by Tessa Boase
When summoned to Lady Coke’s office in 2011 and offered the top job, Nicky wasn’t sure she could do it. She has always viewed herself as a grafter–‘someone who works really hard but never gets anywhere’. She was intimidated by the title Head Housekeeper, wondering if she shouldn’t be called Cleaning Supervisor instead. But, as she soon discovered, cleaning was the most straightforward part of her role.
‘Grateful, tearful and slightly petrified’, she signed up for a trial period. ‘It was such an honour. I felt I had a lot to prove.’ But unlike our previous housekeepers, it was never assumed that she would do it all by herself. The daunting responsibility of running Holkham Hall was not placed squarely on her shoulders, but shared by a network of senior staff–estates director, enterprises manager, collections and security manager, cook–with the Cokes just as closely involved. Nicky’s previous job was in catering, but her mistress didn’t seize the opportunity and make her cook-housekeeper, as Louisa Yorke did with Ellen Penketh. Today that would be seen as exploitation. Portuguese cook Maria is in charge of the family and big events, while mistress and master like to cook in their own kitchen. If indifferent fare is served up to important visitors, it is the enterprises manager, not Holkham’s housekeeper, who takes the rap.
As a child, Nicky used to picnic in the grounds of Holkham Hall like any other tourist, and she found it hard to believe that somebody actually lived there. Like a castle in a fairy tale, it fascinated her. ‘It was so huge. And I was so tiny.’ Today, as she swings her car down the avenue and sees the great house before her, ‘I think, Wow! I work in there.’ None of her forebears had the same daily experience of a fresh perspective on their place of work. They lived in the house; they spent their days in its service quarters. They could never step back from it.
Nicky feels awe, and she also feels pride. Perhaps not for a hundred years has this great house been so well looked after, and she is part of its renaissance. There is a level of luxury and an attention to detail throughout–from the little silver vases of flowers in each bedroom, to the crisply laundered linen napkins at the breakfast table–that can only be attained by a highly motivated professional team.
The Hall has a long tradition of hospitality. In 1822 it was said to be ‘always full and very like an Inn, for people arrive without any previous notice and seem to stay as long as they like’.2 Even in the dark days of the Second World War and its aftermath it kept up appearances. When James Lees-Milne visited in June 1947 on behalf of the National Trust, he found it to be ‘superbly kept up, all the steel grates, for instance, shining brightly, the work of one devoted daily’, despite the fact that Lady Leicester had a nervous breakdown ‘brought on by the anxiety and worry of keeping up Holkham with practically no servants. What these wretched landowners have to go through!’3
Male Cokes have always been house-proud, even housekeeperly. In the 1950s and 1960s the 5th Earl of Leicester would go and check the lavatory paper and the writing paper in all the bedrooms, to his wife’s exasperation. Polly’s husband Tom, Viscount Coke (son of the 7th Earl), is equally fastidious. He checks the fridge; he goes through the recycling bins. In Holkham’s public spaces ‘he’ll pick out a cobweb at one hundred miles. He’s got more quirks than Lady Coke,’ says Nicky. ‘He hates chemicals. He’s definitely one for the brass. He’s fanatical about linseed oil.’
Nicky must train her four girls in the Holkham Hall ways, such as Lady Coke’s obsession with the level of water in the flower vases. ‘My new girl Claire is petrified. Petrified that she’ll bump into Lord or Lady Coke; that she’ll get something wrong.’ Victorian maids caught at work would once feign invisibility. Today, the down-to-earth Cokes would be mortified if their staff thought them unapproachable–but these old upstairs-downstairs reflexes are, not surprisingly, hard to lose when you work in a house as historically grand as this.
If Nicky Garner and Polly Coke had met as strangers, say, while walking their dogs on the white sands of Holkham beach, there would be none of this standing on ceremony. They would be two local mothers–one small and sturdy, the other tall and willowy–equally entitled to ownership of this ravishing stretch of British coastline. Class distinctions are less immediately obvious today. But once the big house is brought into the equation, the setting seems to demand a different sort of protocol. Polly winces when journalists use the title Viscountess Coke, but there is no getting away from it. The heft of Holkham Hall enforces this slightly absurd world of lords and ladies, housekeepers and butlers. Nicky and Polly are both playing a role, and each has had to work hard at her part.
Nicky has been sent on many a human resources training course, from people management to etiquette. Lady Coke is blunt about her housekeeper’s foibles: ‘She can be too chatty, overfamiliar. She’s had to learn when to hold back, to learn the manners of a different generation. For example, I don’t want her saying goodbye to guests at the same time that Tom and I are seeing off our friends. But she doesn’t mind being told.’
‘It’s all part and parcel,’ Nicky shrugs. ‘I’ve learnt through trial and error.’ She still has excruciating moments–such as the time she gave Lady Coke a grateful hug in return for a present. ‘I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get a warning now.’ But she didn’t. Lady Coke hugged her back and told her not to worry. ‘Still, I walked away and thought, I shouldn’t have done that.’ Does she sometimes feel as if she’s bowing and scraping? ‘Yes, especially when I’m apologising. And it has to be “Lord and Lady Coke”; I’ve learnt not to overstep the mark. It’s a humble position; there is a lot of yes sir, no sir.’ But Nicky thrives on all this; she likes working for what she calls ‘high-ranking people’.
When I asked Lady Coke if I might spend a day with her housekeeper, she first sought Nicky’s permission. It wasn’t what she might say that bothered Lady Coke; she just wanted to make sure her housekeeper would be comfortable appearing in a book. Nicky, for her part, was honoured. ‘I’m quite excited, to say the least. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity,’ she’d emailed back to her mistress–who was, in turn, rather touched. Such transparency did not exist a century previously. In 1907, the Yorkes of Erddig Hall were mortified to have the workings of their household exposed in court. Servants ‘getting above themselves’ were once firmly to be discouraged, and an instinctive reticence was the result. Hannah Mackenzie lost her job for forgetting her place at Wrest Park in 1915. Grace Higgens was hesitant talking to journalists about Charleston even in her retirement.
But Nicky is very much a talker, and shows every sign of becoming a Holkham Hall ‘character’; a fixture like her aunts Althea Butters and Sheila Gibson before her. Does she see herself here in twenty, even thirty years’ time? ‘Absolutely! If I ever leave I’ll be dragged out kicking and screaming.’ But while Polly’s tenure at the Hall will pass into history, in time becoming the story of the 8th Earl and Countess of Leicester, Nicky’s most probably won’t. She might be remembered anecdotally for her obsession with moths, or for the green and gold she revealed in the tapestries by introducing the Museum Vac. She might even get her portrait painted, a new Coke tradition introduced by the 7th Earl in 1993. But who will be able to discover the story of Nicky Garner in a hundred years’ time?
This book has shone a light on a handful of women who, for the most part, did not make it into history. It has resurrected them as human beings rather than as footnotes in the archives: real women with opinions, hopes, anxieties and crises. Many were erased from the story of the big house, and I like to think that in tuning into their faint voices, in sifting through the evidence, I’ve helped to set the record straight. There were many hundreds of such women working in the basements of our great houses throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century; these are just five representative stories. Read together, they form a salute to the dedication, tenacity and sheer hard toil of the housekeeper, and an attempt to give her back the dignity she was largely denied in life.
Notes
Prologue
2 ‘A goody sort’: Below Stairs, p. 89.
3 ‘The under-maids’: Eric Horne, What the Butler Winked At, p. 65.
4 ‘Out of Dickens’: ed. Merlin Waterson, The Country House Remembered, p. 42.
5 ‘Faithful and excellent’: Wilton Household Regulations, quoted in Jeremy Musson, Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant, p. 148.
Part 1: Dorothy Doar
The Sutherland Collection at the Staffordshire Record Office (SRO D593) is my source for all family and servant correspondence, estate ledgers, floor plans, wage books and miscellaneous records, unless otherwise stated.
1 The Leveson-Gowers’ wealth and houses, guest comments: Eric Richards, The Leviathan of Wealth: Sutherland Fortune in the Industrial Revolution.
2 ‘Pigmy and dingy’: Gervas Huxley, Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors, Life in a Whig Family 1822–1839.
3 ‘Jewellery worth £3,622. 8s. 6d.’: The Leviathan of Wealth.
4 ‘I rushed to the potager’: 19 November 1828. Letters of Harriet, Countess Granville, 1810–1845.
5 French appendix: Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant.
6 ‘Strictly abstain from all conjugal intercourse’: The Diaries of Sylvester Douglas.
7 ‘Encourage Sellar in trouncing these people’: The Leviathan of Wealth.
8 ‘As good as a play’: Thomas Creevey, The Creevey Papers. Entry from 1833.
9 ‘A delightful voyage’: Letters of Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland and Marchioness of Stafford, to her husband George, Marquis of Stafford (later 1st Duke of Sutherland) during her visit to Sutherland. SRO D6579/11/1-41.
10 Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant. (1825)
11 ‘She must be able to undertake’: correspondence to James Loch, SRO D593/K/3/1/5.
12 ‘Every shilling we have’: James Loch to William Lewis, SRO D593/K/1/3/20.
13 The Potteries: Employment of Children and Young Persons in the District of the North Staffordshire Potteries and on the Actual State, Conditions and Treatment of Such Children and Young Persons: report by Dr Samuel Scriven, submitted 1841, published 1843.
14 1840 wages book for all four houses: SRO D593/R/4/3.
15 Dunham Massey: Pamela Sambrook, A Country House at Work.
16 Mrs Ingram’s vouchers, 1874: SRO D593/R/10/7.
17 ‘Little things’: Julia McNair Wright, The Complete Home, quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things.
18 List taken from the 1826 inventory of household furniture at Trentham Hall, SRO D593/R/7/10b.
19 ‘Best yellow soap’: Mrs Ingram’s vouchers.
20 A list for the value of meals: Mr Vantini’s accounts books 1833–38, Household Disbursements. SRO D593/R/1/8.
21 1803 linen inventory, Trentham Hall. SRO D593/R/7/2.
22 The Countess of Carlisle: Dorothy Henley, Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle.
23 An 1864 entry from Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letters and Memorials. Jane Welsh Carlyle was a letter writer, diarist and wife of essayist Thomas Carlyle.
24 Foundling Hospital. John R. Gillis, ‘Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’. Feminist Studies vol. 5, no 1, Spring 1979.
25 Bucks Herald, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Sheffield Independent between 15 and 29 December 1849.
26 ‘A liberal use of their sticks’: Staffordshire Advertiser, 4 February 1832.
27 ‘This is our time!’: Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 5 April, reporting on the court case for the October 1831 Bristol and Bath riots.
28 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ‘Gin-Shops’, Chapter XXII. Published 1833–6 in newspapers and periodicals.
29 ‘Her Ladyship desires me to say’: letters from Loch to Lewis and Lewis to Loch, from SRO D593/K/3/1/18 and D593/K/3/2/12.
30 ‘You will excuse my troubling you’: miscellaneous correspondence with James Loch, SRO D593/K/1/3/20.
31 Ball at Ashburnham House: Morning Post, 13 April 1832. All further court and social reports mentioning the Marchioness of Stafford are taken from London’s Morning Post, May 1832.
32 ‘Disastrous news from London’: Mr Lee to James Loch, SRO D593/K/1/3/20.
33 Thomas Creevey, The Creevey Papers.
34 ‘An astounding hissing and yelling’: Staffordshire Advertiser, 19 May 1832.
35 Domestic Servants As They Are & As They Ought To Be: A few friendly hints to employers by a practical mistress of a household. With some revelations of Kitchen Life and Tricks of Trade.
36 Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant.
Part 2: Sarah Wells
Copies of the five diaries of Sarah Wells are kept at the West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), MSS 41,235–9. I have dated extracts only where relevant or meaningful.
Other material comes from personal observation at Uppark today, and from these books: Margaret Meade-Fetherstonhaugh and Oliver Warner, Uppark and Its People, for Harry Fetherstonhaugh’s marriage to Mary Ann Bullock, and the subsequent reign of Frances Fetherstonhaugh and Ann Sutherland at Uppark. Margaret Meade-Fetherstonhaugh inherited the house in 1930 and spoke to those who remembered the High Victorian era. Most archives used for the book were destroyed in the fire of 1989. H. G. Wells, Volume I of Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), for Sarah Wells’s life and employment and her son’s visits to Uppark. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, an autobiographical novel in which Uppark is recreated as ‘Bladesover’ and Bertie Wells is ‘George’.
1 Quoted in Pamela Horn, The Rise & Fall of the Victorian Servant, p. 58.
2 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 110.
3 The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, pp. 423–4.
4 ‘Servants included…’ from 1851 census.
5 Accounts from Frances Bullock Fetherstonhaugh’s bank books, WSRO Uppark MSS 234–9. Staff lists and payments from Box of Accounts (twenty-six bundles for year 1880), Uppark MSS 861.
6 Taken from the 1881 and 1891 census.
7 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, p. 19.
8 Box of Accounts (twenty-six bundles for year 1880), WSRO Uppark, MSS 861.
9 ‘There came and went on these floors…a peer of the United Kingdom’: Tono-Bungay, p. 13.
10 ‘O God how dull I am!’ Letter to A. T. Simmons quoted in Geoffrey West, H. G. Wells, p. 71.
11 ‘Take it to Petworth’: Christopher Rowell, Uppark (The National Trust, 1995), p. 33.
12 ‘Winds, wet ways and old women’: Letter to Miss Healey, quoted in H. G. Wells, p. 71.
13 Frances Bullock Fetherstonhaugh’s bank books, WSRO Uppark MSS 234–9.
14 Box of Accounts (twenty-six bundles for year 1880), Uppark MSS 861.
15 The Sphere–quoted in Frank Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants: Domestic service in England 1850–1939, p. 21.
16 ‘Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty’. The Westminster Review, vol. 43, March–June 1845, pp. 162–92.
17 The Lancet, 19 August 1905, p. 546.
18 Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, p. 5.
19 Crichton-Browne, Education and the Nervous System (1883), quoted in Shattered Nerves, p. 200.
20 Eric Horne, More Winks, Being further notes from the life and adventures of E. Horne, p. 46.
Part 3: Ellen Penketh
Much of my material comes from the diaries of Louisa Matilda Scott (later Mrs L. M. Yorke), 1885–1909, kept at Flintshire Record Office, Erddig MSS, D/E/2816.
Other documents consulted in this archive (Erddig MSS, GB 0208 D/E) include:
Housekeeper’s Petty Cash Accounts 1902–27 (D/E/463)
Mrs Yorke’s Household Accounts 1902–18 (D/E/464)
Estate Cash Book 1904–24 (D/E/2365)
For the history of Erddig and descriptions of Meller and th
e Yorke family, I have consulted Merlin Waterson’s The Servants’ Hall: a domestic history of Erddig as well as talking to Mr Waterson. As the National Trust’s agent at the time of Erddig’s handover, he spent much time with Philip Yorke III before Philip’s death in 1978.
For details of guests and entertaining I have consulted the Yorkes’ visitors’ book (1902–14) kept by the National Trust at Erddig.
For Ellen Penketh’s hearing at Wrexham Magistrate’s Court and her trial at the Ruthin Assizes, I have used the detailed reports in the Wrexham Advertiser (27 September and 5 December 1907) and the North Wales Guardian (6 December–an edition kept by the Yorke family, now in the Erddig archive, D/E/2754).
I have filled in the gaps in Ellen Penketh’s life using the National Census; the Female Nominal Roll at Shrewsbury Prison (1905–21) held at Shropshire Archives, SA 6405 and the Home Office Identity and Passport Service for her death certificate.
Details on Ruthin Gaol and its regime come from material and archives on display (now open as a museum, www.ruthingaol.co.uk).
1 D/E/2820 Letter from Philip Yorke II to Mr Campbell, 15/11/1877.
2 Butler’s letter to Mr Hughes, 9 December 1897, Erddig MSS, D/E/595.
3 ‘Between 1901 and 1911, the number of maids aged 14-plus willing to go into service dropped by over 62 per cent’: Pamela Horn, Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century, p. 12.
4 ‘…inevitably a source of friction’: E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw, p. 238.
5 ‘…by lowering a key in a basket’: according to maids interviewed by Merlin Waterson for The Servants’ Hall, this was what Ellen Penketh’s successor Miss Brown used to do.
