by Pamela Horn
Some nannies, however, were very snobbish, so that those employed in titled families considered themselves a cut above fellow nurses who were recruited by less prestigious parents. Often, too, when they acted as a surrogate mother they came to regard themselves as the real decision-makers in the upbringing of ‘their’ children. Daphne Weymouth, who had her first child in 1929, remembered that the little girl’s nurse firmly informed her that ‘she did not approve of parents interfering in the nursery’. However, when the woman was found to be keeping the baby ‘tightly wound up in shawls with her hands bound down to her side’, Daphne summoned up all her resolution and dismissed her after three weeks. Ironically the final breach took place not over her treatment of the baby, but over the fact that she refused to allow dogs in the nursery.5 After this, Daphne took great care in selecting a new nurse, with Grace Marks the chosen candidate. She remained with the family for the rest of her life, finally retiring to a cottage on the Longleat estate after Daphne’s husband had succeeded as the Marquess of Bath.6 Over the years Nanny Marks experienced problems with other staff members, notably with the cook over the issue of nursery meals, and with one of the governesses, who was determined that the nurse should not interfere with the children’s education. She sought by various means to undermine the nanny’s influence but ultimately had to accept defeat.
Edwina Mountbatten, who spent her pregnancy in a frantic social whirl, dancing at night-clubs, visiting the theatre, and meeting her friends, unsurprisingly lost no time in passing her infant daughter to Nanny Woodard after her birth in February 1924. Edwina seemingly took little interest in the baby. Instead she concentrated on her own recovery, so that she could resume her hectic social round. With the aid of electric massage, three weeks after the birth she was ready for her first outing. Soon after that, she and her sister-in-law, Nada Milford Haven, went to Paris to purchase new clothes. From there they visited a friend at Antibes in the South of France. Edwina returned to England in April when Dickie Mountbatten himself came home on leave, and their daughter was christened Patricia Edwina Victoria a few days later. As Edwina’s biographer notes, few photographs or press cuttings relating to Patricia’s birth or christening have survived: ‘Edwina’s album for 1924 had dozens of snapshots of her friends, playing tennis, hunting, yachting, winning cups at polo, many of herself, three of Simon, her black spaniel, but only nine of Patricia in the first months of her life. Edwina consigned her daughter to experts.’ It was indeed her father who gave the little girl love and attention rather than her mother.7 Paradoxically, that seems to have made Edwina jealous and when her second daughter, Pamela, was born in April 1928, she was determined to retain the younger child’s affection, to the exclusion of her father. So when Dickie returned to England from Malta in July 1929, he was excluded from the nursery, Edwina giving as an excuse that the nanny thought his visits disturbed the baby. ‘Dickie was upset but believed what he was told and stayed away. Edwina’s albums had no pictures of Dickie and Pamela together. Mother and daughter, yes; father and daughter, no.’8 Nonetheless it was upon Nanny Woodard that both little girls depended for their day-to-day care.
Other socialites would probably have sympathised with Nancy Astor’s sentiments when she referred to Frances Gibbons, the Astor children’s long-standing nurse, as her ‘strength and stay’ and the ‘backbone’ of her home.9 That meant that if other servants displeased the nanny, they would be dismissed by Lady Astor, who took the view that if they could not ‘get on with Nanny Gibbons’ they must go. Edwin Lee, the Astors’ long-serving butler and the real linchpin in the running of the household, nevertheless conceded ruefully that it was useless to oppose Frances Gibbons.10
Like many of the nurses employed in these elite families, Nanny Gibbons was loved by her young charges. As was the case with the Churchill children, such women brought stability and affection into their lives when, often enough, they had little contact with their parents. At best they might be brought down once a day to the drawing room for a brief stay after tea, or parents sometimes paid short visits to the nursery. Only a few remained long enough to play with their offspring. Many children, like the young Churchills, accepted that although their mother was ‘devoted and conscientious’ in her contacts with them, it was her husband and his interests that ‘came first’. ‘We never expected either of our parents to attend our school plays, prizegivings or sports’ days’, wrote their daughter, Mary. ‘We knew they were both more urgently occupied.’ Mrs Richard Cavendish, whose father was at Court and whose mother was a daughter of Lord Bellew, similarly recalled that her parents were away from their Oxfordshire home at Compton Beauchamp for most of the time. This was where the children were based and the parents visited only at weekends:
When we were tiny children it was absolutely straightforward: Nanny Abbott took charge of us and during the week we did exactly what Nanny said. We had walks, and then we rode our ponies … and had a few lessons … [At] weekends there were grand visitors and we were shoved into smart clothes. We were much too young to see what was going on in the dining room, but we used to hang about on the back stairs and get food and delicious things when they came out of the dining room.11
It was Nanny Abbott who took them on visits to their grandparents, usually when their parents had other engagements, where they were thoroughly spoilt. And it was she and a nurserymaid who went with them on seaside holidays: ‘We would go to places like Frinton. We used to go shrimping and paddling … And Nanny, who never let on when she was at Compton that she was able to cook, cooked like a dream. My parents would come down to see us once or twice during our seaside holidays – they loathed coming … They’d come down for about three minutes and go away again. They’d done their duty.’12
Like many other girls in her social circle at that time, and much as had been the case before 1914, Mrs Cavendish did not go to school but was educated at home by governesses. They rarely stayed long ‘because we were so nasty’ to them. The schoolroom was a converted billiard room and neighbouring children from similar families came to share in their lessons. She and her sister also attended dancing classes in nearby Faringdon and when they were older they went to Oxford twice weekly for lessons in French, dancing and skating. During the holidays a French governess was recruited and this was a practice followed by Lady Astor for her children and by Lady Redesdale for the young Mitfords. While the governess was with the latter family, they were supposed to speak only French during meals.13 As a consequence at those times there was largely silence, though in later life Nancy, the eldest daughter, was to become an ardent Francophile.
Unlike Mrs Cavendish’s mother, Lady Redesdale took a personal interest in the rearing of her children, although in their earliest years she depended on the nanny, Laura Dicks (nicknamed ‘Blor’) for their care and training. All of the Mitford girls kept pets, and two of the older children, Pamela and Diana, had hens, the sale of whose eggs provided them with pocket money. Nancy had goats whose milk she sold to the estate’s home farm. Their mother also took up chicken farming on a considerable scale and was so successful that she later claimed she had paid the governess’s £120-a-year salary from the egg money.14 Somewhat unusually, Sydney Redesdale herself gave lessons to her children up to the age of about eight, and according to Jessica, one of the younger daughters, she was a far better teacher than the governesses she employed. Nonetheless these varied greatly in quality. The first to be employed was a Miss Mirams, who had the daunting task of not only teaching four children of varying ages and abilities, but of giving special tuition to the only boy, Tom, in readiness for his entry to a preparatory school.15 When he eventually went to Lockers Park at the age of nine he proved to be advanced for his age and, unlike many other boys going away to school for the first time, he seems to have enjoyed the change. As he had grown up with older sisters, and especially with the eldest, Nancy, who was a great tease and something of a bully, he was well equipped to cope with the minor difficulties of prep school life. He was suffici
ently good at games to enjoy them, was normally near the top of his class, and at the appropriate age he passed effortlessly on to Eton.
Tom Mitford’s education, moving from preparatory school to public school and then on to university, was one common to most of the boys in his social class. For the girls, however, schooling at home, with perhaps additional classes in dancing, French and music or other accomplishments was still widespread, as we have seen. Inevitably, too, as Helen Vlasto remembered, they had to accept the strict stratification which took place within the household. In Helen’s home the different floors seemed to divide the house into different worlds.
We children belonged at the top of the house … Right down below the ground floor, with its elegant public rooms, lived the maids, surrounded by kitchen, scullery, pantries, store cupboards, and a massive coal cellar … One thing … linked the top of the house with the basement, and vice versa, and that was the speaking tube. ‘Go and whistle down and ask Cook nicely for another plate of bread and butter, there’s a good girl,’ Nurse would say … After tea was the time for washing sticky fingers and faces, and for a quite painful hair-brushing from Nurse, in her hurry to get us going downstairs. This was the lovely time for doing things with our parents, and often for being polite to visitors in the drawing room.16
Even as adults such girls remembered the rules their nanny drilled into them such as, ‘Bread and butter first, then jam’, or ‘No such word as can’t.’
It was, however, a sign of changing attitudes that an increasing number of girls’ day and boarding schools were established from the close of the Victorian era. Towards the end of the First World War, Loelia Ponsonby, for example, attended Heathfield, which was considered at the time to be the most fashionable girls’ school in England, with fees to match. She did not consider the education she received to be particularly good, and regarded the highly religious headmistress as distinctly eccentric. The girls had to attend prayers twice daily, ‘putting on strange, starched caps, rather like nurses’. In sexual matters she remembered they were ‘absurdly innocent’. ‘Most of us knew nothing at all about the “facts of life”, even though we were fifteen or sixteen years of age’.17 She left after two years, with few regrets, probably because her parents were experiencing ‘one of their recurrent financial crises for I … just lived at home and rather languidly did a correspondence secretarial course … people said it would always come in useful’. Then, soon after the war ended she ‘came out’ as a debutante, noting drily that ‘till one came out, one was a child … speaking when spoken to, dressed in any old clothes (it went without saying that well-dressed children had common mothers) and of course no male friends.’18
Lady Astor, too, sent her only daughter, Phyllis (known as Wissie in the family) to school. Initially she chose a day school, Notting Hill High School, which Wissie attended during the week while her parents were in London. After about a year, however, in August 1922, Lady Astor decided that this was not in her daughter’s best interest. Originally it had been intended that she should stay on ‘until she was ready for college if she was anxious to go there’. But Wissie showed little interest in pursuing an academic career. This was not, however, the reason for her mother’s change of heart. Because she was living in a large, busy household, with weekends often spent at Cliveden and with her mother either occupied with her parliamentary duties or her social activities, Wissie became stressed. Nor had she many opportunities to get into the fresh air, as would have been the case if she had stayed in the country. Her mother therefore decided that she should attend North Foreland Lodge, St Peter’s-in-Thanet in Kent as a boarder. This was fairly close to the Astors’ holiday home at Sandwich and it catered for girls between the ages of twelve and nineteen. According to its prospectus, it aimed to ‘develop their characters and power of thought and, while rousing intellectual interest to keep in sight the domestic and social life in which they will take part on leaving school’. At the same time care was taken ‘to train them in habits of responsibility, order, and courtesy’.19 These objectives met Lady Astor’s own requirements that her daughter should be taught ‘unselfishness and a steadiness of purpose’, which, as she told the headmistress, Miss Wolseley-Lewis, ‘I feel you will be able to do, better than I can under the circumstances.’20
The headmistress was to prove a stabilising influence, anxious that Wissie should fit in, for as she told Lady Astor, girls shrank from being ‘different’. ‘Perhaps it seems to them an instance of the hated taint of “swank”!’ Initially Wissie’s school reports suggest that she was still under strain. At the end of the summer term in 1924, for example, when she was around fourteen, her form mistress called her ‘Good and helpful … but still excitable’, while the headmistress considered she had ‘made a real effort to do better work and to be more self-controlled’.21
Phyllis Astor seems to have stayed on at the school until 1928,when at the age of eighteen, she embarked on the important social rituals associated with ‘coming out’ and being presented at Court, thereby marking her entry into the adult world.
Unlike the Astors, Lord and Lady Redesdale strongly disapproved of girls receiving a formal education. They believed that they got nothing from going away to school ‘except over-developed muscles and an argumentative disposition.’22 Their daughter Nancy particularly resented this decision.
She felt for the rest of her life that it had hampered her intellectual development. In practice, as she had access to a good library at home and her governesses taught all the children along the lines recommended by the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU), her education was ‘thorough and reliable’. The PNEU system catered for children learning at home and each summer and Michaelmas term examination papers were sent out which the youngsters had to sit, much as they might have done at school. The papers were then sent to London to be marked.23 It seems more likely that Nancy simply wanted to get away from the restrictions of the parental roof. Not until she was sixteen, in 1921, did her opportunity come, when she was able to attend a school of sorts conducted at Hatherop Castle, just over the Gloucestershire border from her Oxfordshire home.
Hatherop Castle was owned by a Mrs Cadogan, who had several daughters of her own to educate. She therefore invited a small number of girls from neighbouring ‘superior’ families to join them. They lived in the servants’ quarters and were looked after by the family nanny, who acted as matron. The rooms were spartan and very cold in winter, and the academic programme sketchy, with French taught by Mlle Pierrat, and the rest of the curriculum covered by a highly competent young woman called Essex Cholmondeley. Mornings were devoted to lessons, and after lunch Miss Cholmondeley read aloud to them while they lay on the floor, presumably to rest and perhaps to improve their posture. The afternoons were spent in walking, sketching and netball, according to the weather. In the summer there was swimming and tennis. Once a week the largely unmusical Nancy had a piano lesson, and piano practice was a regular part of her routine.24
Nancy remained at Hatherop for a few months only but during that time she formed a friendship with Mary Milnes-Gaskell which outlived her brief ‘school’ career. She and Mary joined a troop of Girl Guides and her enthusiasm for this was such that when she returned home she set up a troop in her home village of Asthall for the local girls. Her two reluctant oldest female siblings, Pamela and Diana, were recruited as patrol leaders. After about a year, however, her interest waned, much to her sisters’ relief.25
In April 1922, seventeen-year-old Nancy, like a number of other daughters of the social elite, was sent on a cultural tour of Europe, visiting Paris, Florence and Venice. It was organised by the headmistress of a school in Queen’s Gate in London attended by one of her friends, and was carefully chaperoned. In many respects it was a substitute for attendance at one of the many Continental finishing schools favoured by the parents of other girls at around this time. Angela Lambert, tongue in cheek, has described these schools as bestowing a ‘light dusting of culture’ while instil
ling ‘the rudiments of feminine skills like arranging flowers’ and bringing their pupils into contact with a selection of well-bred girls of different nationalities.26
For Nancy Mitford this Continental tour proved a life-changing experience and one during which she felt that she had really grown up. The main disadvantage, from her point of view, was that she realised that her clothes were much less smart than those of her companions and she was not allowed to wear any powder, as they did. But on that point her father was adamant: ‘paint, however discreet, was not for ladies. Nancy had been allowed one concession, to wear her hair up, and that was enough.’27
Edwina Ashley, the future Edwina Mountbatten, by contrast, was sent at the end of 1919 to Alde House at Aldeburgh, which called itself a Domestic Science Training College. Its aim was to instruct ‘batches of twenty girls at a time’ in the rudiments of competent housekeeping. It was something of a halfway house in that its pupils were no longer girls but were not yet quite women. Like the others, Edwina took turns working as a scullion, in the laundry, and as a housekeeper, ordering meals, paying wages, and getting in stores.28 From her point of view its two main benefits were that it taught her that she was able to organise other people into an effective team and she learnt about the details of housework and was thus better able to manage her own household after marriage and to judge the competence of her servants. She remained at Alde House for a few months only and then, like Nancy Mitford, although on far more luxurious lines, she went on a Continental tour, with a chaperone and accompanied first by her cousin, Marjorie, and then by a school friend. Her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, had had three objects for Edwina to fulfil on this tour – shopping, culture, and integration into society. The trip began with an extensive clothes-buying spree in Paris and a visit to the Louvre, while in Rome she took in the city’s ancient sights, had lessons in music and Italian, and learned to mix in upper-class Italian society. Above all, despite feeble protests from her chaperone, she discovered it was ‘pleasant to do exactly what she wanted, especially if it was risky’. According to her cousin Marjorie, it was during this visit to Italy that Edwina ‘discovered men’. At the beginning of 1920 she returned to England to prepare for her formal introduction to London Society the following May.29