Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor (20 page)

Sometimes his lordship would take Mr Lee with him racing. He recalls one Derby: ‘Despite the fact that his lordship discouraged betting I couldn’t see the point of going racing without having a little flutter. He’d got a horse running called St Germain, and even if he was saying nothing, the stable seemed to think it had a good chance, so I had a nice each way bet on it. I was going back to the grandstand when I met Lord Derby’s valet. “What do you fancy, Astor?” he said to me. (We always called each other by our masters’ names.) I told him what I’d done.

‘“I’ve heard a bit different,” he said, “and that is that my lord’s Sansovino can’t be beat. Let’s go down again. I’ll cover myself with an each way bet on your lordship’s horse and you do the same with a win on mine.”

‘I did that, Miss Harrison, and he was right: Sansovino won and St Germain was second. It helped us to enjoy a very good day out.’

To his disappointment Lord Astor never won a Derby, though he was second four times. One of my favourite pictures at Cliveden was one that Alfred Munnings did of him amongst his horses. There’s no doubt that they were a great relaxation for him. Racing people were continually on at Mr Lee for tips, but as he said, he couldn’t help them as his lordship never told him anything. This didn’t stop them though. When Mr Lee had given his usual reply to Sir Harold Werner, another owner, Sir Harold said, ‘Well, what are you backing yourself, Lee?’

‘Nothing, sir, I never bet off the course.’

Sir Harold laughed and said, ‘You’re a damn sight different from my bloody butler, he’s never off the phone to his bookmaker.’

According to Mr Lee some servants of racehorse owners gave tips for money, which again struck him as a betrayal of trust.

His lordship also took a pride in the gardens and greenhouses, and was a great friend of Frank Copcutt’s. ‘The difference between him and her ladyship, Rose,’ Frank said, ‘was that if he wanted anything done in the gardens he asked if it was possible to do it, whereas her ladyship demanded that it be done.’

According to Frank he was a generous employer, he paid ten shillings a week more than the going rate and provided cottages or accommodation as well. He started a social security service after the First World War with sickness benefit for the wives and children on the estate, and a pension scheme for the men. He was fond of sports of all kinds and engaged cricket and tennis coaches for his children in the holidays. George Fenner was the cricket coach. He was popular with the boys and the staff alike, particularly with Mr Lee, who was good at cricket and often played for the Cliveden side.

Above all else Lord Astor’s interest was in his children, and from an early age. Mr Lee recalls the time when he was valet to his lordship. ‘He was an early riser; a call with coffee at 6.30, a bath, then I would shave him. It was always about this time that the children, knowing he was awake, would come rushing down, and he would have one on each knee while I tried to control the razor. I was scared that I would cut either him or the children, and times out of number I’ve had to restrain myself from putting the shaving brush in their mouths.’

As I’ve said, when I arrived at Cliveden in 1928, Mr William was twenty-one and the youngest, Mr Jakie, was nine, so I saw nothing of any of their early lives or their relationships at that time with their parents. Mr Lee, Arthur Bushell, Gordon Grimmett and Frank Copcutt would often talk about them and their growing up. For them it seemed they were very much part of the vitality of the house; they made it more real, gay and happy, a place with a purpose. The children caught from their father the way to behave with servants and sometimes it seemed from what they said that they and the other servants got more enjoyment out of them than their parents did.

Cliveden was of course a wonderful place to be young in. It had everything. Theirs was a traditional upbringing: the nursery, governesses, preparatory and public schools and university. It was inevitable from the moment they were born. Let me begin with the nursery and Nanny Gibbons. She had joined the Astors when Mr William was born and she lived the rest of her life there. Now even nannies who are good with their children can be very unpopular with the rest of the staff. They are neither fish, flesh nor good red herring. By that I mean they are not servants, neither are they masters, they are in-betweens, in limbo as it were. In smaller households than ours they often dined with the master and mistress of the house and afterwards sat with them. They had the ear of their employers and could, and sometimes did, speak of things that went on below stairs. They could make demands, particularly of the kitchen staff for special food for their charges, at inconvenient times. They could also be toffee-nosed and hoity-toity. Therefore to servants they were suspect. Not Nanny Gibbons; she struck exactly the right balance. She had made her requirements plain from the moment she’d arrived, had seen that they suited and fitted in with everybody else’s and was always friendly though not familiar with the staff. Never, according to Mr Lee, had she made complaints about the servants to anyone but him and when she had they had always been justified, so the staff respected her. The children showed her great affection, and did till the end of her life. In that she was clever, too. Some nannies tried to get too much from the children they looked after. They attempted to become the mother-figure. This could cause great emotional problems with both children and parents. As it was, the Astors as children adored their mother, but I think looked on Nanny Gibbons as a warm and friendly grandmother.

In stature Nanny Gibbons had a figure similar to her ladyship’s, short and slimly built. In the morning she wore a white blouse and grey skirt and changed into a darker grey dress for afternoon and evening wear. She was devoted to her children, she studied all their interests and looked after their diet, their clothes and their money. She was very painstaking with the repairs of the boys’ clothes, which were handed down as they would have been in any poor family, often I think to the annoyance of the recipients. She didn’t like waste of any kind.

One of the rituals for the younger children was a drive in the pony cart every afternoon regularly at two-thirty. That way I think the children must have got to know every blade of grass for miles around. I understand that one way the boys relieved the monotony of these daily drives was to wait for the pony to make a rude noise, and then stare at Nanny Gibbons until her stern set features dissolved into a smile. She was perhaps a little prim. It was the mould of nannies of that time.

Arthur Bushell told me about an evening when some of the staff were giving an entertainment in the servants’ hall. Nanny and the children had been invited. Arthur as usual was dressed up as a woman and, as was his custom, sailing near to the wind with his jokes and behaviour. The broader these got the more the children laughed, and the more set became Nanny’s expression. The next day Arthur asked her how she’d enjoyed it. ‘The children seemed to be amused; I found your dress left much to be desired.’

‘Oh, Miss Gibbons,’ he said, ‘what did it leave you desiring?’

‘She swept off: and for a week when she saw me she only sniffed.’

When Nanny died and she left £7,500 everyone thought she had saved it from her salary. It got them all wondering how she could possibly have done it. She couldn’t. In fact £3,500 had been left to her by her sister, and I know that the children gave her £2,000, though they won’t thank me for saying so.

Assisting her was a nurserymaid, whose job it was to clean the nursery, do the washing and ironing, lay the tables and serve the food, wheel the babies in the pram or, when they were older, take them for walks round the gardens and play games with them. Nurserymaids wore print dresses with starched cuffs and collars, and when they were out had grey felt hats and coats. Then there always seemed to be a French or sometimes a German governess around the place so the children learnt languages from a very early age. Finally there was the nursery boy, more commonly known as the hall boy, who carried the food trays from the kitchen and did any of the harder, rougher jobs that were necessary.

The day nursery was a large, comfortable, light room. In the centre was a table and there were cupboards and bookcases all around the walls where the toys and books were stored. These were plentiful and watched over religiously by Nanny Gibbons, and the toys were kept under lock and key unless they were in use. From time to time my lady would have a blitz, take what toys she thought the children no longer wanted and see that they were given to less privileged children. There was a large comfy couch and easy chairs; a sideboard decorated with flowers and never without fruit on it, so the nursery was the essence of comfort, and of course of cleanliness.

Nanny slept in the night nursery with the children in cots or beds until they were old enough to move into their own rooms. I have spoken of the nursery as if it belonged to the Astor family, but it was often shared with visitors’ children. It was in this way that nannies became well known among the aristocracy; our Nanny Gibbons had a great reputation. There was another such at Hatfield House. Although Nanny Gibbons’s affection was visited mostly upon the children, she was devoted to the Astors and particularly to his lordship. It was he who as it were ruled over the nursery, and it was to him that she went for help or advice if ever she needed it, though this was rare as they seemed to think and behave as one.

His lordship, while wanting his children brought up in the pattern of the time for his rank and position, was determined that they should not be spoilt. For example, he limited their pocket money. Indeed Mr Lee has told me that at times he and other of his men have slipped them a few pence on some special occasion, such as the annual fair on nearby Woburn Green. I suppose too Lord Astor wanted his children brought up in his own image. If this is a fault it’s one that is in most of us. We want our children to do at least as well as, if not better than, we have done. We think we can show them the way and we get offended or hurt if they rebel against us. It is something in human nature that is hard for parents to deny or escape from if they think about their children at all. In my day ‘the sins of the fathers were visited on the children’. Today it seems that the sins of the children are visited on the fathers. In looking for an excuse for misbehaviour children are encouraged to blame their parents by doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers and their likes.

Having got that off my chest let me hasten to say that this feeling about their mother or father is not one shared by any of the Astor children, though it may have been in the minds of others when considering the occasional misdemeanours that they consider have been committed – ‘poor little rich children’ is an easy gibe and one which cannot be applied to them. I’m sure they are today as proud of their parents as I am and would never attempt to use them as whipping-boys for anything wrong that they may have done. There are problems about growing up rich. Perhaps rich people are encouraged to think they’re different from others, but in the Astor home they were taught that this difference brought with it responsibilities to others that poorer children don’t have. Example and leadership are two such things. Unfortunately the slightest lapse from either in this day and age brings down the wrath of people who have few if any qualities themselves. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The big moment of any day for the children when they were little was when they went down from the nursery to join their parents after tea, whether there were guests with them or not. Her ladyship was at her gayest at this time and this gaiety pervaded the room. She would turn anything into a laugh. It was as though she was an actress; she turned her charm on, it flowed like water from a tap and she gave a different performance every night. These were the people with whom she was most at home, the young and innocent, and as I found out during the war years it was not reserved just for people of her own kind. She was as easy with a child from a slum and so he was with her. I used to envy the boys these times with my lady. It was only occasionally I had glimpses of them. Even more I loved the other evenings when she would tell her stories from the Deep South, with their mixture of the comic with the melancholy, acting the various parts and reverting continually to her Southern drawl. Of course the children didn’t always find it beer and skittles, there were times when her gay mood could change to gall and she’d be her other self, sarcastic and mocking.

Of the boys’ schooldays I knew little. They all went away at about the age of eight to their preparatory school. I’ve later gathered that it was selected because the headmaster admitted pupils who were Christian Scientists. Not I think that they could have had much idea at their age of what this was all about. Apparently they didn’t suffer from going there. They retained the charm they’d cultivated early. There was no religious compromise over their public school, they had to go to Eton. Again to the best of my knowledge they enjoyed it and it seemed Eton enjoyed them, judging by the attitude and number of friends who came to visit Cliveden. Mr Lee paid several visits to the school, taking fruit and serving picnic luncheons on the Fourth of June.

The only person who didn’t care for the school was Gordon Grimmett. ‘I had good reason not to, Miss Harrison,’ he told me. ‘It was during Mr Billy’s first term. Mr Lee came to me one day after he’d been there about eight weeks and said that according to Nanny Gibbons someone, and that on this occasion that someone was me, had to go to Eton to examine his suits and shoes to see if any repairs were needed. Any shoes which wanted heeling – and I was informed that there was some sort of competition as to who could first wear them down to the soles – were to be taken without argument to Ganes, the old-established cobbler in the High Street, and any clothes that required mending were to be returned to Nanny Gibbons.

‘I was driven by Bert Jeffries, then his lordship’s second chauffeur, in the Daimler to Mr Conybeare’s house. It was a rambling old place. Outside there was a group of boys, top-hatted and all carrying badly rolled umbrellas. “Could they,” I asked, “inform me which room the Honourable William Astor occupied?”