'Servants or the 'The returned'..possible subjects for Assignment 4

Reading and enjoying Lucy Lethbridge's book entitled 'Servants - A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain' ( Bloomsbury,2013) has given me an idea to explore for my fourth assignment.

Both my grandmothers were in service at the beginning of the twentieth century, the period covered by this book. My maternal grandmother came from a lower middle class background.The sudden death of her mother was followed by the unexpected announcement of her father that he had remarried. Like Catherine Cookson novel a stepmother and two step sisters arrived who expected grandmother to keep house for them. This change of circumstances led to her leaving home. With no real education or skills she fell back onto going into service, initially as a 'tweeny' maid, the lowest of the low. I know tall of this from the many stories she later told of her life in service before getting married.

My paternal grandmother appears in the 1911 census as a 'general domestic servant' residing' in the family home of a solicitor in Worthing.



I have few family pictures from this period of their lives but there two that exist. Could I use  these to rework the dustjacket design for Lucy Letherbridge's book?

The book tells the stories of below stairs workers drawing on their experiences of being in service over a period of time when households whether in the country or town, huge estates establishments or more modest homes with less than ten servants began to experience the huge changes overtaking the country and society in general before and after the first world war. These are my two images scanned from two original photographs briefly loaned to me by my 90 year old aunt.

Paternal grandmother in 'Sunday best'

'Big granny 'and husband 

These images present a number of challenges and 'ethical issues' which I want to come back and look at in some detail in a later post
 

An alternative....

An alternative subject would be the redesign of the front cover for MOGWAI's  CD 'Les Revenants' .This the recording of the music or recordings for 'The Revenants', a  television series created by Fabrice Gobert and based on the film' They Came Back' by Robin Campillo.

                                           
   Photos  for the cover ( front and inside )
 by c Haut et Court TV/Patrick Blossier- Batmanu

I thoroughly enjoyed this television series and in thinking about how I might rework the cover, an image came to mind which I took last year and which has echoes of one of the story lines ...a local underpass for foot pedestrians might well be the starting point and worth looking at.  

So two ideas to start with and explore for this assignment....