Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [99]
Another little-known example occurred at the end of the century. John Chaworth Musters of Annesley Park, Nottinghamshire, who was born in 1860 and had been educated at Eton and Christchurch, fell in love with Mary-Anne Sharp or ‘Polly’, the nursery housemaid in his father’s household and the daughter of a Nottingham miner. They went to live in Norway, where his parents had a fishing lodge and where she bore him three sons. They married when they realised they had to return to England for John to take up his inheritance on his father’s unexpected death in 1887. Four more sons were born to them. A relation later wrote: ‘Close relatives back in England who were aware of the situation were surprised to see how she, the one time nursery house-maid would cope with it all. To their surprise she did so extremely well . . . a truly remarkable woman. Her dress sense and accomplishments were impeccable, and her relatively humble origins were never guessed by many who came to know and love her.’ She lost six of her seven sons in the First World War.5
Perhaps to avoid such romances or, at any rate, any illegitimate children, many houses operated systems to keep staff and family apart for much of the time. This separation could be taken to extremes. One man’s smooth-running household might epitomise his wife’s lonely existence. Testimony to this can be found in an interesting account of life in a Regency country house, as seen through the eyes of a young English bride, Catherine Osborne, arriving at her older husband’s family home, Newtown Anner in County Tipperary. Her letters home were transcribed and published in Memorials of Lady Osborne.6
Given the age difference between husband and wife, it is a fair assumption that the management style of the household represented the values of the previous generation: ‘The moment we arrived, which was early in the morning, Sir Thomas took me to look at the kitchen garden, which is very extensive, and kept in beautiful order. The gardener attended us. The moment he saw me he took off his hat and said, with all the Irish warmth of manner: “Welcome to your home my Lady.” ’7 At first she was not even sure how many servants there were, writing in a letter: ‘My maid tells me that they sat down six-and-twenty to dinner in the servants’ hall yesterday, and some of the people were out. It is the fashion in Ireland for the upper servants to dine with the rest, with the exception of the kitchen-maid, groom and whipper-in, who attend them and dine afterwards.’8
Lady Osborne admitted in the same letter that she used to ask her maid Johnstone to keep her company in her dressing room. ‘I make her sit there that I sometimes see a female face – hear a human voice. I never saw a house so still and solitary as this. It is so very much apart from the servants; no door of communication upstairs with their apartments. My maid and I walk along the long corridor, from room to room, without more fear of interruption from a single being than if we were in the deserts of Arabia.’ How easily might a maid become the close friend and confidante of a chatelaine in a remote country house.9
She also refers to Sir Thomas’s secret of good household management: ‘He says that a lady should delegate all her authority over the female part of the establishment to the housekeeper and her own maid, and the gentleman to the butler. She should never give any orders to the inferior servants, because that would create confusion.’ Lady Osborne observed humbly: