In old age, Hannah Mackenzie was remembered for the nicotine stain in her shock of white hair and her fondness for shouting out, in a throaty American accent, ‘Now look here, sister!’ and ‘You bunch of bums!’ She was forceful, irreverent, a practical joker and a flirt. In her retirement she consumed one hundred Chesterfield cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch a day–delivered by relatives to her hospital bed in Northampton even as dementia set in. She also, evidently, had great charm.
Her career in domestic service spanned the Victorian industrialist middle classes, the Edwardian conservative nouveau riche, the liberal aristocracy during the Great War and the American super-rich of the Roaring Twenties. She went into service at the turn of the century, when whalebone corsets and gaslighting were the norm. She reached her prime twenty-five years later in a New York palazzo working as head housekeeper to the Vanderbilts, with shingled hair, silk stockings and a six-line telephone system. By any standards of domestic service, this was an unimaginable career for a working-class woman from Inverness.
This story shines a spotlight on one year of Hannah’s career–August 1914 to August 1915. It is a snapshot of a great house at an extraordinary moment in time: a critical juncture in British social history. Wrest Park in Bedfordshire was the first country-house war hospital to receive wounded soldiers from the Great War. It was one of many such hospitals, but an exemplary one, and the two women who ran it were among the first in the country to experience what the war actually meant in all its horror. Amputations, gas poisoning, shell shock, shrapnel wounds…the Honourable Nan Herbert and her housekeeper Mrs Mackenzie were witness to it all–and it changed them, perhaps fundamentally.
One year after her appointment, with Wrest Park Hospital at the peak of its efficiency, Hannah was forced to resign. ‘Downstairs’ had become ‘dangerous and disorderly’, an unhappy place for domestic staff to work–all, allegedly, her doing. What is more, the public-school-educated land agent Cecil Argles had fallen ‘violently’ in love with her. Housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie was the only thing, Mr Argles confessed, that stopped him from going mad.
In researching Hannah’s story I had no idea what, or how much, I would find. Many housekeepers typically left no trail behind them, especially when a great house such as Wrest Park changed hands after the First World War. All I had was one photograph–a formal portrait of two upper servants taken in 1914. The woman with a red cross on her implacable bosom looks at some imaginary point in the sky: this is the cook, Hetty Geyton. The younger, seated woman has an air of poise and composure: so much so, you might mistake her for the lady of the house, were it not for the bunch of keys in her lap. She is, for a servant, remarkably comfortable with the camera.
The Honourable Nan Ino Herbert kept a detailed diary of Wrest Park’s role in the Great War, probably with an eye to posterity. Today an annotated version survives with the family, typed out and pasted into a series of scrapbooks by her daughter in the 1950s. This has since become the official version of events at Wrest Park: a remarkable unpublished archive crammed with small black-and-white photographs. Domestic servants form just a footnote to the narrative, but it’s clear that they were a source of upset and constant anxiety to Nan. The real business to her was the war, the wounded soldiers and the smooth running of the hospital. Domestic spats were not meant to be a part of this heroic story. Yet Hannah Mackenzie jumps off the pages of Nan’s diary–feisty and strong-willed, a manipulative charmer, attractive to men. What the mistress wrote about the housekeeper is scant, but it is also telling. Here, clearly, was a ‘character’. Hannah’s audacious story seemed to capture the texture of domestic service during the Great War: uneasy, complicated, explosive.
Piecing together the fragments of her life involved much patient detective work. Biographies, letters, notebooks, census returns, shipping records, dusty archives–I trawled through them all. Once I had narrowed down the census returns to the right woman and sent off for her death certificate, I was astonished to find that Hannah had a living relative in Northampton with a clear memory of her.
Ross Mackenzie, her great-nephew, was born in 1947; Hannah was his favourite great-aunt from a large family clan now split between Inverness, Northampton and Australia. One snowy afternoon, over champagne, Benson & Hedges and egg mayonnaise bridge rolls, Ross told me all he could remember of Hannah, filling in the gaps in her story. It emerged that she went on to work as housekeeper to the greatest American socialite of them all–Mrs Grace Vanderbilt. Wrest Park was just one episode in a colourful career, imparted to the young Ross through well-oiled anecdotes. He remembered her fondness for practical jokes, and the way she ‘trotted round London with her handbag’ (crocodile skin; a gift from Jackie Kennedy). She smoked Cuban cigars. She could drink a man under the table. She was, in later life, deeply into séances and spirit friends. At her funeral in 1985, two brigadiers were among the congregation. Hannah, in the eyes of her great-nephew, was ‘such good fun–not like a normal auntie’.
I set out to re-examine Hannah Mackenzie’s mysterious disgrace at Wrest Park Hospital during this febrile era for domestic service. ‘Settled Hannah’s “holiday”’, wrote her mistress disingenuously on the last day of August 1915. The house had become ‘dangerous and disorderly’: what exactly did this mean? Was Mrs Mackenzie a troublemaker? Or was she working in an impossible situation? Hannah’s experience and her disgrace were perhaps indicative of an old order crumbling. Up until now, the role of housekeeper had been straightforward, even prescriptive. From the Great War onwards it was not at all so. The war acted as a leveller of hierarchies, and with their collapse the function of domestic staff was no longer so clear-cut–nor did the old servile reflexes come so easily. When a great house changed its use as dramatically as Wrest Park, from indulgent weekend chateau to war hospital, the role of the upper servants became still more unfamiliar and insecure. Mistress vied with matron, who jostled with cook and housekeeper for ascendancy. The kitchen was renamed the ‘Commissariat Department’; military men attempted to take over the managerial role of the housekeeper. There was all to play for.
Wrest gained a reputation as the War Office’s best country-house base hospital. It patched up the bodies of some two thousand men, sending them back to the Front to fight again until a fire led to its premature closure in September 1916. It was a shipshape place of ruthless efficiency: of timetables, mass catering, delousing and rehousing. It ran like a machine. But it was also a place of knotty and impenetrable human relations. There was passion and hatred in play here at Wrest; chaos and disorder, along with the raw realities of war. At the heart of this tale are our housekeeper, Hannah Mackenzie, the maverick spinster aristocrat she served and the land agent who fell for her. It is also a story about Scots in exile. Intriguingly, the most famous writer of his time, J. M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan), was a benefactor and regular guest at Wrest. He was a friend of the family; was he also captivated by the housekeeper? Everything we know about Barrie and Hannah Mackenzie suggests that this was almost certainly the case.