Off The Record
Alan Crosby shares the story of one of his mother’s best friends during his childhood
Alan Crosby researches one of his mother’s best friends
Reading an article about servant girls in the Edwardian period, and how they so often went into service far from home, brought to mind Auntie Ethel. She was my mother’s close friend when I was young, and I knew her well. We went to tea with her every Wednesday and I listened to them talking and reminiscing, and in that way I learnt something about her story. She was 13 years older than Mum, warm and caring, an ideal friend for my mother who had recently arrived in a suburban Surrey town. Ethel was from industrial South Wales, my mother from inner- city Manchester – both newcomers in an unfamiliar world, which meant that they really bonded.
Ethel was born in 1913 in Ebbw Vale, Monmouthshire, the youngest of the 10 children of a coal miner. Her father was almost 50 when she was born, and her oldest brother, John Henry, was already 22. I can still recall her speaking of him, pronouncing his name in her strong Eastern Valleys accent: “our J’nendrie”. Her mother was in poor health – bearing 10 children over 23 years can’t have helped – so the little girl was to all intents and purposes brought up by her older sister Ada, born in 1904. They lived in a tiny terraced house, nine of the family being recorded there in the 1911 census. Their poor mother died in 1922 when Ethel was nine; in 1925 Ada got married and left home; and in 1927, when Ethel was 14 and had just finished her schooling, their father also died.
What was to become of her? The answer, as it had been for generations of other girls of her age and circumstances, was that she had to go into service. By the late 1920s domestic service was in decline – the trend towards smaller households, the postwar need for economy, and the availability of alternative employment (such as clerical work or shop work) meant that the demand for servants and the supply of girls were both falling. Nevertheless, going into service was still one of the most common fates for working- class girls. For Ethel there was no choice – her siblings couldn’t easily take her in, depressed Ebbw Vale offered little work, and she was old enough to fend for herself.
So Ethel was taken on the train down the valley to Newport, with her little suitcase, and there she was put on the express to Paddington, all alone. When she reached London, she was met by a housekeeper from a large residence in the West End, and immediately afterwards began her employment as a junior housemaid, ‘below stairs’. As with many Welsh girls over the previous 80 years, the Great Western Railway conveyed her away to a new life, far from the smoke and grime, heavy industry and poverty of Ebbw Vale, or the dozens of other mining communities in the Valleys. Whether it was a better life is debatable.
Ethel never lost her strong accent, and she kept in touch with at least some of her family. Indeed, I have shadowy memories of a visit by Ada, the sister who brought her up – a large and characterful lady who died in 1974. In the early 1930s Ethel moved on, to new positions, and in 1935 when working near Birmingham she met and married a young man, a bricklayer by trade. Knowing the opportunities in the south- east of England, where building was booming as suburban development sprawled across the green fields around London, they soon moved down to Surrey.
Yet Ethel never lost her attachment to her birthplace. When she and Bob proudly built their own small house they called it ‘Beaufort’, after the high part of Ebbw Vale which looks over the hills of South Wales. Suburban Surrey was a world away from that, but the memory lingered.
Ethel died almost 40 years ago, sadly before I was able to ask her more about her story. I’ve pieced this together from my own recollections, and from online resources. But I can’t ever forget the image of that orphaned young girl being put on the train and sent off alone to start her new life.
The Great Western Railway conveyed Ethel to a new life