Katherine Holden - Nanny Knows Best: The History of the British Nanny

This book is dedicated to my dearest aunt, Ursula Holden, who first inspired me to start researching and writing about nannies.

One of the difficulties in making acknowledgements is knowing who to include. Ideas have been discussed with and leads given by so many people that it would be impossible to name them all. An added problem is the cloak of anonymity under which most of my interviewees told their stories, enabling them to speak more frankly than if they had been named. The oral testimony at the heart of this book was a gift freely offered and I am deeply grateful for it. I learned an enormous amount; without it my work on nannies would have been so much less interesting. Rather than listing names and acknowledging some but not all of them, I am therefore offering heartfelt collective thanks to everyone who recorded interviews with me. I am similarly grateful to those who offered insights, information and suggestions or commented on papers or talks that I gave. These include members of my family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, librarians and archivists.

A few peoples contributions to the project have been of particular importance or pivotal in certain respects. Lesley Hall, who attended one of the first papers I gave on this subject at the Oxford Womens History Network conference in September 2009, led me to the Bowlby papers (which proved to be such a rich and important set of sources) and put me in touch with Tim DArch Smith, nephew of the novelist Pamela Frankau. As well as recording his memories of their nanny Agnes, Tim shared photographs, lent me an unpublished biography of Frankau, helped me with census searches and took me to his nannys grave. I made a similar trip to meet Ian Armstrong, who showed me the grave shared by his godmother Sylvia Fletcher Moulton and her nanny. Sadly the photographs I took on both occasions were not of good enough quality to include in the book. The clear and accurate professional service of transcribing the interviews undertaken by Sue Rodman was worth its weight in gold. So also was the voluntary help of Kelly Mullins, who assisted me with picture research at the end of the project, a time when I was in desperate need of support. Norland College and Nursery World generously opened up their archives to me and gave me permission to publish many of the images in the book; thanks especially to Katy Morton. A grant from the British Academy was essential in enabling me to pursue the project as it paid my research expenses and transcription costs. The research leave granted by the history department and my former employers at the University of the West of England was equally valuable at the writing stage.

Finally the ongoing support of my friends Janet Fink, Megan Doolittle and Leonore Davidoff has been invaluable. They read and offered advice on successive drafts of most chapters and, in Megan and Janets cases, commented on a draft of the whole book. I thank them for their persistence in the face of my doubts and their belief in me. I am also deeply grateful for the careful reading and editing of the final draft by Grey Osterud and the proof check by Tracey Loughran, both of whom saved me from many errors. As always, my friend Helen Kendall has been my most important support and critic, offering advice and help at every stage of the writing and in every other aspect of my life.

The roots of this book are long and dense. They can be traced in the first place to a desire to make sense of my own history and to understand why, as a single woman in my early sixties with no children of my own, I still had an abiding interest in other peoples children. This interest began during my teenage years when I became involved in the care of babies and young children belonging to a succession of single mothers who came to live with my family as lodgers or mothers helps. These young women were there to help my mother in the house, and the idea that they might have needed a nanny for their own children never entered anyones head. The help I gave these incomers was inexpert, unpaid and intermittent: rocking a baby to sleep, bathing, dressing and changing nappies. In the absence of the mother and with no one else around to consult, I once asked a 2-year-old child how to fold its terry towelling nappy and where to place the safety pins! Yet it offered me a role as assistant to and occasionally temporary replacement for a mother, a position which became increasingly familiar as I grew up and my friends began to have children and I did not.

My frustrations about not having children came to a head in my late thirties when I took a class in feminist theory. After several weeks of a seemingly excessive focus on motherhood, I asked the tutor if we might focus on women who were not mothers. Her response was to encourage me to write an essay on single women, a subject she correctly predicted I would soon take much further. Its final incarnation was a book, The Shadow of Marriage: Single Women in England 19141960, published seventeen years later, by which time my prospects of becoming a mother had vanished. As I interviewed women who had never married for this project I was struck by how often single women during the early and mid-twentieth centuries became involved with children, professionally and personally, and I began to see them as an invisible support system to families. I have since discovered that this point had been made in a much more generalised way by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who believes that a species with young as dependent as human children could not have evolved without access to what she calls alloparents individuals other than the genetic parents who helped care for them. In early and mid-twentieth century Britain, many of those individuals were single women.

It was not only nannies who interested me at that point, although a surprisingly high number of the single women I interviewed had been nannies or mothers helps at some time in their lives. In doing this research, I encountered an army of other women who had spent their lives looking after children as aunts, midwives, matrons, teachers, foster and adoptive mothers, and social workers. Some of these women saw the job of supporting mothers to bring up children as hugely important, giving colour and meaning to their lives. Others ended up in these occupations by default because few other choices were available. But, however much or little they loved the work, all of them faced the challenge of looking after other peoples children without the status and authority of being a mother.

The decision to narrow my focus to nannies, rather than including other child-related occupations, was made partly because not much has been written about them. But I also had a more personal reason: both my parents both came from colonial families and had been brought up by nannies. My mother, the eldest daughter of a missionary, had Indian nurses known as ayahs for the first eight years of her life. My father and his four sisters, children of a civil servant who worked abroad in Egypt, were cared for by nannies and, later, a nursery governess who took full charge when their mother was away.

My relatives recalled their experiences in different ways. My mother remembered that her younger sister Noreen had learned their ayahs language, Marathi, before she knew any English, and the older children had to translate so that their parents could understand her. Although Noreen left India at the age of 6 and never saw her ayah again, the bond between them was never entirely broken. Many years later, when my grandparents made a return visit to India, the ayah gave them bangles for Noreens future children, a gift for the little girl she had loved and lost.

My father had no memory of his nanny, who left when he was 2 or 3 years old, but his older sister Ursula remembered being smacked by her and all the nannys attention being focused on my father, the treasured boy. My father characterised their governess, Miss Caryer, as a rather rigid, prudish spinster who insisted that they say rhubarb oranges rather than blood oranges, while Ursula remembered her as calm and loving. Both siblings stressed the importance of the continuity she gave them through a childhood of agonising parental departures. Ursula deeply regretted that Miss Caryer had never known how much she owed her.