Lethbridge’s book charts the ‘halting escape of women from servitude’. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“Money might not buy happiness but it certainly sponsors battiness. Waldorf Astor only liked milk from his own herd, so whenever the Astors went to Scotland, one of their cows would travel with them on the train.” Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday praised Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain as “exhaustively researched and delightfully well-written”. “There are plenty of … tales of pointless etiquette and jaw-dropping extravagance … Up until his death in 1940, the Duke of Bedford employed 60 indoor servants just to look after him and his wife, along with eight chauffeurs.”

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