Economics of London, 1919

I've read that Agatha Christie once wrote, "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car."

I'm not sure she put it in those exact words, but according to Slate (2022), she did describe her young married life this way in her autobiography:

The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.

The couple’s annual income was around 700 pounds ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—500 pounds ($36,000) from his salary and another 200 pounds ($14,000) in passive income.

They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was 90 pounds for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for 36 pounds ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”

The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.

“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”

In 1919, Ford’s Model T cost 170 pounds—around $12,000 in 2022 dollars. So a car was worth about three months of income for the Christie family—but almost five years of income for their maid!

I'm sure the fact that they lived in a city with an extensive public transit system and businesses on every corner also made it possible for them to never think of having a car.

The pittance paid to the maid is the real shock in all of that. Just $2,600 a year in 2022 dollars! That's $1.25/hour if it she worked what is now considered full-time work, and I'm willing to bet that woman didn't work 40 hours per week. Yes, yes, she got room and board, too... 

Can you imagine legally hiring anyone for $1.25 plus room and board in 2022?