The Staircase Girls Read online

  In memory of my family of bedders: Great-Nana Mizen, Nana Seymour, Nana Adams and Aunty Shirley

  Contents

  Introduction

  Joyce Jones Cambridge, October 1952

  Ann Pilcher Folkestone to Cambridge, 1937–40

  Rose Hobbs 1920s–40s

  Joyce Redhill and Caterham, Surrey, September–October 1940

  Ann Cambridge 1941

  Joyce Redhill to Cambridge, January 1941

  Ann Cambridge 1942–43

  Joyce Cambridge 1941–46

  Maud Cooper Cambridge 1945–50

  Ann Cambridge 1945–47

  Joyce Cambridge 1946–53

  Rose Cambridge 1954

  Maud Cambridge 1950–55

  Audrey Perry Cambridge 1955–56

  Rose Cambridge 1959–63

  Audrey Cambridge 1960

  Ann Cambridge 1948–62

  Joyce Cambridge 1953–62

  Audrey Cambridge 1962–63

  Maud Cambridge 1960–68

  Ann Cambridge 1962 onwards

  Audrey Cambridge 1965–70s

  Rose Cambridge 1965–66

  Joyce Cambridge 1962 onwards

  Audrey Cambridge 1974 onwards

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  One of my earliest memories is of being five years old and sitting on a freshly made single bed, in a tiny room at a major Cambridge college, watching my nana, Ann ‘Nance’ Adams, as she went through her daily cleaning routine. A ‘bedder’ of some years, she looked smart in her starched tabard and smelled of my early childhood – a mix of lavender and carbolic soap. I sat transfixed by the smooth efficiency of her movements, as she picked up clothes from the floor, which needed vacuuming, emptied the bin ready for the next deposit of scrapped notes and wiped the surface of the desk in preparation for more studying. I always hoped to catch one of my nana’s infectious grins in those days, so I’d stare at her when I should have been reading, just in case she gave me one of her smiles. I think she liked my company; I know I liked hers.

  It was 1976 and Ann was a mother of four; almost fifty, and looked a lot older. Life had not been easy so far. Her two youngest children suffered with epilepsy. Kenny had contracted meningitis at five years old and was left permanently brain damaged. The second youngest, known to all as ‘our Shirl’, was struck on the head by a swing while playing at the park when she was eight years old, and was never the same after that. Her eldest (and my mum), Glenis, was Ann’s ‘rock’, but she missed a lot of schooling in order to help look after the youngest two children. Then there was Dorothy, who Ann worried about because she suffered with ill health.

  Over the years I watched my nana at work during the school holidays and on days when a persistent ear infection kept me from school. That was when I learned a lot about our family, and saw the great affection she had for her students. She would tell me her fears for the family and the hopes and dreams she once had for herself, before snapping out advice about marriage and children, half-informed by her observation of her students. ‘Don’t you dare get married early, Catherine!’ she’d exclaim. ‘You must study and travel the world. You have to have a life before children. Wait until you are at least thirty-five. Keep your hand on your ha’penny, my girl!’

  She drummed that into me from an early age, maybe even as early as 1976. A lot of it stuck, perhaps too well. At the age of eighteen I left my family behind in the working-class area of Barnwell in Cambridge, performing with Cambridge Youth Theatre and other theatre companies before becoming the first female in the family to attend university. After graduating from drama school, I stayed in London and worked in television. But I always knew that there’d be a welcome in the homes of my extended family when I returned, and particularly in that of my Aunt Shirley, who followed her mother into the business of being a bedder.

  From our Shirl I sometimes heard intriguing tales of the comings and goings, loves, hates and peculiarities of her ‘boys’, as she called the students on her staircase at college. I enjoyed hearing how one boy had been discovered with a girl in his room, or how another had simply disappeared without trace for a few days, only to return and claim to not remember anything. But I was too busy making my way in London to be really interested in people of Cambridge who were not family or close friends.

  Like many of her friends and family before her, Aunt Shirley remained in the same job and worked the same staircase for decades. She did so because, while the job was hard – until the 1980s bedders were expected to carry buckets of coal up the stairs to set fires in the grate for fellows in their rooms, as well as dust, tidy, take away rubbish and in some colleges, make the students’ breakfasts – it came with privileges and offered an experience unlike other jobs available to her class and gender. Some women who became bedders previously worked in shops or as waitresses, cleaners, factory hands or at similarly low-paid, manual work that demanded an 8–4 or 9–5 shift (some took on seasonal work such as picking fruit during the summer months when colleges were closed). Once employed by a college though, they, like Aunt Shirley, appreciated the more family-friendly hours that being a bedder brought. Starting early, but home in time for the midday meal, they could cook dinner for their children, for one thing. Or if their kids had school dinners, they could get on with the housekeeping at home after work, and have tea ready and waiting at the end of the school day. Often bedders with pre-school children would pay a neighbour to mind them while they worked. Many informal pre-school playgroups existed in areas where a number of bedders with similarly aged children lived, usually run by a child minder who had perhaps retired from other work, or for whom childcare was the only way to earn a living.

  As well as working hours that suited working mums, bedders enjoyed certain perks that went with their job. For some, getting to know the occupants of the rooms that they cleaned and the beds they made was a perk in itself, allowing as it did a glimpse into a world of which they had little knowledge or experience. A few bedders I met while doing research for this project resented the way that students ‘looked down’ on them, and as a result were reluctant to engage in anything but necessary communication with students and masters. But for the very many, who not only cleaned but also dispensed advice, physical aid and a reassuring maternal presence, they found a return of affection, and at Christmas, end of term or on graduation there would be small parcels addressed to their bedder left in newly vacated rooms. For the bedders who really got to know their students, graduation was almost like watching their own children leave home.

  For most of the twentieth century, in getting to know their students so well, Cambridge University’s bedders were the only members of their social class to have close-up, intimate contact with the chosen few who made it into the hallowed halls and quads of the 800-year-old institution. It is true that many of the upper-class students (and masters and fellows) who attended Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century saw bedders as simply the latest of the ‘servant class’ to engage with, having grown up with nannies, governesses, butlers and maids. However, for many others, the women who roused them from sleep and instructed them in how to do everything from dressing properly to combing their hair and tying their shoelaces, and who kept their living quarters habitable, were exotic, strange and the only faintly maternal presence in an otherwise lonely and paternalistic environment.

  I knew from hearing the stories that Aunt Shirley, Nana and their friends told that there was a unique relationship between bedders and students that the multitude of ‘Town vs Gown’ books and articles never even hinted at. I was prompted to begin exploring the intriguing living history of bedders in 2008 when our Shirl – then a fifty-six-year-old mother
of two and a recent grandmother – failed to turn up for work one Thursday.

  We know that the day started for Aunt Shirley as it usually did: she was woken at 5 a.m. by the sound of the alarm clock that sat on the landing outside her bedroom door – kept there, she always said, so she didn’t have to hear the incessant tick-tock that it made throughout the night. It seems that she went about her routine as usual, getting out of bed to turn the alarm clock off before going downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Then Shirley returned to her bedroom with her tea, because she liked to have a ‘leisurely’ morning before her journey on the first bus at six o’clock from Arbury to start work at Sidney Sussex College for half past six. She always began with the cleaning of the chapel, the part of her duties which, along with looking after the chaplain’s cat, she was most proud of. ‘You know Oliver Cromwell’s head is buried in my chapel, don’t you?’ she’d ask me on my frequent visits from London, never forgetting to add, ‘You can come in anytime.’ But Aunt Shirley never made it into her beloved chapel that day, because she collapsed and died on her bedroom floor. We are still unsure why.

  When the news broke, we were helped enormously through the grief we felt by seeing the love that was held for our Shirl and the support given to us by the domestic staff, the students and the chaplain at the college. They all insisted that the flag should be flown at half mast during the beautiful funeral service, which was held for Shirley in the chapel that she so loved. It was made very clear that it wasn’t only us, her family, who would miss her but also her ‘family’ at Sidney Sussex.

  Inspired and surprised by the clear bond that existed between my aunt and her employers – something that increasingly few of us ever get to experience, I think – I decided to make a short film that explored and celebrated the life and work of Cambridge’s bedders, aiming to finish it in time for the university’s 800th anniversary in 2009. So my serious research into the role of the Cambridge bedmaker began, and it wasn’t long before I discovered another family tie to the occupation. While searching the nineteenth-century archives of the Cambridge News I spotted the eerily familiar features of my paternal great-grandmother in a photograph. She was seated among a group of fellow bedders, and I hadn’t known that she too had worked at the colleges until that moment.

  After weeks of research I became extremely frustrated, though. While there were a few photographs and passing comments about bedders made by ex-students and masters, I could find very few personal stories told by the bedders. I decided to gather as many first-person stories as I could from the women who play an integral, but largely unseen and unsung, part in the everyday life of the university, even if they couldn’t all be included in the film, simply titled The Bedders. Beginning with my own family, I was introduced to bedders going back three generations. From them I heard stories that are in turns joyous, heartbreaking, revealing, sometimes gob-smacking and often very funny. There are enough to fill a book, or two, I thought.

  In gathering stories from the bedders who worked from after the Second World War to the present day, I have heard tales of personal tragedy, vicarious triumph, small victories and failures, huge generosity, births, deaths and marriages, all taking place against a backdrop of a strangely unchanging society secreted away from what, to them, was often a fluctuating and sometimes bewildering world.

  For me, the voices of the bedders of Cambridge that are gathered together in this book add a vital and unique strand to the history of the university. At the same time, they provide an extraordinary glimpse into working-class life in the latter half of the twentieth century. These are personal histories told by families of women who have touched the lives of thousands of men and women with whom they had little in common, but on whom they have left a lasting impression. From John Keats to Prince Charles, world-changing scientists, prize-winning authors and the greatest legal minds of generations have all had reason to bless their luck in having a bedder to help them stay the course of their studies. The bedders know, but they rarely make a fuss about it. After each graduation, they’ll have a cup of tea and wonder who will be on their staircase next year. They are remarkable women with remarkable stories to tell. Here are just a few of them.

  CATHERINE SEYMOUR, 2016

  JOYCE JONES

  Cambridge, October 1952

  Joyce Jones leaned her black Triumph bicycle against a wall, and shivered in the foggy, early dawn light. Glancing up at the enormous wooden, carved gate, she hesitated. While it wasn’t the first job that she had begun, it was the first to take her into the colleges that were firmly closed to people like her. This was a secret world she was about to enter, as she’d been told by more than one person, her mum included. People inside here had all the rights, while the likes of her had none. Some of the students, she’d heard, had taken advantage of girls from the town and got away with it because of who they were, or who their parents were. They’d get girls merry with gin and beer and, while some of the girls might say no, others might not. The students on the other side of this door had a bad reputation, alright. They also had money and didn’t need the ration cards that Joyce and her family were still dependent on, and would remain so until well into next year. Or so people said.

  Apprehension filled Joyce with a stiffness that she’d never felt when serving the young gentlemen from behind the counter at Woolies. That counter and her uniform somehow kept her separate and safe from them, even though sometimes a boy would squeeze her hand as she took money from them – one mad boy in his cape and tweed jacket had even quoted poetry at her as she tried to take his thruppence ha’penny. Now she was about to go into their rooms – their bedrooms, too – all alone, maybe even without a uniform to protect her.

  It’s a shame about that job in Woolies, she thought, her fingers rising to trace the scar on her neck, still raw from the operation. She’d caught septicaemia in an accident at work and nearly died. Her mum was definite that she couldn’t go back there after that, and told her that their neighbour Maud knew about an old lady who was retiring from her job as a bedder. As her mum said, ‘You’re young and fit enough to go up and down them twisty stairs – the old lady can’t do them any more, reckons Maudie.’ And that was it, as far as Joyce’s mum was concerned.

  So here she was, hours before anyone else had to go to work, feeling cold and thinking about the job she’d loved, especially meeting customers – or most of them anyway. Joyce had really liked chatting with her friends who worked behind the counter. They’d be having a right laugh on their way to the shop this morning without her, she thought, before realizing that they wouldn’t even be getting up for another hour or more. Lucky sods. Her breath left her in plumes, and she felt the cold creep up through the thinning soles of her ‘sensible’ shoes – which were a half size too big, because they were her mum’s and the only ones in the house that her mum said would do for running up and down stairs all day.

  Was that what she’d be doing, then, running up and down stairs, wondered Joyce. Hard to imagine that being the case since the old biddy that she was taking over from was well into her eighties, and Maud had said she moved with as much speed as the milkman’s old horse. Joyce really had no idea of what being a bedder entailed. She guessed that she had to make beds, that much was obvious, and clean the rooms and lug coal to make fires – but she did that at home anyway, and it didn’t seem much like a job that anyone would pay her for. But apparently the colleges would (and a whopping £5 a week, too). Staring at the door in front of her, she wondered, where were the stairs in there? Was this old place built like a house inside, then?

  The cold air, deadened by the fog, gathered around Joyce as she stood uncertainly, wondering whether to bang on the stupid big door with her fist, or if there was a bell somewhere.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’

  Joyce almost jumped out of her skin, and turned to see a smartly dressed man in a black overcoat and bowler hat. In his mid-thirties, she thought (old, anyway), he was peering intently at her, his hands behind his
back.

  ‘Er, no. I mean yes, that is . . .’ Joyce’s mind went blank. What was the name of the old woman she was supposed to meet?

  ‘Are you looking for someone, miss?’ the man asked in his slightly stuck-up voice. He wasn’t posh, Joyce could tell, but he was talking as if he wanted to be.

  ‘Yes!’ Joyce rushed her words: ‘An old woman, a bedder, I’m here to learn the job, take over from her doing for the young gentlemen, you see.’

  The man stood up straight and looked down his nose at her. ‘Oh.’

  He turned, pulled open a small door cut into the big one, leaned in and shouted, ‘Trevor! There’s a new bedder here, for old Annie.’ He looked over his shoulder at Joyce, jerked his head to motion her inside, and held the door open wider. Inside the little door, under an arch that was as deep as her bedroom at home, Joyce gawped at a big expanse of green grass. Straight paved footpaths cut through it, making squares of lawn.

  Surrounding her was a building that looked like a church, with leaded windows, carvings on the walls, and turrets and crows silently perched along the top of the slate roof which loomed high in the air. They’re watching me, she thought, and almost blurted out ‘Blimey!’, but noticed that the man in the bowler hat had opened another door a few feet to her right and was walking through it, so she turned and moved towards him. Joyce got to the door just as it was closing, and pushed her way through, into what looked like a cobbler’s shop, with a wooden counter in front of a wall of wooden boxes out of which poked papers and envelopes. Between the boxes and the counter she could see a single bar electric heater that stood in front of a hard chair, which blocked the entrance to another, even smaller room, lined with more wooden shelves and boxes. Joyce could feel her cheeks flushing, her face getting hot. The thin, utility-issue overcoat that she wore started to lose the sheen of water that the dense fog had left on it as it soaked into the material. The man in the bowler hat moved round to the other side of the counter, took off his overcoat – though not his hat – and hung it inside the smaller room behind him. He looked Joyce up and down with a blank expression.