There were ten women working under the housekeeper at Uppark; ten women plus a cook. Mrs Wells was to oversee one lady’s maid, three housemaids, two laundry maids and one each of still-room, scullery, kitchen and dairymaid.
Back in the 1850s, as Mrs Wells remembered, the servants were drawn from Harting village with a handful from Petersfield and Chichester. By 1881 the census return tells us that they came from all over the country. There was the cook, Scottish, aged 26. There was her mistress’s maid, Emily Dyson, 29, from Suffolk. The young dairymaid, Mary Drinkwater, came from Cheshire and talked broad, as did the footmen Frederick Dunnett and Walter Larner, one from Norfolk, the other from Gloucester.6 The girls were mostly very young–17, 18, 19–and they left after a few months, a year at most. No one really wanted to settle, it seemed to Mrs Wells; they were always imagining the grass was greener at some other big house, or wanted to try some of this new shop-girl or factory work. A thoroughly modern ‘International Stores’ had just opened in Chichester, where Shippam’s meat-paste factory was also recruiting. As soon as you’d broken them in, they were off. By December of her first year, two of the young maids had gone and three more had been appointed. It was all very wearing.
With half an eye on the young housemaid who cleaned her bedroom up in the eaves, Mrs Wells managed to keep up her daily diary entry over the years that followed. She alluded warily to the hothouse of warring females she now found herself in.
Oh how I long for a quiet house.
The Cook disagreeable to Miss F.
No peace with servants here.
E & D most disagreeable. What a party.
Engaged kitchenmaid. Mrs Holmes gave warning.
To the Dairy. What passionate women, I never can think the end of it all.
The Poor Cook kept under by that horrid woman in the Dairy who can Pass it over!!!
What a party of women I am surrounded with.
‘Women’ is thrice underlined. Uppark was a house full of women. Mrs Wells’s closest colleague, the one she might expect to share confidences with, was the butler, Mr Lambert. But Edward Lambert (on £40 a year) lived in a flat over the laundry with two young babies and Frances, his wife. Even when in his pantry, his mind was elsewhere; he was his own agent. Grooms, coachmen and gardeners likewise, all lived out.
Sarah Wells was used to male company: she had three grown sons and a husband. To start with, she might have fancied herself on holiday from all their noise and need and mess. She wrote daily to her sons, yet was surprised to discover she didn’t pine for her husband quite as much as she felt she should. But once she had fitted out her private quarters and arranged her books on the dresser just so–an old Peerage, Crockford’s Clerical Directory, her yellow Bradshaw railway timetable, the Whitaker’s Almanack, Old Moore’s Almanack, an eighteenth-century dictionary and her well-thumbed Bible–the novelty soon wore off and she found that she missed them.
She had kept her own house for twenty-seven years. Now she must keep another’s, without any of the satisfactions of ownership. Neither the preserving jars of strawberry jam laid down on the shelves, nor the fine towels hand-hemmed and monogrammed, were her own. All her activity was directed towards the comforts of another. And, proudly independent woman that she once was, a certain sense of resentment began to grow.
Did not move out, busy all day, supposed to do nothing.
Busy cutting out fine towels.
Busy with goods from the stores, did not go out. Busy making up wages book.
Busy put Red Currant Wine in Cask about 5 gal.
Strawberries sent in for preserving. Busy all day did not venture out. Lovely day.
Not even the lovely day was hers to enjoy. However well she performed her duties, Mrs Wells could not break through the glass ceiling. There was no further promotion for a housekeeper, and none that would pluck her permanently from the basement.
Mrs Beeton’s description of the ideal housekeeper in her Book of Household Management (1861) has a poignant resonance for women such as Mrs Wells who had kept their own house. ‘The Housekeeper must consider herself as the immediate representative of her mistress, and bring to the management of the household all those qualities of honesty, industry, and vigilance in the same degree as if she were the head of her own family. Constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any domestics, she will overlook all that goes on in the house.’7 For a woman who had been her own mistress, no matter how shabby her domain, this sudden lack of any real autonomy must have been both demeaning and frustrating.
The respectable, much-sought-after position of housekeeper might well have seemed the answer to a certain sort of woman down on her luck–but the reality could be unexpectedly crushing. The Times carried dozens of advertisements placed by needy middle-class women, often widowed, seeking the job of housekeeper. 1850: ‘Wanted, by a highly respectable middle-aged country person, a situation as housekeeper in a tradesman’s family, or in any capacity of trust and confidence. She would prove a great acquisition. The advertiser is a widow, truly domesticated, and, having a small independence, salary is not so much an object as a comfortable situation.’ Here is another from 1870: ‘A widow lady, age 38, well educated, musical, with a good knowledge of French, domesticated, and fond of children, seeks an engagement as housekeeper to a gentleman.’
Innkeeper’s daughter Sarah Wells, with her finishing-school education and her long-buried aspirations to learn French, was of perplexingly similar social standing to Miss Fetherstonhaugh, daughter of a dairy farmer. The housekeeper occupied Uppark like a troubling mirror image, or understudy, to her mistress–reminding her how far the one had travelled and how far the other had sunk. The relationship was never straightforward, and was frequently fractious.