Upstairs Downstairs

The Politics of Upstairs Downstairs

What Does A Historian Think?

We asked Dr. Dina Copelman, a British history professor at George Mason University, to preview the new Upstairs Downstairs series and give us her thoughts on how well it captured the time and place of 1930s England. She had lots of interesting feedback on the series and the historical period. Read below and learn a little something!

What were your initial reactions upon watching the series?

I remember watching the original Upstairs Downstairs, so for me this was a return to my youth. The production is beautiful. It’s visually and technically superior to the original one, where the sets had to be dismantled and put back together. It’s a wonderful viewing experience and I think it’s full of nuance and nuggets for thought. I also think it hits a nice, consistent, middle of the road space. BBC doesn’t hide from doing more aggressive, edgy programming but this one is not going to offend anybody. Also, the timing couldn’t be more perfect! It seems to fit the national moment with the Royal wedding and The Kings Speech movie.

The series is set in 1936. What were the major political and cultural trends at work in England during that period? Did you feel that the series accurately represented those forces?

Americans have a sense of the prosperous, roaring ‘20s abruptly halted by the Depression and that’s not really appropriate in thinking about Britain. Even though there was a little bit of a recovery right after World War I, the 1920s were a very hard period with high unemployment and labor unrest.

There had been a lot of unrest before the war around labor and suffrage—some of these issues made their way into the first Upstairs Downstairs series. After the war, particularly in the industrial north of England, unemployment was high and so was labor discontent, particularly in mining and other key sectors, such as transportation.

The nation was slowly doing better and then it got hit by the Wall Street crash. The years 1929-1933 were hard all around. But there was also a huge regional aspect to this. In southern England and London, in what are called the Home Counties, things were considerably better. Still, throughout the 1930s and in 1936 when the series takes place, unemployment, labor unrest, dissatisfaction with government action (or, more appropriately, inaction)—these issues were certainly in the public eye.

The series producers clearly attempted to set the time and place for the series by including various real-life events and people. Did you think they were effective?

I wish I could footnote the show! I think in some ways it did a very good job. It does touch upon some major political issues – the Abyssinia Crisis, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, the King’s abdication. What the series doesn’t give a sense of is the actual government and political parties.

Also, you don’t see the emergence of the Spanish Civil War at all. If Agnes or Hallam would have had a younger brother, setting him on the road to Spain would not have been an unrealistic portrayal. The Spanish Civil War was really a huge issue at the time mobilized already active anti-fascists and served as a wake up call for many other people.

I think the appeal of fascism to someone like the driver is realistic and the portrayal of the Blackshirts’ demonstration itself is realistic – there was violence. By the time of the show, there had already been a very large demonstration in 1934 that had resulted in quite a lot of violence on the part of fascists. The government reacted with legislation that attempted to regulate sedition—though that was aimed as much at fears of the left as at fascists. As Hitler became more aggressive and repressive, however, the fascists really went down in popularity in Britain. While pools of support remained, fascism as an organized presence declined and by 1940 was outlawed. The Mosleys—Oswald and his wife Diana—and other key fascists were imprisoned.

One of the central elements of the series is the interactions between the family and their servants. Did you find the portrayal of the household historically accurate?

What we’re seeing is not an entirely unrealistic view but certainly not a typical view of domestic employment. One thing that I hope viewers don’t take away from this is that this period was some sort of heyday of domestic service because it was not. Domestic service was the largest area of employment for women in the mid 19th century, but the numbers peaked around the turn of the century. By the 1930s, when the show is set, domestic service had been going down, particularly for servants living in the home.

One misleading aspect of Upstairs Downstairs is that most domestic servants were not part of a huge staff. There were maybe one or two in solid middle class homes. Most families probably had a char woman coming in one or two days a week, and maybe also a nurse maid. Especially by the 1930s, the trend was more and more toward daily service rather than living-in service.

Another unique thing that places the show in a very elite environment is the presence of men. Domestic service was, by and large, a female occupation. A driver and a butler were rare and men were more expensive. So, the arrangement portrayed in Upstairs Downstairs is not very representative. Nonetheless, it’s certainly significant.

Which of the characters did you find most compelling or illuminating?

I found the mother in law, Maud, to be very interesting. A careful observer will notice her multi-colored hose. She wears yellow and pink and she’s eccentric in some independent, democratic, radical ways. She has her Indian secretary who isn’t an equal but is respected and educated. She can cross class boundaries and can break the rules, but she knows them intimately. She lives and breathes and eats and sleeps the rules. She knows them perfectly and does not doubt that she knows them. And, to some extent the rules are whatever she chooses the rules to be. I thought that her self confidence was well portrayed.

Were there any characters that you thought were particularly well-represented historically?

One interesting thing that I learned through this series is that there were immigrant Jewish servants. There were refugees, but there was also a permit that some young women had, which allowed them to be hired as domestics. There is some literature on this topic. Some were treated well. Some were treated horribly, even if they were in a Jewish household. There was a clash between their background – the complete ignorance of household work on the part of many young Jewish women – and what was expected of them. According to the quick research that I did, there may have been as many as 20,000 Jewish women working as servants and a significant number may have had children being cared for by another family. So, in that sense, Lottie’s character highlights a real historical situation.

Anything else you’d like to add about the relationship between the family and the servants?

The show represents an already established cultural view of servants, which you see in the plays of Moliere and other cultural representations. The servants are the ones who really know what is going on. They may lack elite sophistication, but they are the ones with wisdom and they look in amused tolerance at the goings-on of their employers but eventually, hopefully, the employers will see the light in the way that the servants do. That’s a cultural trope that is already well established and I think the show does a good job of conveying it in a subtle but consistent way.

Another thing the show did well was represent the tensions that could arise between servants as well as the generation gap between different kinds of servants in a household with a considerable staff. Finally, I thought the show captured how mass culture—for instance, popular music, magazines and fashion—was a part of servants’ lives.

Were there particular areas where you thought the series missed the boat?

I guess what I would emphasize is not so much that things were not done well, but that the middle-of–the-road approach does not allow for an in-depth portrayal of some of the issues which were at work during the period. The series introduces class tensions and divisions in society but ultimately takes a feel-good approach to them. Historically, what is extremely difficult to represent and think about is not harsh ugliness but ordinary ugliness. Servants’ lives may not have been horrendous, but life at 165 Eaton Place is certainly idealized. I would like to think that media and film can help us understand some of these complexities. But, that is utopian and certainly not the mission of every show.

Even if the program cannot deal with some of the more nuanced issues, is there value in simply portraying the period and getting people interested in thinking about a time and place that is different from their experience?

Sure, that’s always a good thing, and I do not discount the entertainment factor. If I was able to push the agenda a bit, I would have liked to see the show explore the multiple forces at work, the cultural and political schizophrenia of the period. A lot was going on-- maybe it would have been useful to have a few breakfast scenes with a newspaper headline of hunger marchers from the north, or events in Spain, or something like that.

Statistically, it would have been as plausible for Persie to be a communist or to have gone to university – that was becoming more common for women of her class during this period. You don’t see those options but hopefully from what is included in the program, viewers get a sense that people were getting pulled in all sorts of different directions during this period.