Tessa Boase - The Housekeepers Tale - Sarah Wellss Story: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House

Uppark, West Sussex 18801893

How dark in these underground rooms.

SARAH WELLS

T he second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for the housekeeper. This was the era of wealth creation for the Victorians: the railway age. The moneyed classes built new houses, refashioned old ones and filled them with the spoils of Empire. To run them they employed many more servants than before. According to the national census, between 1851 and 1871 the number of housekeepers tripled, from 46,648 to 140,836. This ranged from women working in middle-class homes to those employed by the great estates. And as houses got bigger and more and more crammed with furniture and ornaments, so the housekeepers responsibilities grew.

The male house steward at the head of the household receded into the past. An all-powerful domestic matriarch took his place. The housekeeper commanded more girlsmany more girls, each with specialised skills and separate areas of responsibility. A brisk new air of professionalism imbued her team. Maids uniforms become absolutely codified (print dresses for the dirty work of the morning; black dress with lace cap and apron for the afternoon); surnames rather than first names were used; salaries rose according to fine gradations laid out in a spate of domestic manuals.

But country houses also resisted change. For every Trentham Hall or Highclere Castle undergoing a fashionable Charles Barry rebuild, there was an Uppark. Change on a country estate usually came about with a new male heir, but Uppark had no new lord of the manor. During Queen Victorias reign it languished in a time warp. The outside world was moving swiftly ongaslighting, central heating, hot-water plumbing, elevatorsbut Uppark slumbered in its green acres, oblivious to the modern era. It might as well have been situated in the remote Scottish Highlands rather than West Sussex, fifty miles from London on the steam locomotive. While recruitment agencies began to promote a new breed of first class professional servant, at Uppark the approach was more arbitraryand the choice of housekeeper was, arguably, reckless.

According to her sons autobiography, Sarah Wells was perhaps the worst housekeeper that was ever thought of. This has become the accepted view of Mrs Wellss tenure at Uppark, which ran from 1880 to 1893. She was bad at accounts, she was bad at managing her girls, she was ill experienced in buying stores and economisingso said her son, the writer H. G. Wells. If you visit the house today, push past the brass-tack-studded red baize door, descend the eighteen steps to the basement and peer into her little sitting room, this is the line that the hovering National Trust guide will give you: here sat Mrs Wells, the very worst of Victorian housekeepers. But is this fair? It seems nobody has really looked at the evidence. We have unquestioningly swallowed the judgement of her son, the famously prolific Edwardian novelist.

Fortunately, there is another source for Mrs Wellss story: her own version of events. She was a habitual diary keeper, jotting down a few repetitive lines each night before climbing wearily into bed. Unlike so many housekeepers personal records, these have survived because of the fame of her son. Today they lie in the university library of Illinois, handled with reverential white gloves by scholars hoping to find insights on H. G. Wells. The diaries have also been photocopied by the West Sussex Record Office, and it was here, in Chichester, not ten miles from Uppark, that I laboriously read through hundreds of pages of her quavering copperplate script.