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

Trentham Hall, Staffordshire 1832

It is quite impossible in such an establishment to permit of her breeding.

JAMES LOCH, CHIEF AGENT TO THE SUTHERLANDS

T hey made a formidable cabal, the five housekeepers of the Duke of Sutherland. Like pawns on a chessboard they were ranged across the country: Mrs Spillman sat at Dunrobin Castle in the far north-east of Scotland; Mrs Cleaver at the southernmost extreme, West Hill in Wandsworth, Surrey. In the capital, the tireless Mrs Galleazie reigned over Stafford House, scene of much entertaining. Mrs Kirke presided over the new hunting lodge, Lilleshall Hall up in Shropshire; and Mrs Doar sat plumb in the middle: keeper of Trentham Hall, Staffordshire.

Letters flew between these five women daily: hastily scrawled notes with advance warning of the familys imminent arrival or departure; requests to send Staffordshire partridge, kid boots from London, whisky barrels from Scotland, more ripe pineapples for this weeks reception at Stafford House. Sicknesses were communicated, staff vacancies filled and in-house gossip quenched. A nobleman could not hope to employ five more discreet or implacable custodians.

This is the story of one of these women: a housekeeper who, after fourteen years loyal service, fell spectacularly foul of her employers. The year was 1832, a time of great political upheaval in Britain. Dorothy Doar was a small but vital cog in the enormous machine servicing the richest, most powerful and probably most disliked family of her day. Given the size of this machinethe Duke and Duchess of Sutherland moved between not two, but five housesit is by sheer chance that the sorry tale of Mrs Doar has survived at all. But, like a gnat squashed between the pages of a book, I came across her in a random bundle of otherwise dry correspondence between two land agents; a bundle tied with white ribbon and filed away in the vast Sutherland Collection at the Staffordshire Record Office.

Written over the course of two months in 1832, this series of letters is highly unusualunusual because the housekeeper leaps brightly off the page. Dorothy Doar lives; her character and foibles are laid bare. Her tale unfolds in a drama that no wage book, store-cupboard inventory or housekeeping accounts book can hope to compete with. The letters throw light on basement politics between upper servants in the Regency era: back-stabbing, rumour spreading, leapfrogging for advancement. There are hints of sexual liberties; of houses so rarely visited by their owners that they develop their own unconventional codes of conduct. The letters show us, too, how the uber-aristocracy of the day treated their upper servants.

For such an important family, a surprising amount of time and energy was put into the relationship between mistress and housekeeper. You could not run five houses without the likes of Mrs Doar. She was somebody to be kept sweet: to be soothed, praised and assisted. The relationship was based on loyalty, honesty and trustwith the servant always aware of the immense gap between the haves and have-nots. No servant, no matter how senior, could take anything for grantedas Dorothy Doar was to learn to her cost.

Mrs Doars job was to facilitate the most luxurious lifestyle pursued in Britain at that time. Her employer was George Granville Leveson-Gower (pronounced Looshun Gore), known to his housekeeper in 1832 as the Marquis of Stafford, just one year off being made the Duke of Sutherland, the title by which this lineage is remembered. He had, by virtue of an astute marriage, created a dynasty second only in wealth to the royal family. Quite simply, the Staffords owned much of Britain, and as a consequence were hated and revered in equal measure.