by Flo Wadlow
At Hatfield House Flo worked for the 4th Marquess of Salisbury, who had been Aide-de-Camp to both King Edward VII and King George V, and was Lord Privy Seal from 1924 to 1929.
Hatfield House was a different cup of tea altogether. The Marquess of Salisbury and his wife were there. He was an elderly gentleman but he was very active in parliamentary affairs and was Leader of the House of Lords at that time. I went there about the 1st of January 1935. There was the Marquess and his wife the Marchioness, and his brother, Lord Hugh Cecil, lived with them. The Salisburys’ son was Viscount Cranborne, and he was very influential in the Conservative Party. He worked with Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office. Hatfield seemed to me like a step up the ladder. I’d worked for very nice people, and they were all gentry – but to work for a marquess, I’d never encountered them before. I felt elevated as well!
Modern Flo in front of Hatfield House
Sometimes during the week we would go to Arlington Street – their London house – when his Lordship was in the House of Lords or if anything was going on up there, or if they were entertaining anybody. Sometimes there would only be the head kitchen maid who went and we would be left in the country. When we went to 21 Arlington Street, there was a resident housekeeper, and there would be a girl in the scullery there. She was a little girl whose father was an out-of-work Welsh miner at the time. Arlington Street was just off Piccadilly, by the corner of The Ritz, so I was right in the heart of London.
The family also had an estate at Cranborne in Dorset, where they got their other title from, and we used to go and stay down there too, in the summer time. For this we had special transport for the staff – one of those charabancs, the very old type of bus. One of the chauffeurs would drive us, either up to London or down to Cranborne. There was a housekeeper at the London house who was always there and there was a housekeeper at Hatfield who was always here. There were one or two staff in London all the time, but mostly when his Lordship was in the House of Lords we would go up there.
We had a much greater staff at Hatfield. There were lots of rooms right up in the top of the house. In some places where I’ve been, the butler would live out of doors, but most of them lived in here. The chauffeurs lived out but the footmen all lived in. Her Ladyship had a lady’s maid and there was a valet for his Lordship and a valet for Lord Hugh Cecil. The butler was called the steward there, and we had to call him ‘sir’! The butler’s pantry was where they kept all the silver, and where the silver was cleaned. The third footman, Edward, would clean that. The first footman would be more responsible for answering the door, and answering the telephone, but they used to take it in turns. At Hatfield, Charles was the first footman and Stanley was the second. Stanley was a nice young man – I liked him. Charles was a bit haughty. He was a very good-looking boy – and he knew it! He had his nose up in the air. He thought he was the cat’s whiskers – God’s gift to women. If he could find fault with anything he did. One time Charles wasn’t well. He had a touch of gastritis, so he had to go on a diet. Mrs Harris, the cook, was up in arms, having to cook special food for him – fish and all that. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Nothing gives me better delight. I’m glad he can’t eat what the others have. He’s got to have fish done in water. It serves him jolly well right.’ He eventually went with Lord Tweedsmuir [the author John Buchan] when he went as Governor-General to Canada.
So there were three footmen altogether and a steward’s room boy, and an odd man. The odd man would do all the odd jobs about the place. The upper servants had their meals in the steward’s room and the boy would wait on them and learn to be a footman. There’d be the butler and the housekeeper and the valet and the lady’s maid, and the cook could go in there, but she very rarely did, because she was so busy in the kitchen. They were allowed to rule the household and rule the roost!
There were six housemaids and a housekeeper, as well as two stillroom maids. They all had their meals in the servants’ hall. I always got on very well with the housekeeper. Her uniform was a long black skirt and black blouse and she wore a little white lace cap – and sometimes she would have an apron on (but not very often). She had a belt, and a big bunch of keys to show her position, and she ordered all the provisions for the house. Once a week I had to go to her with a list of all the things that we wanted, and she would get them out. And they said she would be ever so angry if you forgot anything and had to go back another day. You had a special day for doing that. When I first went there people warned me about the housekeeper, and said she was a proper martinet. But I always got on all right with her – she reminded me of my granny. She was quite nice to me, and I never had any trouble at all. The kind of things you would get from the housekeeper were flour and sugar and butter and lard. The lard was in a pigskin, or pig’s bladder – they were called ‘a bladder of lard’. That was the only place I’ve ever seen it. You would also get household things – floor cloths, sand and soft soap.
The housekeeper was also the head of the stillroom. Hatfield was the only house where Flo had encountered a stillroom, though its position in the arrangement of grand houses stretched way back into history.
The stillroom maids made cakes for the dining room, and they did all the jams, preserving things, and marmalade, and they did the early morning cups of tea for the gentry. They would also make the toast for breakfast, and bake the bread as well. In the kitchen we just cooked the bacon and eggs, or the kippers or kedgeree, or whatever they had. Working in the stillroom you were more likely to go on to be a housekeeper. I wasn’t really conversant with the general practice.
There were four of us in the kitchen. The cook was a person probably in her fifties and there was the head kitchen maid. I was the second one, and then we had a scullery maid. The scullery maid might well have been in her fifties also, but she’d been at Hatfield ever since she left school, because she was brought up in an orphanage. Lady Salisbury had something to do with the orphanage and sometimes took girls from there to work in the house. The scullery maid always stayed at Hatfield; she never moved with us to the other places. Her name was Florence so again I couldn’t be called Florence while I was there. They asked me what my second name was, and when I said that was Georgina – well of course that was again too posh for a kitchen maid. I said I was called Ena at one place, but no they didn’t like Ena much, so I was called Jean – that was part of Georgina.
At Hatfield – praise be – we had gas! So we had gas rings and there was a big stand in the middle of the kitchen divided into four. The cook would have one part and the head kitchen maid another; the scullery maid would have another and I would have one part. The ovens in the wall had been converted to gas, so we could utilise these. ’Course that was a lot cleaner and there wasn’t all the preparation of lighting the stoves like I had gone through before, so that was marvellous. They’d still got their old black-leaded door, and latches to lift up. And of course when we went to London, we had gas there. When we went down to Cranborne in Dorset, we went back to fires, and there was only the head kitchen maid and I went, and we had a scullery maid who came in from the village.
At Hatfield they also had what they called an ‘ice cave’. It was specially made so you could freeze such things as soufflés and other special dishes. It had chopped up ice at the bottom and freezing salt to prevent the ice melting. You had to pack it all round, and there was a part in the middle of it where you could put the soufflés. ‘Ice soufflés’ they called them. Nearly always there was a meat safe and the window would be very fine mesh, so the air could get in.
The kitchen contained an old spit, baking ovens in the wall, a meat-chopping block and a brine tub.
There was an old spit hanging in the Hatfield kitchen and there were windows, right up high, so we couldn’t see out at all. But in the scullery you could just see out to the front. There were sinks all along here where Florence washed and cleaned the copper pots and pans. They were relined whenever we wanted them to be. I can remember helping Florence sometimes – especially when w
e had rabbit for the staff. We had ten rabbits to feed all the staff and while she was skinning three, I would do seven. While I was here we had a firm in Wisbech and we used to send all the rabbit skins to them, and I would get so much each skin. That was my perk.
It was quite a big kitchen, and of course it had to be scrubbed every day – and the tables and things, all had to be scrubbed. Sometimes, if I wasn’t too tired I’d try to do it overnight, so that I hadn’t got it to do in the morning. But we were fortunate having the gas here, because we hadn’t got the fires to light. Sometimes after lunch you would clean bits of the kitchen floor as well, if anywhere had got particularly dirty. I don’t think the cleaning seemed quite so intensive at Hatfield as it was in some of the other places, where they seemed to clean just for the sake of it. At Hatfield – apart from the floors and the tables – you did it when it was necessary. I would get the table all ready then I would scrub the floors, in the morning usually. They were all wooden floors and I did get a terrible splinter of wood down my nail and they had to have the doctor come and take it out for me. That was because the scrubbing brush had worn down rather, and I ought to have had a new one. But as I said, you had to go to the housekeeper for all the stores here, and evidently I didn’t ask for one soon enough.
They did provide you with uniform here. We had pink-and-white striped dresses. They were very nice, and little chef’s hats – they weren’t right tall ones – which you had to have your hair tucked underneath.
My main job again, at Hatfield, was to prepare the staff meals, and you can tell, with all that lot (although we didn’t know it at the time) it was quite a big undertaking. There’d be the breakfast for the steward’s room and the servants’ hall and for us in the kitchen. Mostly, they would have eggs of some kind. Sometimes they would have fish – kippers or something like that, but mostly eggs, with bacon perhaps. And I used to do the vegetables too, for the dining room. The head kitchen maid helped the cook, and of course the scullery maid would prepare the vegetables for the servants, but I would do the cooking of them, and cooked their meals. So I had my day very full.
The staff meals weren’t the same as the dining-room meals – ’course they weren’t – but they had good meals really, joint of meat for Sundays and cold on the Monday. Perhaps on Tuesday we might have rabbit brought in from the estate, and we’d have rabbit pie or stew. One day a week we’d have fish. Sometimes this was fried and another time perhaps we’d make it into a fish pie.
We had our meals as and when we had time. We did have a little sitting room that was just off our kitchen and we had our meals in there – when we had time to sit down. If you’re going to have the servants’ lunch at about half past twelve and the dining-room lunch at about quarter past one, you haven’t got much time to have your own lunch. You either had it quick beforehand, or else you had it in the middle of the afternoon, when it was past the best. You didn’t have a lot of time to use the sitting room but it was lovely just to pop in there and sit down for a few minutes to eat your breakfast – while Mrs Harris, the cook, had perhaps gone up to see her Ladyship, to discuss the menus. The gardeners weren’t fed, and they probably lived on the estate.
In addition, however, we had three secretaries who came in every day, and we had to provide lunch for them on trays. Where they ate it I don’t know. I never asked! Perhaps they had it in their office or the estate office. I had to do three trays for them, all the steward’s room meals and the servants’ hall, so I had a busy time.
As a kitchen maid Flo’s increasing experience made her more and more useful to the cooks she assisted, particularly as has been suggested, in setting out the cook’s working table, and using her knowledge of the menus to keep one step ahead.
In front of the cook there’d be flour. She had a kind of box thing in two halves and it had a lid each side – one side was plain and one was self-raising. She had little canisters with salt and pepper and caster sugar, and the scales were on the table in front of her. I had to see that everything was at hand. All the cook’s boards had to be specially scrubbed. You’d put some salt on them and some boiling water. You’d never use soap on the board because if she was chopping up meat or vegetables you couldn’t have the taste of soap in the vegetables for her Ladyship could you?
We had a nice case with a glass front and the menu book would be put in there. They were all written in French, so you had to know what the English equivalent was. Now if they had ‘Consommé Julienne’, I would know that she’d want some vegetables cut into very tiny little strips and cooked, ready to put into the consommé. If it was ‘Eggs Florentine’ I would know you had to have spinach, and you would cook the spinach and put it through a sieve. They don’t have it just chopped up you know. You couldn’t have bits of stalk! You had to understand what it was like. I would look at the menus and then I would know what she was doing. If there was a different garnish of some kind I would know what she wanted. At Hatfield I learnt more about menus and I would take notice of what the cook did. My mother said I had an enquiring mind. I was a bit nosey, really. I liked to know what they were doing, as well as me. That’s really how I learnt.
The gardener would mostly bring what vegetables he had in the garden. It wasn’t so much what we wanted but you used what you had in the season. It wasn’t like today, where you have foreign vegetables all the year round. Lord Salisbury, who I worked for, liked very plain food, and he had a milk pudding every day. It didn’t matter whatever else was in the dining room, there was a milk pudding made for his Lordship.
At weekends they nearly always had big parties. Ever so many people would come and stay – all the parliamentary people of the time – the Prime Minister and so on. It was nothing to have sixteen or twenty people staying. And they would bring their wives and their wives would bring their lady’s maids and the gentlemen would bring their valets and probably a chauffeur. So you would have extra staff in the servants’ hall.
At Hatfield there was a wonderful room called the Armoury, with four big tapestries on the wall representing spring, summer, autumn and winter, and there was lots of armour and all that kind of thing. We used to have a man come in, nearly every day, to clean the armour. It was like the Forth Bridge. When he had finished one end of the house, he’d have to go round again!
There were six housemaids, and Rose, the second housemaid, was a particular friend of mine. One day she said, ‘The housemaids have got to be up at five tomorrow to scrub the Armoury.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask the housekeeper if I can come with you.’ So I helped scrub the Armoury just so I could see it. I wanted to see the lovely tapestries hanging up. I only scrubbed it once. I had enough scrubbing to do as it was.
The Armoury had four tapestries showing the seasons. These were woven by the Sheldon Tapestry Weavers in 1611.
There was also a marvellous chapel at Hatfield and we had to go to prayers in the morning, after the servants had had their breakfast and before the dining-room breakfast. The head kitchen maid and I used to take it in turns to go, because one would be left behind looking after the bacon and eggs for the dining room while the others were in chapel, saying their prayers. There’d also be one footman who didn’t go. They took it in turns so that one could be on duty at the front door and for the telephone. Occasionally we were all there. Some of the girls didn’t like chapel at all. They thought it was an imposition really, but I thought it was lovely. I loved the chapel and that window for one thing, with all the different Bible stories in it. Whenever I think of Hatfield I always think of that window. And I loved seeing the people who I worked for.
Working in the kitchen, as a lowly kitchen maid, you didn’t usually see the people of the house and they hardly ever deigned to come down into the kitchen. I shall never forget once, when we were in Arlington Street, Mrs Harris, the cook, had been in to see her Ladyship and we were told that his Lordship was coming into the kitchen, with an architect, because they wanted something done to the place. When Mrs Harris came down
from seeing her Ladyship she came into the kitchen and said:
‘Our Lord is coming down!’ Yes, he did come down, and we stood up meekly.
I only once ever spoke to Lady Salisbury and I never did to his Lordship. But there at Hatfield, his Lordship and her Ladyship came to prayers in the chapel, and you were there with them – a few rows back maybe – so I liked that very much. We’d be all seated in our places before the family came in and we would rise. When the service was over we watched them all walk out then we would walk behind and come out last.
We saw her Ladyship’s sister, the Dowager Countess of Airlie. She was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. She was a dignified and stately lady, very much in the style of Queen Mary. She looked and dressed like Queen Mary. She often used to come and visit when she wasn’t on duty at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden used to come to Hatfield and all the top people in the cabinet, and they would come to chapel too. That’s how I saw all these people that you read about in the newspapers.
I wasn’t so keen coming on Wednesdays or Fridays because we always had the Litany that day – that was a bit beyond me – but otherwise I loved it. It really started me off. The clergyman or the curate would come from Hatfield and take the prayers, and we’d have hymns. When we went to London we didn’t have services in the house there, but we did in Cranborne. We went in the dining room there and his Lordship would say the prayers. I laughed and said we should have had prayers in London, because that’s where you want them more, don’t you? You could be more led astray in London than you could in Cranborne or Hatfield!
In the general run of things, the kitchen staff would tend not to mix with the other staff, but Flo was probably an exception to the rule: