Sarah Wells’s diaries are at first glimpse disappointingly mundane:
Busy this week with my black silk dress.
Called on Mrs Budd took dripping.
Went to Harting and paid folks.
Miss F had her first drive since Sept.
But read in context, from a Victorian housekeeper’s room in the basement of a great house, they are revealing. They do not tell us too much about her thoughts, but it is possible to get a sense of what it was like to be down there, day after day: the frustrations, the consolations, the physical discomforts and the petty politics.
It was a startlingly unstable household. Written in the back of Mrs Wells’s 1890 diary is a list of cooks:
Mrs Stewart came to Uppark August 5th 1880 left Sept 22nd 1881
Mrs Bartlett came some time left Aug 1882
Mrs Heard came 14th left April 1884
Mrs Francis came in June 7th 84 left April 1885
F. Gate came Jan 1886 left Nov 1887
Mrs Clements came May 90 left Jan 91
Mrs Cates came Jan 20th left Feb 8th 92
Mrs Holmes came Feb 92 left Aug 92
Mrs Keeble came Aug 17th left Sept 17th 92
Mrs Harrison came Sept 92 left Feb 93
In the twelve and a half years that Mrs Wells was housekeeper, from the age of 57 to 69, ten cooks came and went at Uppark. Ten cooks. This was a good job, relatively well paid, in a notoriously relaxed regime with a gloriously spacious, high-ceilinged kitchen overlooking the South Downs. The cook did not slave away in the basement. Early in the century the kitchens at Uppark had been moved outside to a handsome brick pavilion accessed by a service tunnel. The dank old kitchen became the housekeeper’s still room for preparing breakfasts, sweets, preserves and tea. In these kitchens the cook, kitchen maids and ‘casual friends’ (according to Bertie) nattered away in the hot glow among bright copper pans in their own fiefdom. The workload was relatively slight: there were two bird-like old ladies to feed, who were often away, plus staff. House parties were rare; dinner parties unusual. Luncheon and tea were the usual hours for Miss Fetherstonhaugh’s sporadic entertaining of military and clergy types. Why, then, was it so hard to keep a cook?
Traditionally, housekeeper and cook had a prickly relationship. The housekeeper deemed herself to be above the cook, but the cook (along with the lady’s maid) was appointed by the mistress, not the housekeeper. Yet Miss Fetherstonhaugh gladly left the bother of recruitment to Mrs Wells, who was forever answering, or putting into the West Sussex Gazette, advertisements for servants. Perhaps she chose unwisely. Perhaps it was hard to find a cook for a big country house that had neither the excitement of gay house parties nor the labour-saving technology that professionals were coming to expect in the late nineteenth century.
Uppark was a mirror of the nation’s servant problems at large. ‘The servant who takes an interest in her work seems no longer to exist’, complained an article in The Sphere at the turn of the century; ‘and in return for high wages we get but superficial service. Where is the maid to be found who takes pride in the brilliance of the glass used upon the table or remembers of her own initiative to darn the damask? Every sort of contrivance now lessens labour–carpet sweepers, knife machines, bathrooms, lifts–in spite of these the life of a housewife is one long wrestle and failure to establish order.’15
For housewife, read housekeeper. With little or no support from above stairs, and none of the new Victorian technology, Mrs Wells was preoccupied constantly with staff spats in an era beginning to be known for ‘the servant problem’. Domestic service was still the largest single female occupation in the country, but it was becoming unpopular. Shop work, factory work, any work other than service was now being sought by young girls–girls unwilling to subdue their spirits to the sort of crushing dictates enforced below stairs. The prolific servants’ conduct books of the era strike a shrill, somewhat desperate note: ‘Do not walk in the garden unless permitted or unless you know that all the family are out, and be careful to walk quietly when there, and on no account to be noisy.’ ‘Never sing or whistle at your work where the family would be likely to hear you.’ ‘When meeting any ladies or gentlemen about the house, stand back or move aside for them to pass.’ These come from A Few Rules for the Manners of Servants in Good Families, published by the Ladies Sanitary Association in 1895 and again in 1901.
It was down to the housekeeper, of course, to try to instil these rules. Perhaps Mrs Wells was a bad manager of people. Perhaps, though, her raw material left much to be desired.
Wrote to Mrs Holmes hope she will come and help. What a worry this house is!!
Sadly vexed about Mrs Keeble not suiting.
Told Mrs Keeble about leaving what a miserable house this is!!
Worried with the Cook leaving how unsettled this house.
Mrs Keeble left. Mrs Harrison came. Miss Maxwell left.
Felt unsettled but hope it please God all will be ordered for the best.
The world was speeding on apace outside Uppark’s walls. In 1887 the gramophone was invented; in 1888 the pneumatic tyre and the Kodak box camera. In 1890 London’s first electric train made its journey underground, and by 1891 you could actually telephone through to Paris. Some innovations were welcome–there was now a treadle-operated Singer sewing machine in the housekeeper’s room. Others were deeply troubling. Women were demanding the vote, divorce was more commonplace; there was even a ‘Rational Dress’ movement to liberate ladies from long, heavy skirts and tightly laced corsets. By the 1890s women were playing tennis and riding bicycles (even smoking cigarettes!) with a freedom Mrs Wells found faintly shocking. The comforting old hymns they sang at church were being edged out by strange, modern tunes–like that one they ploughed through last Sunday, ‘What a Friend We have in Jesus’. Her old rural neighbourhood in Bromley, Joe told her, had grown into a noisy suburb of London. The ‘brown and babbling’ River Ravensbourne with its overhanging trees had been swallowed up by a new drainage system.
It was an era of furious, baffling change. In November 1892 Mrs Wells visited a young lady in the village and came away feeling horribly out of the swim of things: ‘Felt very unsettled and seeing such altered ways makes one very dull’, she wrote, sitting tight-lipped in the crepuscular gloom of the servants’ basement.
Her son, making his way in this exciting new world, felt his mother’s bafflement keenly as she got left behind. ‘Vast unsuspected forces beyond her ken were steadily destroying the social order’, wrote H. G. Wells:
the horse and sailing ship transport, the handicrafts and the tenant-farming social order, to which all her beliefs were attuned and on which all her confidence was based. To her these mighty changes in human life presented themselves as a series of perplexing frustrations and undeserved misfortunes, for which nothing or nobody was clearly to blame–unless it was my father and the disingenuous behaviour of people about her from whom she might have expected better things.
There is a photographic portrait of Mrs Wells taken in the 1880s, dressed in black silk and cap as a record for the great house. ‘Mrs Wells, Housekeeper of Uppark’ has a perplexed expression. She does not radiate confidence. She attempts to look dignified, but the eyes are tired and a little frightened, and the hand on her book is nervous.