Detailed Information About the Unfortunate Job of a Scullery Maid (2024)

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Detailed Information About the Unfortunate Job of a Scullery Maid? ›

The scullery maid provided hot water for the scullery, kitchen tasks, and household. In addition to her other tasks, the scullery maid had to keep the scullery clean by clearing away meat and vegetable garbage, scrubbing work tables, and swilling the floors. The water was carried through a drain outside the house.

The Scullery Maid

Her job was to wash pots and pans, and her hands were perpetually raw and covered in chilblains. She also had to scrub floors, dressers and tables and clean away vegetable, meat and fish debris and generally skivvy for the other servants.

You must assist the Kitchen Maid with any food preparation for the Family's dinner and Servants' Supper and continuously wash up any pots and pans used. After the Family's Dinner has been served you must clean the Kitchen Passages, Pantries, Scullery and Kitchen.

A scullery is a small kitchen or room at the back of the house used for washing dishes and other dirty household work. Until recently, sculleries were most often associated with the Victorian period and turn of the 20th century in larger homes where the kitchen was not a place to be seen.

A household with just one servant had what was called a “Maid-of-all-Work,” a lone woman that was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, and general maintenance of the members of the household. If you had more money, you could get a cook, a housemaid, a lady's maid, a butler, and a valet.

“6:00 am ​- First up is ​Poppy, the scullery maid​- who gets the kitchen range hot enough to boil the water for tea. 6:30 am ​- The alarm rings in the housemaids' rooms (​Jane and Charlotte​). Their early tasks include struggling into corsets and putting on their bloomers.

Maid is a female who works as a servant in a hotel or in someone's home. Maid is responsible for cleaning, but can also do a variety of other tasks such as ironing, grocery shopping and cooking.

Housemaids, scullery maids and kitchen maids slept on the attic floor of the house. Two to a room, in some houses they even shared beds.

The name derives from the fact that the hall boy usually slept in the servants' hall. Like his female counterpart, the scullery maid, the hall boy would have been expected to work up to 16 hours per day, seven days per week.

In great houses, scullery maids were the lowest-ranked and often the youngest of the female domestic servants and acted as assistants to a kitchen maid.

Were scullery maids paid? ›

Maids started early, literally and figuratively. Before child labor laws, it wasn't unusual to find tweens working sixteen-hour days as scullery maids, the lowest form of kitchen life. They were paid a pittance to scrub pots and blacken the stove, fed scraps, and with any luck, allowed to sleep by the stove.

Uniforms were a must and these we had to provide ourselves. In the mornings we all wore blue dresses, large white bib-aprons, white caps, black stockings (not nylon – horrible lisle), fully fashioned with seams, low heel, one bar button fastening shoes. The kitchen and scullery maids wore this uniform at all times.

The scullery maid, or person washing dishes at the sink, would stand on slatted wood mats near the sinks. The floor itself was often dug six inches or so (150mm) below the main house floor in case of leaks or flooding.

Working as a maid 'in service'

Girls often went into service aged just 12 or 13, sometimes younger. Girls from rural villages were in demand as maids, as it was often thought that they would work harder than children from cities.

#OldMaidsDay. There was a time when a single woman over the age of 25 was considered an old maid. During the 17th century, many people referred to them as spinster or a thornback because they never married. Today, Old Maids are often career-oriented, postponing marriage, and motherhood by choice or by circ*mstance.

Most servants were unmarried. Employers didn't want servants distracted by spouses or children.

Housemaids, scullery maids and kitchen maids slept on the attic floor of the house. Two to a room, in some houses they even shared beds.

The rules make it quite clear - a scullery maid should know her place: "As scullery maid you are the lowest ranking servant of all the female Staff. Positioned directly below the kitchen maid in order of seniority, you answer directly to her and the chef de cuisine who is head of the Kitchen Department."

A butler's pantry is a more modest and smaller space than a scullery. In the days of the old English manor, the butler's pantry would serve as a space for the butler to ensure the food presentation was to a high standard before it was taken out to the household and their guests.