Life BELOW STAIRS

From pages to cooks, from wet nurses to seamstresses, a host of workers used their skills to look after the royal family over the centuries. A new exhibition at Kensington Palace is set to uncover their forgotten stories

SANDRA LAWRENCE

Kensington Palace has become famous for glittering exhibitions of court glamour, yet it has always taken a vast backstage crew to create and maintain such opulence. The palace’s next major show may not sparkle with diamonds or rustle with taffeta, but it packs an altogether different punch: the secret world behind the green baize door. “The word ‘servant’ is not a comfortable term for us today,” admits Dr Mishka Sinha, one of the curators of Untold Lives: A Palace at Work, “but everyone in the 18th-century court was a servant of the king. People who did quite grand things, essentially duchesses and dukes, were still ‘servants’ and had retainers. If you were at court, you got paid and, often, living quarters. Of course,” she adds, “the amount you got paid…

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Britain (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/Jun 2024

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