The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  Six months later Nan surprised everyone by marrying Lt. Col. Howard Lister Cooper, a friend of her brother’s, owner of a ‘darling’ Stellite car and one of the few men in her circle to survive the war. She was 36 and lucky to find a man; two million women remained single after the Great War. The couple moved to Wiltshire, brought up Anne Rosemary and Rachel and lived the ‘sedately married’ life she had once disparaged.

  Cecil Argles remained land agent at Wrest Park for some years, increasingly disturbed and aggrieved by what was happening. The Essex Timber Company felled many of the great trees, and the estate was finally sold in 1939, in disrepair, to the Sun Insurance Company for use as their wartime headquarters. His son Gerry produced no children–but Argles, being Argles, kept busy. To atone for the death of that young cyclist, still heavy on his conscience, he sat on the committee for the first Highway Code in 1931. He lived not far from Hannah, in the end: she in Northampton, he and Muriel in Wansford, Huntingdonshire. It is just possible that they met again, many years after that strange time at the start of the First World War when life was lived at a heightened pitch.

  XIII

  Hannah Triumphant

  It is not remembered where Hannah Mackenzie spent the remainder of the war. It is thought that she stayed on in Bedfordshire in domestic service. Whatever she did, she found the time and confidence to start another relationship with a man roughly her age–a man who was then picked off by the Military Service Conscription Bill of 1916 which demanded that men aged 18 to 41 sign up. Hannah’s unnamed sweetheart did not survive the war.

  The Mackenzies, like all families, bore their losses. Younger sister Nellie was widowed on the first day of the Battle of Loos in Flanders, September 1915, a month after Hannah’s departure from Wrest. Nellie was pregnant. Baby ‘Vermelles Hughina Munro’ was named after the cemetery where her father lay, near the battle that took his and 50,000 other British lives. Two years later Hannah’s older sister Jessie lost her second son William at the Battle of the Somme, 26 November 1917. He was 19 years old.

  Hannah’s response to the bleak post-war years of poverty, strikes and unemployment was typical of her chutzpah. On 25 November 1922, aged 41, she left her brother Alick’s house in Bedford and set off by train for the Liverpool docks with two friends, Ethel Nobbs, 23, and Jessie Quarry, 35, both domestic servants. Here they boarded the Titanic’s sister ship the Adriatic, White Star Line, for the thirteen-day crossing to New York. Two years later she was photographed at a studio in downtown Greenwich Village, close to the First Presbyterian Church where the Scots in New York congregate. Her great-nephew Ross still has the portrait.

  This 43-year-old Hannah is stouter, with a daring shingled hairdo and fashionable ‘barrel line’ dress falling in soft ruched waves from her hips. She still has that poise; that quiet air of self-possession. And something else: a hard-won satisfaction. The look in her eye in this portrait of 1924 might say to her old employer Nan Herbert, that no, Wrest Park was not the ‘supreme moment’ of her life. There was far, far better to come. Clearly Hannah was none of those things–sloppy, stupid, chaotic–that were levelled against her at Wrest. Or perhaps she was: but only momentarily, in the madness of love and war. Hannah must have been a class act among housekeepers, for she ended up working for the most famous party-giver on Fifth Avenue.

  There was a certain snobbery attached to having a Scottish housekeeper (thought by many to be the best), which might have proved irresistible to Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt III. The ‘top-flight hostess of her era’ was addicted to a lifestyle that had all but fizzled out in the post-war world. ‘They didn’t cut down in the Depression’, her chauffeur remembered. ‘They just went on the same.’24 She would routinely spend $300,000 a year on entertaining; guests included the Queen of Spain, the King of Siam, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, the Duke of Kent, Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill. She moved between the vast, Italianate mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue with its thirty liveried servants in Vanderbilt maroon (now the site of the department store Bergdorf Goodman), the family’s Rhode Island summer house, The Breakers, and a three-month stint in London followed by Kelso Castle in the Scottish Borders every summer, with full retinue of staff in tow.

  Grace Vanderbilt was in thrall to all things English–from her monogrammed linen, to her marriage hopes for her children, to her servants. Each summer she set about poaching the staff of her upper-crust English hosts. In 1927 she persuaded Prince Arthur of Connaught’s steward to become her butler; Stanley Hudson was to stay with her for twenty-five years, remembered by fellow servants as ‘a stalwart, heavy British, very true to his calling’.25 I like to imagine Hannah Mackenzie falling under the scrutiny of this 52-year-old Queen of Fifth Avenue, perhaps at an efficiently run ‘Saturday to Monday’ country-house party in Bedfordshire in the summer of 1922. Or perhaps she came recommended by her old friend J. M. Barrie, a regular at Mrs Vanderbilt’s famous soirées when in New York.

  Working for the Vanderbilts–the American equivalent of royalty–was exacting. Grace did not pay high wages, and her servants were ‘expected to do their work to perfection’.26 There was little time off, but few left her service. She knew, said her son, ‘exactly what she wanted and how to give directions’. She expected the same firm hand from her housekeeper. It seems that Hannah–‘Mrs McKinsey’ as the Americans called her–delivered the goods. For chauffeur Howard ‘Happy’ Grant, one incident stood out. On a Saturday night in the summer of 1926, four years into Hannah’s sojourn in America, Grace Vanderbilt gave a big dinner party at The Breakers, her in-laws’ sumptuous mansion at Newport (‘The Breakers was the ultimate’, said Happy). The two young footmen in maroon livery flanking the door suddenly started fighting. ‘In the meanwhile the guests are arriving. And there was a Mrs McKinsey’, remembered Happy, ‘who was then the housekeeper for Vanderbilt. And she came to the front door and she said to the head chauffeur, she says, “Well, Mr Sanguine, will you break this up?” And he said, “No, I got nothing to do with this”.’ So Hannah herself waded in. The men, a footman and Mr Vanderbilt’s valet, were fired the following Monday.

  The Vanderbilts lived and entertained on a scale unimaginable in post-war Britain. Mrs Vanderbilt threw a ball once a month. Twice weekly she hosted dinner parties for a hundred people. On a daily basis she gave ‘smaller’ dinners and brunches for up to fifty. One hundred people would ‘drop in’ for tea on Sundays, making the house feel ‘like Grand Central’ (according to her antisocial husband Neily, ‘the General’). There were six footmen in maroon breeches and jackets with white stockings and buckled shoes. There was the obligatory highly strung French chef, Charles Massé, who would spoil the staff with ‘individual shepherd’s pies in little dishes, lemon meringue pies and little tartlets’. (The servants, it is remembered, loved their desserts.) The bed sheets were changed twice a day; a bath towel would be used once and once only. It was like running a five-star hotel.

  When the family moved to Rhode Island after the New York opera season, a fleet of hired vans moved the Steinway, the Gobelin tapestries, the gold service and the trunks of Vanderbilt silver with them. The house at 640 Fifth Avenue was shut up for the summer; ‘everything had to be draped and everybody pitched in’,27 according to chambermaid Norah Kavanagh Sarsfield. Norah had made the journey over from Ireland in 1926, steerage class. She described the house rules for a lowly chambermaid thus: ‘You don’t cross the housekeeper ever. That is a mortal sin. You stay out of the way of the family. But you’re right there at a moment’s notice when the family wants you.’ ‘Mrs McKinsey’, by all accounts, ran a tight ship below stairs. Norah learnt ‘very early’ not to cross her; ‘that was a rule. You followed to the T what the housekeeper wanted you to do. You did it, and you kept your mouth shut.’ If you didn’t, you were out. But there was also ‘great camaraderie’ among the staff. Servants ate the same food as the Vanderbilts, drank the leftover champagne and when the family was away, the kitchen maids and footmen would roller-skate around the ‘humungous’ kit
chen. Young Irish maids Norah and Mary remembered once being ‘intoxicated’ while on duty. And their housekeeper, for all her formidable manner, kept her sense of mischief–the way she put those champagne corks in the fountains, giving Hudson the butler the fright of his life when he turned on the water jets each morning! Bang, bang, bang!

  Hannah returned to England in the mid-1930s with an American accent and an extraordinary stock of first-hand anecdotes about the likes of Lillie Langtry and Lady Docker. More importantly, she brought back from New York a tremendous confidence, which signalled the end of her career in domestic service. She took on a boarding house on Fellowes Road in Hampstead, her tenants eventually to include two brigadiers and an alleged German spy. When the Blitz made her living too dangerous she moved to Northampton to look after brother Alick, who’d lost his leg falling down a lift shaft during a blackout. Having installed a large American-style fridge, there she stayed, the classic spinster-sister housekeeper figure–and yet nothing like that in spirit.

  Even in old age, as great-nephew Ross remembers, Hannah was formidable trotting around London in feathered hat, fox fur and pearls, taking tea at Jackson’s of Piccadilly where she was treated like family. In a large deed box initialled ‘H.M.’, she kept her stocks and shares certificates for gold mines, Scottish & Newcastle breweries and British American Tobacco (given to her by the Vanderbilts). Ross has the box still: dark brown crinkled Moroccan leather made by J. C. Vickery of Regent Street–a shop with so many royal warrants that this was surely another gift from Mrs Vanderbilt.

  By 1981 Hannah was resident at St Crispin’s Hospital, Northampton–one of Britain’s last long-stay hospitals for dementia sufferers. Here the Northampton Chronicle & Echo caught up with her and took her photograph: ‘A glass of champagne for Miss Hannah Mackenzie, who reached her hundredth birthday at St Crispin’s Hospital on Monday’, reads the caption. ‘She enjoys a glass of whisky and a cigarette, too.’ By then she wasn’t able to tell them her story–but, almost inadvertently, the local reporter got it right. Even with dementia, Hannah still liked the good things in life. She died two years later, aged 102.

  Part 5

  Grace Higgens

  Charleston, East Sussex 1920–1971

  I cannot regard Grace as anything but a family appendage.

  DUNCAN GRANT

  Timeline

  1931

  – Five per cent of England and Wales employs a resident domestic.

  1933

  – Dettol, antiseptic liquid, goes on sale.

  1935

  – Penguin brings out paperback books at 6 pence each.

  1936

  – George V dies. Edward VIII succeeds and abdicates. George VI becomes King.

  1938

  – First electric steam iron.

  1939-1945

  – The Second World War. Half a million women employed by the armed forces.

  1939

  – Instant coffee first available.

  1940

  – Ration books introduced.

  1943

  – Conscription of all single women aged 19 to 24.

  1946

  – The biro invented. Family Allowances introduced for the second child onwards.

  1947

  – Education Act: school leaving age rises to 15.

  1948

  – National Health Service founded.

  1949

  – Family Planning Association clinics open at the rate of five weekly.

  1951

  – 0.72 million servants in England and Wales, a fall of 46 per cent. Britain’s first automatic washing machines.

  1953

  – Over 20 million people watch Elizabeth II’s Coronation on television.

  1959

  – The Morris Mini-Minor goes on sale for £500. First Spanish package holiday: 15 days in Majorca for 55 guineas.

  1960

  – Contraceptive pill available to women.

  1963

  – ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles. Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  1966

  – England wins the football World Cup.

  1971

  – Upstairs, Downstairs airs on ITV.

  I

  Forty-Four Little Books

  Here is a different story. Our housekeeper occupies not a grand country house but a ten-bedroomed, isolated farmhouse at the foot of the South Downs. She has none of the obvious trappings of power: no black dress, no keys around her waist, no wood-panelled sitting room with fireplace stoked by a cowed young maid. There is, in fact, no retinue of underlings to keep in line: she has just the house (damp, decaying) as her gruelling charge. She lives in close proximity to her mistress, eventually to share a familiarity unimaginable to previous generations on both sides of the class divide.

  The tale of Grace Higgens is a story of loyalty–excessive loyalty, perhaps–and it unfolds over fifty years of the greatest period of social change Britain has yet seen, defined by the central event of the Second World War. Grace entered service as a housemaid for the Bell family in 1920, when deferential teenage maids still curtsied and averted their eyes and cooks were hidden away in dark basement kitchens. By the time of her retirement in 1971 she was the last of her line: an anachronism serving a household of one in the same year that a drama called Upstairs, Downstairs made its debut on ITV. No one in 1971 had live-in servants. No one could find live-in servants. Or if you could, you kept quiet about it.

  Even though Grace married and became a mother, she chose to remain living in the freezing attic at Charleston working for Vanessa Bell (on £5 a week, bath night Fridays) right up until her sixty-seventh year, though her husband Walter clearly wished it otherwise. Having finally made the break, she was found a decade later by a Sunday Times reporter sitting in her Ringmer ‘chalet’, fulminating about a disrespectful TV documentary on the Bloomsbury Group (‘What rubbish!’). Through retirement and right up to her death, Grace kept scrapbooks of every press cutting she could find on the circle–her circle.

  The individuals she worked for had–and still have–a reputation for being wildly unconventional, so much so that it is odd to think of servants being a part of their ménage at all. The household of artist Vanessa Bell waxed and waned over Grace’s half-century to include her separated husband Clive Bell, their children Julian and Quentin and her one-time lover and lifelong companion, the homosexual artist Duncan Grant. There was also her younger daughter Angelica, secretly fathered by Duncan, whom Clive Bell had agreed to pass off as his own. Vanessa’s sister, the author Virginia Woolf, was central to this family, as was her husband Leonard Woolf. So intriguing and well documented is the group that its clamorous voice threatens to overwhelm this housekeeper’s tale. My aim is to turn down the volume on the ‘Bloomsbury Set’, on its clever irony and self-conscious wit, and to coax into life the unheard voice of domestic servant Grace Higgens.

  After her death in 1983, a hoard of forty-four little books was discovered among Grace’s possessions. She had been an inveterate diarist. From the first ruled exercise book kept beneath her mattress, aged 16, to the hardbacked, illustrated recipe diary written in her seventy-ninth year, Grace recorded her day-to-day life with an eye for pithy detail. There are the Provençal peasants on her first trip abroad with the Bell family in 1921, ‘who came & stared & jabbered in French’; the dinner guest resembling film star ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle; the Woolfs on their bicycles in Sussex looking ‘absolute freaks, Mr Woolf with a corduroy coat which had split up the back like a swallow tail, & Mrs Woolf in a costume she had had for years’. Later–thirty or forty years later–Grace was still trenchant. ‘Sat for my portrait after lunch…I had a peep & think I look a peevish woman’; ‘The house looks as if a tornado had hit it’; ‘Heard our voices on Tape machine. Sounded ghastly’; and, returning to France for the last time in 1960, ‘I spilt so much Chanel 5 on myself I smelt like a whore, but better I hope.’

  The cache of diaries, along with letters, phot
ographs and scrapbooks, was acquired by the British Library in 2007 as background material for scholars of Bloomsbury, every famous name carefully annotated. But the mundane nature of much of her diary entries (‘Whist drive’; ‘hen on goose egg’; ‘cricket match Firle’) give us perhaps a truer picture of Charleston than Bloomsbury’s own descriptions of the notorious house parties where T. S. Eliot was served two whole grouse, or when Quentin Bell dressed up as a stout lady and spoke in a falsetto. The arc of Grace’s story has its own validity: this was her house, after all, for thirty-seven years. In some senses it was more hers than Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s, who shuttled between London and Sussex. And for Grace’s son John, it was the only childhood home he knew.

  Grace was practically a child when she started working for Vanessa Bell; she was 16 years old. She did her growing up with this family. But at 30 she became a wife and soon afterwards a mother–and this is when she decided to make her married home in the attics of Charleston. She wouldn’t leave the farmhouse until she was 67. The intimate moments of family life were played out in small, squeezed spaces, under the noses of those she served. The Higgens family and the Bell family lived on top of each other, quite literally, in a claustrophobic unit that would have been unthinkable to previous housekeepers and their mistresses. There was no question as to which family had the worse deal–but what did it feel like to be on Grace’s side of the master–servant divide? Was this simply a tale of sacrifice, or was it perhaps one of an identity gained?