Behind The Green Baize Door

My handsome Dad, wearing his butler's uniform, ca 1969

I’ve mentioned before that I spent most of my childhood living in other people’s houses while my parents worked in domestic service. It occurred to me that some people might find some of our adventures interesting, so here goes.

My Mum had left school at 14 and, being a Lancashire lass, had gone to work as a towel weaver in a cotton mill, a job she’d never really taken to. One of the older weavers said to her ‘You want to get yourself a job in service and learn to be a cook.’ So that’s what she did and, when she met Dad in 1936, she was working as a housekeeper for the then editor of the Bolton Evening News. They were married a year later, when it was so foggy, even the vicar was late.

In the late 1930s with the threat of war with Germany looming, Dad had joined the Army as a reservist because it meant an extra £15 a year. Because of this, he was one of the first to be called up.

Soon after that, Mum and I left Horwich for her to go back into domestic service and we spent the rest of the war years in Blackpool, where Mum was working as a live-in housekeeper. I was a shy, timid child and there were two noisy lively children there who made my life a misery, like the time they emptied a chamber pot out of the bedroom window and saying it was me.

After Dad was demobbed in 1946, we moved to Ivybridge, Devon, where my parents had taken a job, Mum as cook-housekeeper, Dad as chauffeur-gardener, even though he knew almost nothing about gardening. You could say he learned on the job. The house was large and rambling and because of the danger of flooding from the river that ran through the town, only the upper floors could be used. I nearly came to a watery end in the river when I fell down the embankment. Fortunately, I landed on a ledge!

In 1947, we moved to Birmingham and it’s here that my memories become more vivid because we stayed for three years and I was very happy there. Again, it was a large house with a large garden. To get to the servants’ quarters, you had to go through a green baize door, hence the title. The house was owned by a middle-aged bachelor, Mr Barclay, and I remember him as a pink and portly gentleman with thinning grey hair who spoke rather ponderously. Mum always said, with some affection, that he was a typical crusty old bachelor.

              Although we seemed to eat well in Birmingham, severe rationing was still in force. Mr Barclay was in the habit of ringing up at the last minute, having invited someone round to dinner and she’d be left to find something for dinner out of what was often lean pickings. Occasionally, there were pheasants or grouse from a shoot or chickens and eggs from a farmer friend, but more often than not, Mr Barclay and his friends would end up with our rations while we ‘made do.’ In the end, the constant strain began to tell on Mum and they decided to leave.

This time we were to move back to Bolton, where Dad had been brought up. We were to stay, for the time being with Dad’s Auntie Leah, his mother’s youngest sister, who had inherited the family home after my great-grandfather died in 1947. Moving to a traditional two-up, two-down terraced house was a bit of a shock after the spacious houses with bathrooms and central heating, we’d lived in. Now we had to get used to washing at a kitchen sink and having to use an outside toilet.

In a previous blog, Four Schools in One Term, I spoke about winning a place at a Bolton grammar school but before I could take up the offer, we had moved to Rotherham, where my parents were taking jobs in their usual capacity for a solicitor and my scholarship was transferred to Rotherham Girls’ Grammar School. Yet within only a few weeks of moving to Rotherham, we were on the move again, to Chesterfield this time, my scholarship being transferred to Chesterfield Grammar School.

After a very short stay there, I learned we were off again. This time, we were going to stay with my Dad’s brother, who lived on the outskirts of Manchester, and his family for a few weeks until something could be sorted out. I wasn’t happy about this; I didn’t get on with my cousin Patricia. It meant having to go to Levenshulme High School with her.

Mum and Dad had decided they’d had enough of domestic service for a while and were looking to put down roots in either Bolton or Horwich by getting ordinary jobs. Eventually, we found a house to rent on the outskirts of Bolton and my scholarship was transferred to Farnworth Grammar School where I stayed for the rest of my school life.

That should have been the end of my parents’ involvement in domestic service; it certainly was for me. Not so my parents. In about 1967, Mum had been working for some time as a cook for the directors’ of the large packaging group based at their headquarters in Bolton while Dad was chauffeuring directors, visitors etc to and from Bolton station. Then one of the partners of the company asked them would they consider working at his Bedfordshire country home. The temptation was too great and sometime that year, they moved there. Fortunately, for most of the year, that just mean working at the weekends. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard as the owner entertained lavishly, with guests staying. Dad, by this time had graduated to chauffeur/butler, and found he’d got a natural flair for it.

Mum, doing what she did best, cooking!

In 1971, Mum decided to retire while Dad carried on for a while longer. Big mistake! Mum was bored. Within only a few months, she and Dad went after a number of jobs she’d seen advertised in ‘The Lady’ magazine, a pastime she was addicted to.

Once they were offered a job at the country house of the late MP John Stonehouse by his then wife. They turned it down because they felt it would be too much entertaining for them. Shortly afterwards, apparently beset by money troubles, he faked his own death by leaving a pile of clothes on a beach. He turned up years later in Australia, living with his secretary, whom he later married. He was eventually sent to prison for fraud and died in 1988.

              Mum and Dad also turned down an offer of a job from Victor Lownes, the European head of the Playboy organisation, at his country house, Stocks, in Hertfordshire, because he wanted to keep the Victorian kitchen exactly the way it was.

              Remember Asil Nadir, the disgraced business man who fled to Northern Cyprus, returning to the UK some years ago, where he’s now serving a prison sentence? For a short time, they worked for him when he had a house on The Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, known as Millionaire’s Row. They had a few adventures while they were there, like having to hustle his mistress out of the back door when his ex-wife came to call with their son. Or the time Dad nearly caught out some burglars by finding a bedroom window open and a ladder propped against the wall outside. Mum and Dad left only because he’d promised to employ them at his country house, which never materialised.

From there, they went to work for an elderly couple, the Puxleys, in a large house, designed

Langley End, King's Langley, Herts

by the famous architect, Edward Lutyens, in Hertfordshire. It was only after they’d been there a couple of weeks that they discovered that the Puxleys were both suffering from cancer. Feeling sorry for the couple in their isolation, for they had no children, my parents agreed to stay on. Fortunately, the Puxleys were rich enough to have nursing staff so all Mum had to do was a little light cooking and Dad occasional chauffeuring. Not a bad thing really as Mum and Dad were getting older themselves. Mrs Puxley died first followed shortly after by Mr Puxley. Mum and Dad were asked to stay on for a while longer to help Mr Puxley’s brother sort out the estate and this they agreed to do. One night when Dad got up to go to the toilet, he quite plainly heard Mr Puxley’s voice calling out ‘Williams?’ in the imperious tone the old man used. Needless to say, he scuttled back to bed pretty sharpish.

And so their long and interesting career in domestic service finally came to an end. Fortunately, because their accommodation had been tied to the estate, they were allocated council accommodation. Even then, Mum continued to work as a cook for the Sue Ryder organisation in one of their hospices while Dad got a job as a personnel driver for a nearby airfield. As by this time, they were well into their sixties you might have thought that would be the end of it. No, it wasn’t. When they finally moved back to Horwich in 1980, Mum got a job as the manageress of a charity shop in Bolton with Dad helping out in the shop. When that came to an end, she spent her time fund-raising for local charities or entering cookery competitions. Dad died in 1999 aged 87 and even though Mum was 90 in 2001, she bravely moved to be near us and finally died aged 97 in 2008. 

They just don’t make them like that any-more!

Doing the Lambeth Walk

Mum on the right with her friend doing the Lambeth Walk

It occurred to me recently that although I’ve blogged about my dear old Dad and his soldiering days, I haven’t talked about my lovely Mum, Emily (and known fondly as Em). She was born in Horwich, near Bolton, in 1911, the youngest of three sisters. She also had an older and two younger brothers. Life was very hard for my grandmother, also an Emily, because my grandfather, as a private in the 1^st Battalion of the ‘Six VCs before breakfast’ Lancashire Fusiliers, had died during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. At 39, with a young family, he would not have had to go to war except that he was a reservist, having served with the Lancashire Fusiliers previously between 1894 and 1899.

              Mary Ellen, her mother’s sister, lived with them, off and on, sleeping on the sofa because there was no bed to spare. As she was lame and unable to work, she helped out where she could. Labelled ‘an interfering old bugger’ by my Auntie Mary, she was nevertheless a great influence on my mother’s life. She loved to sing and taught Mum many of the songs she knew, not all of them respectable. Mum got into trouble once at a tea party for war orphans for singing one of Auntie Mary Ellen’s songs, about a young woman who pretended to be a soldier in order to stay with her soldier sweetheart. It was the phrase, ‘her lily white breasts,’ which earned her a telling-off from the good ladies of the Co-operative Guild. She also had a suitable saying for every occasion and these have passed down through Mum until they have become family mottos. Sayings like ‘It’s a long lane that has no turning,’ and ‘As one door closes, another opens,’ have been held on to over and over again when things were going badly. I was later to find, through doing my family history, that she died, aged only 52, in Fishpool Workhouse in Bolton, Lancashire

              When Mum was 11, she passed a scholarship to go to local grammar school. The school was Protestant and Mum’s family were Catholics but her mother, aware of the advantages of education, insisted she go. Mum remembered that she wasn’t allowed to go into the morning assembly with the others, but apart from that, she really enjoyed school and seemed to do well there. Unfortunately, when she was 13, her mother fell gravely ill and as she lay dying, the priest refused her the last rites unless ‘that child leaves that Protestant grammar school.’ Under intense pressure, and knowing what it would mean to her mother to have the last rites, she agreed, though it was to turn her against Catholicism. She never forgave that priest.

The then equivalent of Social Services wanted to split the family up and foster the children separately but Mary, the elder sister, and John, the elder brother, themselves only 19 and 18 (they were both born in the same year, 1905) would not hear of it. Mary used to come home in her dinner break from the mill where she worked, to give the younger children their dinner.

When Mum left school at fourteen, she went in 't'mill' like her sisters Mary and Annie but never liked it. By sixteen, she was working 'in service' and stayed in that line of work for most of her working life. In 1936, she met my Dad, Ronald, and within a year they were married. Both of them worked, on and off, in domestic service for most of my childhood and afterwards.

She always said that it was Dad who had itchy feet but it was actually her that kept looking in ‘The Lady’ magazine for other domestic service jobs. One interview they went to was with John Stonehouse, one time MP, who, shortly after, faked his own death by drowning and turned up in Australia living with his secretary. Another interview was with Victor Lowndes, the European head of the Playboy organisation. They turned him down because he refused to consider changing the original Victorian kitchen of his country house, Stocks.

In about 1972/73, they went to work for an up and coming business man, Asil Nadir, who had a rather grand house on Bishop's Avenue, otherwise known as Millionaire's Row, Hampstead, London. They had some hilarious adventures there, including bundling Asil's mistress out of the back door while his wife came in the front. In 1993, while on bail on fraud charges relating to his Polly Peck organisation, he fled the country to live in Turkish Cyprus. In 2010, he returned to the UK, the case went to trial and he is now serving a prison sentence.

After officially retiring from domestic service, Emily became manager of a charity shop, first of all in Bedford, then, after they’d moved back to Lancashire, in Bolton. Even when she retired from that, she kept busy fund-raising for various charities and organising a bingo social club in Bolton two or three days a week. In the early 1980s, when she was in her seventies, she and a friend entered a national competition being held to promote the West End opening of ‘Me and My Girl’ starring Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson. Their portrayal of the Lambeth Walk led to them winning the regional final and then, against stiff competition from Londoners themselves, they won the national final!

Mum in later life with that smile!

After my Dad died in 1999, Mum continued to live alone in their flat in Horwich but in 2001, moved to Bolsover, Derbyshire to be nearer me and my husband. She lived in sheltered accommodation, making friends easily and participating in most of the events. I visited most afternoons and on Sundays, she would come to us for lunch. In 2008, after a series of stays in hospital, she moved into a care home as she needed more daily care than I was able to provide. She died in December 2008, following a short illness aged 97. All who came into contact with her declared her to be ‘a lovely lady’ with a big and generous heart and, as someone said, ‘a captivating smile.’ I’m so proud that she was my Mum.