by Flo Wadlow
They were fanatical about cricket and they had their own cricket team – mostly the people who worked on the estate. The butler, Mr Brickett, was the captain of the team and the chauffeurs and the gardeners were in it. Mr Pilbrow played, and Master Ashley when he was down from Cambridge. They used to have teams come from various parts of Kent, from the village, and other villages round. I suppose they were in some kind of league. We had quite a lot of teams come then and sometimes they used to go away and play.
This was a cricketing household, with a team made up of members of staff. The butler, Mr Brickett, is wearing the striped blazer.
We had marvellous cricket teas for them – bread rolls and sausage rolls, meat pies and sandwiches and cakes of all kinds. They had a real spread, I can assure you. They also had a big dinner for the cricket team, though we didn’t cater for that. That was held in the village hall of Four Elms, near Edenbridge. All the team went to the dinner, but we were allowed to go afterwards, when they had the dances. I had never been to a dance before. Of course I didn’t dare tell my mother I was going to a dance because, I mean, what wicked things you could have got up to at a dance. I was quite excited about that. The village boys and some of the young lads who followed the cricket team were very friendly – and quite interested in the girls who worked at the big house! So they taught me how to dance. I had a whale of a time – thoroughly enjoyed myself.
You were allowed too to go to dances in the village but you see, you weren’t allowed to have young men – to bring you home. No followers! The under chauffeur had to bring one of the cars – not the best limousine, but the one used for shopping. I think he used to dance himself, if I remember. Mr and Mrs Pilbrow were very caring about their staff. The under chauffeur took us all to the dance and brought us home. No hanky-panky!
I don’t think you would have been dismissed if you had a boyfriend, but they liked to look after me how my mother would have done. They were responsible for you, weren’t they? Well, that’s how I felt. It was a terrible thing in those days if a girl got into trouble so I think it was really more about them looking after you. I could have had a boyfriend easily because the village boys were ever so friendly.
The butler, and in that case the housekeeper, Mrs Brickett, his wife, were the ones who were strict. They probably had orders from the ladies and gentlemen, but they were the ones I knew. Often such people were the reason some young girls didn’t like being in service. They got with the wrong people and didn’t like it – hated every minute of it. I was very fortunate, or perhaps I looked at it in a different way to some people. I felt they were really only trying to look after me. That’s how my mother had impressed it on me – to be a good girl and do what I was told.
At Mapleton I did learn quite a bit of cooking. The butler’s wife, Mrs Brickett, even if strict, was a nice lady. She had been the cook previously but she had been ill. She couldn’t do the cooking so they got a young cook, and I was the kitchen maid. We had the butler and the parlour maid and two housemaids again.
When Cook went on her whole day off, Mrs Brickett would come in to help. She came into the kitchen and she showed me lots of things. She taught me how to make bread. The first loaf of bread I made I think was the best I ever did! I learnt all different kinds of pastry – short-crust, choux pastry and puff pastry too. It seemed miraculous how that should rise; and all the little leaves to make vol-au-vents. I learnt different kinds of sauces like mayonnaise and Hollandaise. Every drop of oil we had to stir with a wooden spoon in those days. She taught me how to make soufflés – hot and cold – and different kinds of meat dishes.
She was ever so good to me, and I was eager to learn. I suppose it was nice for her as well to be able to teach someone who appreciated her. She really laid the basis of my knowledge of cooking. I learnt things like how to make a Genoese sponge cake and we used to make the liver pâté. She was very good, and she did teach me quite a lot of things I hadn’t ever done before, or learnt at home.
Preparing the food would depend upon what kinds of vegetables you were going to need. If you were having spinach, for example, we would cook the spinach and it would all go through a sieve, and perhaps then you would make a sauce and add the spinach to it at night. You might do the potatoes in the morning. You might cut them up how they wanted them done. If you were having ‘Duchess’ potatoes you would mash them in the morning and mix the egg with them and pipe them out – or make little crêpes and all that kind of thing, in the morning.
Generally they had soup and fish, and meat and sweet. Sometimes they might not have the fish as well, but often they did have the four courses. If they had a dinner party, they would have five or six. A lot of things were prepared in the morning – like the pudding would probably be prepared in the morning. Tarts they would usually have for lunch. Soufflés and soup would be prepared in the morning. If it was going to be a thick soup that would have to be put through the hair sieve [like a coarse muslin]. There was masses of work really to be done. I still had to do the kitchen table and the kitchen floor and all that every day, the scullery floor and all the washing up, but there weren’t all the passages to clean. The house was all on one level. We weren’t in the basement – downstairs, like I had been before – so it was much nicer there.
To help Flo explore the Kent countryside she decided to invest in a bicycle.
Well you could buy a bicycle for about two pounds in those days – not two hundred pounds like you pay nowadays. On my day off I sometimes used to cycle to Tunbridge Wells to see a friend of mine, Dorothy, who I went to school with in Wells. She worked in Tunbridge Wells. Sometimes I would go on a bus. Dorothy did find a young man and she settled down and lived down that way. So if I’d stayed there longer I think I could have done the same. Fate takes a hand sometimes, doesn’t it?
You could go on the Green-Line Bus from Westerham, and you could go to London. If you wanted to go on the bus the under chauffeur was allowed to take you to the bus stop and to pick you up again at night. The butler would arrange all the details and times.
In Kent we lived next door to where Winston Churchill lived. I saw that great man, one day, when I had my half-day. I saw him building his wall at Chartwell. There was a public right of way that went past his house and he didn’t like people looking in his garden, so he built a wall to keep ’em out.
One morning when I went to the bathroom to get washed and clean my teeth before I went downstairs to work, I collapsed. I shared a room with the under parlour maid and she came running to find out what had happened and she found me in a heap on the floor. She went and told Mr and Mrs Brickett. They got the doctor and they found I’d got diphtheria, so I had to go into an isolation hospital. I was the only patient in the whole of Kent, and they had to get two nurses specially from London, one a day nurse and one a night nurse, to look after me. The housekeeper, Mrs Brickett, used to get the under chauffeur to bring her every day to see me, and she talked to me through the window. She used to send cards to my mum to tell her how I was getting on. Now you wouldn’t get that from many people.
One day she asked me, since I would be in hospital six weeks or more, if they should get somebody permanent in my place or somebody temporary until I was better. I thought about it seriously. I had been there a year – year and a half – so I felt I might just as well leave. I said they should get somebody permanently. When it was time for me to go home Mrs Brickett and the under chauffeur, they packed all my things up for me and brought the car to the hospital. My bike was on top of the car. They took me to the station in London and put me on the train and off I went home. I couldn’t have been looked after nicer. They were some of the nicest people I ever did come across. When Mrs Brickett came to say goodbye to me she said, ‘You will have another job in the kitchen, won’t you, because I really think you have the makings of a good cook.’
With the newfound freedom of her bicycle, Flo thought she would get a job back in Norfolk. She would be able to cycle home to see her mother occasionall
y.
I never realised how big Norfolk was. I got this job at ‘Woodhall’, Hilgay, which is a long way from Wells. There, apart from half a day once a week and half a day once a fortnight, once a month we had a whole day off. And I did cycle home to Wells, which was only about forty-eight miles!
Woodhall in Hilgay, north-west Norfolk, is a gracious Tudor house. Its claim to fame was that Captain William Manby lived here. He invented the rocket (or ‘mortar’) device, used to save shipwrecked crews.
In this house there were two gentlemen: the old gentleman, Mr Stocks, and his son, Captain Eric. There was a butler and a footman and a hall boy and they had a valet for Captain Eric. There were two housemaids and the cook, and I was the kitchen maid. There was a scullery maid there as well. She was a nice girl and I’m friends with her to this day. I did have a lot more cooking to do there. I did all the servants’ meals and I even had to get the dogs’ dinners ready, because they were ‘shooting people’ and so the dogs had to have a special menu – special meat and everything cooked for them. Some days for example, if we didn’t have cabbage for the dining room or the servants’ hall, I had to cook cabbage especially for the dogs. I learnt such a lot there with all the game birds – and different vegetables.
All the meat had to be prepared. At Hilgay, being shooting people, they would have pheasants and partridges and hares – and rabbit for the staff – all that to prepare as well, and cook. You did get more and more experienced! I never was squeamish like Molly, the scullery maid. She made out that she didn’t like doing it. She would pluck the pheasants but she didn’t like drawing them. I had to do that. I think she got round Cook, so Florence had to do them!
Sometimes you made little quenelles of rabbit or chicken, and the meat was pounded first in a mortar and pestle and then put through a sieve raw, before it was mixed with some sauce and egg, and steamed. There was ages of work putting it through a sieve. That’s why you really wanted so many staff, didn’t you?
I’ll never forget once when we were at Woodhall and we had a big shooting lunch there. We’d made some soup, and the ‘guns’ were round the house in the garden, and a pheasant came flying right through the kitchen window and landed on the table. I grabbed hold of the bird and opened the window and threw it out. Well of course that was as frightened as anything. Everybody laughed at me, the gardeners and everybody. ‘Why didn’t you wring its neck, Florence?’ Well I never thought about that, and I wouldn’t dare wring its neck, poor thing. But there was glass in everything, ’cause it came straight through the window, and we had to strain everything through hair sieves. You can imagine, feathers and glass all about. Well you couldn’t give anybody food with glass in, could you? We hadn’t got time to prepare everything all again; it was bad enough having to sieve it all.
From Hilgay we went to London, in the ‘Season’. They had a lovely place in Cadogan Square, just off the Brompton Road. While I was there I bought myself a sewing machine in the Brompton Road. We used to buy material from Pontings at four and a half pence a yard, and I used to make dresses for me and the scullery maid. We used to go on the train up to London. They had a large kitchen garden at Hilgay, so when we were in London they used to send up a big hamper of vegetables and fruit. They would take it either to Hilgay or Downham Market and put it on the train, and then the chauffeur in London would go to Liverpool Street to pick it up. So we had all fresh vegetables from the estate.
The family did a fair amount of entertaining. They had several big lunch parties in London – we had more lunch parties there than dinner parties. Even then, though, we used to have soup and fish and meat and savoury. We didn’t have sweet very often because there wasn’t a Mrs Stocks. It makes you wonder how they ate all that. Mostly the food would be dished on silver dishes, and the footman would come to the kitchen and collect them, and they had a big butler’s tray to carry them through to the dining room. The butler and the footman would hand the things round, but of course I never did go in the dining room or even around the house much, because you weren’t allowed to go in the parts that weren’t ‘your own’.
While I was there Mr Stock’s niece was presented at Court. Her mother didn’t have a London house so they came and stayed at Cadogan Square and she went from there. We were allowed to go up to the drawing room and see this girl in all her finery. What she must have felt like I don’t know – us girls looking at her, and examining her dress. She didn’t seem to mind.
They had quite a lot of shooting parties in the wintertime at Hilgay. Sometimes they would have their lunch out in a farmhouse at the further end of the estate, and we would probably have to make chicken casseroles, or beef or Irish stew, for the ‘guns’. We’d put it all in a haybox. This was like a big wooden box and there was another container you could put into it. You put this middle piece in and packed your hay all round the sides of it – you had to do it very tight – and then you put your casserole in, that was hot from the oven. And then put a lid on and the outer lid on, so it was totally covered with hay, and with a couple of lids. It was to keep the food hot when they were right at the other end of the estate and they didn’t have time to get back to the main house for lunch. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t packed properly.
We had to provide the lunch for the beaters. They all had a baked potato each, and we cooked perhaps either some boiled bacon or some salt beef, and we would make up some meat sandwiches, with a bottle of beer! Of course the people who were staying in the house would come home and have a big dinner at night-time.
There weren’t any fridges, not there. We still had an icebox in the larder, like a chest, all lead-lined, and the fishmonger would bring you a big slab of ice. It was a fairly big chest so I think it would last about two weeks. You would put the ice in the chest and you either put things round, or on top of the ice, depending on how cold you wanted them to keep. Fresh fish and meat would go on the ice and was covered generally either with a tea cloth or a piece of clean blanket. Cooked meat wouldn’t matter so much. That was often just put in the larder, not in the ice chest. The larder was mostly down a few steps, or in the cellar, to keep things cool. In the larder they nearly always had a marble slab for coolness – where the cook made her pastry. In the summer there would be butter in the chest, but not so near the ice. You didn’t want it frozen hard! The butter we put in a bowl and used to shape it with a couple of butter pats. Some of it you’d flatten, then curl it up.
Probably you had your provisions about once a week, and you would have all sorts of things round the edges of the ice. But it was mainly if the fishmonger had been, and brought you some fish that would probably go on the top to keep until the next day, or the day after that. That’s where they got the idea of freezers from! Fish used to come from King’s Lynn and they would put it on a train and we would get it at Hilgay or Downham Market, where they arranged for it to come. It would be packed in ice on the train. They would also use some of the ice if they wanted to make ice cream. You would have ice and freezing salt and you had a ‘paddle’ thing and you had to turn a handle.
It was a happy staff really. Cook was a bit funny at times – a Welsh lady. Sometimes she was a bit temperamental. Sometimes she would be all talk, and be as friendly as anything, where another time she wouldn’t talk to you at all. We didn’t really know how to take her at times. She had a niece who was working in London, in the kitchen as well. When we went to Cadogan Square her niece would come round to see her aunt and they used to jabber away in Welsh. I thought that was very amusing because you see we didn’t know a thing they were talking about. She said that all we girls thought about was boys, dancing and dresses. So I was just the normal sort of girl!
When Flo was able to attend any dances she found herself literally ‘one step ahead’ of some of the other servants, because she had learnt all the new dances down in Kent. She was now able to impress some of the young men by being ‘with it’, up with the latest dance craze.
I think the new dances were way ahead for Hilgay. I k
new how to do the ‘palais glide’ and all those kind of things. Well the footman and the hall boy couldn’t believe it, so of course we had to teach them how to do it. We thought we were on to a good thing there. Molly borrowed her mother’s gramophone and we got some records, and in the servants’ hall at night, after supper, we used to teach these boys how to dance. But of course when we went to the dance they picked the village girls, and never looked at us!
I was at Hilgay about two years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was time again to make a move because I had learnt as much as I thought I could. I went to an agency in London ’cause we were working in London at the time. The butler, Mr Orchard, was a very nice man and as I got the letters from the agency about the different jobs I could have, he advised me which ones I ought to try for.
And when a letter came informing Flo that the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House required the services of a bright young kitchen maid, the butler had no hesitation in encouraging Flo to go for it.
‘Oh I should go to Hatfield if I were you – you’ll get very good training there.’
The Georgian kitchen at Hatfield occupied two storeys of the house and was in full use until 1939.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hatfield House