The Housekeeper's Tale Read online

  The Housekeeper’s Tale

  The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House

  By TESSA BOASE

  For my parents

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1 Dorothy Doar of Trentham Hall

  Part 2 Sarah Wells of Uppark

  Part 3 Ellen Penketh of Erddig

  Part 4 Hannah Mackenzie of Wrest Park

  Part 5 Grace Higgens of Charleston

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Prologue

  Hatfield House, Hertfordshire 1890

  Good housekeepers are not easily got at.

  JOHN STRIKE, FORMER HOUSE STEWARD TO LORD SALISBURY, PRIME MINISTER

  Housekeeper Wanted

  On Thursday, 16 October 1890, an advertisement appeared in The Times and The Morning Post, London:

  HOUSEKEEPER WANTED, for a large, country house. A person is required, of a good address, who has filled a similar position. Write, stating qualifications, to S.N., May’s Advertising offices, 162 Piccadilly, W.

  Fifty-nine women read the advertisement, considered their options and replied in slanting copperplate handwriting, stating their particulars.

  ‘I am a Protestant’, wrote Mrs Phillips, 40, from Lambeth, in quavering black ink, ‘an abstainer, early riser, very methodical, punctual in all duties and judicious in supervision of servants.’ She was experienced in looking after linen, valuable china and stores, she ‘fully understood’ cooking with economy and she required wages ‘from £35’ a year. That is around £2,100 in today’s money. Mrs Catherine Coleman, housekeeper to the Lord Mayor of London at Mansion House, also applied for the job. She prided herself on being ‘a careful and industrious manageress, possessing a large amount of discretion, tact and judicious firmness necessary to control servants’. She was educated, tall, ‘of good appearance and address’. She was leaving the post because the Lord Mayor elect would be bringing his own housekeeper. From temporary lodgings at Kemp Street, Brighton Mrs Ridout wrote too. Well educated for her ‘station in life’, she thoroughly understood the making of ‘all Preserves, Marmalades, Cakes, etc’. She had been ‘disengaged’ at the precarious age of 50, and was hoping something would turn up.

  There were replies that appealed to a prospective mistress’s vanity, promising to pander to her every need. ‘I shall not consider anything a trouble which will add to the comfort of the household’, wrote Mrs Davidson of Mayfair. Kate Corrigan, manageress of the Mosley Hotel in Manchester, understood ‘all the nice little refinements of a well-ordered establishment’. Her hotel was about to be pulled down and rebuilt; in any case, she would much prefer a position in a ‘house’.

  There were replies from career servants seeking to better their position, such as Miss Bessie Kelly, writing from a ‘gentleman’s establishment’ near Warrington, Cheshire. ‘I want to change now to gain more experience. My age is 38. I think I may say I have a very good address & appearance.’ Mrs Jennings from West Dean Park, Chichester, was disgruntled with her current job as cook-housekeeper, wishing to drop the ‘cook’ part. ‘I do not like the management of the cooking and it’s more then I thought it would be, but I took the situation through the wishes of Friends.’ She had been there less than a year.

  The words ‘large, country house’ acted as a clarion call. This was the top job for a working woman in the nineteenth century. You could do no better, nor live more comfortably or with greater security, and all under your own steam. Uniquely, it was a life that had no need of a man–and was far more exhilarating, perhaps, than housekeeping for a husband. The Victorian years were the housekeeper’s apogee, a time of supreme confidence and expansion for the English country house. She started the century a more subordinate, explicitly feminine figure–pickler, preserver, sweet maker, distiller; in charge of all store cupboards and material things, a large bunch of keys clinking at her waist as she checked her housemaids’ work. She ended the century in a black silk dress, a senior management figure of absolute authority, whose wages might outstrip both cook and butler (at Holkham Hall, Norfolk in 1894 the housekeeper earned £65 a year to the cook and butler’s £40).1 She answered only to the mistress of the house, hiring and firing dozens of maids and controlling the entire household budget. She remains one of the most caricatured figures of the age.

  The housekeeper is invariably one of two types. She is a stern-faced, elderly spinster dressed in black–meticulous, repressed, asexual, perhaps nursing some secret bitterness. Or else she is a bluff, apple-cheeked Yorkshirewoman, spaniel-like in her devotion. Dickens, himself the grandson of a country-house housekeeper, delighted in the caricature–in Hard Times (1854) there is the ludicrous Mrs Sparsit, a widowed gentlewoman fallen on hard times with a ‘Coriolanian style of nose’ and ‘dense black eyebrows’, her preposterous sights set on marrying her master, Mr Bounderby. In Bleak House (1853) there’s her counterpoint: the inoffensive treasure Mrs Rouncewell, ‘a fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat’, an indispensable part of the grand Dedlock Estate for fifty years. Scotswoman Mrs Hughes of the television drama Downton Abbey (loyal, astute, a spinster by choice) belongs firmly in this second camp.

  She was a stereotype to her employers: in 1822 Lady Elizabeth Coke urged her new husband not to engage a gorgon; rather, she wanted ‘a goody sort of person, who will occasionally make up a mess of broth or sago for the poor people’.2 The stereotype extended to her staff. Typically, ‘the under-maids were more afraid of her than they were of her Ladyship’,3 wrote ex-butler Eric Horne in 1923. The Victorian caricature persisted well into the twentieth century, when mistresses actively looked for a cliché to employ, as if ballast against the bumptious new generation of servants. The young, insecure Duchess of Westminster hired ‘somebody completely out of Dickens’ to run Eaton Hall in 1930; a ‘stoutish character’ dressed in floor-length black bombazine.4 Then there is the most sinister and manipulative of them all: Mrs Danvers, housekeeper of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Tall and gaunt, dressed in black, her prominent cheekbones and ‘great, hollow eyes’ give her ‘a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame’.

  *

  The replies to the Times advertisement of 1890 paint a rather different picture. It was the top job, but it seems to have been a tough job in every sense–from ‘judicious control’ of unruly servants, to getting down on your knees with a scrubbing brush yourself. ‘She is not afraid to soil her hands’, reads the character reference for a Mrs Adams from Chorlton, Manchester. For all its status, it was a surprisingly insecure job (1890 was a year of sharp financial recession), many women blaming ‘restructuring of establishment’ for their being let go. It was also a job for the desperate: widowed and orphaned gentlewomen, young and old, down on their luck. Their letters make poignant reading.

  On black-edged notepaper from Bridgnorth in the old county of Salop, a 24-year-old widow applied for the post. ‘Owing to my husband’s recent death I have been obliged to depend upon myself’, wrote Frances Christy in intelligent, legible handwriting. ‘I have never been out before, but am a lady and used to house keeping of my own, and am fully qualified for the post, being used to a large house in China, and having the command of a staff of servants. If you think it likely I should do’, she added, ‘kindly let me know as soon as possible, as I am anxious to get something to do.’

  ‘I am a widow and I have one child who is at school’, wrote Mrs Cleary from Southampton, a 36-year-old with ‘the highest references’ from a canon of Westminster Abbey. She admitted that she had not worked since she was married, ‘but I am a competent housekeeper and would soon get into the routine of a Ge
ntleman’s house. Wages, £50.’

  Death, in this sheaf of replies, is everywhere. ‘I am the orphan daughter of a Gentleman, of very good family and connections, many of whom have held important posts in the Army, Navy, Church, Legal and Medical professions’, wrote the ‘very energetic and cheerful’ Miss E. Illingworth, aged 31, in a rather defensive four-page letter posted in London. Harriet Robinson from Micheldever, Hampshire is another: ‘My father now dead was for many years in the Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh & a Notary Public.’ She did not state her age but sent a piteous photograph, ‘taken about 4 years ago’: very young, very slim, with a frizzled Princess Alexandra-style fringe and a yearning face. She holds a portrait of her dead father. ‘Salary £35 to £40.’

  Just one woman, 54-year-old Fanny Tagg from Birmingham, asked for more information. ‘Would you let me know what your arrangements are for Country House and what county it is in.’ Where was this ‘large, country house’? It was a fair question. And yet it was, apparently, irrelevant to most. Their employment histories show them to be continually on the move, travelling by the great Victorian rail network hundreds of miles to each new posting, one big black trunk in tow: two years here, four years there, from Salop to Sunderland, Dorset to Derbyshire. Location was of far less concern than wages, for once you were installed in the closed world of the big house and its estate, you rarely left it.

  What none of these women knew, as they dipped steel-nibbed pens in ink and laboriously wrote out their particulars, was that their letter would be read by the Marchioness of Salisbury, wife to the Conservative Prime Minister. A housekeeper was needed for the Cecil family seat in Hertfordshire: that vast and historic Jacobean mansion, Hatfield House. Had these poor women known, they might have been too daunted to apply.

  Fourteen women–none of the above–were shortlisted for the job. A small, stiff envelope arrived in the post from Hatfield House inviting each to a personal interview with the Marchioness of Salisbury in the last week of October 1890, all expenses paid. For four consecutive days Her Ladyship sat in her morning room while personal secretary Mr Gunton ushered women in and out in fifteen-minute slots. ‘No good’, she scrawled irritably on their application letters. ‘Not much.’ ‘Won’t do.’ ‘Very nice but wants experience.’ She struck off the typed names on her list, one after another, as the women entered and departed. ‘Good, but perhaps too small a woman’, she wrote of Louisa Aylott, ex-still-room maid of Hatfield House, who was terrified to find herself in front of her old mistress. The field shrank. A small, tentative cross was finally brought to rest next to the names of Mrs Neill and Mrs Prince.

  Mrs Neill was a Scotswoman, a member of the Church of England; age 37 years, height 5ft 5 1/2in. In her last job as housekeeper to Mrs Carlile of Gayhurst House, an Elizabethan mansion in Buckinghamshire, she was said in her reference to have assiduously ‘studied the interests of the family whom she serves’. The story of Mrs Neill is a sad one, for clearly she was a woman qualified to do the job. Her superior earnings of £55 hint at her status: here was a top-flight housekeeper. The Marchioness interviewed her, liked her, but deliberated for several days. Mrs Neill waited anxiously, then finally left London and returned to her friend in Oswestry, Salop. Hearing nothing, she continued to apply for jobs.

  On 7 November another small, stiff white envelope, grubby with several carriage and train journeys, was delivered to Oswestry by the Royal Mail. It contained a letter written a week earlier to Mrs Neill’s temporary London address. ‘Dear Madam, I am directed by the Marchioness of Salisbury to ask you to please to come to see her again tomorrow, Monday, between 11 & 12. Yours faithfully, R.T. Gunton.’ It was too late. Mrs Neill was distraught. ‘Sir, your letter was forwarded to me this morning, I beg to say that I waited in London till last Saturday expecting to hear from her Ladyship, she promised me her decision as last Wednesday week.’ Since then she had accepted a situation in Scotland ‘on speculation’, and was to start in six days. ‘I should have “preferred” her Ladyship’s’, she wrote.

  Two days into her new job–housekeeper for an elderly widow at Stichill House, a turreted Victorian mansion in the Scottish borders–she wrote again to Mr Gunton. ‘Sir if her Ladyship is still in want of a Housekeeper I should be glad to accept the situation as I find it would be impossible for me to remain here longer than my month as I should lose my good character’–her all-important reference. ‘It is a very “rough place”. I beg sir to remain yours respectfully, A.S. Neill.’ But that is the last Mrs Neill heard from Mr Gunton or from the Marchioness of Salisbury. A letter delivered late had changed the course of her life for ever.

  The other woman to interest Her Ladyship was Mrs Prince. Her application letter is in large copperplate, bold, unhurried and confidently to the point. ‘My Lady,’ she wrote from Alcester in Warwickshire, ‘I have just returned here after being in London and concluded that you had engaged as it was some time since your advertisement appeared. I have been living 5 years with someone your Ladyship knows well.’ This was intriguing to the Marchioness, who wrote on the top left corner, ‘Ask what family she means.’ Mrs Prince was well connected: she had read the advertisement and she knew who had placed it. There was a network of gossip running between the housekeepers of Britain’s great houses as taut and as time-sensitive, in its day, as Twitter. In London there were up to twelve mail deliveries a day, allowing for many ongoing conversations.

  She continued laconically: ‘I wish to have £60 a year’–this is about £3,600 in today’s money. (Lord Salisbury’s annual income was £60,000: about £3.6 million today.) ‘Have been used to a large country house and understand household bread also a dairy.’ This, in Victorian country-house code, hints at a very large establishment. Mrs Prince was confident, and she was tough. Mr Gunton duly summoned this 48-year-old woman to Hatfield House for interview on Saturday, 25 October at 11 a.m., reimbursing her a hefty £2 for her expenses, about £120 in today’s money. But once Mrs Prince had travelled all the way back to the Midlands, she received a regretful letter of rejection from Mr Gunton. The Marchioness had apparently decided against her.

  The job was first offered to Maria Woods, 51, long-term housekeeper of Middleton Park in Oxfordshire for the influential Earl and Countess of Jersey, political allies of Lord Salisbury. It seems likely that Mrs Woods was coerced into meeting Lady Salisbury out of respectful deference–her own, and probably that of her mistress, who was 31 years old to Lady Salisbury’s 53. It was not easy to deny the Prime Minister’s wife.

  But Maria Woods turned the offer down. The housekeeper wrote bravely to Mr Gunton, once safely back in the basement of her Georgian mansion, saying that ‘after due consideration’ she didn’t think she would be ‘quite strong enough’ to manage such a large house as Hatfield, and that she was sorry to be obliged to decline the honour. ‘Lady Jersey says she do not think I should be strong enough either.’

  Who, then, was given the position?

  In a box in an upper servants’ hall at Hatfield House is a large brown envelope, dirty and frayed, whose contents chart the Marchioness of Salisbury’s meticulous hunt for a housekeeper in that autumn of 1890. This basement room is now the archive office, and I sat at a long, polished dining table where once the housekeeper had sat with butler, lady’s maids, valets and cook, and read through those fifty-nine letters. To Her Ladyship, Georgina, who saw the whole process as something of a chore, they were just letters. Divided into bundles, each is marked with her impatient writing: ‘London ones’, ‘Country ones’ and ‘These are hopeless, to be burnt’. To secretary Mr Gunton, who kept them all, they were estate correspondence to be scrupulously filed. But to me, they were the first evidence I had found of housekeepers as real women– and as such, they were thrilling.

  Behind each page of diagonal scrawl, near impossible to read, was a story. I could almost hear their voices: ‘I am a careful and industrious manageress’…‘I presume you do not object to a Catholic’…‘I will do all in my power to merit your esteem’…‘I
am a widow (40) and have no family’…‘I left through the breaking up of the establishment’. Behind each cramped or flowery signature–Mrs Boosey, Mrs Bouncey, Mrs Bocquet–was a personality, a woman with weaknesses, eccentricities, secret hopes and appetites. There was something very exposed and vulnerable about this collection of letters.

  Hatfield House is still lived in by the Cecil family, and is today a heavyweight player in Britain’s heritage industry. It has clanking suits of armour from the sixteenth century; the silk stockings of a youthful Queen Elizabeth I; a wooden staircase topped with snarling lions carved in 1611. The week I visited, a Hollywood crew was filming with Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow–location hire now all part of the reinvention of the English country house. But the woman who ran this vast and prominent house for the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury–three times Prime Minister to Queen Victoria–is entirely missing from the archives. There is a small, unexplained hole in the estate records between 1840 and 1928, a hole perhaps forgivable in an archive that goes back to 1610. The bundle of applications is unique in surviving at all, and the archivists haven’t yet got round to reading it.

  I put the letters back in their battered envelope and turned to my laptop, and to the Internet, to solve the mystery of who was appointed housekeeper in 1890. The website ancestry.com took me to the 1891 census, then to Hatfield House, Hertfordshire and its list of servants. The housekeeper (‘in charge’ written above her job title) was Ann E. Prince, a widow of 49–the very same who had initially received a letter of rejection. There she was, with eight maids in their twenties, on that Sunday in April some six months after her appointment. The rest of the household staff were with Lord and Lady Salisbury at their London residence in Arlington Street. Mrs Prince, who had so boldly requested £60 a year, was born in Islington. She ended up working just twenty miles from her birthplace. Ten years later, at the 1901 census, she was there still–though her mistress had died in 1899. By 1911, eight years after Lord Salisbury’s death, she had gone.