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

Wrest Park, Bedfordshire 19141915

It wasnt so much her looksit was her character.

ROSS MACKENZIE, GREAT-NEPHEW OF HANNAH MACKENZIE

I n 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 daydelivered 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 Hannahs careerAugust 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 woundsthe Honourable Nan Herbert and her housekeeper Mrs Mackenzie were witness to it alland 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 workall, 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 Hannahs 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 photographa 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 Parks 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 its 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 Nans diaryfeisty 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. Hannahs audacious story seemed to capture the texture of domestic service during the Great War: uneasy, complicated, explosive.