THE FAMILY TRADE
We look back at a snapshot of Bristol in domestic service from the 1880s to the 1930s
IT’S very likely that many of us had ancestors who were, in some capacity, in domestic service during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
For many teenage girls, in particular, being “in service” was the most common form of employment, usually as a house or kitchen maid in some family home, whether it be a modest town house or a larger mansion in the country, working for “the gentry”.
Things began to change during the First World War, but many homes still had some sort of domestic staff at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Several members of my own family on my maternal grandmother’s side were in service in Bristol from the 1880s to the 1930s. My branch of the Dike family moved to Bristol about 1879 from Cirencester where the family had been since the 1780s. At first the family lived at College Green in a house behind where City Hall is today.
My great-great grandfather, James Edward Dike (1844-1902) was a coach painter and his second eldest son, Charles Henry Dike (1866-1954) was my great grandfather. Charles was born in Stratton, a village near Cirencester (now a suburb of the town) and married Bristol girl Clara Grace Rex in 1885 at St Werburgh’s church.
Charles was a coachman and later chauffeur and for about 40 years worked for Dr Edwin Leonard Lees (1864-1949), a GP who lived in Redland and Clifton. Charles Henry moved houses in the Horfield and Kingsdown area as his family (he and Clara eventually had seven children) but lived in Alfred Place, Kingsdown for nearly 40 years.
As motor cars appeared around the turn of the century, some coachmen managed to transition from horses to horse-power, as did my great grandfather, who reputedly drove the first car in Clifton in 1902.
Charles and his employer were of an age and both had young families (Dr Lees had five children) and outgrown toys from the Lees family were often passed to Charles for his children.
The two men appeared to have enjoyed a friendly relationship and on one occasion went out for a drink after work, possibly to celebrate the birth of one of their children. Both returned home rather merry, much to the annoyance of their respective wives!
The two men must have got on well, as my great uncle Harold Leonard Dike (1900-1971) was named after Dr Lees. My grandmother always spoke of him as “Dr Leonard Lees” and it appears he was a respected and caring employer.
Thomas Dike (1863-1943), my great-great uncle and Charles Henry Dike’s elder brother, was also a coachman and chauffeur.
Thomas and his family of four children lived at Rosemont Terrace, Clifton Wood, Freeland Place and Crosby Row, Hotwells. For 28 years from 1890 to 1918 he was coachman to Dr Eliza Walker Dunbar (1845-1925), the first woman from the UK to qualify and work as a doctor.
Born in India, her father and brother were also doctors and Eliza studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where she was one of the first women to gain a medical degree.
Returning to England in 1873, she applied for the position of house surgeon at Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children at St Michael’s Hill. She was the only female candidate and the all-male staff informed the hospital management they would resign if she was appointed.
When she did get the job, two staff resigned immediately, followed by the rest, and after five days Dr Walker Dunbar resigned to save the hospital further embarrassment.
She then set up her own private practice in Dowry Square,
Clifton, before establishing the Read Dispensary for Women and Children in St G e org e’s Road, Hotwells, in 1876.
In 1895, she set up the Bristol Private Hospital for Women and Children at 34 Berkeley Square which later became the Walker Dunbar Hospital in Clifton Down Road. Dr Walker Dunbar was also for many years medical officer to the Red Lodge Reformatory for Girls in Park Row and the Bristol Training College for Elementary Teachers. A fighter and pioneer in the medical world she was also an early pioneer of women’s suffrage.
From 1882 until her death, she lived at 9 Oakfield Road, Clifton, where a plaque now commemorates her name. For many years she used to remove her brass plate on her house at night in case she found it defaced or stolen in the morning!
She wrote a letter of reference for Thomas dated May 14, 1918, in which she praised his service of almost 28 years.
My grandmother, Amy Louisa Brain, nee Dike (1894-1993), Charles Henry’s third daughter was a children’s nanny before and during the First World War.
In 1909, aged 15, she began work as an under nanny for the family of Charles Ernest Boucher (18691946) at Parram House, 14 Tyndall’s Park Road. Mr Boucher and his wife Maude had two grown-up daughters Joyce and Audrey and two boys, baby Charles Anthony (1909-1981) and fouryear-old John Fabian (1905-1977). My grandmother remembered taking the boys out on the Downs, and recalled being at Parram House when the news broke that Dr Crippen had been caught in July 1910. One of the housemaids rushed in with the news that Crippen had been apprehended on board Montrose in mid-Atlantic on suspicion of the murder of his wife.
Mrs Boucher, who was rather deaf, responded “What have you broken?”
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, later hung for the murder and dismemberment of his wife Cora, was the first suspect to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy whilst attempting to flee to America with his typist and lover Ethel Le Neve, dressed as a boy, the pair trying to pass themselves off as father and son.
Charles Boucher was managing director of Bristol chemist and pharmaceutical firm Ferris & Co Ltd in Union Street. Ferris’s invented Nigroids, the liquorice throat sweets in 1900 (re named Vigroids in 2010). He was also a Bristol historian and a respected member of Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society.
My grandmother didn’t “live in” at Parram House but the family did employ a nanny, cook and housemaid who did.
In 1913, Amy left the Bouchers to work for the Hereford family at 12 Cotham Road, Redland. Dr Charles Francis Alexander Hereford (18801943) was a surgeon and he and his wife Catherine also had two young sons, Charles Gordon (1909-1996) and baby Arthur John (1913-1994).
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 my grandmother was with the family holidaying in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. She remembered how all the German waiters in the hotel they were staying in seemed to disappear overnight!
She always used to say the German Kaiser’s son Crown Prince Willie was also staying in Shanklin at the time, but this story has proved to be untrue, although there may have been some aristocratic German staying there who looked like him!
Dr Hereford served throughout the war as a Lieutenant Surgeon in the Navy and was on HMS Prince of Wales, present at the landings at Gallipoli in 1915 during the Dardanelles campaign against the Turkish Ottoman empire.
At the time of the 1911 Census, the Herefords employed a live-in cook and housemaid, but as the war progressed more women found they could earn more doing various kinds of “war work”.
Amy was asked to do domestic duties in addition to her nannying job which she did not want to do. She left the family in 1916 to work at the General Post Office in Small Street where she met my grandfather George Brain, a postman.
Later the same year, George was called up and served as an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Amy and George were married at St
Mary Redcliffe church in 1920 and spent most of their married life in Spring Gardens, Knowle Park, and later Aspen Drive, Brislington. They had an only daughter, Eunice (my Mum) in 1922. George died in 1972 and Amy lived on for another 21 years and died a few days before her 99th birthday in 1993.
Amy’s elder sister, my great aunt Gladys Florence Dike (1892-1980), never married and spent her whole working life “in service” in various capacities.
In 1911 she was 19 and a live-in housemaid with the Morgans at 13 Cotham Road, where she had probably been since leaving school. Thomas Morgans (1841-1926) and his wife Sarah Jane (1843-1935) were an elderly couple who also employed a live-in cook.
The Morgans family were civil and mining engineers with offices in London, Paris, South America and Bristol. The company was established in Bristol in 1867 by Morgan Morgans (1814-1888) and his sons and the family ran the business for three generations, the Bristol branch closing in 1923.
In about 1914, Thomas and Sarah Jane moved to 7 Elton Road, Tyndall’s Park, and Gladys went with them. Mr Morgans died in 1926 and his widow moved the following year to Park Road, High Barnet, near London. Gladys became Mrs Morgans’ lady’s maid/companion and stayed with her until her death in 1935 aged 91.
Gladys returned to Bristol and by 1939 was a live-in housekeeper to William Smith, a widowed vet in Cote Park, Westbury-on-Trym. From the 1940s until 1970, she was housekeeper to schoolteacher Miss Marion Gowing at 70 Redcatch Road.
Gladys died at Terrill House (now Court) nursing home, 14 Apsley Road, Clifton in 1980. She was quite refined and devoutly religious and always knelt by her bed every night to say her prayers. She spent her adult life being paid to cook and clean, and care for other people.
Today the whole world of being “in service” belongs to a vanished past, and to young people of today probably seems demeaning and bizarre, and I am sure the reality of domestic service for many was a life of drudgery and servitude.
When I was a child I remember being served orange squash on a silver salver by a liveried footman at the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House in Bristol, and I grew up watching Upstairs, Downstairs on television in the 1970s, which fuelled my delusions of grandeur, and the idea of having a “Mrs Bridges” to cook meals and “Mr Hudson” to serve and lay out my clothes is definitely quite appealing!
“Watkins, you can bring the car round now…”