Can't think of a word.

regdog

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I'm in need of some help. I am drawing a total blank. Does anyone know the name of the pull used in English Manor homes to call for a servant?

Total brain freeze here.

Thanks.
 

MaryMumsy

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Bell pull? In the earlier days a cord would have connected it to a bell in the servants area. There would have been multiple bells, so the servants would know where to go. In later days I think there was a push button system that lit light bulbs on a display.

MM
 

Lillie

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This is from Sherlock Holmes, The Speckled Band.

"Indeed, it seemed unnecessary to put so nice a bell-pull there. You will excuse me for a few minutes while I satisfy myself as to this floor." He threw himself down upon his face with his lens in his hand and crawled swiftly backward and forward, examining minutely the cracks between the boards. Then he did the same with the wood-work with which the chamber was panelled. Finally he walked over to the bed and spent some time in staring at it and in running his eye up and down the wall. Finally he took the bell-rope in his hand and gave it a brisk tug.
 

Puma

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I would have said bell cord instead of pull. There might be some regional variation in what it was called. Puma
 

Kitti

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I was thinking bell cord, too. The OED seems to think bell pull or bell cord would work, but the latter was used more often for passenger vehicles?
 

Puma

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Passenger vehicles ... what was the name of the XXX you pulled to tell the train engineer you wanted off, or the streetcar driver? That was a bell cord wasn't it? Puma
 

Old Hack

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I'd use bell-pull, or just something like, "he rang for the butler".

Our house is biggish, but isn't a manor house by any stretch. It has a bell system which was installed in the mid 1800s, I'd guess (and was sadly mostly ripped out by the house's previous owner).

There is a wooden board high up on the wall in the servants' quarters, on which a number of bells were mounted. Each one on a spiral spring. Then those bells were attached to metal cables, a few mm thick, which ran under floorboards throughout the house, stapled to the sides of the joists.

Every room had a bell-pull which looks a bit like a large door-handle, mounted on the walls at waist height: there is a ceramic disc about three inches wide flat against the wall, with a metal handle radiating off it, which has a matching ceramic knob on the end. So you wouldn't pull a cord to make the bell ring, you'd just crank the handle.

I hope that's a help.
 

regdog

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Thank you all. Brain now unfrozen :)