David Bowie – The Clean Genie?
Way back last century, when David Bowie was a starving artist who had yet to conquer space, his devoted father typed up a wonderful letter of recommendation on his behalf.
Young David, Mr. Haywood Jones told the prospective employer, was “a real trooper,” possessed “a keen brain,” and even “works too hard at times.” So, what job was David hoping to secure?
It seems he wished to become a cleaner. Yes, really — show up at your home with a cheery smile and leave the place looking spotless. David had even met with Mr. Jones’ addressee, a certain W. A. Freshman, the owner of a London firm named Your Servant, to press his case.
Just to be clear, David did not envisage domestic chores as a long-term prospect, but simply “an opportunity to earn a living and at the same time allow him to continue his career as a song writer, etc..,” according to Mr. Jones, who probably wrote the letter a year or so either side of 1966, when his son’s musical aspirations were sinking in the quicksand.
The letter is one of the 90,000 artifacts in the late singer’s personal archive, which has been donated by his heirs to the new David Bowie Centre at the V&A Storehouse, the East London branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Times did an article on it, and seemed to think “Your Servant” was a law firm and that young David was eyeing a job in the legal profession.
But a quick check of the BritishNewspaperArchive database came up with a more likely scenario.
An item about male cleaners in the Sept. 28, 1968, issue of the Daily Mirror profiled a singer/actor named Tony Astell who did domestic chores for “seven bob an hour” (about US$8 these days) through an agency called Ryder Domestics. “Usually they are out of work actors and the like, who need something to tide them over until the next show opens,” the Mirror said, noting that men were apparently better cleaners than women. The author of the article checked in with the manager of a competing firm, which happened to be Your Servant, who informed him, “Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have women cleaners. We find they’re not awfully clean.”
The manager may have been Mr. Freshman himself, William Aubrey Freshman, an Australian-born actor-writer-director known as “Billy” to his friends. With his 1930s heyday long behind him, the man once described in a 1929 Down Under newspaper article as “Australia’s screen Adonis” had evidently diversified into supplying janitorial work for the young dudes of Swinging London.
Whether the future Ziggy actually got jiggy with a vacuum cleaner is unknown. Probably not? I assume the letter was typed for hand delivery by David and that he never got the opportunity to revisit Mr. Freshman. Still, it’s nice to imagine the Bromley lad dressed up in hair curlers and headscarf, like Hilda Ogden, keeping the housewives happy.
