The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  Her mistress was by this stage 71 and her son Frank was 33, Freddy, 28 and Bertie, 24 (within a year to be married to his cousin, Isabel). Her husband Joseph Wells had given up the shop, and for the past three years had been living a couple of miles away in the tiny agricultural hamlet of Nyewood. She sent him regular if slightly reluctant payments that she recorded in her diary:

  Sent JW £1-00.

  Sent JW rent £2-00.

  Paid JW £1-00. Very tired.

  Joe’s years on his own had not been spent entirely unhappily. At Atlas House ‘My father camped, so to speak, amidst its disorder very comfortably’, wrote H. G. Wells. ‘He cooked very well, far better than my mother had ever done.’ On moving close to Uppark he gave up all pretence at work and was kept by his wife, who he would see for the occasional afternoon tea, overnight stay in her rooms or walk in the woods. Mrs Wells felt both guilty and exasperated.

  JW left after breakfast he sounded sadly depressed.

  Sent JW £1-00 being the last. What will they do when I am gone.

  This diary is a seven-inch Ferre’s Twopenny Pocket Diary, one week to a page. Inside is an advertisement for ‘The latest and most improved system of gas lighting, the Etoile Gas Lamp Regenerator’. Most country houses have by now succumbed to gaslighting; Chatsworth House in Derbyshire is at work on the water turbines that will shortly bring it electricity. But Uppark is not on the gas mains, so Mrs Wells does her work by oil lamp.

  In the back of the diary are advertisements for health supplements:

  Beecham’s Pills–for Bilious and NERVOUS DISORDERS, such as Wind and Pain in the Stomach, Sick Headache, Giddiness, Illness and Swelling after Meals, Dizziness, and Drowsiness, Cold Chills, Flushings of Heat, Loss of Appetite, Shortness of Breath, Costiveness, Scurvy, Blotches on the Skin, Disturbed Sleep, Frightful Dreams, and all the Nervous and Trembling Sensations, &c.

  (Now in use for half a century, the secret ingredients in Beecham’s Pills were aloes, a purgative and ginger soap.)

  Her entries are no longer in ink but written with a soft stub of pencil, firmly pressed. The handwriting is now almost illegible; the hand of an old lady tremblingly filling in a mundane line a day. It is her bedtime ritual–what we might call today her therapy.

  IX

  Sadly Vexed

  Sarah Wells’s diaries are at first glimpse disappointingly mundane:

  Busy this week with my black silk dress.

  Called on Mrs Budd took dripping.

  Went to Harting and paid folks.

  Miss F had her first drive since Sept.

  But read in context, from a Victorian housekeeper’s room in the basement of a great house, they are revealing. They do not tell us too much about her thoughts, but it is possible to get a sense of what it was like to be down there, day after day: the frustrations, the consolations, the physical discomforts and the petty politics.

  It was a startlingly unstable household. Written in the back of Mrs Wells’s 1890 diary is a list of cooks:

  Mrs Stewart came to Uppark August 5th 1880 left Sept 22nd 1881

  Mrs Bartlett came some time left Aug 1882

  Mrs Heard came 14th left April 1884

  Mrs Francis came in June 7th 84 left April 1885

  F. Gate came Jan 1886 left Nov 1887

  Mrs Clements came May 90 left Jan 91

  Mrs Cates came Jan 20th left Feb 8th 92

  Mrs Holmes came Feb 92 left Aug 92

  Mrs Keeble came Aug 17th left Sept 17th 92

  Mrs Harrison came Sept 92 left Feb 93

  In the twelve and a half years that Mrs Wells was housekeeper, from the age of 57 to 69, ten cooks came and went at Uppark. Ten cooks. This was a good job, relatively well paid, in a notoriously relaxed regime with a gloriously spacious, high-ceilinged kitchen overlooking the South Downs. The cook did not slave away in the basement. Early in the century the kitchens at Uppark had been moved outside to a handsome brick pavilion accessed by a service tunnel. The dank old kitchen became the housekeeper’s still room for preparing breakfasts, sweets, preserves and tea. In these kitchens the cook, kitchen maids and ‘casual friends’ (according to Bertie) nattered away in the hot glow among bright copper pans in their own fiefdom. The workload was relatively slight: there were two bird-like old ladies to feed, who were often away, plus staff. House parties were rare; dinner parties unusual. Luncheon and tea were the usual hours for Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s sporadic entertaining of military and clergy types. Why, then, was it so hard to keep a cook?

  Traditionally, housekeeper and cook had a prickly relationship. The housekeeper deemed herself to be above the cook, but the cook (along with the lady’s maid) was appointed by the mistress, not the housekeeper. Yet Miss Fetherstonhaugh gladly left the bother of recruitment to Mrs Wells, who was forever answering, or putting into the West Sussex Gazette, advertisements for servants. Perhaps she chose unwisely. Perhaps it was hard to find a cook for a big country house that had neither the excitement of gay house parties nor the labour-saving technology that professionals were coming to expect in the late nineteenth century.

  Uppark was a mirror of the nation’s servant problems at large. ‘The servant who takes an interest in her work seems no longer to exist’, complained an article in The Sphere at the turn of the century; ‘and in return for high wages we get but superficial service. Where is the maid to be found who takes pride in the brilliance of the glass used upon the table or remembers of her own initiative to darn the damask? Every sort of contrivance now lessens labour–carpet sweepers, knife machines, bathrooms, lifts–in spite of these the life of a housewife is one long wrestle and failure to establish order.’15

  For housewife, read housekeeper. With little or no support from above stairs, and none of the new Victorian technology, Mrs Wells was preoccupied constantly with staff spats in an era beginning to be known for ‘the servant problem’. Domestic service was still the largest single female occupation in the country, but it was becoming unpopular. Shop work, factory work, any work other than service was now being sought by young girls–girls unwilling to subdue their spirits to the sort of crushing dictates enforced below stairs. The prolific servants’ conduct books of the era strike a shrill, somewhat desperate note: ‘Do not walk in the garden unless permitted or unless you know that all the family are out, and be careful to walk quietly when there, and on no account to be noisy.’ ‘Never sing or whistle at your work where the family would be likely to hear you.’ ‘When meeting any ladies or gentlemen about the house, stand back or move aside for them to pass.’ These come from A Few Rules for the Manners of Servants in Good Families, published by the Ladies Sanitary Association in 1895 and again in 1901.

  It was down to the housekeeper, of course, to try to instil these rules. Perhaps Mrs Wells was a bad manager of people. Perhaps, though, her raw material left much to be desired.

  Wrote to Mrs Holmes hope she will come and help. What a worry this house is!!

  Sadly vexed about Mrs Keeble not suiting.

  Told Mrs Keeble about leaving what a miserable house this is!!

  Worried with the Cook leaving how unsettled this house.

  Mrs Keeble left. Mrs Harrison came. Miss Maxwell left.

  Felt unsettled but hope it please God all will be ordered for the best.

  The world was speeding on apace outside Uppark’s walls. In 1887 the gramophone was invented; in 1888 the pneumatic tyre and the Kodak box camera. In 1890 London’s first electric train made its journey underground, and by 1891 you could actually telephone through to Paris. Some innovations were welcome–there was now a treadle-operated Singer sewing machine in the housekeeper’s room. Others were deeply troubling. Women were demanding the vote, divorce was more commonplace; there was even a ‘Rational Dress’ movement to liberate ladies from long, heavy skirts and tightly laced corsets. By the 1890s women were playing tennis and riding bicycles (even smoking cigarettes!) with a freedom Mrs Wells found faintly shocking. The comforting old hymns they sang at church were bei
ng edged out by strange, modern tunes–like that one they ploughed through last Sunday, ‘What a Friend We have in Jesus’. Her old rural neighbourhood in Bromley, Joe told her, had grown into a noisy suburb of London. The ‘brown and babbling’ River Ravensbourne with its overhanging trees had been swallowed up by a new drainage system.

  It was an era of furious, baffling change. In November 1892 Mrs Wells visited a young lady in the village and came away feeling horribly out of the swim of things: ‘Felt very unsettled and seeing such altered ways makes one very dull’, she wrote, sitting tight-lipped in the crepuscular gloom of the servants’ basement.

  Her son, making his way in this exciting new world, felt his mother’s bafflement keenly as she got left behind. ‘Vast unsuspected forces beyond her ken were steadily destroying the social order’, wrote H. G. Wells:

  the horse and sailing ship transport, the handicrafts and the tenant-farming social order, to which all her beliefs were attuned and on which all her confidence was based. To her these mighty changes in human life presented themselves as a series of perplexing frustrations and undeserved misfortunes, for which nothing or nobody was clearly to blame–unless it was my father and the disingenuous behaviour of people about her from whom she might have expected better things.

  There is a photographic portrait of Mrs Wells taken in the 1880s, dressed in black silk and cap as a record for the great house. ‘Mrs Wells, Housekeeper of Uppark’ has a perplexed expression. She does not radiate confidence. She attempts to look dignified, but the eyes are tired and a little frightened, and the hand on her book is nervous.

  X

  Longing To Get Out

  Mrs Wells clung to small routines and predictabilities to ward off those ‘unsettled’ feelings brought on by change. There is a sense that the very act of diary keeping soothed her with its repetitive nature; that every mundane entry had an incantatory effect. She had her rhythms, her routines and gripes. Staffing problems aside, there are, by and large, four types of entry. First, paying off the tradesmen who supply Uppark. She would walk or ride down Harting Hill every Monday and take a glass of sherry with each: ‘Went to Harting and paid folks’.

  Second, her sons. Sarah lived for letters and visits, and fretted in their absence: ‘Bertie letter only a few words.’

  Frank came to tea. I fear he never goes to Church. How altered. Sadly grieved about him.

  Bertie exam–I trust my dearest one has got on well.

  My poor old birthday. Not a word from my Boys.

  Sent Bertie by Rail Brace of Pheasants. Wrote to Frank sent Leg of Mutton.

  Third, church: ‘What a comfort the blessed Sabbath day.’ The South Harting Parish Church of St Mary and St Gabriel is an antique-feeling place of Elizabethan timber, narrow windows and sparsely spaced lamps. It was made darker still at the death of Lady Mary Ann Fetherstonhaugh in 1874 with a bequest of three piously illustrated stained-glass windows at the western end (Attending the Sick; Visiting the Prisoner, and so on), where light once streamed in to touch the far altar. Servants sat at the back, behind the gentry and village folk, and Mrs Wells kept a sharp eye on her maids during the lengthy sermons.

  South Harting lies at the foot of Uppark’s steep beech-wood territory: a vertiginous mile-long walk down a rough track, the maids’ heavy skirts trailing in the mud. The walk back up to the big house would have made Mrs Wells’s lungs wheeze in protest. When her mistress was in residence, and in a generous mood, she shared the carriage with her. The days Mrs Wells did not make it down Harting Hill to church (bad weather, ill health) were spent in glum resentment. Church was her respite. ‘So thankful got to Church’, notes more than one entry.

  Finally, and most interestingly, she writes regularly on the weather, and getting out. For someone who spent most of her life in the basement Mrs Wells was acutely sensitive to her environment, to the passing of the seasons and fine gradations of the weather. In just a line she economically–poetically, even–conjures the raw outdoors.

  Boisterous winds did not go out.

  Snow on the ground–came in the night but melting in the sun.

  Rough day. Busy with elder wine.

  Walked the garden. Cold winds.

  Primroses.

  Every day is weighed by whether she manages to breathe fresh air or not.

  Showery day did not go out. Busy cleaning.

  Feel very worn out. Tired. Busy all day. Showed house to servants. Longing to get out.

  Her mood lifts as spring and summer come round; there is palpable joy as Mrs Wells feels the sun on her face, if only for half an hour.

  Sat in the shrubbery read papers.

  I walked after dinner yew tree field got primroses they are now lovely.

  Short walk shrubbery. Sun shining all day, quite warm, such lovely spring days, how thankful I am my loved ones all well.

  Got a few bluebells. Sent them to Bertie.

  What were the consequences of confining servants to dark basement quarters, where the only windows were high and barred, the only exit through a long, dank tunnel?

  In 1845 the Government commissioned a report on the condition of mental institutions throughout England, and its findings resonated with the below-stairs world of servants. Older asylums, which resembled dreary ‘prisons or dungeons’, were compared with the more ‘modern establishments’, designed with the well-being and comfort of patients as a priority. ‘The patients ought to have the benefit of a cheerful lookout on a pleasing prospect’, argued the Commissioners, concluding that the older asylums were not suitable for Victorian patients. Newly constructed asylums should ‘avoid everything which might give to the patient the impression he is in prison’.16

  Uppark was designed in the early eighteenth century in the old style: servants in the dark, gentry in the light. The kitchen was moved upstairs as entertaining got more lavish, but the rest of the staff remained below ground.

  In the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, drastic improvements were being made around Britain to the standards of living for servants. Enlightened country-house design did not favour troglodyte conditions, bringing them up instead into fresh air and daylight. Lanhydrock in Cornwall, a Jacobean mansion devastated by fire in 1881, was rebuilt according to the latest ideas in service design. Visitors today can see the ground-floor housekeeper’s room with its large, light-flooded windows facing in two directions, while the next-door housemaids’ sitting room is an airy, bright room where the girls would have entertained their friends.

  In 1905 an article in the medical journal The Lancet claimed that the ‘eminently depressing’ living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements, where ‘diffused light is but a matter of a few hours daily even in midsummer’, accounted for the anaemic appearance of so many employed in affluent homes.17 The body’s need for Vitamin D made through exposure to sunlight was not known about at this time, though the health benefits of cod liver oil had been discovered. (H. G. Wells writes about his mother’s ‘fanatical belief’ in the stuff to prevent the ‘vitamin insufficiency that gave my brother a pigeon breast and a retarded growth’.) Mrs Wells recorded her bouts of ill health and self-medication in her diary: ‘Very poorly took oil.’ She noted this on 23 August of her last year at Uppark, twelve years of a largely underground existence. When the young Sarah Wells was lady’s maid at Uppark, she spent her time mostly above stairs–stitching, dressing and hairdressing, helping Miss Frances with her ablutions in beautifully proportioned Georgian rooms looking out towards the South Downs. It was a house made for sunlight: all those windows facing east, south and west; all those tall, giltwood pier-glasses reflecting yet more light back into the rooms. From her mistress’s quarters she could see the gardens, and perhaps imagine Joe at work down there in the fresh air. Now, as housekeeper, she was like a mole–‘busy all day in those vaulted passages’, as she wrote with resentment. Mrs Wells’s mood darkened as summer passed. She dreaded the short days ahead.

  18 July: ‘Days already drawing in.�
� (Underlined three times.)

  14 October: ‘Rain & wind, dark dull day, winter coming on.’

  27 October: ‘Dull day foggy and wet, not so cold. No walk–how dark in these underground rooms.’

  Seasonal Affective Disorder, or ‘SAD’, is a modern diagnosis of the suffering that can be brought on by shorter days and less sunlight. It is held that SAD sufferers are more likely to be women, and that they commonly start craving sugary foods: cakes, biscuits, chocolate. ‘Fat little mother’, wrote H. G. Wells in a letter, under a sketch of a rotund little lady in a lace cap. The still room was a dangerous place for sugar addicts: all those cakes and scones, jellies and jams. More gravely, lack of exposure to natural sunlight is now known to induce depression, osteoporosis and breast cancer–even schizophrenia.

  Victorians could only hypothesise at this time about the relationship between mind and body. It was understood that depression afflicted all classes–though the connection between lack of sunlight and symptoms of severe depression among the working classes had not properly been made. The terminology was still imprecise. Phrases such as ‘nervous exhaustion’ and ‘nervous collapse’ were used loosely for feelings of dullness, inertia, pessimism and deep unhappiness, where the victim was still able to function.18 A nervous breakdown was vaguely described as ‘shattered nerves’ or ‘broken health’, and a new label–‘neurasthenia’–was brandished towards the end of the century. Melancholy was another much-used term; or, more severe, ‘falling into melancholia’, which could be brought on by a trauma. Hysteria was thought to be particularly the curse of women–and especially idle women.

  But what about those under-stimulated, or frustrated, working women? Mrs Wells was the opposite of idle, but her vitality had been blunted and her mind shut down by the dull, repetitive nature of her job. Victorian psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne, who devoted his life to the study of mental health, wrote in 1883 of the ‘dreary, aimless vacuity of mind that is hysteria’s favourite soil’.19 As for the connection between mind and environment, this had barely been made. In 1885 Alexander Bain published his groundbreaking study The Senses and the Intellect, in which he argued that a new method of studying the mind was needed: one that took into account experience, the environment and physical actions. It was the advent of modern psychology.