Servants are often quite misunderstood.
There are a lot of misery memoirs out there from servants that were very badly treated
who had a horrible time.
But there were also servants who had a wail of a time, who made the best friends of their
lives in country houses, who recall cycling along corridors, long, huge, aching country
house corridors.
The aristocracy in Britain mainly employed male chefs if they could.
The thing about employing a man was that they were quite expensive.
If you couldn't afford a hundred pounds a year for an English man cook you would advertise
for an English female professed cook, that is to say a cook who has made cooking her
profession, preferably one who has been trained under a man cook.
That cook would probably cost you around fifty to sixty pounds a year and that's the bracket
that Avis Crocombe fell into, she was a professed cook.
Now that that's stewed down nicely, as my apple was a little sweet I'm going to add
some lemon juice.
When we study female servants we are really studying the history of women, and to me it
is impossible to think about studying the history of women without looking in-depth
at servant life.
Avis Crocombe and the other cooks like her who reached the pinnacle of their profession
in a time when it was unthinkable to get any further, are incredibly important figures
to consider and to look at.
They're people that fought the gender battle in their own way.
They didn't put on sashes and go out on the streets or throw themselves under horses,
but in their own way they nevertheless fought for women to be recognised as professionals
doing a professional job in an incredibly male-dominated profession.
If I say to you, think of a chef, I suspect that in the back of your head you have a mental
image of a man in a toque and whites, and if I say to you think of a cook you will probably
think of a woman in her normal clothes with an apron on top.
The gender divisions in cookery still exist today, very much so.
Cookery is still seen, and still is, a very male-dominated profession, and I would say
we should celebrate women like Avis Crocombe who fought the fight, who got to the top,
who lived their own lives despite the fact they were women in an incredibly patriarchal
society.
Go Avis!