After walking through Marylebone and seeing the modest houses where Maude had lived as a child, we found Knightsbridge and Mayfair striking in their grandeur. We were approaching Chesterfield Street where my great-grandmother and great-grandfather were in service together. How they must have congratulated themselves on landing such enviable jobs!
As explained in an earlier blog post, the census record in which they both appear was hard to trace. I had been looking for Maude Parker in the 1901 census and eventually found her listed as Alice Parker. David, for his part, was listed as Daria. Finding them living and working in the same household was an incredible surprise. Better still, it explained how they must have met.
The census record revealed that they were both single and occupied as household staff. They were listed along with 10 other staff members, the most senior being Charles Dixon, aged 55, who must have been the butler. The head of the house was the Viscount Francis Wheler Hood and the only other family members living there were the Viscountess Edith Hood and their adult daughter, the Honourable Dorothy Hood.
We found the address very easily because I had researched the property and discovered that it was now the premises of the High Commission of the Bahamas. Although the house looks fairly compact from the front, it is apparently very spacious inside. In addition to the rooms having high ceilings, the property stretches far back, affording ample space for entertaining and accommodating guests.
In my imagination I can see Maude Alice Parker standing just behind the butler, Charles Dixon, as he holds open the front door. She is ready to take the cloaks and hats from the arriving visitors and show them into the parlour. Meanwhile, David, serving as footman, directs the carriage and horses to the courtyard at the back. Outside on the street, a young boy in heavy boots lights a row of oil lamps. From a house across the way, a silver-haired man with a walking-stick steps out for an evening of high-stakes gambling at his nearby gentleman's club.
I may not be accurate in my depiction of the details of this scene but the exercise is fruitful in making me contemplate
the actual lives of my ancestors. Standing in the street where they had possibly stolen kisses late at night, I came face to face with the fact that Maude Parker and David Ritchie were far more than names on a census. Nor were they staid and starchy as we tend to think the Victorians were. No, the young couple were adventurous, passionate and idealistic, no doubt as full of big dreams for the new century as I once was for the new millennium.
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