It cannot be imagined what George and Ruth felt when their eldest son, George Thomas, who had just turned twelve, fell ill. Like the others, he had a fever, which raged for two weeks, and a rash spread across his body. He lay in his sickbed, his condition worsening, while the family buried his brother Eli. Because families of enlisted men were not permitted to call upon the services of the regiment’s physician, the Smiths were forced to summon a doctor whose fees they could hardly afford. George Thomas was diagnosed with typhus. He struggled with it for three weeks before expiring on June 15.
Over the span of only three weeks, death had claimed four of the Smiths’ six children. The enormity of this tragedy is almost inconceivable to modern sensibilities, particularly as their lives might have been spared had they lived in an era of antibiotics. However, George and Ruth were powerless in the face of incurable illness. The death of children was simply an unfortunate but not uncommon aspect of life, though this fact did not make the experience easier for the parents or the surviving siblings. Now only two of the Smiths’ children remained: Annie and Emily. Long after the event, this calamity continued to cast a heavy shadow over the family.
Somehow Ruth and George found it in their hearts to move forward. Two years later, in 1856, a daughter, Georgina, was born in Windsor. She was followed by another Miriam: Miriam Ruth, in 1858. In the midst of this, Annie grew into a teenage girl with dark, wavy brown hair and an intense blue-eyed stare. At about the time that her mother’s arms were once again filled with a newborn, Annie would have been nearing her fifteenth birthday. Traditionally this was considered the age when a girl’s education was complete and she would be expected to start earning a full-time wage. For a large number of teenage girls, this meant entering domestic service. This transition was almost a rite of passage: a young woman took on the burden of supporting her younger siblings and made the sacrifice of leaving her family home. Although removing herself from her parents’ protection did pose potential moral dangers, domestic service had advantages over other options, such as factory work, because a young woman could gain skills that would prove useful in her future married life. As a result, between 1851 and 1891, nearly 43 percent of British women between the ages of fifteen and twenty entered this occupation. Ruth Smith herself had been in service. When Annie came of age, Ruth had Emily at home to assist with the younger children, thereby freeing Annie to begin to make contributions to the family income.
By 1861 Annie Smith was working as a housemaid for William Henry Lewer; whether this was her first job in domestic service is unknown. A successful architect, Lewer lived at numbers 2 and 3 Duke Street in Westminster, a part of London that a number of designers and engineers called home. Several doors down, at numbers 17–18, lived Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great creator of railways, bridges, and tunnels, and his family. As long-term residents of Duke Street, the Lewers and Brunels, who shared professional interests, would have been acquainted socially. It is likely that Annie and her fellow housemaid, Eleanor Brown, as well as the Lewers’ housekeeper, Mary Ford, would have recognized the family, or even had the privilege of waiting upon them in their masters’ drawing room.
In 1861, Annie was the junior of three women who tended to sixty-seven-year-old William Lewer and his bachelor brother, Edward, a retired stockbroker. Although all three would have begun their working day at 5 or 6 a.m., Annie’s responsibilities would have been the most arduous. Sometimes described as “maids-of-all-work,” servants in small households were expected to perform every task, from the miserable chore of washing dishes three times a day, to hauling buckets of coal up flights of stairs, making the beds, and lighting the fires in the grates. At the Lewers’ home, Mrs. Ford, the housekeeper, may have doubled as the cook; it’s likely that Annie would assist in the preparation of meals and in serving them as well. Even though she served only two older gentlemen, Annie’s list of jobs would rarely allow her a spare moment. When she wasn’t dusting, or clearing out fireplaces, she was scrubbing the floors, beating rugs, drawing water for baths, polishing boots, or mending clothes. The Lewers may have sent their dirty linens to one of London’s many commercial laundries, but if they didn’t, the strenuous work of washing, rinsing, wringing, and ironing would have fallen to Annie as well. For their hours of toil, housemaids were remunerated poorly. Mrs. Beeton, in her Book of Household Management,published in 1861, suggested that a maid-of-all-work should receive annual pay of nine to fourteen pounds; if the employer supplied the maid with an allowance to purchase her own tea, sugar, and small beer, this figure was reduced to seven and a half to eleven pounds.* Employers believed these small sums were justified because they were providing the young woman’s room and board. In the Lewer household, where apparently space was plentiful, Annie and Mrs. Ford had their own rooms above the architect’s office at number 2 Duke Street, while Eleanor slept in the attic at number 3. For Annie, who had spent her life sharing two or at most three rooms with her entire family, the privacy she enjoyed in William Lewer’s servants’ quarters must have seemed strange and wonderful.
When Annie began life as a live-in domestic, she would expect to see very little of her family. For a housemaid, time off was granted at the discretion of her employer, and most servants could expect no more than a day or even a half day away from their duties each month. An hour or so on Sunday for attending church was also permissible. These restrictions, however, would have made it difficult for Annie to travel to and from Windsor, where the Smiths were based until 1861.
For roughly twenty-one years, the army had beaten the march that the Smith family followed. For both Ruth and George, the regiment, and the families and officers who comprised it, formed the defining framework of their lives. This closed, clanlike community, who migrated together between barracks, who had shared housing and meals, whose children had been schooled together and grown up as if they were cousins, who had consoled one another, and lent each other money, would leave an indelible stamp on each of the Smiths’ sense of identity. This was especially so for George, who as he entered his forties would be forced to contemplate retirement and his future prospects. The 2nd Regiment of the Life Guards had been a family to him as much as his wife and children. So closely were the two intertwined that he chose to name his youngest son in recognition of those under whom he had served. On February 25, 1861, Fountaine Hamilton Smith was born at 6 Middle Row North, a short distance from Raphael Street, where George and Ruth had parted with three sons and a daughter in 1854. Perhaps, in that same year, George experienced some relief from this tragedy when John Glencairn Carter Hamilton (later 1st Baron Hamilton of Dalzell) became one of his captains. Whatever support Hamilton provided, whether financial, emotional, or spiritual, George never forgot his kindness. Neither was he able to forget the bond he had forged with another of his commanders, Captain Fountaine Hogge Allen, whose death, in November 1857, must have affected him profoundly. It is likely that Fountaine’s birth signified to George the approaching end of his career, and inspired in him a desire to commemorate those men and experiences that had shaped his person.
As a loyal servant of the regiment, who had earned four distinguishing marks for good conduct, George was judged a suitable candidate to become a valet to his commanding officers. According to army regulations, cavalry officers who were not already attended by a civilian were permitted to employ a “soldier servant” from within the regiment to maintain their military kit and uniforms, care for their physical appearance, and manage the administrative details of daily life.
In 1856, Roger William Henry Palmer, a hero of the Crimean War who had participated in the charge of the Light Brigade, returned to Britain and exchanged his commission in the 11th Hussars for one in the 2nd Life Guards. When selecting a valet from among the men in his new regiment, Palmer spotted the necessary qualities for a “gentleman’s gentleman” in Trooper Smith.7
Within the hierarchy of servants, a gentleman’s valet had a prestigious role. Significant trust was invested in him. No other
servant was permitted such intimate insight into an employer, from his physical weaknesses to his thoughts and personal secrets. To be selected for such a position, George would have been judged to possess “polite manners, modest demeanour, and respectful reserve,” along with “good sense, good temper, some self-denial, and consideration for the feelings of others.”8 A valet had many tasks to perform. According to Mrs. Beeton, that arbiter of social custom, valets were required to tend to their masters by “dressing them, accompanying them in all their journeys” as well as acting as “the confidents and agents of their most unguarded moments.” More specifically, a valet took on “brushing his master’s clothes, cleaning his top boots, his shooting, walking and dress boots; carrying up the water for his master’s bath, putting out his things for dressing, assisting him in dressing, and packing and unpacking his clothes when travelling . . .”9 Although Mrs. Beeton points out that many gentlemen preferred to shave themselves, a valet had to be prepared to perform this task too, as well as regularly trim his master’s beard and mustache.
The benefits of George’s association with Palmer would be wide-ranging. Already a military hero when his path crossed with George’s, Palmer would eventually succeed to his family’s Irish baronetcy. Being a valet allowed George to remain within his regiment but excused him from parades and barracks responsibilities, including the universally disliked guard duty. It entitled him to live in the officers’ mess, where he received better food, and sometimes wine as well. When Palmer was elected as a member of Parliament, George’s duties took him away from army life altogether and into the exclusive realm of country houses, shooting parties, and the government. Because Palmer spent much of his time as a commissioned officer traveling between his family estates in County Mayo, George got to see Ireland and the opulent interiors of its castles and manors. Then, in 1862, George Smith, the son of a Lincolnshire shoemaker, went to Paris.
The year before, George had begun to serve as valet for another officer in his regiment: Captain Thomas Naylor Leyland. So much had Leyland come to value his “soldier-servant” that when he chose to marry and exchange his commission for one in the Denbighshire Yeomanry, he asked George to leave the 2nd Life Guards and accompany him.10 This opportunity would have required a good deal of deliberation, but it arrived at a time when reason demanded that George take it. Leyland was offering him a paid position, which would place George among the butler and cook within the top rank of his household servants. He could expect to receive £25–£50 per year, in addition to his army pension of 1 shilling and 1½ pence per day. As a middle-aged man from the working classes, George could hardly do better than this for his family.
On March 19, 1862, less than a month before his forty-third birthday, Trooper George Smith became Mr. Smith. He bid farewell to his associates, the barracks, and the regiment that had made him, and set off to accompany Thomas Naylor Leyland to Paris, where Leyland had arranged to marry his fiancée, Mary Ann Scarisbrick, at the British embassy before embarking on a honeymoon in France.
From about the end of 1861, it appears that Ruth and George decided to settle the family more permanently in Knightsbridge, near Leyland’s palatial, art-filled mansion, Hyde Park House. This was conveniently situated in the area that Ruth knew best, near the Hyde Park Barracks and within a short walk from the home of George’s brother, Thomas, who had also retired from the regiment and returned to the family occupation of shoemaking. Much like Annie, George likely saw little of his family while occupied in domestic service, and this estrangement from his wife and children, and from his former regiment, began to bear down on him. A valet, when not tending to his master, had time to himself, to read, to think, and without the distractions of family or regimental life, there were many subjects George did not wish to ponder. Undoubtedly, the deaths of four of his children were among them.
In 1863, Captain Leyland had agreed to act as steward at the Denbighshire Yeomanry Cavalry Races in Wrexham, to be held on June 13. This large, convivial social gathering would include a grand dinner for the officers and their ladies. The evening before, members of the regiment and their guests arrived in town and retired to their lodgings. While his master resided in officers’ quarters, George shared a room at a pub, the Elephant and Castle, with another member of Leyland’s staff. As they extinguished the light that night, George appeared his usual self, and “quite cheerful.” The next morning, between 7 and 8 a.m., the servant called out to George, to remind him of the time. “It’s all right, I’m not asleep,” he answered, though he made no attempt to get out of bed. Less than an hour later, when George had still not appeared, the landlady went upstairs and, much to her horror, discovered Leyland’s valet “with his throat cut, in a shocking manner, with a razor lying by him covered with blood.” George was dead by the time he was found, on the floor, “with only his shirt and drawers on.”11
That day, which had been intended as an occasion of sporting amusement, immediately soured into one of shock and dismay. When informed of the horrible news, Thomas Naylor Leyland rushed to the scene and “was much affected” by what he beheld. However, so that the races would not have to be abandoned, the coroners quickly assembled that afternoon and presented a verdict of “suicide by cutting his throat with a razor while labouring under temporary insanity.”12 There was also the suggestion that George had been drinking, a problem to which he had succumbed quite seriously since leaving the army.
Notwithstanding the unfortunate turn of events, Leyland still appeared on the turf that afternoon to watch the horses run, though it cannot be imagined that he derived much pleasure from it.
He later paid the expenses of George’s funeral.
There is no record of what occurred when Ruth and her daughters received the news. Fountaine, who was only two, would never know his father. The pension to which George had been entitled expired with his death; in the mid-nineteenth century the law did not permit a widow to make a claim on behalf of a deceased husband. Overnight, the family was bereft of an income, other than the money that Annie sent home or that her sister, Emily, may have earned. For the Smiths, this dire situation could have landed them in the workhouse.
Curiously, this did not happen. By the following year, Ruth had returned to an address where the family had once lived, in 1851: 29 Montpelier Place, situated in the respectable lower-middle-class Knightsbridge neighborhood that they had come to know as home.* With three floors, including a basement kitchen and larder, as well as a first-floor parlor, which hinted at middle-class pretensions, this was certainly the most comfortable house the family had occupied. It is unlikely that Ruth could have afforded the rent on such a property without assistance. After George’s death, Leyland would have paid what was owed of his valet’s quarterly wage to his wife, and, given the tragic circumstances, he may have made a donation to the widow as well, a gesture not uncommon among employers at this time. Ruth invested the money she received wisely and, following the lead of many of her neighbors, took the lease on an adequately sized home and let out rooms to lodgers. Because the house was equipped with a full kitchen and scullery below stairs, she could make some extra income by taking in laundry.
Due to its affordability and its location near the mansions of Knightsbridge, Montpelier Place and the surrounding streets were a haven for those in domestic service. Housemaids, butlers, valets, and footmen filled the census returns for the area from the 1860s through the 70s. Additionally, the street’s position close to several mews (or groups of buildings that include private stables) meant that more than ten addresses on Montpelier Place alone were occupied by coachmen and grooms. Among them was a young man named John Chapman.
Little is known about the man who appeared one day at the door of 29 Montpelier Place and inquired about lodgings. Although he and Ruth shared the same surname, their families apparently had no connection; still, John’s name may have endeared him to his soon-to-be-landlady at their first meeting. Born in 1844, John came from a family of “horse-keepers” in
Newmarket, Suffolk. This center of racing and horse breeding would have given Chapman an immersive education in the needs and care of these animals. He and four of his brothers started out as stable assistants and grooms, brushing, feeding, and exercising horses, before eventually working their way through the ranks to become coach drivers. By the second half of the 1860s, John had come to London to pursue his trade, probably in the employment of a family.
It might be that Annie met her mother’s lodger in the kitchen of the family home, on a rare day away from her workplace. Or perhaps Annie was residing at home when John came into her life. Either way, something blossomed between them, though it is impossible to say what, exactly. Annie, at age twenty-seven, was not yet married, a situation not unusual for a woman who had spent her “eligible years” in domestic service. But at this age she knew that to refuse an opportunity to marry might mean passing the rest of her days as a spinster, a person universally regarded with pity. With the exception of Fountaine, who was still a boy, the Smiths were now a family of women, headed by a widow. The addition of a man, who might earn a steady livelihood and act as paterfamilias, would have been most welcome. This would have been Annie’s great moment—a chance to make a success of her life, to become everything society intended for her. No longer just a helpmeet to her family, she could become the mistress of her own home and, most important, a wife and a mother.
Mrs. Chapman
Like many Victorian newlyweds, Mr. and Mrs. John Chapman made an appointment to have their photograph taken, dressed in their Sunday finest. John removed his hat when they arrived at the Brompton Road studio, and the couple were shown to a corner, where a suitable backdrop had been unfurled behind some furniture. Either they or the photographer had chosen the pleasant outdoor scene: a set of garden steps leading to a church in the distance. The canvas was flanked by drapery, to make it look as if the sitters were posing before a large picture window. Annie was placed at the center, upon a chair, while John was directed to stand beside her and lean, with casual authority, against a wood-and-plaster plinth. Since this photograph was to commemorate the start of a new marriage, the photographer rested a Bible on Annie’s lap. As a wife and would-be mother, she was to be the family guardian of all that was sacred in the state of matrimony: fidelity, fecundity, compassion, meekness, servility, and cleanliness of body and soul.
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