07 February 2020
Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary but her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid, and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, a man to whom food was central, not only as a pleasure by itself, but as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.
Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. Through one eager eater, and one skilled cook, Annie Gray contextualises twentieth century food through two figures who were both intimately involved with it. Recipes include Georgina’s German Kougelhof, Curried Brains, macaroons, Boodles Orange, Mousse de Maple and ‘Chocolat Cake Good’.
Annie Gray is an historian, cook, broadcaster and writer specialising in the history of food and dining in Britain from around 1600 to the present day. She has presented TV history documentaries including Victorian Bakers and The Sweetmakers, and appears on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet. Find Annie on Twitter and Instagram.
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One day in 1977, an elderly lady stood weeping in her bedsit kitchen, methodically shredding her memoir into tiny pieces and washing them down her sink. Her son-in- law and her daughter had told her that no one would be interested in her life. It was a bad time, tensions were high, and so she took the loose pages, written in slightly shaky, crabby handwriting, and watched as the blue ink ran, and the scraps of her life disappeared down the drain. That any of the pages survived was only due to her granddaughter, who discovered her, and saved twenty-six and a half pages, written and rewritten, crossed out and corrected, and which detailed the first fourteen years of the ninety-five she’d so far lived.
In some ways, they were right. This is a book about an ordinary woman, born and brought up in average conditions, and who had, on the face of it, a career like thousands of others. She’d been in service, like so many thousands of other women born in the late Victorian period, rising from scullery maid to cook, and eventually retiring, somewhat later than those brought up with the expectation of guaranteed pensions and a generally accepted retirement age. But this was also a woman to whom Winston Churchill, fresh from addressing the crowd on VE Day, said that he couldn’t have achieved what he had without her.
Georgina Landemare worked for the Churchills from 1940 to 1954, the longest-serving of any of their domestic servants. They were, in turn, her longest employers. Her relationship with the family became one of friendship and respect, although she never forgot the ingrained line between servant and served. She was particularly close to Clementine Churchill, who valued her skills, her loyalty and her ability to turn out meals with minimum fuss despite rationing and the upheavals of war. In the course of her career she’d been Georgina Young, a schoolgirl; Georgie, a sweetheart and friend; Mrs Landemare, wife, mother and jobbing cook; and now she was known to the Churchill clan as ‘Mrs Mar’, an endearing mixture of nickname and the standard cook’s honorific (cooks were always Mrs, regardless of marital status). She had been in daily personal contact with Clementine, a stalwart providing sustenance and delight to Winston, and, throughout the war years especially, a key element in his particular brand of dinner-table diplomacy, believing, as he so firmly did, that personal contact, especially over good food and wine, was the secret to political success.
Unfortunately, public history sometimes slips into a blur of great people doing great deeds: tales of the rich and famous, easy to research and easy to sell, for people have heard of them. In 2017 alone there were two major biographic films and a TV series with Winston Churchill as a key character. There are over a thousand books about him, which include titles such as Hero of the Empire, An Unexpected Hero and A Study in Greatness: there is a definite theme. But look through the indexes of these books: even the magisterial multi-volume Martin Gilbert biography gives scant room to his domestic servants. Georgina does appear occasionally, but it’s in passing, as a stock figure, vaguely imagined as a benevolent and buxom shadow, apron-clad among her pans. But great though Churchill may have been, his greatness was certainly made much more achievable by having someone on hand to pick up his pants – and cook his dinner.
Happily, this is not reflective of the wider historical discipline, and there’s a thriving academic and popular interest in studying the lives of once marginalised figures, either because they reflect wider society or through the light they shed on specific events or better known individuals.1 The working classes, women, black and other minority ethnic groups are all being firmly (re)integrated into the historical narrative, whether in the form of biography, letters and diaries, or narrative history. This is particularly true when it comes to servants, for a long time dismissed as the subject of serious study. In the 1970s, when Georgina was writing down her experiences, domestic service was still a tense topic, something repudiated by the generation represented by Georgina’s daughter, who had often been brought up with parents in service, but were now in a changing world, where it was increasingly seen as undesirable and not really to be talked of.
Domestic service remains deeply emotive, due either to family experience or simple modern politics. There are many excellent and nuanced studies of servant life, from the eighteenth century to the modern day, and a number of service wings at country houses are open with costumed interpreters or volunteers specifically tasked with tackling the tendency toward easy assumptions about servant life.2 But media depictions, with some notable exceptions, still tend to emphasise either the cosy, nostalgic view, where over-stuffed houses were staffed by bobbing parlourmaids in black gowns with white caps; or the miserable, exploitative aspect, this time centred around young teenagers weeping as they scrubbed floors until their knees bled. At its peak, and although reliable statistics are impossible to obtain, domestic service was the single biggest employer of women in the UK. It’s generally thought that it employed around 14 per cent of the working population by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1911 census, one in three women who gave their status as ‘occupied’ (i.e. having an occupation) was in service. This ignores all the women who had part-time jobs, took in laundry, went out to char, or who preferred, for reasons of status or social form, to state that they were unoccupied, and that their husbands or fathers could afford to keep them.3 Service was, in short, a huge area, and very few women would live their lives without either being a servant or employing servants – sometimes both in the course of a life. Indeed, the history of service and that of women in the Victorian period through to the Second World War are so intertwined that it is inconceivable to consider one without the other. A study of domestic service is, in many ways, the study of all women at this time.4
Georgina’s memoir was deeply political. She wrote in response to her son-in-law’s view of the past – through which she had lived – beginning with the words ‘to my son-in-law, who always talks about the bad old days’. By the time she started writing, she had become, like many of those who worked predominantly in large establishments, and were career servants, rather reactionary. There should be no dichotomy between her view of herself as a servant who knew – and valued – her place, and the very real achievements of her life, during which she went from rural poverty to the top of her chosen profession; but for her daughter and son-in-law, the very fact that she’d been in service negated the value of her opinions. Her own words suggest that service, a profession that she’d had little choice but to enter, was nevertheless empowering: ‘I feel I did give my whole life to the work I loved and enjoyed, and not only that but the most interesting people I served & liked who gave me the courage and inspired me to work hard and not to feel that I had no standing in life as a cook, but to feel on a par with other walks in life.’ (The lack of grammar is her own.)
Researching the life of an unknown working-class woman in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century is not easy. Apart from the fragmentary memoir, which stops in about 1895, the evidence of Georgina’s life and her career is hard to trace. I first came across her when idly browsing a cookery book collection, and came across a copy of Georgina’s Recipes from N0.10, which was published in 1958 with a foreword by Clementine Churchill. Through that, and talking to her granddaughter, Edwina (who, in her late 70s, is Britain’s oldest Ironman competitor, and clearly follows in her grandmother’s footsteps in terms of determination and longevity), I became hooked, and determined to tell the story of a woman whose very averageness at the start of her life was part of her appeal. Georgina’s life was so much like that of so many other women, except that it was not: for she was one of only a handful of female society chefs in a profession dominated at its highest levels by men, and she remained part of the workforce throughout marriage and childrearing. Her life covers a time of enormous change in British food, from Edwardian excess to 1940s rationing, and into the era of frozen TV dinners and the wholefood movement. She cooked through all of it, gaining a reputation as ‘a superb cook, combining the best of French and English skills’.5 She was highly driven, highly motivated, very talented and determined. However, I would not be writing about her had she not had an equally driven, motivated, talented and determined final employer. Churchill continues to be central to the British sense of national identity, a figure of apparently endless fascination. There are books about all sorts of topics and people related to him. But, although you can read about his secretaries, his bodyguards and his nurses, the servants who fetched and carried, and served and cooked remain invisible. This is a start at filling that gap.
This is a book about Georgina Landemare. It’s about her life, her times and some of her employers, including Winston and Clementine Churchill. It’s about workingclass life, and women’s work and expectations, and it’s about domestic service at the highest level. It’s about British food, and French influence, and the impact of war on the way we ate. It’s the story of a woman who lived, loved and cooked her way through much of twentieth- century Britain, and, while her life is made more resonant by her relationship to her last employers, it remains, above all else, Georgina’s story.