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Uneasy mingling: the Servants’ Ball at ITV’s Downton Abbey, where Lady Grantham rightly couples Carson, the butler – and Lord Grantham escorts housekeeper Mrs Hughes Was the Servants’ Ball really so marvellous? It is invoked as an example of the cosy, protective relationship within the English country house between the family and their servants. But this traditional ChristmasRead more

Did servants suffer from SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder? The Victorian diaries of Mrs Sarah Wells, housekeeper of Uppark and mother to novelist H. G. Wells, reveal the physical and emotional cost of working in subterranean servant quarters. ‘So dark in these underground rooms!’ she wrote in 1892, twelve years into an anxious and exhausting tenureRead more

A dozen feathered hats, hidden within the fashion archives of the Victorian and Albert Museum, London, were my first introduction to Edwardian fashion addict Heather Firbank. Having viewed the hats – seductive, stylish, the last word in couture millinery – I was intrigued to know more about their wearer. And so I made an appointmentRead more

I stumbled across Heather Firbank, Edwardian fashion victim, when I made an appointment to view a dozen feathered hats at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archive centre in Olympia, west London.  I was researching a book on the women who campaigned to save the birds from ‘murderous millinery’, and I wanted to understand why theseRead more

When I started researching Margaretta Lemon, co-founder of the all-female RSPB, I assumed that she would be in favour of women’s suffrage. Of course she would! Etta Lemon, Mayoress of Reigate and co-founder of the RSPB This was a woman not afraid to swim against the current. As a girl, Etta was notorious for herRead more