Handy Around the House

At Maryborough House, thrown back to Britain's pre-plumbing era, lackeys heated cauldrons over the kitchen fire to provide warm bath water for Queen Mary. At the Admiralty and the War Office, civil servants ate their meals cold, and went home unwashed and inkstained. In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill rose to speak, swathed in a huge ulster that stretched nearly to the floor, his throat muffled in black wool. Declared Speaker Douglas Clifton-Brown: "I was unable to get a bath this morning myself."

It was all the fault of a week-long wildcat walkout of most of the Ministry of Works' 2,400 maintenance men, who wanted $2.50 a week more than their present $19.50 to do their chores around London's official buildings. When King George and his family returned from a weekend at Windsor, they found Buckingham Palace chillier than a Bloomsbury walkup, and there was not a drop of warm water in any of its bathrooms. "Oh, well," King George was heard to say, "I will go down and have a look." He went to the basement and stoked the furnace himself.

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