Something told me I was going to be all right.
Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
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STEAMED SUET PUDDING
The way to a man’s heart is through pudding! Men cannot get enough of them. No man, from chimney sweep to lord of the manor, can resist. Give ’em something sticky, sweet, oozing with jam, covered in custard and piping hot and they’ll love you forever. My husband’s favourite was steamed suet pudding with apples and cream. You can replace the apples with jam, blackberries, raspberries or whatever you fancy.
8 oz (225 g) self-raising flour
4 oz (110 g) shredded suet (you can buy this in packets)
6 large cooking apples
2 tablespoonfuls sugar
Mix flour and suet with a little water to form a firm dough, roll out thinly on a floured board to under half an inch thick and line a pudding basin with it.
Use the scraps and roll out again to make a lid for the pudding.
Cut the apples very finely and lay inside the bowl. Keep layering the apples until the basin is full. Sprinkle with two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Wet the edges of the pastry round the basin and then stick the lid on and seal over. Trim the edges.
Cover with foil or greaseproof paper secured with string, and cook in a saucepan half-filled with boiling water. Keep it simmering for two hours. Once cooked, shake the basin and then carefully turn it out on a plate. Serve with warm custard or cream.
HOUSEHOLD TIP
Don’t spend a fortune on products designed to tackle limescale. To remove limescale on the end of taps, put two lemon halves on them overnight. Hey presto, sparkly new taps!
Afterword
Today I am ninety-six years old. I may not climb trees or shin down the side of Tudor halls any more, but I’ve still got a fair bit of life in me. I walk my poodle, Rodney, on the beach and compete in a Scrabble group every Monday. I’m not bad either – I won the Scrabble tournament in December 2011. Ruth, my daughter, says I exhaust her!
I still cook too and I get enormous pleasure from it.
Whenever I host the Scrabble club I cook for thirty people. Some of them worry it’s too much for a ninety-six-year-old woman but I love it. It’s all in the planning and I make big curries, shepherd’s pies and apple crumbles. Old habits die hard!
My ‘carrot-top’ red hair has long since faded to grey, but the dreams and memories of a long and happy life have yet to fade. I’m very grateful for the adventures I got to experience and the laughter I shared below stairs. And it’s not over yet! My mind’s still buzzing with plans and I’m forever plotting new adventures, like my next get-together with my dear old friend, Flo Wadlow.
Flo is now one hundred years old and would you believe we’re determined to meet up soon for a cup of tea and a chat about old times. Until that happens, we talk regularly on the phone, and boy do we have a laugh! We cackle until the tears are streaming down our faces when we remember climbing out of the servants’ quarters at Woodhall to sneak out to the dance that time or the memorable occasion the runaway pheasant burst through the kitchen window, showering glass in the soup!
They really were the best of times and I feel so honoured to have shared them with Flo. She is the most kind-hearted person I know. She’s talented too. Do you know, she went on to make cook too, in her twenties. She worked for the Marquess of Lothian at a grand old home called Blickling Hall in Norfolk, where she cooked for, amongst others, the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin during the abdication crisis and Queen Mary, George V’s widow.
Between us we’ve cooked for royalty, politicians and the gentry. They truly were remarkable times. We could tell the writers of Downton Abbey a thing or two, that’s for sure!
Here we are, 196 years of experience between us, and still got our wits about us. I put our remarkable good health down to the fact that we have eaten well all our lives. No vegetables stuffed with chemicals or nasty processed food. We’ve worked hard and never sat down on our bums for long.
Granny Esther lasted until 1953 and the ripe old age of eighty-five, and my mother didn’t die until 1985 when she was ninety, so I suppose you could say the women in my family are battlers.
More than anything – and I passionately believe this to be true – I’ve enjoyed my life and tried to find the fun in any situation. That’s why I’m still here to tell the tale. More than can be said for most of my old employers, I’m sad to say.
Kind old Mr Stocks passed away in 1957 and left Woodhall to his son, Captain Eric. Mr Orchard remained faithfully by his side until the day Captain Eric died in the summer of 1974, aged seventy-six. He left Woodhall the minute Captain Eric’s wake was finished. Where he went, nobody knows. Loyal to the end, Mr Orchard had devoted a lifetime to the service of the Stocks family, unshakable in his belief that what he was doing was worthwhile, that he was born to serve them. Every day for over forty-four years he tended to his master’s every need, carefully placing the silver-framed menu on the table, faithfully sounding the gong to announce dinner at seven thirty p.m.
Larking about shortly after the birth of my son, Timothy James, in 1946.
The sound of a chiming dinner gong may well have died out in the hallways of upper-class houses in Britain, a symbol of a bygone age, but I like to think Mr Orchard’s legacy lives on. He certainly taught me a thing or two about hard work and devotion to duty.
That butler was one of a dying breed. Once all the rank and deference had collapsed after World War Two and domestic service faded away, he clung to the ways of the old world. He couldn’t have coped with the new, more democratic, way of life. Flo and I may have been born to serve in the way that Mr Orchard was, but we didn’t live to serve. We took our opportunities and we used them to our advantage.
Mrs Jones will long since have died. I don’t know where she went to as, sadly, we lost touch, but I’ll never forget her. She was fierce, yes, but also fiercely loyal and I have her to thank for turning me from a scullery maid into a cook! I thought I knew it all, but in reality I was just a kid. Sneaking off with that troubled footman and Henry the Blackshirt showed me up for what I was, a rebellious little girl. I thought she was just exerting control over me but now, with the benefit of hindsight and wisdom, I can see she was only looking out for me. She always did. She’s probably up there now, sitting on a cloud, giving some cherub hell.
As for lovely gentle George the farmhand, believe it or not we stayed in touch, even after I left Woodhall, and we remained friends for years. He became a proper old bachelor. I got him a job near where I lived years later in Bournemouth. He was a dear, sweet, kind man and I often wish he’d found the love that eluded him. He died in 1986 in a nursing home, aged seventy. I was with him when he took his last breath. It may sound strange but we became so close that he was almost like family. When he got ill, suffering from cancer of the throat, and we knew the time was near, Timothy and I visited him every day.
On the day of his death a nurse rang. ‘George is asking for you, Mollie,’ she said. ‘Can you get up here now, he’s not got long.’
I grabbed my keys and raced up to the hospital. As I burst into the ward I was relieved to see him propped up in bed. When he spotted me, a gentle smile flickered over his face and his eyelids closed.
‘Mollie,’ he whispered, slowly stretching out his hand across the bed sheet and lacing his fingers through mine. My name was the last word he ever said. Sixty seconds later, he died. I’ll never forget my lovely farmhand.
I’m afraid to say that kind Mrs Luddington didn’t have quite such a peaceful end. After I visited her that day, during the war, I never did see her again. I was horrified to hear that on 29 February 1960 she was killed in an earthquake in Agadir in Morocco. It was the most destructive and deadly earthquake in Moroccan history and killed around 15,000 people. It lasted just fifteen seconds, but killed one third of the population of Agadir.
Poor Nell. She would have been fifty years old. Such a terrible end for such a gentle woman. My heart went out to her
poor husband and children. I don’t know what became of her husband, but I understand Wallington was passed down through the generations until it was sold in 2007. The location of the buried treasure remains a mystery to this day, but I’ve heard the bitter ghost of Elizabeth Coningsby still makes her presence known!
The rest of the gentry that I knew of fared no better than Nell in many ways.
Before and after World War Two Wallis and Edward were suspected by many of being Nazi sympathizers. After the duke’s death in 1972, the duchess lived in seclusion and was rarely seen in public.
In May 1940 Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana Mitford were interned. They were released in 1943 but spent the rest of the war under house arrest. The war ended what was left of his political reputation.
As for our beloved King George VI, the stress of the war was believed to have taken its toll on his health and he died in 1952.
I walked over miles of heather from King’s Lynn to pay my respects and watch his coffin being placed on the train at Wolferton Station, the official station for Sandringham. What a strange day. I and a group of sombre onlookers bowed our heads in respect as the queen (the Queen Mother as she later became), Elizabeth and Margaret all walked down the platform past us, following the coffin, in long, heavy black veils.
There was no security or burly bodyguards to hustle us back – there simply wasn’t the fear that anything bad could happen to them. They were so loved by their people that they accepted us just standing there within touching distance of the coffin.
It may sound strange, my wanting to watch the coffin go off, but I adored our royal family. Their lives felt so intertwined with my own. In many ways we felt like they were our own family, and so I too wanted to pay homage as the king left his country home for the last time.
Elizabeth would have been just twenty-five as she followed her father’s coffin up the platform, aware of the enormity of the task ahead of her. I’d seen her playing as a little girl in her garden and, nineteen years later, on the threshold of being made our queen. What an enormous responsibility for one so young! How incredible I find it that sixty years on we have just celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Not since I witnessed her grandfather King George V’s Silver Jubilee back in 1935 have I seen such a total outpouring of patriotism and love.
Me and my son, Timothy James, aged two. We had our photos taken at Selfridges for half a crown. The war was over but rationing was still biting, so photos like this were a small, affordable pleasure.
The end of World War Two brought about many changes, not just the demise of our king and accession of his daughter Elizabeth. It was also the end of the domestic servant as we had known it.
Many trends that began the decline in service from the First World War were accelerated by the Second World War, but in a more pronounced and permanent way. For the first time, after World War Two, domestic appliances such as cookers, Hoovers and electric irons became available. Time-consuming tasks that would have required housemaids like Irene suddenly became easier and quicker, meaning servants weren’t needed.
Huge employment opportunities, like clerical work, became available to young women as a result of the war. What young woman wanted to work long hours as a scullery or kitchen maid when she could get paid more and work fewer hours in an office? The rise in the school-leaving age meant that girls like me, who would have started as a scullery maid aged fourteen, now had more educational opportunities open to them. Thanks to the war, people viewed domestic service differently too. Doing things for yourself became popular and the idea of the ‘housewife’ as an identity also took off.
Although many households did still employ servants, it was on nowhere near the scale that I had witnessed. Usually it was confined to just one or two servants, such as a cleaner or a charwoman who lived out. It’s impossible, really, to overstate how much the war changed the lives and homes of Britons from every single class background.
It was all change for me too. In 1953, soon after the death of King George VI, with two young children in tow – Ruth and a son, Timothy James – I finally departed British shores. My husband rose through the ranks to become an officer and was posted to the Far East and we went with him.
I may not have made it to Spain but I did make it to Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Yemen to name but a few.
As an officer’s wife I had an incredible time and saw some amazing sights. I saw Singapore before there was even a single high-rise building built, travelled over developing countries in an eight-seater Commodore plane, watched native burning ceremonies in Kuala Lumpur and drank gin and tonic on a troopship from Singapore to England. What a trip that was. It took us a month to get home, sailing through the Suez Canal, stopping at Yemen and then Gibraltar. Every night there were fancy-dress parties, card games and drinks for the officers’ wives and we all dressed up to the nines. I even had a man assigned to my cabin who ran my bath for me every night and brought me whatever I wanted. They virtually wiped your bottom for you. It was a high old time!
The kids and I once travelled through the Malay jungle under armed guard, clutching a Sten gun for fear of kidnap by communist terrorists. But after facing Mrs Jones in the kitchen, nothing fazed me. Like I say, nothing frightened me much when I was young.
The ultimate irony to my mind is that as my husband rose through the ranks and we grew in so-called social prominence, we began to have staff of our own. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a household of staff. In Singapore we had no end of servants to help cook, clean and look after the children. As a commissioned officer in the RAF, my husband even had his own airman-come-personal-servant, known as a batman, who would come to the house to do our cleaning and sort out his uniform. I hated it. How would you feel having a strange bloke in your home doing your housework? Maybe it was the years of cooking and cleaning I did for the gentry, but I knew just how I wanted things doing and it felt wrong to sit back and let other people do it for me.
On board HMS Clyde in 1954, sailing back from Singapore. I’m sat to the right wearing a scoop-neck dress. Timothy was on board another ship that had set sail weeks earlier. As an officer’s wife you were given first-class service, and had servants to run your bath, warm up your toilet seat and pour your gin and tonic.
I suppose you could say I’ve been in the unique position of having been on both ends of the social scale, downstairs and upstairs, but believe me, I’m in no doubt which was the more fun place to be. The ten years I spent in domestic service were some of the happiest times of my life and have made me the woman I am today.
Starting as a scullery maid and working up to cook instilled in me confidence, a good work ethic, self-esteem and pride in my work. How many other professions today give young people those feelings?
It taught me to think on my feet, not to be reliant on anyone and not to be afraid of hard work or finding fun.
I can cook and I can count and those two skills, along with a willingness to work hard and the love of a good man, have carried me through my whole life. Service may seem like a class struggle to some and slavery to others, but to me it represented adventure and freedom beyond my wildest dreams.
From my humble beginnings as a scullery maid to my dream job as a cook, I owe domestic service a debt of gratitude. I’ll keep on believing that until the final gong sounds.
Photographs
Here’s me at the ripe old age of ninety-six. My face may be wrinkled and my hair faded to silver, but I think you can tell by the twinkle in my eye that I still find the fun in life.
Me as a baby being held by my indomitable Granny Esther. I was always her favourite.
That’s me on the far right, aged ten, being awarded first prize at school sports day in 1926. I was the fastest runner and the highest jumper in the whole area – I always thought I was better than anyone else back then!
Downham Market Baptist Church members on a day out in the 1920s. I’m in the middle, behind the boy in the white shorts.
Number 24 Cadogan Square,
Knightsbridge, Mr Stocks’s London house. We’d come up here every year for the London season.
A very desirable postcode – all the gentry had a London house for the season.
My dear friend Flo Wadlow, the kitchen maid I worked with at Woodhall and Cadogan Square, in her uniform in a previous job. She was my partner in crime and a gentle, kind and loyal friend. We met in 1931 and we’re still friends to this day.
On the left is Louis Thornton (in the white apron), Mr Stocks’s second chauffeur. A good deal of time was spent lusting after this handsome man. On the right is Ernie Bratton, Captain Eric’s valet, a lovely fella who took me to the Chelsea Arts Ball.
A plaque in Woodhall’s church graveyard to commemorate Captain Manby, previous occupant of Woodhall and inventor of a rocket device used to save the crews of shipwrecked ships.
Mr Stocks, my boss and the owner of Woodhall. A finer gentleman you’d be hard-pressed to find. Unlike some of the gentry, he was kind and generous and a real old-fashioned gent. We didn’t have much to do with him, mind you, but whenever I did see him he would be striding about the place in his plus fours, flat cap on his head and a Labrador trotting by his side.
This is the back of Woodhall. Can you see the fireescape ladder Flo and I used to sneak out of the servants’ quarters to go to the dance?
Magnificent Woodhall, a beautiful listed Tudor home in the Norfolk countryside.
Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid Page 29