My Grandmother was a Victorian: Alis Hawkins
I wrote my latest novel full of rage. Rage at something that happened more than a hundred years ago. Something that happened to my beloved grandmother when she was in her teens. Something that happened to many, many working class girls.
My grandmother was a Victorian. She was born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire, in 1899 into a mining family that had come to the anglicised east of Wales from the Welsh-speaking Rhondda Valleys for work. Her life was very different to mine, but by the time we could meet on relatively equal ground, when I was a teenager and she was in her late 70s, she possessed not a single attitude that might have been regarded as Victorian.
Not only that, but she was very clear about her attitude to the world she’d been born into. ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you things were better then,’ she told me once. ‘They weren’t. They’re much better now.’
She’d have been in her early 80s then, but I didn’t discover the reason for her vehemence until after her death in 1997. I’d asked my mother what she knew about Nan’s decade in ‘service’ after she’d left school at 14. My grandmother had only alluded to her time as a housemaid on two occasions that I could remember. The first had been to point out an inaccuracy on the TV drama Upstairs Downstairs and the second was when she told me that, the first time she came home from Bristol to see her family, one of her brothers had picked her up from the station in a hansom cab. ‘And now,’ she’d said, ‘I’ve seen men walk on the moon.’
‘The only thing I know,’ my mother said, ‘is why she moved from Bristol to a different job in Newport.’ As far as I’d known, Nan had never lived outside Wales so the fact that she’d worked in Bristol was a surprise to me. ‘The son of the house apparently thought she was his for the taking, and he had a bit of a shock when he made it clear she wasn’t.’
Nan had two older brothers, both miners, who’d adored their younger sister and I can only imagine that they had taught her how to defend herself against boys who thought they could take liberties.
How did things play out at that house in Bristol? Did Nan give notice, and if so, what reason did she give? Or perhaps the son complained of her, got her sacked? It would have been difficult to get another position without a ‘character’ as references were knwn then, so I imagine that it was she who instigated the move.
Some light was shed on the likely answers to those questions when I began researching the domestic lives of the working class and their middle class employers for my Oxford Mystery series. In the series, the main protagonist is a young woman from west Wales who has come to Oxford to study at the beginning of the women’s college movement, and it was through researching the world she had propelled herself into that I really began to understand what Nan had faced as a young, working class girl.
Some of the attitudes I came across were very jarring to modern, egalitarian sensibilities. For instance there was a prevalent middle class belief that working class people had fundamentally different natures from their ‘betters’, and that, therefore, they didn’t deserve to be treated with the same respect the middle classes demanded for themselves.
This was very starkly illustrated by something I discovered when I was researching my second book. In Oxford and Cambridge, the universities had, historically, been granted special jurisdiction giving their senior disciplinary officers – the proctors – powers of arrest and detention. And the people they were most interested in arresting and detaining were the city’s working class girls who were regarded as a corrupting influence on the undergraduates. Any young woman seen talking to a student, or who was judged to be ‘loitering’ in the street where she had no business (to their mind) being was presumed to be soliciting. She was arrested and marched off to the cells beneath the proctors’ office to await summary trial by the Vice Chancellor’s Court the following morning.
At that trial, the luckless girl’s evidence carried no weight against the word of an undergraduate who was assumed to be a gentlemen and whose word, therefore, was above suspicion. If he declared that he’d had no immoral intentions towards the girl – even if they’d been found in a compromising situation – then his word was taken at face value. The girl, however, was automatically assumed to have been attempting to seduce him. Found guilty, she’d be committed to prison – usually for a fortnight if it was her first ‘offence’ – to learn the error of her ways.
This was the background to the inspiration for my latest book. In Cambridge, in 1891, Daisy Hopkins, a young woman who’d been imprisoned in the University’s own jail, the ‘Spinning House’, fought back. Her family employed a lawyer who brought a case of habeaus corpus against the University. She was released and subsequently sued the Senior Proctor for false imprisonment.
In The Hunters’ Club there’s a strand loosely based on Daisy Hopkins’s case and, while I was writing it, I was driven by the rage I felt on behalf of my teenage grandmother. Away from home, unable to communicate easily with friends or family, she’d been at the mercy of the family who employed her and their arrogant, entitled son. My kind, clever, forward-looking grandmother became my inspiration for the book, the real wronged woman behind the characters I created.
She was a great reader, Nan, and I like to think she’d approve.