by Tessa Boase
There is no evidence of what kind of person Mrs Prince was, or even what she looked like–whether tall and fearsome, or small and benevolent. This was the woman behind all those famous political house parties with their influential guests, the woman responsible for the care and conservation of so many extraordinary treasures. Yet it is as if she never existed. Whatever her story, however successful her tenure, there is huge poignancy in this fact.
In researching this book, I was less interested in the minutiae and logistics of running a country house than in the human stories: the women entrusted with that weighty job. It was, in many ways, an isolating role. She was too senior to fraternise with her maids; too dignified to let her hair down. ‘A faithful and excellent housekeeper’, such as that belonging to the 11th Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, Wiltshire in 1800, was ‘consequently well hated by a proportion of servants under her direction’.5 She was mocked both upstairs and downstairs for putting on the refined airs and graces of her employers. She was trusted with the family’s most intimate secrets; she handled huge sums of money–yet the housekeeper’s position was ambivalent, even supplicatory. She was entirely at the mercy of her mistress’s good humour.
I set out to try to bring to life a handful of these women from the past one hundred and fifty years, from her modest Georgian origins, to her infinitely more powerful Victorian counterpart, to her undignified, diminished end, hastened by two world wars. What were the fault lines of this very particular role, and how did it change as time passed? What were the physical hardships and the emotional rewards?
Exhuming their stories was not easy. Most housekeepers were, naturally, the soul of discretion, unquestioningly loyal to the mistress of the house. If she wrote a diary it was usually trivial, preserved only if it threw light on other, more interesting people. (Sarah Wells, habitual diarist and housekeeper of Uppark, was mother to the Edwardian writer H. G. Wells; the forty-four diaries of Grace Higgens, housekeeper to the Bloomsbury set, are valued today for their sprinkling of famous names.) I trawled through the neglected archives of these great houses–the yellowing bundles of estate letters; the housekeeping ledgers, shopping bills and laundry lists; the photo albums crawling with dust mites–and I managed to find documentary evidence of that guard being dropped; odd letters or diary entries that made me witness to their innermost thoughts.
At times I felt like a detective pursuing the smallest shred of evidence, for servants pass like ghosts through most country-house archives. Where there were gaping holes I assembled the outside facts and used my imagination. To put flesh on their bones I visited the houses, breathed in the dank basement air of the housekeeper’s sitting room, pictured what it might be like to push through that green baize door from a dark, flagstoned passageway smelling faintly of cabbage and into the elegant opulence of a stateroom hung with Gainsboroughs. I layered all these impressions one upon the other and tried to immerse myself in their world.
My housekeepers link arms in a chain through history, from the Great Reform Act of 1832 to decimalisation and the TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971. There is Dorothy Doar, Regency housekeeper for the obscenely wealthy Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire. There is Sarah Wells, a deaf and elderly Victorian in charge of Uppark, West Sussex. Ellen Penketh is Edwardian cook-housekeeper at the sociable but impecunious Erddig Hall in the Welsh borders. The First World War turned these country houses upside down–literally, in the case of Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, whose new role as war hospital was enabled by Scotswoman Hannah Mackenzie. The story of Grace Higgens, cook-housekeeper at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex for half a century, has a different flavour–but is no less moving for its tale of stoicism and endurance.
The surprise is in the great hardship of their lives. History, fiction, film and television have led us to believe that these were secure and rather grand ladies, yet, as suggested by Lady Salisbury’s bundle of replies, these women lived precariously. They were given immense responsibility for very little financial reward in a world with few choices. They suffered private hardships and crises while serving their families, yet often responded with heroic chutzpah. I discovered an unwanted pregnancy, an affair, two thefts and a court case. One housekeeper worked until she was 70; another crossed the Atlantic several times and died at 102, enjoying a daily bottle of whisky. The accounts of these women end for the most part badly and abruptly, but having examined the evidence and tried to understand their motives, I found myself cheering them on.
Part 1
Dorothy Doar
Trentham Hall, Staffordshire 1832
It is quite impossible in such an establishment to permit of her breeding.
JAMES LOCH, CHIEF AGENT TO THE SUTHERLANDS
Timeline
1830s
– Stagecoach from London to Edinburgh takes two days as turnpike roads improve. ‘Railway Mania’ begins.
1830
– William IV ascends throne, aged 64. First D.I.Y. knitting book, Ladies’ Work for Sailors.
1832
– Great Reform Act: men with homes with an annual value of £10 get the vote.
1835
– First pre-packaged baking powder on sale.
1836
– Dickens’s first novel The Pickwick Papers serialised.
1834
– Poor Law Amendment Act: the destitute refused parish relief and forced into the workhouse.
1837
– Victoria becomes Queen, aged 18.
1839
– First Indian tea for sale in London.
1840s
– Railways expand to most towns and villages. Food in tin cans becomes more widely used.
1840
– First postage stamps: Penny Black and Twopence Blue.
1841
– London’s Reform Club installs gas cookers, among first in the country.
1842
– Beecham’s Pills first marketed. Coal Mines Act: Women and children under ten prohibited from working underground.
1849
– Safety pin invented.
I
Abominably Rich
They made a formidable cabal, the five housekeepers of the Duke of Sutherland. Like pawns on a chessboard they were ranged across the country: Mrs Spillman sat at Dunrobin Castle in the far north-east of Scotland; Mrs Cleaver at the southernmost extreme, West Hill in Wandsworth, Surrey. In the capital, the tireless Mrs Galleazie reigned over Stafford House, scene of much entertaining. Mrs Kirke presided over the new hunting lodge, Lilleshall Hall up in Shropshire; and Mrs Doar sat plumb in the middle: keeper of Trentham Hall, Staffordshire.
Letters flew between these five women daily: hastily scrawled notes with advance warning of the family’s imminent arrival or departure; requests to send Staffordshire partridge, kid boots from London, whisky barrels from Scotland, more ripe pineapples for this week’s reception at Stafford House. Sicknesses were communicated, staff vacancies filled and in-house gossip quenched. A nobleman could not hope to employ five more discreet or implacable custodians.
This is the story of one of these women: a housekeeper who, after fourteen years’ loyal service, fell spectacularly foul of her employers. The year was 1832, a time of great political upheaval in Britain. Dorothy Doar was a small but vital cog in the enormous machine servicing the richest, most powerful and probably most disliked family of her day. Given the size of this machine–the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland moved between not two, but five houses–it is by sheer chance that the sorry tale of Mrs Doar has survived at all. But, like a gnat squashed between the pages of a book, I came across her in a random bundle of otherwise dry correspondence between two land agents; a bundle tied with white ribbon and filed away in the vast Sutherland Collection at the Staffordshire Record Office.
Written over the course of two months in 1832, this series of letters is highly unusual–unusual because the housekeeper leaps brightly off the page. Dorothy Doar lives; her character and foibles
are laid bare. Her tale unfolds in a drama that no wage book, store-cupboard inventory or housekeeping accounts book can hope to compete with. The letters throw light on basement politics between upper servants in the Regency era: back-stabbing, rumour spreading, leapfrogging for advancement. There are hints of sexual liberties; of houses so rarely visited by their owners that they develop their own unconventional codes of conduct. The letters show us, too, how the uber-aristocracy of the day treated their upper servants.
For such an important family, a surprising amount of time and energy was put into the relationship between mistress and housekeeper. You could not run five houses without the likes of Mrs Doar. She was somebody to be kept sweet: to be soothed, praised and assisted. The relationship was based on loyalty, honesty and trust–with the servant always aware of the immense gap between the haves and have-nots. No servant, no matter how senior, could take anything for granted–as Dorothy Doar was to learn to her cost.
Mrs Doar’s job was to facilitate the most luxurious lifestyle pursued in Britain at that time. Her employer was George Granville Leveson-Gower (pronounced ‘Looshun Gore’), known to his housekeeper in 1832 as the Marquis of Stafford, just one year off being made the Duke of Sutherland, the title by which this lineage is remembered. He had, by virtue of an astute marriage, created a dynasty second only in wealth to the royal family. Quite simply, the Staffords owned much of Britain, and as a consequence were hated and revered in equal measure.
They were not, like some aristocrats, cheese-paring. The Marquis’s annual income was around £200,000 (£10 million in today’s money), and his wife, the Marchioness, lived to enjoy it. At Stafford House, the largest and most sumptuous of London’s private palaces, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower would host famously lavish dinners and late evening parties where the ‘long succession of rooms, their spaciousness and loftiness has such an effect that people look like Lilliputians’.1 The size and grandeur of the staircase alone made ‘the whole company look both pigmy and dingy’,2 remarked a guest. The style of living of the Marquis of Stafford exceeded, thought one Lady Beaumont, ‘everything in this country. No one could vie with it.’
Lilleshall, the smaller of their country residences, was so luxurious that Lord Stafford’s sister-in-law Henrietta, Viscountess Granville, found herself beginning ‘to wish for something to dislike, as I think my eternal raptures must sicken all my friends and acquaintances’, she wrote. ‘Lord Stafford is abominably rich.’
For a woman in Mrs Doar’s profession, you could not hope to do better. The opportunities for job advancement, with so many houses, were endless (not just the family’s own, but those of their in-laws–Castle Howard, Eaton Hall, Chatsworth House, to name but a handful). An army of staff was in constant employment and redeployment around the country. Loyalty was rewarded, glamour–at a distance–an exciting distraction from the daily routine. To come to the attention of My Lady Stafford, to worm one’s way into her good books, was to be assured–one would have hoped–of protection in life.
At the hub of this great family’s wheel of influence and patronage was Mrs Doar’s fiefdom, Trentham Hall. Every dynasty must have its seat, and this chaste and elegant Georgian mansion, connected by scrupulously formal gardens to a mile-long, baguette-shaped lake, was where the important scenes of life were played out for Lord and Lady Stafford and the four surviving Leveson-Gower enfants, George, Charlotte, Elizabeth and Francis.
In just her second year with the family back in 1819, Mrs Doar helped prepare for the young Elizabeth’s wedding at Trentham–a phenomenal strain for the servants, hundreds of mouths to feed and all eyes fixed on the 22-year-old bride, rumoured to have been presented by her new father-in-law, the Earl of Grosvenor, with jewellery worth £3,622 8s 6d (£180,000).3 In 1828 Mrs Doar had helped contrive, with much sweat and labour, the euphoric celebrations at Trentham Hall for the birth of Lord Stafford’s first grandson. Cannons were fired, feasts and games for the tenants laid on with no stinting, and ‘spontaneous rejoicings’ were reported on every Sutherland estate up and down the country.
It was an orderly world, tightly run by house steward William Lewis and his second in command, housekeeper Dorothy Doar: representatives of master and mistress in their absence. But for much of the year there would be a sense of suspended animation within the house. When would the family return? The Staffords loved Trentham Hall–a two-day gallop from London in the well-sprung family postchaise–but they used it sporadically. Politics, St James’s Palace, the London season (February to July), Scottish acres and grandchildren at Lilleshall all vied for their attention. They liked to spend September here after summer in the Highlands, but they were a highly mobile family and so there were no other certainties.
Country-house tourists who turned up at Trentham hoping for a glimpse of the legendary Staffords were shown round by the housekeeper. This was the Georgian way: a guided tour given in exchange for a tip. Jones’s Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen (1829) was the hefty guidebook of the day and it lists each of Trentham’s 295 works of art. Visitors knew precisely which ‘fine specimens of the best masters’ they would find here–the Poussins and Watteaus, Tiepolos and Titians, Holbeins and Hogarths. Mrs Doar led a well-worn circuit around two dozen staterooms often shrouded in dust sheets. She learnt to pause on the curve of the great staircase to show to best advantage the Holy Family by Rubens; she allowed extra time in the Old Library for viewing of Holbein’s King Henry VIII (a masterly copy). And she knew that the ladies in particular wanted to peruse her mistress’s chambers, hung with family portraits and Her Ladyship’s own watercolours.
Visitors made a refreshing change, but they were not Family. Mrs Doar expended a great deal of nervous energy in waiting: scrutinising the family rooms through her mistress’s eyes, checking and rechecking the linen cupboard, sorting the translucent Staffordshire bone china and adding to the growing stock of rosehip, gooseberry and ginger wines which lined her still-room shelves.
Under her control were a kitchen maid, a laundry maid, three housemaids, a still-room maid and two dairymaids: eight young girls to be kept busy on ‘board wages’ in a house that was, essentially, killing time. Kept busy, and kept away from the butler’s charges–four footmen, under-butler, steward’s room boy, hall boy, boot boy and knife boy. Country-house staff the length of Britain routinely spent months on end similarly holding their breath.
It was imperative to be ready. When the family arrived, tired from bouncing along the turnpike roads, Trentham Hall must look as if it was always thus: no dust sheets on the furniture, fresh flowers in all the vases, writing paper and ink in the bedrooms, beds aired, linen crisply ironed and every fireplace scoured until gleaming with brushes, blacklead, emery paper and cloth. Nothing should jar or jolt the family’s cosseted, infantilised sensibilities. No one must wonder at the frantic preparations behind the scenes.
No sooner had the family arrived than its departure must be prepared for, without knowing exactly when it would come. Mrs Doar was a swan, her feet paddling furiously. She was a magician, conjuring scenes of order and tranquillity. I imagine her heart frequently pounded beneath her whalebone stays while her face remained impassive. She lived and worked in an atmosphere of restrained upheaval.
The Staffords adored coming home. Favourite daughter-in-law Harriet wrote to her sister, on arriving at Trentham in 1828:
I rushed to the potager–you know my weakness–and walked up and down between spinach and dahlias in ecstasy…There is a repose, a laissez aller, a freedom, and a security in a vie de chateau that no other destiny offers one. I feel when I set out to walk as if alone in the world–nothing but trees and birds; but then comes the enormous satisfaction of always finding a man dressing a hedge, or a woman in a gingham and a black bonnet on her knees picking up weeds, the natural gendarmerie of the country, and the most comfortable well-organized country.4
Lady Stafford wrote of arriving at Trentham after an exhausting tour of the Scottish Sutherland acres in the autumn of 1
831. She stayed at Dunrobin, where all was ‘in perfect order, Mrs Spillman exceedingly active & happy but finding great difficulty in breaking in Cook maids’. But she was greatly relieved to return, albeit briefly, to the Staffordshire seat. ‘Here I am arrived’, she wrote to her husband in London, ‘and though it very provokingly is a rainy day, I must own I have not seen any thing comparable to it, in its own style since I left it, & hope we shall come here to stay in the summer.’ She continues: ‘I found Doar with everything ready for me & am to have a Partridge for dinner with a boiled Fowl in addition, some fish & an apple tart. Such good bread & butter!’
The menu, drawn up by Mrs Doar after long deliberation with the cook, was pure comfort food. The Marchioness was by this time a stout 66-year-old, known by gossips as ‘old Mother Stafford’; yet there is a sense of her surrendering with pleasure to ‘Doar’ and her clucking ministrations.
II
Like A Dragon
We know a great deal more about Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Marchioness of Stafford, than we do about her housekeeper. Dorothy Doar held one of the most senior posts of the period for a working woman. But in the annals of the Sutherlands she barely figures. If you want to track down her ghost today, to see where she worked, you will find that the house is gone. The far grander Victorian house that replaced Mrs Doar’s Georgian Trentham Hall is gone too; just some pock-marked walls and a grassed-over bumpy footprint remain, overlooking the now restored formal gardens and lake. Yet there is a palpable sense, in the audacious scale of that lake–fed by the diverted River Trent, overlooked by a grim-faced 1st Duke of Sutherland on a Nelson-like column–of this family’s tremendous self-regard. The house is gone, but an atmosphere remains.