Nunca delante de los criados

Frank Victor Dawes, son of a servant who, like so many others, began to serve at the age of thirteen, wanted to investigate, at the height of the series Up and Down on British television, the reasons for the ostensible decrease in the number of people employed in this sector in the United Kingdom (from almost a million and a half until the First World War to less than a hundred thousand at that time). For this he published in 1972 an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph in which he asked anyone who had worked as a domestic staff to send him letters in which he recounted his experiences. The response was so overwhelming that it gave rise to the fascinating journey that Never in front of the servants proposes, a portrait of domestic work over a hundred years based on the testimonies of its protagonists: maids, butlers, governesses, cooks, lackeys and also some employers. The memories that unravel in this book are tragic, comic, evocative, ridiculous and, at times, cruel, and form a decisive social history that corroborates the idea that they have always been considered workers and even second-rate human beings.