Shenstone Lodge

A Memory of Shenstone Lodge School.

The following is taken from my mother's memoirs and the time period Winifred would have worked at the Lodge was between 1929-1932. Her mother, Ann Pamela Myring (b 1887), is described as a 'Housemaid Domestic' in the 1911 Census at the age of 24, living in the house of her parents. I am assuming that the old sepia postcard we have of Shenstone Lodge is the same as Shenstone Lodge School, but this is open for confirmation.

"From the age of thirteen, my mother (Winifred May Allsopp) worked as a domestic servant at Shenstone Lodge, where her mother, Ann Pamela Allsopp, had worked before she was married. She had passed examinations at school and could have gone on and received more education, but her mother, being a widow, could not afford it. Instead, she took her up to Shenstone Lodge to introduce her to the lady of the house. She told my mother: “When we go in to see the lady, you must curtsey”. Well, my mother, being a stroppy thing said: “I’ll curtsey to nobody”. However, when my grandmother went into this room she gave the woman a deep curtsey. You had to show respect to the rich in those days, but not my mother: she wasn’t curtseying to anybody.

Mum worked for a shilling a week and she had two hours off on a Sunday afternoon. She would walk home to where her mother lived and give her mother the shilling. I don’t think she kept any money for herself, but of course you were kept in those days - you lived in the house and you were fed and watered. That was the way of life and you accepted it.

On Sunday lunchtimes her employers would have a big cooked dinner where they often entertained. My mother only had two hours to go home and see her mother, but it began that they took longer and longer over their lunch and drinks. It was my mother’s duty to wait until they had finished, clear the table and do the dishes, but my mother finally got so exasperated with this that she said to the cook: “I’m going, because I’ve only got an hour left to get to my mother’s to give her my shilling and get back”. So she put on her bonnet and coat and swept off down the drive, seeing the master and mistress and their guests looking through the window in horror, mouths agape, because they couldn’t believe that this cheeky young thing had left without clearing the table and doing the dishes! When she got back she was called in and told that she couldn’t go doing that. My mother explained that she didn’t have time to go and see her mother … and ever after that, they were on time. So although they thought she shouldn’t have protested, they got the message that her two hours was her two hours.

It was while my mother was working at Shenstone Lodge that my father came to the house, as a painter and decorator. Romance blossomed and they married. My father was about eight years older than my mother, she being just sixteen when they married, which was, I suppose, the earliest age that you could marry."

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