Nicky Garner drives through the Triumphal Arch in her black Nissan Note. It’s 8.30 a.m. and she’s running late. Two miles to go–into the deer park, over the cattle grid, a curve to the right and there it is: a severe Palladian slab in yellowish brick, crisp against its green parkland, straight off the eighteenth-century architect’s page. She swings into the immense gravel forecourt and climbs out: a diminutive, youthful figure in biker boots, tight black trousers and quilted gilet.
She enters Holkham Hall through the porter’s door and makes straight for her small office in the service wing. Neatly pinned certificates, from firefighting to tower-scaffolding safety, line its walls. Her desk faces the butler’s, but Daniel Green isn’t in yet. Last night’s corporate banquet must have gone on late. She logs on: several emails from ‘Lady C’, one from the new flower-arranging lady, one from the enterprises manager. A discreet Aztec tattoo is visible on Nicky’s right hand as she clicks away with her computer mouse.
This is the head housekeeper. Many things about Nicky’s role today would be unimaginable to the women in the pages of this book. Most obviously, just now, that she shares an office with a man; that she is expected to make her own tea from an electric kettle; and that Her Ladyship is so constantly in touch, with such a stream of informal correspondence. The photograph of Nicky’s two young sons pinned to the wall might catch the eye of Dorothy Doar, dismissed for requesting six weeks’ maternity leave back in 1832. Nicky lives locally with her family, and it is unthinkable that she might desert them as Mrs Doar and Mrs Wells were forced to do in the nineteenth century.
Her priorities lie outside the Triumphal Arch, and it might seem obvious, looking at the calm, unflustered face of Holkham’s housekeeper, that there is little drama or tragedy in her world. She is not crushed or bowed down by her job. She has to suffer none of the random injustices and upheavals of her predecessors; her life is not lived on the edge, or riven by crisis. Nicky Garner is the last in the line of this great tradition–and, thankfully, outwardly her life could not be more different.
She has put the morning aside to take me on a tour of the house, now closed to the public for winter. As we walk through the vast rooms (faded red flock wallpaper; Gainsboroughs and Guido Renis at every turn), she talks of her goals for the ‘closed season’. This year she’s putting her four girls on to the Saloon, the South Drawing Room, the South Dining Room, the Classical Library, the Manuscript Library and the Long Library. All six staterooms are to be ‘deep-cleaned’ by April next year when the house reopens to the public, and Nicky will lead the work from the top plank of the scaffolding, her ‘Museum Vac’ slung over one shoulder like a handbag, inching her way down the seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries with her suction nozzle.
I ask if she’s always this hands-on. ‘Absolutely. I will help clean the chandeliers, the canopies on the beds, the pictures, the picture frames. Everything you can see, everything you can touch, we take care of.’ Is there a pride in doing this kind of work? ‘Absolutely!’ This is Nicky’s favourite word, and it suits her: definite, deliberate. ‘I’m not just cleaning, I’m conserving. I’m making a difference.’ A walkie-talkie sticks out of her back pocket and as we walk, it crackles with news of distant estate business. Everyone at Holkham is connected. Nicky has a purposeful walk–forward leaning, proprietorial. Her dark brown eyes sweep each room, checking the closed shutters, the carpet pile, the fenders, the door handles (‘Lord and Lady Coke like to see very shiny, very brassy door handles and fireguards’).
The house as a whole is one very great work of art, crammed with the extraordinary spoils of the 1st Earl of Leicester’s eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Daily Nicky’s girls stride with their cleaning boxes past Poussins and Titians, Van Dycks and Canalettos to tackle the sagging Georgian furniture, the priceless silver plate and porcelain, the sixty Roman sculptures dotted around the place (one in a guest bathroom, peering voyeuristically down at the bath). It is an awe-inspiring place to work–and to visit, for Holkham is open to the public three days a week, seven months a year. Thirty thousand visitors tramp through these rooms annually. Add to this a heritage-industry programme of corporate jamborees, banquets, weddings, festivals and fairs, all requiring ‘some serious overtime’ from domestic staff, and you get a picture of the reinvented English country house that none of our previous housekeepers would recognise.
Nicky Garner is part of this reinvention. Her role is extraordinarily multifaceted: she’s waging war on the moth infestation, she’s digitally cataloguing the contents of the Fabric Room, she’s showing corporate guests to their bedrooms. But Holkham Hall is also a family home, and for Nicky the Cokes (pronounced ‘Cooks’) come before all else.
Having resurrected the stories of servants long dead, I was fascinated to see this relationship with a family in action. It surprised me to find a twenty-first-century housekeeper with so much invested emotionally in her job. Central to this reverence–and reverence is not too strong a word for what Nicky feels–is the housekeeper’s relationship with her mistress. Nicky is Lady Coke’s right-hand woman–she is her eyes, her ears and her constant prop.
Today the old master–servant relationship is closer than ever–the service wing is just a door away from Lady Coke’s Aga, and communication just an email or phone call away. ‘I tell Nicky to call me whenever she wants to talk,’ says her mistress–and she does, frequently. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Holkham employed sixty indoor servants. Today it has just six full-time and nine part-time staff, and there is a greater dependency on them than ever. Hanging in the corner of the laundry room is a flimsy Bellville Sassoon vintage dress in cream chiffon that Nicky will repair by hand. The modern housekeeper is as much lady’s maid as head housemaid; nothing should be beneath her. But if the prestige of the role is consequently lower, such intimacy brings its own rewards. ‘I’m up close and personal with Lady Coke’s clothes, her shoes, her children,’ says Nicky. She’ll even feed her mistress’s Black-headed Caique parrot, Basil. ‘I’m part of an extended family. I feel appreciated and very much looked after.’
Crackle crackle goes the walkie-talkie.
‘Nicky, it’s Lady Coke, are you receiving?’ The voice is light, friendly, not obviously posh.
‘Yes, go ahead Lady Coke.’ Nicky’s accent is faintly Norfolk, faintly primary-school teacher. She emanates dependability.
‘Nicky, do you know where I could find some fabric to decorate the Santa’s grotto?’ Holkham is preparing for its Christmas opening.
‘Yes of course, Lady Coke, there are some nice bits in the store cupboard in the laundry.’
‘That’s brilliant, Nicky; would you be able to gather them all up and leave them outside my kitchen, please?’
‘Yes of course, Lady Coke, I’ll do that straight away.’
‘Nicky, that’s brill, thank you.’
The housekeeper is above all a giver of comfort, physical and emotional, and her fundamental reward is being appreciated. It is a specifically female transaction, and it is a timeless one. The same relationship did not–and does not–exist between the master of the house and the butler. Lady Coke is conscientious about praising Nicky Garner. She is a great believer in the handwritten thank-you note, the box of Thornton’s chocolates after a big event. It makes a difference. It helps transform a potentially complicated relationship into something mutually satisfying and pleasurable. But it is a delicate relationship all the same, and it is at the heart of the stories I have told here.
Think of Dorothy Doar, welcoming her long-absent Regency mistress to Trentham Hall with roast partridge and apple tart back in 1831; and of Sarah Wells at Uppark, pulling off a High Victorian house party at the age of 69, her efforts ignored by her mistress: ‘Miss F very quiet…Miss F never asks if I am tired.’ Remember Ellen Penketh before her sudden fall from grace, collaborating with her mistress on each triumphant bout of Edwardian entertaining at Erddig, her Charlotte russe invariably chosen for dessert because she did it so well. Then there is the greatest charmer of them all, housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie, flying ‘like a bird’ to those Wrest Park First World War surgeons, in the absence of any praise from her mistress, attending to their needs until they were ‘tied to her little finger’. And think of Grace Higgens, the ‘treasure’, whose diaries noted every tip, every kiss bestowed on her cheek, every compliment for her cooking–in part because they were so rare.
In 2007 Lady Coke had placed an advertisement on the Holkham Hall website for a housekeeper. She, her husband and their four children had recently moved into this austerely beautiful palace set in 25,000 acres on the windswept North Norfolk coast. Along with the house they inherited the old staff that had worked for Viscount Coke’s father, the 7th Earl of Leicester–some since the age of 16. ‘I was given no book of tips from my mother-in-law,’ says Lady Coke. ‘I would have asked for advice, but I didn’t know what to ask.’ It was an ‘incredibly daunting’ period, she remembers, adjusting to the scale of Holkham and working out how to run it as a business. ‘There was a certain resistance to change among the staff. We weeded out those who didn’t have the right attitude.’ To Lady Coke, this elusive attitude is all.
‘Suitable applicants will be required to be conscientious, reliable and discreet at all times’, read the advertisement. ‘Excellent references and a good previous employment history are essential.’ Lady Coke also used an employment agency, but she soon discovered that if you mentioned Holkham Hall it either put people off, or it made them apply for the wrong reasons. ‘If you recruit someone to live in, they often have ideas about being in a position of power. They’re hands-off, managerial. I want someone to be hands-on, not afraid of getting down on their knees if necessary.’
The story of Lady Coke–Polly–echoes the story at Erddig Hall a century earlier, when new chatelaine Louisa Yorke moved into the big house. Neither Polly, a milliner by profession, nor Louisa, a parson’s daughter, were to the manor born. Both women came unexpectedly to these big houses set in remote rural parts of England. Those who served ‘the Hall’–Erddig in North Wales, Holkham in North Norfolk–came from families who had done so for generations. Each mistress (decisive, creative, on the cusp of 40) blew in as the agent of change. It was never going to be easy.
‘Oh! The trouble of the servants at Erddig’, Louisa Yorke wrote in her diary in 1902. ‘The new Housekeeper Mrs Osmond is to leave at once. She will do no work except arrange flowers!’ And so it turned out at Holkham. They came and they went: older women with a certain self-importance, ‘lady housekeepers’ who would not roll up their sleeves and who alienated their staff. They had the wrong attitude. Polly Coke might not have been born to the role (her mother, the fashion designer Belinda Bellville, still thinks it a good joke that her chaotic daughter should have ended up mistress of Holkham). But she knew that the housekeeper was essential to the happiness of her home. Like Louisa Yorke before her, Lady Coke decided to ignore the recruitment agencies and go with her instincts.
There are qualities you can list on a CV, or pick up on at interview, but there is something indefinable about a good housekeeper. In Nicky’s case you could argue that it is genetic. Nicky comes from the Butters clan–and Butters, historically, were born to serve. Her great-grandfather Henry Butters was a lifelong Hall handyman. His son, Fredrick Butters, was a footman and under-butler. Great-aunt Althea worked in the estate office after the Second World War, then as a room steward welcoming the first public visitors to Holkham in 1950; she married Albert Butters, another Hall handyman who doubled up as a footman. Auntie Sheila Gibson, ‘very particular, a bit of a clean freak’, was housekeeper to the 7th Earl of Leicester in the 1990s.
Nicky was born in 1979, eight years after Grace Higgens retired from Charleston. It was thought, back then, that treasures like Grace were the last of their kind–and that, with their passing, the fortunes of the English country house had waned. In 1955 these houses were being demolished at the rate of one every five days. By 2000, one in five (some 1,500) had gone. Those that survived had to adapt to a new world–and a different sort of servant. The Duke of Westminster was incensed to be taken to an industrial tribunal in 2002 by his former housekeeper Mrs Hewson, who claimed unfair dismissal from Eaton Hall, Cheshire because her face ‘no longer fitted’. It was countered that she had ‘harassed’ her underlings and spread ‘malicious gossip’.1 Mrs Hewson lost the case, and the Duke won a High Court injunction banning her from revealing details of his private life.
This is the sort of tale to make blue blood run cold, for the house-keeper’s position is, above all, one of trust. ‘They see me in my dressing gown. They see me shouting at my husband,’ says Lady Coke, who finds the lack of privacy one of the hardest things about her new life. But she had a gut feeling about Nicky Garner, a part-time cleaner at Holkham Hall with a forthright, personable manner and strong work ethic. ‘Not at all the stereotype; the sort you might go and have a beer with.’
Nicky is not the stereotype–she’s young, she’s of her time, she has her Aztec tattoo (and four more, she wouldn’t say where). But for all the immediate differences, I think my five earlier housekeepers would still recognise her as one of them. She has the same obsessive, literal-minded attention to detail; the same character that can’t step back from the job. They would nod approvingly at Nicky’s mantra, ‘Methodical, adaptable and logical’. There is something almost military about her. ‘I’ve always been ridiculously methodical,’ she says, flipping open a folder and showing me her annual graph on moth reduction (down fifty per cent in the staterooms and Statue Gallery).
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.