by Tessa Boase
Steward William Lewis’s room was detached from the Hall, next to the cowsheds, laundry and bathhouse and opposite the poultry. It was essentially an outbuilding and the air around it smelt of the farmyard, but this was ‘Pug’s Parlour’–a kind of senior common room where he, Mrs Doar and the other upper servants (cook, butler, lady’s maids, valets, head gardener, coachman) took their dessert and brandy halfway through the midday dinner at precisely a quarter to one, parading out of the servants’ hall and across the yard in strict precedence, holding bowls and spoons before them. This ritual was repeated at large country houses the length of Britain.
Neurotic attention was given to visiting lady’s maids and valets, who, below stairs, took on their boss’s status (and names). Servants’ manuals devoted whole appendices to this irksome subject. Mrs Doar made it her business to know that an earl’s eldest son always went before a bishop; that a duchess went after wives of the King’s nephews. ‘Excuse me, Mr Kirkby,’ I can see her murmuring in the butler’s ear, ‘but I think you’ll find that on this occasion, it’s Grosvenor before Bedford.’
But for all the airs and graces, these upper servants were not dukes or duchesses. A list of the value of meals per head per day in the Sutherland household at this time allocates 22s for family (£55 per head in today’s money), 4s for the steward’s room (£10) and 2s for the servants’ hall (£5).20
Mrs Doar’s personal lair is not identified on the architect’s floor plan of old Trentham Hall, but it would have been the hub of operations below stairs. This was the engine room of the house, where books were balanced, hopeful girls interviewed or dismissed, tradesmen met over glasses of sweet wine or brandy. As she talked through her requirements she would finger, like a gaoler, the bunch of keys that hung at her waist: symbol of her absolute authority.
The housekeeper’s store cupboard boasted a filing system so elaborate that only she understood the nuance and specificity of each item. There were, for starters, a panoply of brushes–from banister to ‘cow mouth’ brushes, round-table to stair-carpet brushes. It resembled a tightly packed ironmonger’s shop. Every Friday she would open it up, releasing the sweet-sharp smells of horsehair, beeswax and linseed oil, and would parsimoniously deal out the staff requirements (‘Another tallow candle, Paterson?’). Scullery maids and chambermaids, footmen, boot boy and knife boy jostled in line as they called out: ‘Blacklead, ma’am!’ ‘China cloths!’ ‘Beeswax!’
She guarded the linen closet more jealously still. Once a year, usually in winter, Mrs Doar would unlock its heavy oak doors and count over every item, entering it into a book with detailed notes on age, missing items, repairs and replacements needed. Fabulously wealthy the Sutherlands might have been, but old sheets and tablecloths were cut down and reused for children’s sheets, dresser cloths and powdering sheets (for protecting the shoulders when dressing hair). The linen inventory taken at Trentham in 1803 includes 461 napkins (of two qualities), 172 tablecloths (three qualities, one horseshoe-shaped), 109 sheets (three qualities), 441 towels (four qualities) and 78 pillow ‘coats’. There were 189 domestic cloths: china cloths, ‘rubbers’, pocket cloths, glass cloths, lamp cloths, dusters, horn cloths for polishing beer cups in the servants’ hall.21 ‘The right cloth for the right job’ might well have been Mrs Doar’s well-worn mantra, mimicked by the girls as they flicked playful dusters. There were, as yet, no cleaning fluids.
She knew the hierarchy of each piece of fabric in her linen cupboard by its heft in the hand, its particular weave and lustre: damask, diaper, huckaback, fine linen, coarse linen. Guests were given best-quality sheets and towels, then came family, nursery, upper servants and lower servants. Bed sheets for servants were made of a rough hempen ‘hurden’, coarse calico, or unbleached linen that until well washed had the texture of cardboard. Their sheets were made up of two lengths of fabric seamed down the middle, unpicked and remade by Mrs Doar and the maids when threadbare. Nobody wanted to break in a new sheet; much better to inherit a slippery-smooth one slept in by the girl who did your job before you.
Mrs Doar would have felt her position in the very weave of the flannel as she wiped the back of her neck; in the thread count of the pillowcase where she rested her weary face. No tuck or fold or crevice of life was left unassigned or unorganised. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ was the nineteenth-century housekeeper’s catechism.
Except with Mrs Doar, things were not quite in their proper place. In September 1831, just before the Duchess’s partridge-and-apple-tart visit, Dorothy Doar discovered that she was, once again, pregnant.
V
The Fear Of Contagion
Servants were not supposed to have children. It was an almost exclusively celibate occupation. With the reign of Queen Victoria, public censure of maids falling pregnant became ever more strident. Mistresses were neurotic in their determination to control not just their servants’ souls, but their bodies too. The Countess of Carlisle would make a head housemaid in the 1880s report back that the under-maids were regularly washing their monthly napkins at Castle Howard because it ‘proved they were not having a baby’.22 Jane Carlyle’s cook defiled the sanctity of her mistress’s home by giving birth in the house–‘While Mr C was still reading in the Drawingroom! ’23 No matter what the circumstances–betrothed, seduced, raped–getting pregnant was grounds for immediate dismissal without reference.
As her mistress’s eyes and ears, it fell to the housekeeper to keep these girls on the straight and narrow. The layout of country houses became ever more obsessed with creating barriers to intimacy. At Kelmarsh in Northamptonshire, tunnels were built to stop the laundry maids passing through the stable yard. At Lanhydrock in Cornwall, the housekeeper’s bedroom guarded the entrance to the maids’ dormitory. She was the sentinel. But who was watching her?
Of all the babies accepted by London’s Foundling Hospital, Bloomsbury between 1821 and 1830, two-thirds came from servants. Of these, a disproportionate third are in the higher ranks of service (housekeepers, cooks, governesses, nurses, lady’s maids): older women with better social backgrounds and greater literacy skills than the servant population at large.24
How did they become pregnant? Not through promiscuity–there was little opportunity for the upper servant isolated through her position. More often it happened through misfortune: when a longstanding courtship failed to end in marriage as expected. These women did not want to abandon their newborns, but they had no choice. Small, poignant mementos–bracelets, buttons, necklaces–were left with their babies at the Foundling Hospital. These children would, at least, have some kind of a future. Another way out was infanticide.
In 1849 the nation was gripped by a case of unusual horror in which a London cook-housekeeper was accused of a double infanticide: twice over seven years she throttled her child (one newborn, one two years old), boxed up the body and sent it to relatives in the country. ‘The Child Murder in Harley-Street’, as reported, paints 36-year-old Sarah Drake as ‘inhuman’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘unnatural’. Celebrated Scotland Yard detective Sergeant Whicher investigated, and the trial was ‘thronged with eager lovers of the horrible and mysterious’, including many ‘well-dressed females’.25
To public outrage, Drake was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity. She did not hang. Instead she was sent–a ‘criminal lunatic’–to Bedlam. ‘She did not shed any tears’, reported the Bucks Herald. ‘But notwithstanding that, she was evidently suffering most acutely.’
Housekeepers were not supposed to bear children–but nor were they supposed to have husbands. Dorothy Doar was an anomaly in every way. One baby girl had already been born and put out to nurse. She knew that this pregnancy spelt bad news, both for her job and for her family’s precarious finances. She did not inform the Marchioness of Stafford until she was seven months gone.
Perhaps, first, she waited to see if the pregnancy would hold (by now Mrs Doar was probably around forty years old). Perhaps she vowed to do it in the new year, but t
hen was reluctant to trouble her mistress just then when the family was doubly preoccupied by the prospect of a London cholera epidemic and the long-anticipated Reform Bill.
I can see her walking the two miles round Trentham’s long, island-studded lake, hands fretting inside her shawl, as she turns her situation over and over. It is winter, though unusually mild. In nearby Severn Stoke there are reports of an apple tree that has produced a miraculous, unseasonal crop of fruit. But down by the lake the wind comes from the north, biting the back of her neck as she makes the mile-long descent through woodland and birdsong, then comes again like a blade at her face as she rounds the tip and heads towards the house.
Who is her confidante? Can a woman in this position unburden herself without losing her authority?
That winter everyone was distracted. The whole house was on edge. This was a revolutionary time for England. Early in February, rioting was narrowly averted thirty miles to the north in Manchester by the police with ‘a liberal use of their sticks’, breaking up a mass meeting of the Political Union of the Working Classes.26 The people had taken to the streets, agitating for parliamentary reform. It was thirteen years since Peterloo, but the memory of how viciously that demonstration was dealt with by the cavalry, sabres drawn, was still raw. The people of Manchester still wanted change. The previous October, Bristol had burned for two days, put under siege by enraged rioters looting, ripping up gas pipes and smashing windows. The enfranchisement of the working man was their goal. They wanted the vote. ‘This is our time! Go it, go it, my lads!’ was the cry of the mob.27
Then in mid-February came terrifying news from London. Mrs Galleazie, housekeeper at Stafford House, reported that the first case of cholera morbus has reached the East End. This was a new and sinister disease, known variously as ‘Asiatic’, ‘spasmodic’, ‘malignant’, ‘contagious’ and ‘blue’ (for the sufferer’s corpse-like face and tongue). It had spread from India to Russia, from Russia to Hamburg and now by ships to London and the northern ports of Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was ‘a disease which baffles human skill’, lamented one MP at the passing of the Cholera Prevention Bill on 18 February, ‘and therefore it must be considered an infliction of Providence.’
At Stafford House the Marquis reacted with patrician authority (and not a little horror at this working-class pestilence carried in the air, as the ‘miasmatists’ insisted, from the unthinkable slums of the East End). ‘The Marquis of Stafford has adopted the greatest precaution to prevent the cholera morbus amongst his establishment’, reported The Times on 3 March 1832.
All the servants have received the strictest orders that on no pretence whatever they go further eastward than Charing-cross, on pain of immediate dismissal, and that they are not to mix with any of the trades people. The post man now throws the letters into the house, and the newsmen, when they deliver the newspapers in the morning and evening, have to throw them over a wall, so great is the fear of contagion on the family of the noble Marquis.
Mrs Doar has heard of her boss’s draconian measures via Mrs Galleazie, so when a newspaper finds its way to her sitting room she reads of ‘The Cholera Panic’ with knowing shakes of her head, although she has never been to London. Is Charing Cross far enough to be safe, she wonders?
A short stroll to the east took the then 21-year-old reporter Charles Dickens to the squalid streets and slums surrounding Drury Lane: theatreland. ‘The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London can hardly be imagined by those (and there are many such) who have not witnessed it’, he wrote in Sketches by Boz. ‘Filth’, he noted:
filth everywhere–a gutter before the houses and a drain behind–clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.28
By the end of March the cholera was in Paris; 7,000 died in the first two weeks. Its savage spread made London look positively safe. The British papers kept pace, publishing lists of high-born Parisian victims; lists anxiously scanned by the Marchioness. There were ghastly echoes of the Terror as she saw her old social milieu picked off one by one. All this is noted in Trentham’s servants’ hall, The Staffordshire Advertiser spread out on the scrubbed table after dinner. Mrs Doar recognises some of the foreign names; names often glimpsed on her mistress’s prolific correspondence. Can contamination travel by post?
The Midlands sits between London and the northern ports. How long could it be, she asks herself, before the epidemic arrives? By now the nation is decidedly twitchy, any mild bowel problem suspected to be cholera. Mrs Doar is the first at Trentham to become ill. Usually so vigorous, the housekeeper’s limbs feel weak, she sweats all day and has a nausea wholly unconnected to her secret condition. For the first time in many months she is forced to retreat to her bedroom. Then news comes from Lilleshall that housekeeper Mrs Kirke is ill–‘dangerously ill’.
In such a febrile atmosphere, Dorothy Doar does not willingly let go of the reins. She knows she should be overseeing her girls, but once she takes the weight off her feet she feels as if a great hand is pressing down on her, preventing her from moving. The Trentham maids have surely noticed her rounded figure. The house steward William Lewis, her close colleague, remains unaccountably unaware of her new shape, hidden as it is by stiff silk skirts, billowing sleeves and biting stays. As she lies sick and sweating in bed, she knows she must write to Her Ladyship. There is no more concealing it.
VI
My Heart Is Almost Broke
On 2 April 1832 the Marchioness of Stafford attended a soirée at Downing Street given by the Whig Prime Minister’s wife Countess Grey (her old admirer Prince Talleyrand, the French Ambassador, proffering his arm in the absence of her doddery husband). The same day James Loch wrote a letter to William Lewis from his offices in Bloomsbury Square.
Her Ladyship desires me to say that Mrs Doar has announced her pregnancy–and that after deliberating very maturely on the subject she has written to her to say she cannot stay. I am quite certain that her determination is correct and I really gave it every consideration. It would be a bad example to others, and a Housekeeper who has Maids to look after should not be bearing children even to their husbands.
Lady Stafford wishes you to see her as soon after you get this as you can and to soothe her–she wishes the expense of her journey wherever she may wish to go to, to be defrayed.
Her Ladyship laments this circumstance exceedingly as I must say I do if this is of any importance, as she was a most excellent and zealous and faithful person and who did her duty fully, amply and conscientiously. Lady S wishes you to say so to her.
It had been a hard decision, even for a tough old Marchioness. The maternal cluckings of ‘Doar’ were now reversed: Lady Stafford wanted her ‘soothed’ as she knew exactly the damage this decision was about to wreak in her housekeeper’s life. Even James Loch, who knew Lady Stafford of old, was impressed by her genuine regret. He added in a postscript, ‘She does not wish her hurried away by any means.’29
Letters travelled fast in 1832. William Lewis received it the next morning and digested its contents with some surprise (how could he not have noticed?). He braced himself anxiously for a change of regime. What had Mrs Doar been playing at all this time? Foolish woman! Lewis put off knocking at her door until after midday dinner, as it was an interview he was rather dreading.
What were Mrs Doar’s rights, as a pregnant servant? ‘A Woman with Child may be discharged by a Justice’, stated the legal appendix of The Complete Servant. ‘Should a woman with child be hired for a term, and her master knew not of it, or should she prove with child during her servitude, he may discharge her, with the concurrence of a magistrate.’ In modern terminology, it was a sackable offence with no compensation.
‘But
if, when he knows it, he does not discharge her before a magistrate, but keeps her on, he must provide for her till her delivery, and for one month after; when she is to be sent to her place of settlement.’
It was entirely up to the whim of the employer. Crucially, Mrs Doar had revealed her pregnancy. But beyond a few weeks’ grace, she had only Lady Stafford’s goodwill standing between a life of relative comfort and one of great difficulty. Lady Stafford was right: her housekeeper would require a great deal of soothing.
By next day’s return post Loch received a letter from a distraught Dorothy Doar. It starts in a firm hand in flowing cursive script, but soon becomes incoherent and illegible, littered with spelling mistakes. It is the only letter in her hand to survive and it reads as a howl of despair, straight from the heart.
3 April
Sir
You will excuse my troubling you but having experienced great feeling and kindness of hart from you on former accations made me take the Liberty. I sincerely hope you will intersede with Lady Stafford on my behalf–you have hard from her Ladyship of my Situation. I was in hopes her Ladyship would have let me keep my Situation as usual–after my Confinement which will take place early in June I would put the child out to nurce so that it could not in any way interefear with my Buiseness.
I hope and trust Sir you will be my friend and prevail on my Lady to allow me to stay if its only for a short time as God knows what will become of me–my poor husband for a long time has been so very unfortunate and the Education of my Little Girl has [been] taking every shilling we had so that I have not the means of going in any way of business that I could be getting a little to inable us to live. Doar has got a Situation however and I hope he will be able to make it answer–but the sallery is low so that I must dow what I can to inable us to live.