Margaret Powell

MARGARET POWELL was born in 1907 in Hove, and left school at the age of thirteen to start working. At fourteen, she got a job in a hotel laundry room, and a year later went into service as a kitchen maid, eventually progressing to the position of cook, before marrying a milkman named Albert. In 1968 the first volume of her memoirs, Below Stairs, was published to instant success and turned her into a celebrity. She died in 1984.