by Tessa Boase
Grace’s blue biro has heavily scored out the three-figure amount: she didn’t want anyone to find out how much she’d been left. When Duncan Grant died in 1978, aged 93, he left her £500–the equivalent of £5,000 today. ‘I did not expect it’, wrote Grace, ‘as I did not think the poor darling had much money.’
Grace would occasionally grumble, but she did not consider herself exploited. To think this would be to deny a lifetime’s work its validity. She continued to fill her scrapbooks with press cuttings on the circle and, when tracked down by journalists seeking to denigrate ‘Bloomsbury’ (as had become fashionable), she was staunchly loyal. ‘I was just happy to spend my time with them,’ she told a Sunday Times reporter in 1981, three years after Duncan Grant’s death. ‘They were my kind of people.’ In retrospect, viewed from the dignified comfort of her three-piece suite, hers had been a ‘marvelous’ career. If she had a blind spot in her memories, then it suited her.
It also suited the Bell–Grant household to idealise their housekeeper. She would be addressed with fond irony as ‘Amazing Grace’; ‘The presiding genius of Charleston’, or ‘The Angel of Charleston’–as if her work was a divine calling and it were simply a matter of sprinkling fairy dust around to change the sheets, peel the onions, scrub the passageways and wash the dishes. With nicknames like these, how could Grace complain? For all that her son saw her ‘treated as a slave’, doing ‘ongoing, unrewarding work’, she was the Angel of Charleston, and so it was work worth doing. Advantage had undoubtedly been taken of Grace’s cheerful nature–but she was complicit in the deal.
Grace developed breast cancer in 1983, aged 79–and, unlike Vanessa Bell, she did not survive it. Walter had died a year earlier at 88. Their deaths coincided with the restoration of Charleston, steered by Quentin Bell and his wife Olivier. John and Diana Higgens were among the first tourists in 1986, and it was a bizarre experience. All looked so familiar. John wanted to reach out a hand and touch things to bring back memories, but ‘You mustn’t touch!’ said the guide. ‘You mustn’t sit on any chairs!’ He was surprised by the ‘over-the-top’ descriptions of objects he hadn’t given a second glance–the round Omega Workshop dining table, the pictures on the walls, the painted mantelpieces. But when the group moved into the kitchen, he knew he was on solid ground. Ticked off for pulling out the old kitchen drawer where he used to keep his toys, John felt he had to speak up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I don’t think certain things are correct.’ The floor, he told them, had once been concrete, not these smart terracotta tiles. The walls had been covered in ugly lead pipes, the original sink was much lower and smaller and there was no modern, gas-fired Aga but an old brute, ‘a so-and-so to get alight’, that required stoking with coke. The Charleston curators’ obsession with authenticity hadn’t made it into the kitchen. This dark little room, once the hub of the house, had been given a tasteful makeover.
The other tourists looked at John Higgens with new interest–this lanky, diffident man who might be able to get them one step closer to Bloomsbury. ‘It did strike me as rather strange, their interest in me,’ he reflected. ‘I didn’t assume that I was important at all. Obviously my mother was an important person here, but people seemed to think that I might know certain things.’ The room he’d grown up in was essentially gone, but his mother was commemorated with a plaque behind the Aga. Quentin the potter had glazed some tiles in tribute to the cook-housekeeper who had given his family half a century of her life: ‘Grace Higgens, née Germany, 1904–1983, worked here for fifty years & more. She was a good friend to all Charlestonians.’ It was the Bloomsbury equivalent of a gravestone in the family churchyard.
Actually Grace was born in 1903, but it was the spirit of the thing that mattered: she hovered over the farmhouse still, a benevolent angel in flowered nylon housecoat, duster in one hand, soup ladle in the other. For John, this was one step towards redressing the balance. ‘I think in their own way they really did like her and love her,’ he later concluded–‘in some sort of fashion, to the best of their ways.’
Epilogue
Nicky Garner of Holkham Hall, Norfolk 2013
Applicants will be required to be conscientious, reliable and discreet at all times.
ADVERTISEMENT FOR HOUSEKEEPER, HOLKHAM HALL, 2007
Something Almost Military
Nicky Garner drives through the Triumphal Arch in her black Nissan Note. It’s 8.30 a.m. and she’s running late. Two miles to go–into the deer park, over the cattle grid, a curve to the right and there it is: a severe Palladian slab in yellowish brick, crisp against its green parkland, straight off the eighteenth-century architect’s page. She swings into the immense gravel forecourt and climbs out: a diminutive, youthful figure in biker boots, tight black trousers and quilted gilet.
She enters Holkham Hall through the porter’s door and makes straight for her small office in the service wing. Neatly pinned certificates, from firefighting to tower-scaffolding safety, line its walls. Her desk faces the butler’s, but Daniel Green isn’t in yet. Last night’s corporate banquet must have gone on late. She logs on: several emails from ‘Lady C’, one from the new flower-arranging lady, one from the enterprises manager. A discreet Aztec tattoo is visible on Nicky’s right hand as she clicks away with her computer mouse.
This is the head housekeeper. Many things about Nicky’s role today would be unimaginable to the women in the pages of this book. Most obviously, just now, that she shares an office with a man; that she is expected to make her own tea from an electric kettle; and that Her Ladyship is so constantly in touch, with such a stream of informal correspondence. The photograph of Nicky’s two young sons pinned to the wall might catch the eye of Dorothy Doar, dismissed for requesting six weeks’ maternity leave back in 1832. Nicky lives locally with her family, and it is unthinkable that she might desert them as Mrs Doar and Mrs Wells were forced to do in the nineteenth century.
Her priorities lie outside the Triumphal Arch, and it might seem obvious, looking at the calm, unflustered face of Holkham’s housekeeper, that there is little drama or tragedy in her world. She is not crushed or bowed down by her job. She has to suffer none of the random injustices and upheavals of her predecessors; her life is not lived on the edge, or riven by crisis. Nicky Garner is the last in the line of this great tradition–and, thankfully, outwardly her life could not be more different.
She has put the morning aside to take me on a tour of the house, now closed to the public for winter. As we walk through the vast rooms (faded red flock wallpaper; Gainsboroughs and Guido Renis at every turn), she talks of her goals for the ‘closed season’. This year she’s putting her four girls on to the Saloon, the South Drawing Room, the South Dining Room, the Classical Library, the Manuscript Library and the Long Library. All six staterooms are to be ‘deep-cleaned’ by April next year when the house reopens to the public, and Nicky will lead the work from the top plank of the scaffolding, her ‘Museum Vac’ slung over one shoulder like a handbag, inching her way down the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries with her suction nozzle.
I ask if she’s always this hands-on. ‘Absolutely. I will help clean the chandeliers, the canopies on the beds, the pictures, the picture frames. Everything you can see, everything you can touch, we take care of.’ Is there a pride in doing this kind of work? ‘Absolutely!’ This is Nicky’s favourite word, and it suits her: definite, deliberate. ‘I’m not just cleaning, I’m conserving. I’m making a difference.’ A walkie-talkie sticks out of her back pocket and as we walk, it crackles with news of distant estate business. Everyone at Holkham is connected. Nicky has a purposeful walk–forward leaning, proprietorial. Her dark brown eyes sweep each room, checking the closed shutters, the carpet pile, the fenders, the door handles (‘Lord and Lady Coke like to see very shiny, very brassy door handles and fireguards’).
The house as a whole is one very great work of art, crammed with the extraordinary spoils of the 1st Earl of Leicester’s eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Daily Nicky’s girls str
ide with their cleaning boxes past Poussins and Titians, Van Dycks and Canalettos to tackle the sagging Georgian furniture, the priceless silver plate and porcelain, the sixty Roman sculptures dotted around the place (one in a guest bathroom, peering voyeuristically down at the bath). It is an awe-inspiring place to work–and to visit, for Holkham is open to the public three days a week, seven months a year. Thirty thousand visitors tramp through these rooms annually. Add to this a heritage-industry programme of corporate jamborees, banquets, weddings, festivals and fairs, all requiring ‘some serious overtime’ from domestic staff, and you get a picture of the reinvented English country house that none of our previous housekeepers would recognise.
Nicky Garner is part of this reinvention. Her role is extraordinarily multifaceted: she’s waging war on the moth infestation, she’s digitally cataloguing the contents of the Fabric Room, she’s showing corporate guests to their bedrooms. But Holkham Hall is also a family home, and for Nicky the Cokes (pronounced ‘Cooks’) come before all else.
Having resurrected the stories of servants long dead, I was fascinated to see this relationship with a family in action. It surprised me to find a twenty-first-century housekeeper with so much invested emotionally in her job. Central to this reverence–and reverence is not too strong a word for what Nicky feels–is the housekeeper’s relationship with her mistress. Nicky is Lady Coke’s right-hand woman–she is her eyes, her ears and her constant prop.
Today the old master–servant relationship is closer than ever–the service wing is just a door away from Lady Coke’s Aga, and communication just an email or phone call away. ‘I tell Nicky to call me whenever she wants to talk,’ says her mistress–and she does, frequently. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Holkham employed sixty indoor servants. Today it has just six full-time and nine part-time staff, and there is a greater dependency on them than ever. Hanging in the corner of the laundry room is a flimsy Bellville Sassoon vintage dress in cream chiffon that Nicky will repair by hand. The modern housekeeper is as much lady’s maid as head housemaid; nothing should be beneath her. But if the prestige of the role is consequently lower, such intimacy brings its own rewards. ‘I’m up close and personal with Lady Coke’s clothes, her shoes, her children,’ says Nicky. She’ll even feed her mistress’s Black-headed Caique parrot, Basil. ‘I’m part of an extended family. I feel appreciated and very much looked after.’
Crackle crackle goes the walkie-talkie.
‘Nicky, it’s Lady Coke, are you receiving?’ The voice is light, friendly, not obviously posh.
‘Yes, go ahead Lady Coke.’ Nicky’s accent is faintly Norfolk, faintly primary-school teacher. She emanates dependability.
‘Nicky, do you know where I could find some fabric to decorate the Santa’s grotto?’ Holkham is preparing for its Christmas opening.
‘Yes of course, Lady Coke, there are some nice bits in the store cupboard in the laundry.’
‘That’s brilliant, Nicky; would you be able to gather them all up and leave them outside my kitchen, please?’
‘Yes of course, Lady Coke, I’ll do that straight away.’
‘Nicky, that’s brill, thank you.’
The housekeeper is above all a giver of comfort, physical and emotional, and her fundamental reward is being appreciated. It is a specifically female transaction, and it is a timeless one. The same relationship did not–and does not–exist between the master of the house and the butler. Lady Coke is conscientious about praising Nicky Garner. She is a great believer in the handwritten thank-you note, the box of Thornton’s chocolates after a big event. It makes a difference. It helps transform a potentially complicated relationship into something mutually satisfying and pleasurable. But it is a delicate relationship all the same, and it is at the heart of the stories I have told here.
Think of Dorothy Doar, welcoming her long-absent Regency mistress to Trentham Hall with roast partridge and apple tart back in 1831; and of Sarah Wells at Uppark, pulling off a High Victorian house party at the age of 69, her efforts ignored by her mistress: ‘Miss F very quiet…Miss F never asks if I am tired.’ Remember Ellen Penketh before her sudden fall from grace, collaborating with her mistress on each triumphant bout of Edwardian entertaining at Erddig, her Charlotte russe invariably chosen for dessert because she did it so well. Then there is the greatest charmer of them all, housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie, flying ‘like a bird’ to those Wrest Park First World War surgeons, in the absence of any praise from her mistress, attending to their needs until they were ‘tied to her little finger’. And think of Grace Higgens, the ‘treasure’, whose diaries noted every tip, every kiss bestowed on her cheek, every compliment for her cooking–in part because they were so rare.
In 2007 Lady Coke had placed an advertisement on the Holkham Hall website for a housekeeper. She, her husband and their four children had recently moved into this austerely beautiful palace set in 25,000 acres on the windswept North Norfolk coast. Along with the house they inherited the old staff that had worked for Viscount Coke’s father, the 7th Earl of Leicester–some since the age of 16. ‘I was given no book of tips from my mother-in-law,’ says Lady Coke. ‘I would have asked for advice, but I didn’t know what to ask.’ It was an ‘incredibly daunting’ period, she remembers, adjusting to the scale of Holkham and working out how to run it as a business. ‘There was a certain resistance to change among the staff. We weeded out those who didn’t have the right attitude.’ To Lady Coke, this elusive attitude is all.
‘Suitable applicants will be required to be conscientious, reliable and discreet at all times’, read the advertisement. ‘Excellent references and a good previous employment history are essential.’ Lady Coke also used an employment agency, but she soon discovered that if you mentioned Holkham Hall it either put people off, or it made them apply for the wrong reasons. ‘If you recruit someone to live in, they often have ideas about being in a position of power. They’re hands-off, managerial. I want someone to be hands-on, not afraid of getting down on their knees if necessary.’
The story of Lady Coke–Polly–echoes the story at Erddig Hall a century earlier, when new chatelaine Louisa Yorke moved into the big house. Neither Polly, a milliner by profession, nor Louisa, a parson’s daughter, were to the manor born. Both women came unexpectedly to these big houses set in remote rural parts of England. Those who served ‘the Hall’–Erddig in North Wales, Holkham in North Norfolk–came from families who had done so for generations. Each mistress (decisive, creative, on the cusp of 40) blew in as the agent of change. It was never going to be easy.
‘Oh! The trouble of the servants at Erddig’, Louisa Yorke wrote in her diary in 1902. ‘The new Housekeeper Mrs Osmond is to leave at once. She will do no work except arrange flowers!’ And so it turned out at Holkham. They came and they went: older women with a certain self-importance, ‘lady housekeepers’ who would not roll up their sleeves and who alienated their staff. They had the wrong attitude. Polly Coke might not have been born to the role (her mother, the fashion designer Belinda Bellville, still thinks it a good joke that her chaotic daughter should have ended up mistress of Holkham). But she knew that the housekeeper was essential to the happiness of her home. Like Louisa Yorke before her, Lady Coke decided to ignore the recruitment agencies and go with her instincts.
There are qualities you can list on a CV, or pick up on at interview, but there is something indefinable about a good housekeeper. In Nicky’s case you could argue that it is genetic. Nicky comes from the Butters clan–and Butters, historically, were born to serve. Her great-grandfather Henry Butters was a lifelong Hall handyman. His son, Fredrick Butters, was a footman and under-butler. Great-aunt Althea worked in the estate office after the Second World War, then as a room steward welcoming the first public visitors to Holkham in 1950; she married Albert Butters, another Hall handyman who doubled up as a footman. Auntie Sheila Gibson, ‘very particular, a bit of a clean freak’, was housekeeper to the 7th Earl of Leicester in the 1990s.
Nicky was born
in 1979, eight years after Grace Higgens retired from Charleston. It was thought, back then, that treasures like Grace were the last of their kind–and that, with their passing, the fortunes of the English country house had waned. In 1955 these houses were being demolished at the rate of one every five days. By 2000, one in five (some 1,500) had gone. Those that survived had to adapt to a new world–and a different sort of servant. The Duke of Westminster was incensed to be taken to an industrial tribunal in 2002 by his former housekeeper Mrs Hewson, who claimed unfair dismissal from Eaton Hall, Cheshire because her face ‘no longer fitted’. It was countered that she had ‘harassed’ her underlings and spread ‘malicious gossip’.1 Mrs Hewson lost the case, and the Duke won a High Court injunction banning her from revealing details of his private life.
This is the sort of tale to make blue blood run cold, for the house-keeper’s position is, above all, one of trust. ‘They see me in my dressing gown. They see me shouting at my husband,’ says Lady Coke, who finds the lack of privacy one of the hardest things about her new life. But she had a gut feeling about Nicky Garner, a part-time cleaner at Holkham Hall with a forthright, personable manner and strong work ethic. ‘Not at all the stereotype; the sort you might go and have a beer with.’
Nicky is not the stereotype–she’s young, she’s of her time, she has her Aztec tattoo (and four more, she wouldn’t say where). But for all the immediate differences, I think my five earlier housekeepers would still recognise her as one of them. She has the same obsessive, literal-minded attention to detail; the same character that can’t step back from the job. They would nod approvingly at Nicky’s mantra, ‘Methodical, adaptable and logical’. There is something almost military about her. ‘I’ve always been ridiculously methodical,’ she says, flipping open a folder and showing me her annual graph on moth reduction (down fifty per cent in the staterooms and Statue Gallery).