and parlor maid were responsible for cleaning the house, and whatever spare time they had during the day was spent at such incidental tasks as cleaning windows and silver. The physical space of both

house and grounds served to maintain the separation of family and workers, for the maids were never allowed into the front portion of the house except in their capacity as maids, and a separate road for tradesmen went directly to the back of the house.

Because Edward Freshney was virtually retired in the 1920s, he gave little attention to the farm. He wore coat and tie from morning to night, and his main physical activity during the day was to walk to a nearby spring to collect fresh water for his whiskey. Stiles were built over the fences along the way for his benefit. The farm itself was devoted primarily to sheep, grain crops, and a few dairy cattle. A man who lived on an adjacent property at the time reports that the farm crew comprised about fifteen men: at least six to ten teamsters, several shepherds, and one or two cowboys who tended the milk cows. Many of these men lived in the bunkhouse (as distinct from the “big house,” where the Freshneys lived), and they ate in a cookhouse that was served by a full-time cook (a different one, of course, from the woman who cooked for the family). During at least part of the 1920s a manager was hired to oversee the day-to-day operations of the farm, although at some point in either the 1920s or early 1930s Freshney's son, Hugh, assumed that role. Hugh wore work clothes and spent most of the day on the job, but the people I spoke to unanimously affirmed that he did not engage in manual work. His work clothes, in any case, were “tidy” and did not become soiled by the end of the day. And one person who worked for him in the 1930s, when the family was experiencing financial difficulties, said that at shearing time Hugh might drive the truck carrying the morning or afternoon tea from the cookhouse to the wool shed, but he was not likely to participate directly in the shearing operation. The work of bringing the sheep to the shearing shed or moving them out again once they were shorn was left to the hired men.

It is more difficult to reconstruct the everyday lives of the poor than of the rich, since the patterns and events associated with the well-to-do attracted greater notice. People, however, agree that there were some very poor families in South Downs during the 1920s and that life could be hard for them. The poorest men of the district worked as laborers, a large number of them, periodically at least, for the county council. There were virtually no paved roads in the 1920s, so each year large portions of roadway needed to be reshingled. A dray was driven into the river bed, and a yard or more of shingle was shoveled onto the wagon by hand. Although a screening device

came into use at some point in the 1920s or 1930s, the larger rocks were picked out and discarded manually. The dray then was driven to the section of road where the shingle was needed, and it was shoveled, by hand, from the wagon, after which a horse-drawn grader completed the job. Shingle gangs were on the road throughout the year, but they were busiest during the fall. It was usual for the men to live in horse-drawn huts Monday through Friday nights, since they were too far from home to return to their families each day. The huts, needless to say, were small, cold, and uncomfortable.

Another form of unskilled labor was rabbiting. Rabbits were a scourge on the sheep runs, and so the landholders hired men to travel over their properties by foot killing as many as possible. A person usually did this during winter, when other jobs were scarce. The weather was wet and cold, and typically the rabbiter lived alone in a cramped hut.

Throughout much of the year a farmer could drive into town and find a group of men eager for work cutting gorse hedges, digging drainage ditches, building fences, and the like, but in summer the demand for labor was so high that workers could become scarce. The laborer might work for a while on a chaff cutter, which chopped fodder for horses, or he might join a gang of shearers. Harvesting also required considerable manpower. Then, too, a worker might find employment at the wool scour, which required up to thirty men at peak season. As the newly baled wool arrived at the facility the bales were opened and the wool sorted into lots according to quality. After being cleaned in large vats of hot soapy water, the fleece was rinsed, spun in a large cylinder to remove most of the moisture, and laid out to dry in the sun, whereupon it was rebaled. Most of this work was done by manual labor.

Some men were able to find permanent jobs. Farms always had horses, and many needed at least one hired teamster, who was in the stable at 6:00 in the morning for grooming and did not turn the horses out again until 8:00 that evening. Most farm families also had at least two cows, and many had ten or twelve, whose milk was collected regularly by trucks from creameries in nearby towns; since milking and separating were done by hand, most farmers needed at least one cowboy to do the work. This hired hand also tended the vegetable garden, chopped wood, looked after the chickens, and carried out other odd jobs. Some farm families took on a woman to

cook, and some hired a girl or young woman to take care of the pigs and chickens, and perhaps to milk the cows.

It is difficult to document how these people lived, but clearly many of them were thought to be very poor. One farmer commented:

When I went to school in South Downs [in the 1920s], by Jove there were some poor people. Some really poor people. They did laboring work round about, whatever they could get. One family lived opposite the doctor's, a little wee house. Then they built a new house; Fred Banner lives there—it was his people I'm talking about. When they shifted they borrowed a horse and dray to shift the little furniture they had, and the children were saying, “We're leaving the rabbit hutch at last, we've lived in the rabbit hutch long enough.” There were six children in that family.

Not only the working people were poor in the 1920s; some of the farm families were in nearly as bad a state, particularly those who acquired farms through the government program to place returned servicemen on the land after World War I. These farmers were often undercapitalized, and their properties inadequate. As an index, the blacksmith in South Downs was often paid in kind by certain farmers who were always desperately short of cash.