Nanny Knows Best E-Book

Katherine Holden

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 413

Beschreibung

Not quite part of the family and more than just an employee; idealised and demonised, the nanny has always had a difficult role in family life. Any discussion of nannies arouses strong emotions in those who have employed them and reveals a sometimes shocking range of experiences both for the nannies and for the children they looked after. Winston Churchill as a child rarely saw his mother and idolized his nanny, paying for fresh flowers to be maintained on her grave and keeping her portrait by his bedside till he died. A nanny to the one of the principal landowning families in Dorset nearly starved their treasured heir to death, while a Suffolk nanny found parting from one of her charges so traumatic that she suffered a mental breakdown. This book weaves personal stories viewed through the eyes of nannies, mothers and children into a fascinating cultural history of the iconic British nanny. Katherine Holden goes beyond the myths to discover where our tradition of employing nannies comes from and to explore the ways in which it has and has not changed over the past century. From the Norland Nannies' 'method' and the magical Mary Poppins, to the terrifying breach of trust in films, The Nanny and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, to today's child-tamer 'Supernanny', our culture has alternately welcomed and rejected this approach to child-care. The tales told in this history reach to the heart of the nanny dilemma that parents still struggle with today.

Leseprobe

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

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

1 Introduction: Hidden Lives

2 Living Inside the Mother–Nanny–Child Triangle

3 Continuity and Change over Time

4 Nannies in Training

5 Situations Vacant, Situations Wanted: Finding and Keeping a Nanny

6 Life Beyond the Job

7 Imaginary Nannies in Fiction and Film

8 Epilogue: Nannies Today

Archives

Bibliography

Notes

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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 people’s 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 Women’s 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 D’Arch 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 nanny’s 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 Janet’s 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.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

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 people’s 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 anyone’s 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 1914–1960, 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.1 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 people’s 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 ayah’s 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 Noreen’s 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 nanny’s 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.

Although I never had a nanny, these stories fitted into an imagined world of middle-class children already familiar from my childhood reading: the warm comforting Nana in Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes who never left her charges, and the magical Mary Poppins who was always coming and going. But what struck me most about my aunts’ and parents’ tales was that the relationships they had with their nannies and governess were not recognised as important. These women were being paid to look after the children and had at some point to leave them. Any attachments that were formed were inevitably affected by the contracts (whether or not these were written down) that the carers held with my grandparents. I could see the potential for tension in these arrangements in Ursula’s adult writings. Haunted by the governess, nanny and servants who dominated her young life, her 1980s novel Tin Toys replays the petty struggles and rivalries in her childhood household, observed from the perspective of an 8-year-old child:

Nurse’s complexion went darker, she narrowed her dark-lidded eyes. She felt her position and Maggie knew it. Nurse should be running the house not Gov who wasn’t a relation and very old. Nurse despised Maggie for being a servant and lowly born. For her part Maggie pitied Nurse, an aunt by marriage without status or love. No relative would get such treatment in her country. No wonder Nurse was so sulky.2

I wondered about the longer-term legacy of this kind of upbringing, not just for Ursula, my parents and their contemporaries but also my own generation’s post-Second World War childhood when traditional nannies were much rarer. One clue seemed to lie in my father’s belief in the importance of infant attachment, unknown in his own parents’ time: the idea that a child needs one secure and permanent mother or mother figure during the first few years of life. This theory was developed by John Bowlby, with whom my father worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1960s. Bowlby and most other analysts of his generation had been brought up by nannies and, though direct connections with their own pasts were rarely made, it seemed to me that their focus on a child’s relationship with the mother, to the exclusion of others in the family, must be linked partly to their own experiences. The ideas of Bowlby and the equally well-known paediatrician Donald Winnicott about the importance of mothers were widely publicised after the Second World War. Were their theories, which they applied to all classes of mothers, rooted in their own upbringing by what sociologist Cameron Macdonald has called shadow mothers? These were women who devoted their lives to caring for children, but who always took second place to the mother and who might all too easily leave.3

For a short period I too became a shadow mother. In 1971, at the age of 19, I took a job as a mother’s help caring for two young children in a large house in North London. When I met my employer Gill again many years later I discovered she had been brought up by a trained nanny in the early 1940s, at the time when Bowlby was first developing his theories. Gill had disliked her nanny, who had left the family when she was 3 or 4 years old, but her strongest memory was of a profound shock when the woman who had looked after her since birth suddenly disappeared. Gill’s childhood experiences had led her to a rather different pattern of nanny employment with her own children. Determined that she should remain at the centre of her children’s lives, Gill tried to ensure her children would not grow too attached to their carers, and selected young women who would not stay too long. She also worked from home and made sure her helpers did things her way.

I was in my gap year between school and university and did not want to get closely involved with Gill and her family. Although I had a six-month contract, I only intended to stay for three months, not wanting to miss a family holiday. Despite Gill’s good intentions, her childcare system could not protect her children entirely from pain. Most of the day-to-day care of the children was undertaken by her helpers. If they woke in the night, I would soothe them, and it was I, not their mother, who usually greeted them when they woke in the morning. Three months was long enough for Gill’s 1-year-old daughter to become attached to me; I found out afterwards that she had been quite disturbed for a while after I left. I knew why she was upset (after all, I’d been brought up with Bowlby’s Childcare and the Growth of Love) but, rather than empathising with the child’s distress, I felt pleased that she appeared to have loved me as much as her mother and saw it as a marker of my success as a mother’s help.

My experience with Gill’s family also gave me an insight into the day-to-day routines of a nanny’s work. These were dictated partly by the physical layout of the house. Before the Second World War, nannies traditionally occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between family and servant, but even in the more egalitarian 1970s, household space could be segregated. The house I worked in was over four floors with a family kitchen in the basement, which in former times would have been the preserve of servants. I had meals and mixed with the family there, but spent little time on the middle floors. With their elegant furniture, the drawing room and dining room on the ground floor were the domain of Gill and her husband. Here Gill worked and entertained, while the floor above contained their bedroom and a spare room for guests. I had my own bedroom, a day off each week and time off in the afternoons, but I still often felt lonely, spending much of my time with the children in the garden or in their rooms next to mine on the top floor. And while the physical work of childcare was much lighter in the 1970s than earlier in the century, I experienced the boredom and fatigue of day-to-day childcare, carrying the baby up and down long flights of stairs and pushing a pram up those long Hampstead hills. Unlike many pre-Second World War nannies, my background was similar to that of my employers, but this did not make the boundaries between us easier to manage. Gill made efforts to include me and her other helpers in evening meals and conversation, but she often longed for time alone with her husband.

Remembering my time as a mother’s help and hearing my relatives’ memories of their nannies spurred me to look more closely at the dynamics of nanny employment. And what seemed most important to explore were the differing needs and interests of mother, nanny, and child, and the often unspoken conflicts that might help to explain the silence that surrounds this kind of work. There is a pervasive view in our society that a mother should be everything to her child. Coupled with the mother’s power to hire and fire help, this belief made it hard for Gill to assign an equal but different status to her child’s relationship with a paid carer, or recognise its importance. I wanted to know how mothers as well as nannies and children managed these relationships, how they felt about them, and whose interests took priority.

The powerful but often unacknowledged feelings I encountered lie at the heart of this book. Nannies were both insiders and outsiders in families, and the odd and ambivalent position they occupied had an effect on many people’s lives. Those affected stretched far beyond my own family. They included women of all classes and many different cultures and ethnicities, and families of very different shapes, sizes, and backgrounds in twentieth-century Britain. By listening to the voices of children, nannies and mothers whose lives were intertwined in this way in the past, I hope that more light will be shed on the dilemmas families face in caring for children today.

ABBREVIATIONS

GMRO: Greater Manchester Record Office

HRO: Hertfordshire Record Office

IOWRO: Isle of Wight Record Office

LMA: London Metropolitan Archive

NCA: Norland College Archive, Bath

NCUMC: The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child

PC: Princess Christian

SSUS: Sussex University Special Collections

WLAM: Wellcome Library, Archives and Manuscripts

WTS: Wellgarth Training School

1

INTRODUCTION

HIDDEN LIVES

Jimmy put the light out

When you go to bed.

Jimmy put the light out, or you’ll get a head-

Ache that will remind you

That you shouldn’t read in bed.

This piece of doggerel verse, addressed to my grandmother, who was nicknamed ‘Jimmy’,1 was composed by a prominent politician sometime in 1914–15. It was written on the back of a printed thank-you card and discovered by my aunt among her mother’s possessions after she died in the 1970s. As one of the very few documents she had kept from that period of her life, it was a tantalising find. Jimmy was an attractive young woman in her early twenties working as an under-nanny. She only stayed with the politician’s family for six months and never said much about the job. Although she had done two years’ training at the prestigious Norland College, this was her only post, and the explanation given to her daughters was that she didn’t want to spend her time pushing prams.

Why, then, did she keep the card? It was probably attached to a book and kept as a reminder of the present she received from a famous man who may simply have known that she loved reading. Yet the language and tone of the verse suggests that nanny and father could have had closer contact. Going to bed and putting the light out were hardly appropriate suggestions for a man in his position to make to a young lady of her background who was also his employee. The underlining of the word ache on the card might have simply been adding emphasis in a rhyme, but might also suggest that he was missing her or believed she was missing him. Could it be that an illicit flirtation, if not a full-blown affair, had taken place? It was customary for husbands and wives of this class to have separate bedrooms. The fact that this man knew that his nanny read late into the night indicates that he may have visited her room on the floor above, easily accessible yet conveniently out of his wife’s view.

‘Jimmy put the light out’.

‘Jimmy’: my grandmother, Belle Jameson, in 1918.

It was not uncommon for upper- and middle-class men to have sexual liaisons with servants, who were usually dismissed if they were found out or became pregnant.2 But, as the daughter of a Northern Irish protestant minister, my grandmother would not have thought of herself as a servant. The shame of discovery would have been too much to bear, and she might have fled before things went too far. Intrigued by the card, I visited the politician’s family archive to see if I could find out more. Letters written to him by his wife gave glimpses of my grandmother playing happily on the beach with his son, giving no indication that anything was wrong. But her sudden disappearance from the household not long afterwards suggests the wife may have discovered or suspected something was amiss but chose not to reveal it, at least in writing.

What makes this story so compelling is the fact that my grandmother kept the card throughout her life and did not show it to anyone. Whether or not my interpretation is entirely correct, her behaviour shows that any attraction between her and her employer (whether mutual or not, and even if only at the level of fantasy) was forbidden; it could never have been openly admitted by either party. The card, therefore, is a small but important clue to the hidden lives of nannies and to the powerful but often unacknowledged feelings of love and loss that lie at the heart of this book.

The fact that love and loss are so significant in a book about the history of a particular type of childcare needs further explanation. We can begin to see why this is the case by thinking about the wider resonances of my grandmother’s story, particularly for upper- and middle-class families. The story is about class: her love of reading was a sign of her education; it gave her employer an easy opportunity to breach the barriers between them and exploit her feelings. It is also about family secrets, marital betrayal and, possibly, unrequited love. And it is about work which could be tiring and demeaning (pushing prams) but also rewarding (playing with a child on the beach). Above all, it is about relationships that provoke strong emotional responses yet have never been part of the main family story in Britain, being deemed much less important than those between husband and wife or mother and child.

Nannies’ apparent lack of importance in families may be one reason why, despite the ubiquity of figures like Supernanny and Mary Poppins, few histories of nannies have been written. The last major study, Jonathan Gathorne Hardy’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, was first published more than forty years ago. As both an elegy for the golden days of nannies and an exposure of nanny abuse, Gathorne Hardy’s findings are compelling, but warrant further investigation and updating. His story is also part of my own. My initial purpose in writing this book was to find out why nannies have so often been glorified and demonised, even though we know so little about them, and to discover what lies behind their remarkable longevity in the British imagination.

The period I write about, from the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901 to the early 1980s, is separated from our own by more than thirty years, and the personal and domestic service traditions in which nanny employment was embedded seem today, in some ways, like a distant memory. Yet there is much in this book that will resonate with families today. The triangular relationship of mother, nanny and child at the centre of the book is still with us, and much of what I will reveal has relevance for hard-pressed mothers seeking the best kind of care for their children. For example, the relief mothers may feel about delegating the care of their children so that they can get on with their own lives is often mixed with sadness and guilt for leaving their offspring, worry that the carer will not be good enough, and anger and blame if things go wrong.

That these feelings are not unique to the present becomes clear when we read Joan Kennard’s thoughts about her nannies in letters to her parents written more than a century ago. As an army officer’s wife, her loyalties and expectations of childcare were not the same as ours today. She did no paid work, and some of her views about raising children will appear unreasonable, even shocking, by today’s standards. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 2, the dilemmas she faced about what kind of nanny would be right for her family, worries about her children’s health and wellbeing, anger at the apparent neglect of one child, and the conflicts between her roles as a mother and wife are familiar to many mothers today.

DIFFERENT VOICES

We know about Joan Kennard because her parents preserved her letters and deposited them in a family archive. It is rare to find such unguarded and forthright views written by nannies themselves. Correspondence from nannies held in other family collections tells a rather different story. Lady Desborough’s nanny Harriet’s letters (located in the Desborough family archive) give a fascinating picture of her day-to-day responsibilities as well as showing her deep love for the children. Yet the accounts she gave of her charges rarely say anything negative and often feel unreal. To understand why this was so, it is important to think about the conditions of service and relationships that shaped the correspondence and others like it. Where did power lie, and who was dependent upon whom?

A unique feature of this book is the space it gives to these different voices, offering multiple perspectives on similar events and employment scenarios. As well as looking at letters and diaries, I have interviewed and corresponded with nearly fifty mothers, nannies and people brought up by nannies, all of whom were born between the early 1900s and the 1990s.3 All but one of the participants was born in England, Scotland or Wales, but the locations where they lived and worked are not confined to the United Kingdom; they include British families who employed foreign nannies and au pairs, and British nannies working for foreign families. There is often more than one viewpoint on the same set of dynamics, either nanny and child or more than one sibling from the same family; in one case the views of mother, child and nanny have been brought together. I have mixed these oral histories with autobiographies and memoirs, mostly of early twentieth-century childhoods. Putting these sources together allows deeper reflection on the dynamics of the nanny–mother–child relationship. They give us a more interesting view of the rather one-sided stories of perfection or evil told by children and of accounts by mothers and nannies that show themselves in the best light or as the wronged party. Many of these stories are by necessity anonymous, given the sensitivity of information they reveal, with names and identifying details changed.

Children often betrayed the strongest feelings, perhaps because they were the least powerful and least heard voices in the triangle. We encounter a full range of emotions: adoration, sadness, hatred and sometimes abuse. For example, letters written by Lady Desborough’s son reveal how much he missed his nanny and his use of her as an intermediary between himself and his mother. This is important because it shows things that could not be said to each party as well as what could. But such insights are rare. And because most accounts of nannies by their charges are written with hindsight, usually after they had grown up, they also give little sense of the ordinariness of nursery life, with only the most traumatic events or idealised views preserved in memory.

One such account, published in Nursery World magazine in 1926 entitled “‘Nannie”: a tribute to all real nannies and to one in particular by ONE OF HER BABIES’, is nothing short of elegiac. ‘Devoted to her mistress, adoring her babies – true to the servants’; this nanny ‘knew nothing of disappointed old age’. ‘Tucked away in a chair in the corner … with an assured home and security of a pension in the future should she need it’, she remained part of the family and even in death became ‘a guardian angel to her children’s children’.4 But did such paragons of perfection really exist, and were they really so fortunate? Or do stories like this conceal more brutal realities, like those that will be revealed in the letters Harriet sent Lady Desborough in the last few months of her life when she was confined to an institution against her will? Such sources call romanticised accounts of old retainers into question.

The view that most nannies were looked after in old age by the families they cared for hides a more complicated picture. While some employers and/or former charges worked hard to ensure their nannies were well cared for, it was not always an easy task, and some nannies continued working into extreme old age. Connections between nannies’ different families are important to explore, including their blood relations and those they worked for, which often included more than one family. What was the relationship between them during and after employment, and who took responsibility for a nanny in old age and death? The locations of nannies’ graves and inscriptions written on them tell us a lot about their ambivalent position as both insiders and outsiders in families, and suggest the importance of finding out more about their lives beyond the job.

ATTACHMENT AND LOSS

Views of nannies as either all good or all bad were often given by children who had multiple or serial carers. ‘Good’ nannies were rarely viewed as unkind or hurtful, nor could ‘bad’ nannies ever be kind or loving. Sibling jealousies and favouritism by nannies intensified these feelings, and when a hated carer suddenly disappeared children could be burdened with guilt, believing that their bad feelings must have destroyed her. I was told one story by a woman who, as a child, had been given no clear explanation of why her governess had died during an operation, and wondered if she had jumped out of the window because she hated looking after them. Children’s feelings when ‘bad’ nannies left the family were also quite ambivalent. My aunt Ursula at the age of 5 was dismayed to see her ‘bad’ nanny crying in the nursery just before her imminent departure. She assumed that her adored baby brother was the cause and did not relate the tears to herself. Yet Ursula could not entirely let go of the person upon whom she had been dependent from a very early age; so she kept her nanny’s gift of an expensive Italian doll for twenty years, until after her own children were born.

Losing a much loved carer was even more difficult. Children coped in a variety of ways, some of which were more successful than others. Anger with the person they had lost was common, as was punishing the replacement nanny. In order to understand why a child behaved in one way or another, we have to go inside that particular triangle and observe its dynamics. When Ursula’s much loved governess, Miss Caryer, was leaving to go to a new post, the child was told by her mother to stay away. But Ursula glimpsed her governess’s ‘red, twisted face averted from the taxi window’ and felt a ‘hot unease’. She likened this feeling to the time she had carelessly injured a rabbit that had to be put to sleep, thinking it was her fault that the governess was upset. Feeling unable to confide in her mother or fully acknowledge her loss, she reacted by retaliating cruelly. In a letter to Miss Caryer she emphasised her freedom by describing her newly polished nails, an adornment her governess would never have allowed.5

The Holden children with their nanny, c. 1925.

Timothy, a 93-year-old man who told me his story from a care home, had a different strategy for coping with loss. Memories of his ayah in Thailand, whom he adored, were focused primarily on the love this young girl felt for his family. Prominent highlights of his tale were her youth and beauty, her attachment to his sick baby brother, her desperation not to be sent back to an abusive husband, and the horror of her returning the next day with some of her hair pulled out. Timothy stressed his ayah’s devotion as she had watched over him, making sure he did not drown in the family pond (my aunt Noreen told a similar story about her ayah rescuing her from drowning), and he told of her sadness when one of the more senior ayahs was chosen to return to England with the family. We can never know how accurate his memories were or whether the ayah saw things in the same way. But the tears Timothy shed when he spoke about her had probably as much to do with his sadness both in the past and in the present, in the care home where he now feels abandoned. Removed from his ayah’s care to a boarding school at the age of 7, where emotions could not easily be expressed, he had survived by attributing some of his own feelings of loss to her.

Losing the person who had been the primary carer, particularly for a child under the age of 5, was an event which the psychiatrist John Bowlby, writing in the 1950s, believed could ‘be as significant as losing a mother’.6 Yet the adverse effects of nannies’ relationships with children must not be overstated. In the many cases where care was successfully shared between mother and nanny, where nannies stayed throughout childhood or where a nanny’s departure was handled well, children thrived under their care, and the help and friendship nannies offered mothers was highly valued. The fact that the effects of maternal loss were only widely recognised after the Second World War, when Bowlby’s work became well known, is also of some significance. His theories were misused to blame mothers for leaving their children, and the feelings of guilt this provoked probably increased their reluctance to admit that a nanny’s relationship with a child was of real importance.

The Holden family, c. 1936. The woman second from left is my grandfather’s old nurse, who was looked after by the family. The governess, Miss Caryer (fourth from left), is in the least prominent position at the back.

The fears lying behind this refusal to recognise the nanny–child relationship probably arose from a deep but often unspoken rivalry about who the child loved the most, a problem for mother and nanny alike. Cameron Macdonald illustrated this in her book Shadow Mothers, which explores the relationships between mothers and nannies in contemporary America. At the age of 16, Macdonald had taken a summer job as a nanny. Initially, the family all seemed to love her and were keen to have her as a regular babysitter. But when the youngest child hurt herself and refused to be consoled by her mother, only wanting her nanny, the family promptly paid her wages and never saw her again. This abrupt parting left Macdonald with feelings of guilt and shame, realising that by getting too close to the child she had crossed an invisible line.7

The nanny’s side of the line was particularly clearly explained in a 1956 article titled ‘Mother and/or Nanny’ in the magazine Nursery World by psychologist Phyllis Hostler, who was a regular contributor. Responding to concerns frequently aired in the letters columns over the previous three decades, she tried to help parents and nannies resolve their difficulties and make things easier for the child. Hostler recognised the emotional problems for the nanny on her departure, and in the above article she argued that:

It is always difficult to believe when we have served well and faithfully, that any other will do or be as much loved. One of the hardest things a nurse can be called upon to face, is to hand over her charge to another, wholly and undivided.8

Illustrations for the article ‘Mother and/or Nanny’ in Nursery World by Phyllis Hostler, December 1956. Reproduced courtesy of Nursery World

CHANGING DEBATES AND CONDITIONS

Nursery World magazine offered a useful forum for parents and nannies to express concerns of this kind, and their views can be traced in the correspondence columns over a fifty-year period. These were by no means confined to nannies’ comings and goings. Mothers wondered if it was better for a nanny to be trained or untrained and whether or not she should be a ‘lady’; they explained the implications in each case and debated whether a nanny should be treated like a servant, family member or friend. They discussed what kind of work nannies should do, objected to being told that nannies knew more than they did, and hated being represented as ‘interfering mothers’. They also gave their views on whether it was better if a nanny was a mother’s helper or in sole charge. Nannies joined in the discussion about whether being trained at college or learning on the job was best, what role a mother should play in her child’s upbringing, what hours they should work, what ‘time off’ meant, and where they should spend their off-duty time.

Following these debates over time, particularly before and after the Second World War, is fascinating because we can see which aspects altered and which stayed the same. I also trace changes and continuities in home-based childcare over a longer period, from the days of wet nursing until the post-war years when au pairs and mothers’ helps were the main source of help. It has been useful to place these changes in the context of childcare advice, which shifted dramatically over the period, from the days of Truby King in the early twentieth century to Benjamin Spock, the most famous post-war guru. Shifting norms help to explain why a nanny trained under one childcare regime might come into conflict with a mother influenced by another.

Equally important to consider are the household spaces and conditions in which these relationships arose. What was different about having a nanny in a large or a small house, if there were lots of children or only one or two? Did it matter if the nursery was in a separate wing or floor, or next door to the parent’s bedrooms, or if the nanny slept with the children or on her own? Was the amount of time nannies spent in different parts of the house significant, particularly the nursery, living rooms and kitchens? What were the implications of nannies having other servants to wait upon them, if they were the only paid helper in the house, and if they did housework or prepared food as well as childcare? How different was it if the child was breast- or bottle-fed, and if the mother did some of the childcare herself or delegated it all to the nanny?

Many of these things altered over the twentieth century as class barriers became less stable and family sizes declined. More jobs became available for women of all classes, appliances such as washing machines and electric irons became common in middle-class homes, and domestic service went into terminal decline. However, while these factors had an impact on the number and type of nannies being employed, they did not, as Gathorne Hardy argued, largely disappear after 1939. Post-war middle- and upper-class women still often looked for live-in help with their children, even though many of them were not called nannies and their employment conditions had changed.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The fact that there were so many names for this kind of work can be confusing. Nannies, mothers’ helps, lady helps, nurses, lady nurses, children’s nurses, nursemaids, nursery maids, nurse/generals, nurse/housekeepers, nursery governesses, babysitters (more common in America) and au pairs were all common. Some names were markers of class – the terms ‘maid’ and ‘lady’ disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century – and some indicated whether or not housework or teaching would be part of the job. Yet matching an occupational name to a role is not straightforward, as there was too much overlap. Most of the time I use the generic term ‘nanny’, partly for convenience but also because of the difficulties in distinguishing one kind of post from another.

Names for home-based childcare workers were so varied because their jobs not only crossed class boundaries but also took the workers into maternal territory. While it was useful for mothers, delegating childcare was not always easy or comfortable, and knowing what to call the women who did this work could be difficult. Names were particularly tricky when mother and worker were of a similar class, as was the case with Amelia (born 1905), daughter of a corn merchant whose business failed in the 1920s. She explained that she didn’t really have a job title but was simply known as ‘Miss Wilson’. She had no qualifications and would not have described herself as a nurse or a nanny because of their associations with domestic service. Although she likened herself to a governess, the work was not educational but rather involved taking the children out for walks, reading to them and putting them to bed. Most significantly, she explained how convenient her presence was for the children (as indeed it was for their mother) because, as she put it, ‘the mother had other things to do.’9

For Amelia, the benefits of the job were mainly financial. It involved emotional as well as physical labour, not just in relation to the children but also by providing their mother with ‘reassurance and non-intrusive’ childcare. To do this, Amelia had to set boundaries on her own feelings for her charges.10 Her fondness for them was based on their dependence upon her, but she also knew that she must not get too attached. The convenience for mothers lay in the time away from their children women like Amelia gave them. They did the work that mothers had either rejected as beneath them or delegated to another in order to do tasks they could not do with their children around. We can link this delegation of the care and protection of children to a meaning of the word ‘nanny’ in common usage since the 1960s. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘a person, institution, etc., considered to be unduly protective or interfering’. To attribute these qualities to a nanny suggests the difficulty many British people have with feelings of dependency, and it has been widely employed to encourage us to stand on our own two feet.

It is not coincidental that the term ‘nanny state’, coined by the Conservative politician Ian Macleod in 1965, was used to deride governmental interference in affairs deemed to be personal and properly beyond the jurisdiction of the state. The nanny was the woman who had the most power in that generation of middle- and upper-class male politicians’ personal lives when they were children and at their most vulnerable. By deriding nannies, these men were by extension denying any continuing dependence on the labour of women or of working-class people. In this way the fantasy of the self-made man, who achieved success as a result of his efforts alone, was – and still is – maintained. At the same time the important role of the state in protecting weak and vulnerable members of society, just as their nannies had protected them as babies, is dismissed as worthless. It is noticeable also that the term ‘nanny state’ was widely used by Margaret Thatcher to deride Labour party policies. This is particularly ironic, as she had depended on a nanny to bring up her own children, and at that time Labour was perceived as representing the interests of the class from which most nannies originated.

The use of the term ‘nanny’ to mock dependency suggests how deeply embedded nannies are in our national imagination, despite the fact that most of us have no direct experience of their care. It is not coincidental in this respect that the fictional nanny Mary Poppins was one of the earliest figures to be associated with the idea of a nanny state, and that she appeared in the 2012 Olympic ceremony protecting children in the National Health Service from harm as she chased away the evil Voldemort from the Harry Potter stories.11 The nanny we all know best is not a real nanny at all. She is a fantasy figure that many of us would love to have looking after us but whose overweening and sometimes frightening power we also fear. Even if we have never read the books or seen the film, most of us know her. I explore the significance of Mary Poppins and her kind in Chapter 7. But as we progress through this history of nannies and their relationships with mothers and children, it is well to remember how much our beliefs about them are shaped by fantasy nannies in our minds.

2

LIVING INSIDE THE MOTHER–NANNY–CHILD TRIANGLE

James came to me and I was crying and I said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

He said, ‘Pat can help you.’

I said, ‘She won’t, she won’t be able to do it.’

He said, ‘Why won’t she be able to do it?’ … and I was in tears. It makes me cry to think of it … I couldn’t bear it, I thought she’d be repelled and James said, ‘She won’t, she won’t, I’m going to go and talk to her’ … and I can remember to this day, my thrill.

I heard this voice saying, ‘Tell her not to be so bloody stupid.’ It was just wonderful and I felt this … this wonderful sense of relief.1

When Beth’s daughter Emily was born in the late 1970s with a serious medical condition, the family needed a nanny more than ever before. An artist whose husband was often away from home, Beth had employed a series of live-in nannies since her first child David had been a few months old, but it had never been an easy relationship. Beth needed to be in control and she did not want her nannies to be in sole charge or get too close to her family. So she lodged the nanny in the basement, as far away as possible from the family bedrooms. She hated having strangers in the house and thought that was the reason none of them stayed very long.

The crunch came for Beth after Emily was born. Desperate to find time to work, she had retreated to bed, refusing to believe her current nanny, Pat, could possibly help care for her sick child. Beth had finally let go because she could not cope with her sick baby alone and still be an artist. Her previous nannies had helped her achieve both roles but had remained outsiders in the family, and Beth remembered few of their names. But because Pat had been able to take charge of Emily when Beth was at her most vulnerable and at risk of having to stop working, she became Beth’s saviour and was never forgotten.

Beth’s reluctance to give up control over her child, and eventual relinquishment of Emily’s care, illustrate the complex dynamics of the nanny–mother–child triangle. A nanny’s job involves emotional and physical work so central to a mother’s identity that giving them up to another person can never be simple. The feelings Beth and many other mothers experienced include guilt about wanting to have time to themselves rather than always being available to their children, anger at not being able to be superwomen, and fear of trusting people outside the family to take care of their most beloved family members.2 No wonder finding a nanny Beth could rely on seemed like a miracle.

Beth’s nanny Pat had a rather different perspective. She had looked after David before Emily was born, but left to go back to her native Australia, returning to the family just before Emily’s birth. With little experience of childcare, she had taken the job mainly as a way of travelling. Like Beth’s other nannies, Pat did not feel part of the family and was often lonely. But she had also enjoyed the work and felt comfortable doing it, and it had helped her gain confidence. Pat’s memories were focused on the tension and stress the family had suffered after Emily’s birth and how they had affected David. She described how having a succession of different people caring for him, especially at the time of his little sister’s illness, had made him ‘wary’. Pat’s wisdom about the older child’s feelings was matched by tenderness for the younger one, creating a strong bond:

I worried about her more – she was just so tiny and had so many problems. I remember carrying her around the house with her little head in the palm of my hand and her body resting along my arm. Her feet came to my elbow. She was carried around like that against my body as I felt she was safe there.3