The country house consumed material goods on a massive scale. It was a kind of firm devoted to things: getting them in, keeping them in shape. Such seemingly innocuous things were at the heart of Mrs Doar’s downfall, so it is worth exploring exactly what they meant to her and her household.
Trentham Hall sat at the hub of a network of canals that carried a ceaseless traffic of cargo, both industrial and domestic. The lucrative Bridgewater Canal was the Marquis of Stafford’s own, while the Trent and Mersey Canal, laden with Josiah Wedgwood’s fragile wares, passed barely a mile east of Trentham Hall’s front door.
Not far off was another Midlands country house, Dunham Massey, whose housekeeper Anne Calder would have been known to Mrs Doar. Though thirty miles apart, they shared several suppliers, and in this way gossip would pass between the houses as grocer, butcher and brushmaker sat in easy chairs sipping sweet wine and expounding on local news. Like Mrs Doar, Mrs Calder kept a detailed ledger of her orders. By accident it is Mrs Calder’s ledger that survives. And so we know that in 1822 one local carrier on the Bridgewater Canal, a bargewoman called Mary Allen, handled no fewer than 177 different consignments for Dunham Massey–three or four a week–usually of several parcels, boxes, hampers, casks, crates or bundles at a time. These included barrels of vinegar, boxes of cheeses, nine fire-grates, seven coal boxes, bundles of carpeting and matting, eighteen chimney pots, eight slop pails, large parcels of sheet music, a hamper of soda water and a bag of feathers.15
Half a century later, one of Mrs Doar’s successors at Trentham, Mrs Ingram, kept a bundle of crumpled receipts for the year 1874.16 Passing through her hands was a complicated variety of goods, paperwork and money. The bills arrived from all over the country: ‘Baby Linen Warehouse’, ‘Country Tea Warehouse’, Clynelish Distillery in Brora. Through these receipts we can envisage the second Duke or Duchess of Sutherland airily waving a hand–‘Put it on the bill’–as they travelled round the country.
Mrs Ingram handled, among other things, kid elasticated boots, umbrellas, one dozen each of collars and cuffs, whalebone, velvet ribbon and hessian. She paid for thirteen easy chairs; for a gold clock to be repaired and cleaned; for moist sugar, lump sugar, Demerara sugar and arrowroot. There were heartburn lozenges purchased in Edinburgh, coke from the Newcastle Gas Works and two Minton busts of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland commissioned in Stoke-on-Trent.
She ordered calf’s head, sweetbread, tongue and suet; she paid for one box of cigars from Pall Mall, a firkin of ale and remedies from the Staffordshire local homeopathic chemist. For a certain Mrs Wills, who signed her receipt with a shaky cross–‘her mark’–she handed over £2 10s (£114) for a ‘counterpaine knit for Dunrobin Castle’.
These were not just things to Mrs Ingram or Mrs Doar. These shopping lists were, to the housekeeper’s eyes, minutely codified symbols of status. Everything–from the quality of the sugar in your tea to the stuffing of your mattress; from the type of painting hanging on your bedroom wall to the thickness of your ceramic soap dish–came down to hierarchy. Hierarchy lay at the very heart of the country house. As the manager of consumption, the housekeeper knew more about the multiple meaning of things than any other servant.
The order and structure of ‘little things’ was to become very dear to the Victorian upper and middle classes. Managing such household articles established ‘bonds of appropriateness’, so it was thought; bonds on which the whole order of society was built. Housekeeperly organisation and maintenance encouraged habits ‘without which man would tend to the savage state’.17
Outside Trentham Hall’s brick walls lay the industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent. The skyscape of blackened brick ‘bottle oven’ chimneys and slag heaps contrasted starkly with the soft woodland mirrored in Trentham’s still lake. Nothing could be less suggestive of beauty than this district of the Potteries: muddy and miserable, squalid and unclean. Here, people got by on bread and tea alone. A third of all children born didn’t live past the age of five, victims of measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria and bowel disease. Lead poisoning (plumbism) and ‘Potter’s Rot’ (silicosis of the lungs) saw to the rest. Life was savage indeed.
Trentham’s elaborate table services, Her Ladyship’s morning tea set, the translucent plate on which her partridge was served–all this came from Stoke, along with every chamber pot, slop pail and coarse, servant-friendly earthenware plate. Mrs Doar dealt in such hierarchies, and she was grateful to be on the right side of Trentham’s gates. How lucky she was. Yet even so, her world was filled with insidious and occasionally demeaning reminders of status. The devil, as they say, is in the detail.
She had her own bedroom and sitting room; her maids had to share rooms (and often beds). Mattresses were stuffed depending on your place in the hierarchy: straw or horsehair, flock or wool–feather, naturally, for the family. According to an inventory taken of Trentham Hall in 1826, we know that Mrs Doar was rewarded with a feather mattress, but of the inferior one-shilling-per-pound variety (the family’s stuffing cost twice as much). She also had a mahogany four-poster bed, five mahogany chairs, various stuffed armchairs, an oak chest of drawers, a mahogany fire screen and a white-covered sofa (a status-laden luxury in this climate of coal dust). There was a fitted carpet, window curtains and blinds.18 It was a big room, and it is strange to inhabit it in one’s mind; to view its contents like this, without having a clear picture of the woman who lived here. Physically, this is as close to Dorothy as the trail gets.
Steward William Lewis had much the same, but in addition his room boasted a hearthrug, a walnut wardrobe and a writing desk with black leather top and inkstand. He was a man, and he was her senior. The maids’ and footmen’s rooms, by contrast, each contained one beech four-poster bed, one chair, one small table and a looking glass. A mean square of carpet partially covered the draughty floor. Just how far Mrs Doar had advanced in her own career was a fact daily on show, as much for her own benefit as for others’. Her clutter of armchairs, polished mahogany and soft furnishings was a reminder of her power–and, implicitly, her vulnerability.
On her soap dish was a subtly graded bar of soap, of better quality than the coarser maids’ variety, yet not the coveted Rose or Windsor. It had been picked with a sense of entitlement from the store-cupboard soap boxes where best yellow, best mottled, Rose, Windsor, glycerin, white toilet, honey and soft soap lay cut in aromatic squares and wrapped in tissue.19 When the house was full the chambermaids were wont to slip used nuggets of guest soap into their apron pockets, thumbing their noses at ‘place’. Mrs Doar would turn a blind eye depending on her mood. She had her own porcelain washstand and set of chamber ware, more than the standard servant’s seven pieces but some way short of the bedroom sets upstairs, which might consist of eighteen pieces of chintz-patterned china matching bed-hangings, curtains and upholstery.
Some markers of status were subtle, others less so. Trentham Hall in 1832 was not a comfortable house for servants. The wind in winter would gust along the flat Staffordshire acres, whipping up the long lake and moaning through doors and windows. On the wrong side of the green baize door the basement rooms were poorly lit and damp, the attic bedrooms freezing cold. Servants’ privies, out in the muddy yard, were long-drop soil pits with a bucket of ash to sprinkle over your doings. Strips of newspaper hung off a nail for the fastidious.
Steward William Lewis’s room was detached from the Hall, next to the cowsheds, laundry and bathhouse and opposite the poultry. It was essentially an outbuilding and the air around it smelt of the farmyard, but this was ‘Pug’s Parlour’–a kind of senior common room where he, Mrs Doar and the other upper servants (cook, butler, lady’s maids, valets, head gardener, coachman) took their dessert and brandy halfway through the midday dinner at precisely a quarter to one, parading out of the servants’ hall and across the yard in strict precedence, holding bowls and spoons before them. This ritual was repeated at large country houses the length of Britain.
Neurotic attention was given to visiting lady’s maids and valets, who, below stairs, took on their boss’s status (and names). Servants’ manuals devoted whole appendices to this irksome subject. Mrs Doar made it her business to know that an earl’s eldest son always went before a bishop; that a duchess went after wives of the King’s nephews. ‘Excuse me, Mr Kirkby,’ I can see her murmuring in the butler’s ear, ‘but I think you’ll find that on this occasion, it’s Grosvenor before Bedford.’
But for all the airs and graces, these upper servants were not dukes or duchesses. A list of the value of meals per head per day in the Sutherland household at this time allocates 22s for family (£55 per head in today’s money), 4s for the steward’s room (£10) and 2s for the servants’ hall (£5).20
Mrs Doar’s personal lair is not identified on the architect’s floor plan of old Trentham Hall, but it would have been the hub of operations below stairs. This was the engine room of the house, where books were balanced, hopeful girls interviewed or dismissed, tradesmen met over glasses of sweet wine or brandy. As she talked through her requirements she would finger, like a gaoler, the bunch of keys that hung at her waist: symbol of her absolute authority.
The housekeeper’s store cupboard boasted a filing system so elaborate that only she understood the nuance and specificity of each item. There were, for starters, a panoply of brushes–from banister to ‘cow mouth’ brushes, round-table to stair-carpet brushes. It resembled a tightly packed ironmonger’s shop. Every Friday she would open it up, releasing the sweet-sharp smells of horsehair, beeswax and linseed oil, and would parsimoniously deal out the staff requirements (‘Another tallow candle, Paterson?’). Scullery maids and chambermaids, footmen, boot boy and knife boy jostled in line as they called out: ‘Blacklead, ma’am!’ ‘China cloths!’ ‘Beeswax!’
She guarded the linen closet more jealously still. Once a year, usually in winter, Mrs Doar would unlock its heavy oak doors and count over every item, entering it into a book with detailed notes on age, missing items, repairs and replacements needed. Fabulously wealthy the Sutherlands might have been, but old sheets and tablecloths were cut down and reused for children’s sheets, dresser cloths and powdering sheets (for protecting the shoulders when dressing hair). The linen inventory taken at Trentham in 1803 includes 461 napkins (of two qualities), 172 tablecloths (three qualities, one horseshoe-shaped), 109 sheets (three qualities), 441 towels (four qualities) and 78 pillow ‘coats’. There were 189 domestic cloths: china cloths, ‘rubbers’, pocket cloths, glass cloths, lamp cloths, dusters, horn cloths for polishing beer cups in the servants’ hall.21 ‘The right cloth for the right job’ might well have been Mrs Doar’s well-worn mantra, mimicked by the girls as they flicked playful dusters. There were, as yet, no cleaning fluids.
She knew the hierarchy of each piece of fabric in her linen cupboard by its heft in the hand, its particular weave and lustre: damask, diaper, huckaback, fine linen, coarse linen. Guests were given best-quality sheets and towels, then came family, nursery, upper servants and lower servants. Bed sheets for servants were made of a rough hempen ‘hurden’, coarse calico, or unbleached linen that until well washed had the texture of cardboard. Their sheets were made up of two lengths of fabric seamed down the middle, unpicked and remade by Mrs Doar and the maids when threadbare. Nobody wanted to break in a new sheet; much better to inherit a slippery-smooth one slept in by the girl who did your job before you.
Mrs Doar would have felt her position in the very weave of the flannel as she wiped the back of her neck; in the thread count of the pillowcase where she rested her weary face. No tuck or fold or crevice of life was left unassigned or unorganised. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ was the nineteenth-century housekeeper’s catechism.
Except with Mrs Doar, things were not quite in their proper place. In September 1831, just before the Duchess’s partridge-and-apple-tart visit, Dorothy Doar discovered that she was, once again, pregnant.