In his memoirs, the historian Tony Judt recalled his surprise on arriving at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1966 that he had suddenly acquired a servant. His “bedder” was expected to make his bed ...

And yet I regularly sat in the university’s imposing woodpanelled rooms watching as a bedder (a bedmaker) toiled in front of me to make beds, empty bins and clean baths. Mind you I was only five or ...