by Tessa Boase
Elizabeth, Marchioness of Stafford, was orphaned when her parents died of ‘putrid fever’, or typhus, while taking the waters in Bath in 1766. She was one year old. Her grandmother brought her up in Edinburgh, an only child, to inherit a wild, northern estate of one million acres and a castle, Dunrobin. Aged 20, Elizabeth married George Granville, then Earl Gower, a dull, nervous man with a large beaky nose and prim mouth, an obsession with collecting paintings and an aversion to the bagpipes (he swiftly converted Dunrobin’s piper into a porter). With the blending of her Scottish acres and his Staffordshire and Yorkshire acres, they created the largest estate of any landed gentry in the country.
They passed two brilliant years in Paris where George was Ambassador, their four-year-old son romping with the Dauphin and Elizabeth confiding in Queen Marie Antoinette. Just before the Terror they beat a hasty retreat, but retained a love of French food, society and bons mots. Mrs Doar would have studied the French appendix of her manual The Complete Servant for help with the phrases that peppered her mistress’s speech:
Outré–‘oot-ray’. Preposterous.
Ennui–‘ang-wee’. Tiresomeness.
Dernier ressort– ‘dern-yair-res-sor’. Last resort.5
Elizabeth was everything her husband was not: brilliant, socially voracious, fun-loving, fearless. In her time she possessed great beauty–and many lovers. In 1799 Lord Stafford, his eyesight failing, was advised by his physician to ‘strictly abstain from all conjugal intercourse with his wife’–who then, ‘unluckily’, fell pregnant. Lord Francis was born on New Year’s Day of the new century, 1800, his father rumoured to be Lord Carlisle, Stafford’s brother-in-law.6
This was her life–but what was she like to work for? Aged 50, she displayed a steeliness over the Sutherland Highland Clearances, done in her name, encouraging their chief land agent James Loch to continue removing the crofters from the impoverished interior to the coast despite the Sellar affair (an agent who was put on trial for his cruel and needlessly violent evictions). She wrote to Loch, asking him ‘to encourage Sellar in trouncing these people who wish to destroy our system…I do hope the aggressors will be scourged’.7
Physically she was large and indomitable. The Whig diarist Thomas Creevey wrote in 1833 of the newly widowed Elizabeth that ‘it was as good as a play to see old Sutherland moving her huge derrière by slow and dignified degrees about in her chair’. Two years later he remarked that the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland, now aged 70, had ‘all the appearance of a wicked old woman’.8
Her constitution was ox-like. She was the sort who mannishly pooh-poohed physical danger–as when she travelled by paddle steamer up the North Sea coast to the Moray Firth in October 1831. ‘A delightful voyage’, her scratchy letter to the ailing Lord Stafford began, on a gold-edged sheet folded like a book; ‘I triumphant riding in the storm…All sick except myself who was famished & ate roast beef like a Dragon. No calm as yet. It is very odd that though tiresome enough it has not frightened me at all.’ Her maid Betty, meanwhile, was ‘Half dead’.9
III
Every Shilling We Have
Dorothy Doar came to work for the family in 1818: one year before the first steamship crossed the Atlantic; two years before the death of mad King George III; a decade before the first passenger railway. We don’t know her place of birth or where she came from; the first census was not until 1841. She was probably in her late twenties when she arrived.
It was not unusual for girls to go into service at the age of eight; some started work at the neighbouring Stoke-on-Trent potteries and pits aged five. But Mrs Doar had a more fortunate start in life. Recruited from the preferred, steady ranks of the lower middle classes or from among the better of the working classes, she ‘had her letters’: she could write in a strong, slanting hand, she could keep an account book and she could spell, after a fashion.
The manual of the day–The Complete Servant, written by retired butler and housekeeper Samuel and Sarah Adams in 1825–advised that the housekeeper ‘ought to be a steady middle-aged woman, of great experience in her profession, and a tolerable knowledge of the world. In her conduct, she should be moral, exemplary, and assiduous, as the harmony, comfort, and economy of the family will greatly depend on her example.’10
James Loch agreed that the ideal housekeeper should be an older woman. In 1819 he wrote to a colleague about finding one for a Scottish cousin. ‘She must be able to undertake the management of the kitchen when he has company and be a good Cook, but know how to pickle, preserve etc, be able to instruct the servants in baking and brewing and to keep monthly accounts, to take charge of the House & Linen.’ His cousin would be willing to pay from 30 to 35 guineas a year (£1,300 to £1,500 today), throwing in the perks of coal, vegetables and milk. As for her type, ‘he would prefer a woman who has served the most of her time in the country and she must always have been in a good gentleman’s family…her age not under 30 nor above 45’.11 Life expectancy at this time was 46; in Stoke-on-Trent’s pits and potteries, just 37.
Did Dorothy Doar fit the bill, in Loch’s eyes? She was on the young side, so might have worked her way up the ladder, moving on from cook, nurse or lady’s maid. But she was also unusual in her air of maturity. She had indeed a ‘tolerable knowledge of the world’ beyond that of most servants. For Mrs Doar was a rare thing among female domestics: she was married.
This was unusual. For butlers, it was perfectly acceptable to be married. Employers liked it; it stabilised a man, as long as wife and children lived off site and out of sight. But it was an accepted certainty in nineteenth-century domestic service that marriage marked a definitive end to a female servant’s career. A woman might return to service on the death of her husband, but for the most part it was premarital employment, a chance to save some money and learn domestic skills.
The downstairs world of the country house was something of a marriage market, what with so many visiting servants, and although flirtations were routinely sniffed out and quenched (one of Mrs Doar’s particular responsibilities), things happened. At greatest risk were the teenage maids, giggling with the strapping footmen who lurked around the servants’ hall and still room, hair pasted down, calf muscles nicely visible through white stockings.
‘Avoid as much as possible being alone with the other sex, as the greatest mischiefs happen from small circumstances,’ wrote Samuel and Sarah Adams, forefingers wagging. ‘A reserved modesty is the best safeguard of virtue.’
Did Mrs Doar meet Mr Doar through her job, flouting the common ‘No Followers’ rule, or did she arrive already married and simply endured the separation? When did she manage to see her husband, with no formalised holidays and little time off? Was she the first Leveson-Gower housekeeper to be truly a ‘Mrs’, rather than taking up the courtesy title as other housekeepers did? Did her status as a married woman trouble or reassure the Marchioness of Stafford? Elizabeth Leveson-Gower was by birth and instinct a Georgian–and in this pre-Victorian era, the servants’ rulebook was less rigidly codified and prescriptive. Identical uniforms for maids had not yet become the norm; upper servants might wear cast-offs from their master and mistress’s wardrobes. Moral attitudes towards domestic staff were far less censorious in the eighteenth century than they were later to become.
Sometime into her employment Mrs Doar bucked the trend again. She gave birth to a baby girl. When, we do not know, or what her job title was at the time, or how she handled the disruption to her work and the probable censure or irritation of her employers. What we do know is that Dorothy was fiercely and unusually ambitious for her child. Her ‘unfortunate’ husband Mr Doar (as she wrote to agent James Loch) was unable to work, so it was down to Dorothy to fund her daughter’s future. The girl was sent to school, which took ‘every shilling we have’.12 Very few children attended school at the time, and certainly not the offspring of servants. The lives of most children in this industrious part of the Midlands were unremittingly bleak.
Hundreds were employed in the printing
rooms of the nearby potteries, cutting out decorative designs and sticking them onto ceramics. ‘The printing room is indeed a bad school for children,’ reported Dr Samuel Scriven to the House of Commons in 1841.13 ‘Their language is indecent and profane.’ He found, in his research, ‘mouldrunners’ running back and forth with ware ‘labouring like little slaves’, and was troubled by the sight of so many ‘dull and cadaverous countenances’–children suffering from lead poisoning.
Dorothy Doar’s daughter was lucky: her mother’s position meant she would not be gobbled up by Britain’s Industrial Revolution. But there was little precedent at this time for putting a servant’s daughter through full-time education. Not until 1833 would the Factory Act insist on just two hours’ schooling a day for the over-fives. If you wanted to educate your child in the 1820s, you were usually middle class, your child was probably male and you paid heftily for the privilege.
Mrs Doar did not earn much. The richest family in Britain did not pay their female servants highly–perhaps even less than was normal at that time. By 1840 the Sutherland housekeepers were earning between £31.10 and £63 a year (£1,400 to £2,800 in today’s money) depending on experience, according to old leather-bound wage ledgers kept in the Sutherland archive.14 The London house steward, butler and upholsterer, all men, earned twice as much. The various lowly maids got between £12 and £16 a year (£500 and £700), while the still-room maid (the housekeeper’s personal assistant; three arriving and leaving within one year at Stafford House, which cannot have pleased housekeeper Mrs Harriet Galleazie) earned £14.14 (£650).
Bed and board was free, of course, and upper servants’ perks were bumped up by gifts from employers and tradespeople. But still, William Lewis (agent for Trentham and Lilleshall) wrote to James Loch in 1832 that he considered ‘Mrs Doar’s wages too small for the faithful discharge of such a trust’. If you did not pay her enough, it was thought that the housekeeper might fall prey to temptation. At this stage of our story, Mrs Doar was held to be loyal, conscientious and above suspicion–but her low wage might have been a thorn in her side; the result of staying put for so very long. Yet once you found your place in a noble family, once you rose to their notice and approval, Mrs Doar was probably of the opinion that you’d be a fool to walk away.
Her young daughter was at school and her needy husband was lodging in the estate village of Handford, a mile from Trentham’s gates. She was an absent wife, an absent mother; a housekeeper for an absent mistress. Mrs Doar had her share of anxieties, but she was required to sink herself into the minutiae of her work.
IV
Eight Slop Pails
The country house consumed material goods on a massive scale. It was a kind of firm devoted to things: getting them in, keeping them in shape. Such seemingly innocuous things were at the heart of Mrs Doar’s downfall, so it is worth exploring exactly what they meant to her and her household.
Trentham Hall sat at the hub of a network of canals that carried a ceaseless traffic of cargo, both industrial and domestic. The lucrative Bridgewater Canal was the Marquis of Stafford’s own, while the Trent and Mersey Canal, laden with Josiah Wedgwood’s fragile wares, passed barely a mile east of Trentham Hall’s front door.
Not far off was another Midlands country house, Dunham Massey, whose housekeeper Anne Calder would have been known to Mrs Doar. Though thirty miles apart, they shared several suppliers, and in this way gossip would pass between the houses as grocer, butcher and brushmaker sat in easy chairs sipping sweet wine and expounding on local news. Like Mrs Doar, Mrs Calder kept a detailed ledger of her orders. By accident it is Mrs Calder’s ledger that survives. And so we know that in 1822 one local carrier on the Bridgewater Canal, a bargewoman called Mary Allen, handled no fewer than 177 different consignments for Dunham Massey–three or four a week–usually of several parcels, boxes, hampers, casks, crates or bundles at a time. These included barrels of vinegar, boxes of cheeses, nine fire-grates, seven coal boxes, bundles of carpeting and matting, eighteen chimney pots, eight slop pails, large parcels of sheet music, a hamper of soda water and a bag of feathers.15
Half a century later, one of Mrs Doar’s successors at Trentham, Mrs Ingram, kept a bundle of crumpled receipts for the year 1874.16 Passing through her hands was a complicated variety of goods, paperwork and money. The bills arrived from all over the country: ‘Baby Linen Warehouse’, ‘Country Tea Warehouse’, Clynelish Distillery in Brora. Through these receipts we can envisage the second Duke or Duchess of Sutherland airily waving a hand–‘Put it on the bill’–as they travelled round the country.
Mrs Ingram handled, among other things, kid elasticated boots, umbrellas, one dozen each of collars and cuffs, whalebone, velvet ribbon and hessian. She paid for thirteen easy chairs; for a gold clock to be repaired and cleaned; for moist sugar, lump sugar, Demerara sugar and arrowroot. There were heartburn lozenges purchased in Edinburgh, coke from the Newcastle Gas Works and two Minton busts of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland commissioned in Stoke-on-Trent.
She ordered calf’s head, sweetbread, tongue and suet; she paid for one box of cigars from Pall Mall, a firkin of ale and remedies from the Staffordshire local homeopathic chemist. For a certain Mrs Wills, who signed her receipt with a shaky cross–‘her mark’–she handed over £2 10s (£114) for a ‘counterpaine knit for Dunrobin Castle’.
These were not just things to Mrs Ingram or Mrs Doar. These shopping lists were, to the housekeeper’s eyes, minutely codified symbols of status. Everything–from the quality of the sugar in your tea to the stuffing of your mattress; from the type of painting hanging on your bedroom wall to the thickness of your ceramic soap dish–came down to hierarchy. Hierarchy lay at the very heart of the country house. As the manager of consumption, the housekeeper knew more about the multiple meaning of things than any other servant.
The order and structure of ‘little things’ was to become very dear to the Victorian upper and middle classes. Managing such household articles established ‘bonds of appropriateness’, so it was thought; bonds on which the whole order of society was built. Housekeeperly organisation and maintenance encouraged habits ‘without which man would tend to the savage state’.17
Outside Trentham Hall’s brick walls lay the industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent. The skyscape of blackened brick ‘bottle oven’ chimneys and slag heaps contrasted starkly with the soft woodland mirrored in Trentham’s still lake. Nothing could be less suggestive of beauty than this district of the Potteries: muddy and miserable, squalid and unclean. Here, people got by on bread and tea alone. A third of all children born didn’t live past the age of five, victims of measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria and bowel disease. Lead poisoning (plumbism) and ‘Potter’s Rot’ (silicosis of the lungs) saw to the rest. Life was savage indeed.
Trentham’s elaborate table services, Her Ladyship’s morning tea set, the translucent plate on which her partridge was served–all this came from Stoke, along with every chamber pot, slop pail and coarse, servant-friendly earthenware plate. Mrs Doar dealt in such hierarchies, and she was grateful to be on the right side of Trentham’s gates. How lucky she was. Yet even so, her world was filled with insidious and occasionally demeaning reminders of status. The devil, as they say, is in the detail.
She had her own bedroom and sitting room; her maids had to share rooms (and often beds). Mattresses were stuffed depending on your place in the hierarchy: straw or horsehair, flock or wool–feather, naturally, for the family. According to an inventory taken of Trentham Hall in 1826, we know that Mrs Doar was rewarded with a feather mattress, but of the inferior one-shilling-per-pound variety (the family’s stuffing cost twice as much). She also had a mahogany four-poster bed, five mahogany chairs, various stuffed armchairs, an oak chest of drawers, a mahogany fire screen and a white-covered sofa (a status-laden luxury in this climate of coal dust). There was a fitted carpet, window curtains and blinds.18 It was a big room, and it is strange to inhabit it in one’s mind; to view its contents like this, without havi
ng a clear picture of the woman who lived here. Physically, this is as close to Dorothy as the trail gets.
Steward William Lewis had much the same, but in addition his room boasted a hearthrug, a walnut wardrobe and a writing desk with black leather top and inkstand. He was a man, and he was her senior. The maids’ and footmen’s rooms, by contrast, each contained one beech four-poster bed, one chair, one small table and a looking glass. A mean square of carpet partially covered the draughty floor. Just how far Mrs Doar had advanced in her own career was a fact daily on show, as much for her own benefit as for others’. Her clutter of armchairs, polished mahogany and soft furnishings was a reminder of her power–and, implicitly, her vulnerability.
On her soap dish was a subtly graded bar of soap, of better quality than the coarser maids’ variety, yet not the coveted Rose or Windsor. It had been picked with a sense of entitlement from the store-cupboard soap boxes where best yellow, best mottled, Rose, Windsor, glycerin, white toilet, honey and soft soap lay cut in aromatic squares and wrapped in tissue.19 When the house was full the chambermaids were wont to slip used nuggets of guest soap into their apron pockets, thumbing their noses at ‘place’. Mrs Doar would turn a blind eye depending on her mood. She had her own porcelain washstand and set of chamber ware, more than the standard servant’s seven pieces but some way short of the bedroom sets upstairs, which might consist of eighteen pieces of chintz-patterned china matching bed-hangings, curtains and upholstery.
Some markers of status were subtle, others less so. Trentham Hall in 1832 was not a comfortable house for servants. The wind in winter would gust along the flat Staffordshire acres, whipping up the long lake and moaning through doors and windows. On the wrong side of the green baize door the basement rooms were poorly lit and damp, the attic bedrooms freezing cold. Servants’ privies, out in the muddy yard, were long-drop soil pits with a bucket of ash to sprinkle over your doings. Strips of newspaper hung off a nail for the fastidious.