1 ‘At Holkham Hall’: Adeline Hartcup, Below Stairs in the Great Country Houses, p. 93.
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.
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.
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.
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 the 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.
6 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1901.
7 ‘Footman left for impudence’: 11 September 1903. ‘The groom is a worry but I will make him leave the house at 10pm’: 10 January 1904. D/E/2816.
8 ‘At moments when a glass of barley-water might have been acceptable’: J. B. Priestley, The Edwardians, p. 61.
9 Sara Paston-Williams, The Art of Dining, p. 334.
10 ‘The doll in the blue knitted wool dress [in the dolls’ house] was dressed by a Miss Penketh who was stone blind. She was sister to the thief Cook who was at Erthig for many years’. From Facts and Fancies: A description of Erthig, Denbighshire by Louisa Matilda Yorke 1863–1951. This typed manuscript is kept at Erddig.
11 ‘…one never knows when they will turn nasty’: Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, p. 30.
12 As reported by the Wrexham Advertiser, Thursday, 5 December 1907. Mr Davies was called as first witness on the second day at the Ruthin Assizes.
13 Annie Kennedy, Memories of a Militant, on her first imprisonment in Holloway. Quoted in ed. Joyce Marlow, Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes, p. 41.
14 The Criminal Prisons of London, and Scenes of Prison Life, p. 194.
15 Mr Artemus Jones was made King’s Counsel in 1919 and a judge of the County Court in 1930. The practice of the judge offering a defendant a dock brief would have allowed Ellen Penketh to pick any barrister then in court to defend her for a very small sum, if any. My thanks to Victor Tunkel of the Selden Society for information on court practice during this era.
16 ‘Like many other country-house cooks, Mrs Penketh made free with the whisky and cooking sherry. “She’s at it again”, John Jones the footman was overheard to remark to Frank Lovett, as she approached unsteadily along the basement passage’: Merlin Waterson, The Servants’ Hall, p. 191. The anecdote comes from interviews between Waterson and the teetotal Philip Yorke III (who was two years old at the time of Ellen’s trial), and former maid Bessie Gittins, who joined Erddig in 1909 as a nursery maid, two years after Ellen’s departure.
The privately held diaries and photographs of Nan Herbert, ‘Scrapbooks 1909–1916’, are the basis for my story. Andrew Hann and Shelley Garland’s guidebook Wrest Park (English Heritage, 2011) is useful on the house’s history and contents. For details on nursing during the First World War, I consulted the Royal London Hospital Museum, together with Sue Light’s excellent website www.scarletfinders.co.uk.
BLARS–Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service.
1 Extracts from King George V’s diary quoted in J. B. Priestley, The Edwardians, p. 284.
2 H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through. ‘outside English experience’…‘thoroughly at war’, p. 208; ‘something like competition’, p. 250.
3 Caroline Dakers, The Countryside at War 1914–18, p. 39.
4 Mr Britling Sees it Through, p. 207.
5 The Bedfordshire Times, 11 September 1914.
6 Quoted in material at the Royal London Hospital Museum.
7 The Bedfordshire Times, 21 August, 4 September.
8 Obituary for Sir Sydney Beauchamp in the British Medical Journal, 3 December 1921. He was knocked down and killed by a ‘motor omnibus’ in Pall Mall, aged 60.
9 ‘A Scotsman on the make’, in J. M. Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows, Act II (1908). ‘Almost painful in its intensity’: Lisa Chaney, Hide-and-Seek With Angels: A Life of J.M. Barrie, p. 104.
10 Writing to Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland 12 January 1917, quoted in Janet Dunbar, J.M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image, p. 285. The play was The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, adapted into the film Seven Days’ Leave (1930) starring Gary Cooper.
11 Letter to Lord Lucas, 30 March 1916. Ed. Viola Meynell, Letters of J. M. Barrie.
12 Nurse’s autograph book, First World War. Imperial War Museum, Documents 351 (private papers).
13 Independent, 28 December 1914.
14 John Buchan, These for Remembrance: Memoirs of Six Friends Killed in the Great War, p. 22.
15 Barrie to Charles Turley Smith, Hide-and-Seek With Angels, p. 309.
16 Cynthia Asquith, Portrait of Barrie, p. 2.
17 Letter to Nan Herbert, September 1916, on the death of Raymond Asquith.
18 From Eyes of Youth (1943), quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, p. 22.
19 Balfour to Mary Elcho (later Lady Wemyss), August 1891. Ettie, p. 44.
20 Woman’s Life, October 1920. Quoted in Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, p. 97.
21 To Mrs Hugh Lewis, 1 September 1915. Letters of J. M. Barrie.
22 The Times, 4 December 1916.
23 Lady Herbert to Mr Surtees, 17 August 1917. BLARS L 26/1516
24 ‘They just went on the same’: Grant, Howard. Transcription of oral history interview with Tara Kraenzlin, 23 February 2001. The Preservation Society of Newport County Archives (PSNCA).
25 ‘A stalwart, heavy British’…‘individual shepherd’s pies’: Massé Smith, Genevieve (Charles Massé’s daughter). Transcription of oral history interview with Barbara Shotel, 16 August 2000. PSNCA.
26 Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr, Queen of the Golden Age: The Fabulous Story of Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, p. 310.
27 ‘Everybody pitched in’: Coleman, Patricia (daughter of Norah Kavanagh Sarsfield). Transcript of oral history interview with Tara Kraenzlin, 5 August 2001. PSNCA.
These notes are very much intended for the general reader rather than scholars of Bloomsbury. For background material on Charleston and its inhabitants during Grace’s era, I consulted the following: Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson, Charleston, A Bloomsbury House and Garden; Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell; Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness; Quentin Bell et al., Charleston Past and Present; interviews with John and Diana Higgens by Joyce Duncan, 2004, NLSC Artists’ Lives series, British Library. Quotes from Henrietta Garnett come from Stewart MacKay, The Angel of Charleston (British Library, 2013). All letters from Vanessa Bell quoted in the text are found in Regina Marler, ed., Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (Bloomsbury, 1993), unless otherwise specified.
I give dates rather than reference numbers to Grace’s diary entries, and only when this seems important. The Higgens Papers are kept at the British Library (Add MS 83198-83258). Letters written to Grace are part of the Higgens Papers.
I interviewed Diana Higgens, Anne Olivier Bell and her daughter Virginia Nicholson in June 2013. Grace’s son John Higgens sadly died of cancer in April 2013, aged 77.
1 ‘Awesomely noble’: Frances Partridge, quoted in Charleston Past and Present, p. 142.
2 ‘Splendid, devouring, unscrupulous’: Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, 16 February 1919.
3 ‘Oh, skivvies!’: Margaret Powell, Below Stairs, p. 173.
4 ‘Lady Astor’s personal maid’: Rosina Harrison, Rose: My Life in Service.
5 ‘Laundry maid Nesta MacDonald’: Pamela Sambrook, The Country House Servant, p. 207.
6 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1964. 28 June 1936.
7 ‘Dear Mr Bell’: Grace Higgens to Clive Bell, May 1934. Modern Archive at King’s College, Cambridge: ‘Maid at Charleston 1920–1970’.
8 ‘Please forgive me writing to you’: Grace Higgens to Vanessa Bell, 1937. Modern Archive.
9 ‘Servants all over the country’: see Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us, p. 17.
10 ‘Shoplifting proliferated’: Lewes Remembers the Second World War.
11 ‘A mother in Essex’: Millions Like Us, p. 62.
12 ‘A young Lewes mother’: Lewes Remembers the Second World War.
13 ‘Try to run a home’: Barbara Cartland, The Years of Opportunity, p. 134.
14 ‘Yours is a full-time job’: Good Housekeeping, August 1941.
15 ‘I’m happy just where I am’: author interview with Diana Higgens.
16 ‘Creative power base…height of my ambition’: Millions Like Us, p. 351.
17 ‘A family appendage’: Duncan Grant to Bunny Garnett, 13 October 1971. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant, p. 479.
18 ‘Every mortal thing…that lot’: author interview with Diana Higgens.
19 ‘Scones and cups of tea…superbly’: Christopher Mason to Grace Higgens, June 1969, Higgens Papers.
20 ‘Secretly a little pleased’: Richard Shone to Grace Higgens, January 1970, Higgens Papers.
21 ‘I don’t usually have much time’: Grace Higgens interviewed for Duncan Grant at Charleston, dir. Iain Bruce, 1969. Charleston Trust Recordings, British Library (C1180).
22 ‘What a remarkable record!’: Nigel Nicolson to Grace Higgens, 11 May 1978, Higgens Papers.
1 Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2002.
2 ‘Very like an Inn’: Adeline Hartcup, Below Stairs in the Great Country Houses, p. 79.
3 ‘A nervous breakdown’: James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942–1954, p. 288.