Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
Not long ago, I was bought a copy of The Feminist Art of Walking, by Morag Rose (Pluto Press, 2025). It falls into the category of Gender/Urban Studies, which certainly isn’t in my usual ballpark, but I’m often pleasantly surprised to read something completely different, so I dived in. Did you know that Rose established the Loiterers Resistance Movement (LRM)? You do now.
After my two ‘fieldwork’ outings to Rutherglen and Lanark this week, both entailing a fair bit of walking, it occurred to me that my own walks were a kind of feminist walking, insofar as I was commemorating Rose Smith, a forgotten woman composer who was born in Lanark, grew up and spent her early adulthood in Glasgow, then spent most of her adult life in Rutherglen – and also her mother, the ‘Lanarkshire Poetess’. (Not a bad title for an Englishwoman who had lived in Ireland before the family moved to Lanark!)
Honouring the Trumpet Major
As I walked from the cemetery down to the cenotaph in Rutherglen on Monday, I pondered that Rose would have walked over the same ground – although it would have looked very different. Likewise, her steam train would have traversed essentially the same line between Glasgow and Lanark that I travelled yesterday, and I walked on streets that she, her mother and siblings must have used daily. I even walked past the spot where their house stood. Too late, I realised I could have gone and looked at the Episcopal church that they attended. I glimpsed it, just up the road from the Library, I think, but I was too slow on the uptake and didn’t realise that was it. I was more focused on getting to the cemetery without getting drenched en route! Rose had stood at both those gravesides. Mary-Ann was remembered on the Trumpet Major’s headstone, even though she’d actually died whilst staying with a daughter in England.
Today, however, I’ve stayed at home. It’s not a ‘working’ day, but I didn’t feel inclined to make another expedition. (I need to visit the National Library of Scotland, but I can’t in all honesty justify a trip to Edinburgh when I’m going there next week in any case.)
So, I baked, washed floors and dealt with laundry. (This is the reality of semi-retirement!) I wondered if Mary-Ann or Rose made their own bread, or if they’d have laughed as they informed me that there was a perfectly good baker on the high street? They certainly wouldn’t have had a bread-machine to make the dough for rolls, or a packet-mix for an experimental batch of muffins! (Spoiler alert: they came out fine, but the ones I make from scratch are a nicer texture. And my recipes make more of them!) They’d still have had a ‘pulley’ to dry the laundry – but doing the laundry itself would’ve been much more labour-intensive. The ironing? Yes, that’s easier today, too. I’ve already addressed the question of whether they had paid help – answer, the censuses reveal that they certainly didn’t have anyone living in, apart from when Rose’s children were wee.
So, much has changed – but in my situation, at least, the domestic labour is still entirely, 100% mine. The ironing basket will sit there scowling at me until I deal with it. Nothing will be tidied up or put away unless I do it. And (despite frequently being told to be grateful for the white goods in our kitchen, which ‘do everything’), the business of keeping things going, still seems to be defined as ‘women’s work’. (Don’t condemn me. It’s easier this way. IYKYK.)
However, the relative absence of hard graft today makes me all the more respectful of Mary-Ann and Rose, still writing poetry and music as well as doing all the housework! I suppose their daughters helped them. I bet they didn’t have to be politely asked or cajoled – it was probably accepted that this was what was expected of them.
When I go into town next week, Rose’s ghost may well be hanging around the old Glasgow Athenaeum, too. There’s no denying the School of Music opened doors for her. Come to think of it – the name has changed, the remit is far wider and the reach is now global – but the opening of doors is something else that RCS has continued to faciliate. ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, as they say.
Biddy, the Maid of All Work is the title of a children’s book, dating from as early as 1871 in its original version. My own copy is an attractive bound compilation of three stories in a gift book from the turn of the century – it was given to its original owner as a Sunday School prize, and I bought it when I was researching Bayley & Ferguson’s ‘service of song’ books for magic lantern shows. As I have shared before, it’s a very moralistic Christian tale. (I’ll show you the opening paragraphs later on in this post.)
Women and Domestic Labour
But why have I gone back to services of song? As a matter of fact, that wasn’t why I thought of Biddy. Yesterday, I was thinking about women and domestic labour, and pondering over not only what had changed, but also what seems to have stayed the same. When I was working full-time, we employed a cleaner for two hours a week – we’d done so for three decades, and it certainly lessened the load. We don’t now – partly because the agency was struggling to find cleaners, and partly because I don’t feel it’s justified. But somehow, although we used to share the cleaning bill, I alone have ended up with everything connected with running the house, from mending to muffins, and dusting to drain-unblocking. (I’m told I don’t actually ‘do’ the washing, because the modern home has white goods that do everything for me. All I can say is that the washer-dryer hasn’t yet learned how to gather up the laundry, sort it, hang it, iron it and put everything away again.)
Little chimney with no pot: relic from the wash-boiler days
Our house is contemporary with the lives of ‘my’ musical Scotswomen. It was built in 1904. It was occupied by the proprietor (a shipbuilding clerk), his wife and three daughters. It still has a wee chimney leading from where the scullery boiler would have been, on the ground floor. It’s now our kitchen – but it would have been the wash-house: a place of really hard work. We still have a ‘pulley’ in what would have then have been the kitchen, and my office is what would have been the bed recess, under the stairs. Was there a servant sleeping in it? Well, there wasn’t, in the 1911 census. The range was where our dresser is. The kitchen sink? There’s now another bookcase. But the meal-preparation continues, in what was the wash-house. (A Cordon-Bleu cook would find it nightmarishly cramped!)
Anyway, I’m suitably grateful that there’s less ironing, with a much nicer iron than the first occupants would have had! I visualise scrubbed and starched cotton shirts and white frilled pinafores hanging from the pulley, where tee-shirts and jeans are now casually draped, and I do appreciate the advances in both textiles and technology!
The life of a servant like Biddy was certainly a hard one. The author asks us to have sympathy for her, not only for the hard work, but also for her feelings of being uncared-about. Now then, bear in mind that it’s a piece of fiction for children. It’s impossible to know how accurate the picture conveyed actually is. There must have been good and caring employers, and ‘Biddy’s’ employer isn’t portrayed as bad. But it was a different age. The history of domestic labour is not my area of research expertise!
Much more could be said about domestic labour, particularly about the present occupants’ expectations and recollections of childhood and early adulthood which, I can assure you, were quite a long time ago. A different era, made more complicated by the fact that there are also two sets of memories, since our childhoods weren’t simultaneous! And I’ve heard it said that as we age, our most vivid memories are of our early adulthood, when everything was new and exciting. This book (on eBay) is from the ‘sixties: my childhood, not early adulthood. But it is, sadly, from an era when the ‘young wife’ did everything domestically-related. I feel as though I’m dragged back through a time-warp into those dizzy days six decades ago.
The Time of Vivid Memories? (The Young Wife’s Cookery Book, ed. E. Maxwell-Arnot (1967)
Rose and Iden’s Live-in Servant
Anyway, my mind again turned to Rose Smith, the late Victorian/Edwardian church organist who didn’t let three children curtail her musical activities. How much help did she have around the house? So, let’s recap. Rose was born in 1870 in Lanark, and brought up by her widowed mother, mainly in Glasgow. They didn’t have a servant in the 1891 census – indeed, her mother had two lodgers as well as Rose and her older sister to look after.
Rose married in 1898. I knew that Iden and Rose Rigden’s first son was born in June 1899, so at the time of the 1901 census, there were Iden, a tax official; Rose, a teacher and church organist working from home on her ‘own account’ (ie, she was self-employed) and Iden junior, aged nearly two. Iden’s wee brother wouldn’t come along until August 1903. Although it was a small household, there was also a live-in servant, the 17-year old Bella Johnston[e], who was born in Port Logan in Wigtonshire around 1884.
I don’t know exactly how long Johnston stayed with the Rigdens. They had their second son in 1903 and a daughter in 1907, and had moved house by 1911 – where there was no live-in servant. Of course, we don’t know if Rose perhaps had a daily, non-resident maid to help her. We do tend to assume that domestic service became a less common occupation after the Great War, yet here we find the Rigdens without a resident maid, three years before the War. Selina Todd, author of an excellent article on domestic service in the first half of the century, would be unsurprised by this, however, as she demonstrates how, although practices changed, domestic service did continue. Just in a different form:-
The ‘disappearance’ of service — already heralded in the 1920s, when press coverage of ‘the servant problem’ was filled with nostalgic laments for the faithful Victorian maid — never happened. Change, of course, did occur — the live-in housemaid of the 1900s was replaced with the part-time cleaner of the 1950s […]
(Todd, see reference below)
Meanwhile, Bella Johnston herself was still a live-in domestic servant in 1911, working back in Wigtonshire in Kirkmaiden (where her grandmother had lived), for the Cook family in Weston House, Church Street. She married a Kirkmaiden fisherman in 1915.
By 1921, the Rigdons had moved up in the world – from a flat, to a house – but there was still no maid in the census.
It set me wondering. What about the other women musicians whom I’ve researched? In all honesty, I don’t think the Census data is enough on which to base any conclusions, simply because we don’t know about the domestic servants who didn’t live in – often called, ‘charladies’. The term sounds derogatory now, but may not have been considered so at the time. If anything can be deduced from a rainy Friday morning’s searching, it is that having a resident servant seems, in the early 20th century, to have depended on the level of affluence and/or evident need for help.
One thing is certain: the newspapers were full of adverts for Situations Vacant, and from job-seekers.
British Newspaper Archive
Clarinda Augusta Webster (1844-1920), was a music educationalist, and school proprietor in Aberdeen before she moved down to London. No census entry has been traced for 1901. In 1911 in Streatham, Webster employed 31-year old general servant Julia Fullick, who must have been either married or widowed at the time, because her name was the same in 1921, and she was then described as a widow, living with her sister and brother-in-law. Fullick’s occupation was now, ‘charwoman’. Webster had died in 1920; I don’t know if Fullick worked for Webster right up to when she died.
Mary Kerr (ca.1848-1908), was the wife of Glasgow music publisher James S. Kerr, and inheritor of the publishing firm. The couple had a servant whilst their family were young. Widowed and living in Saltcoats in 1901, Mary still had a ‘general servant domestic’, 21-year old Sarah Reid. By this time she had two adult children, two teenagers and a mother of 82 living with her, so I imagine Kerr and Reid would both have been kept busy! Kerr and her mother later moved back to Glasgow with at least one of the adult children – but I don’t know how much paid help they had latterly. (Mary’s mother actually outlived her by three months, living to the grand old age of 90.)
Euphemia Allan (1861-1948) was the sister of Glasgow music publisher Mozart Allan; she was a music teacher and also involved in the family firm. There’s no record of a resident servant either in Mozart Allan’s home in 1901 or 1911, or when Euphemia and her nephew (also Mozart Allan) lived there in 1921. I wonder whether Euphemia and her nephew had a charwoman – surely they must have done?!
Kate Logan (1862-1936) grew up in Inverness, where her parents had a servant and three lodgers by 1881, when Kate was the last of their offspring still at home, working as a music teacher. By 1901, her husband David was working as a music seller and employer, whilst Kate was certainly working as a pianist, although there’s no job designated against her name in the census. There was no live-in servant at that point, but after her husband’s family firm went bankrupt, Kate opened her Pianoforte and Music Saloon in 1904. Thus, by 1911 they were both designated as music sellers – and were employing 17-year old Daisy Shaw as their live-in servant. However, by 1921, the census listed no servant.
Flora Woodman (1896-1981) was a famous coloratura soprano, born in London to a mother with ‘private means’. Her mother grew up in Glasgow; in 1891 there had been two servants to look after a widow and three adult children. It comes as no surprise to learn that Flora’s own single mother had a servant, 18-year old Annie F. Butler, in the 1901 census; 22-year old Emily Owen in the 1911 census; and 34-year old Louie Hurst in 1921.
As a musicologist, I haven’t had to think about domestic service in the context of social history, but as a working mother myself, obviously I can draw on my own lived experience of running a household. I’m still left feeling distinctly impressed with Rose Smith Rigden, who performed the same juggling act of balancing a career with raising a family, when the physical work was unarguably harder. Meanwhile, I also take pleasure in the fact that I’ve memorialised the names of a number of female servants who have probably never before been mentioned in print!
NAME
BIOGRAPHY
Bella [Isabella] Johnstone [Johnston].
Born ca.1884, Wigtonshire. Worked for the Rigdens aged 17 in 1901. Aged 27, a live-in servant in Kirkmaiden in 1911. Married a fisherman in Kirkmaiden, Wigtonshire, in 1915.
Julia Mullins.
Born ca.1880. Aged 21, a servant in Bexley in 1901. Aged 31, now Julia Fullick working for Clarinda Webster, in 1911. A widowed charlady living with her sister and brother-in-law in 1921.
Sarah Reid.
Born ca.1880. Aged 21 in 1901, working for Mary Kerr.
Daisy [Margaret?] Shaw.
Born ca.1894. Aged 17 in 1911, working for the Logans.
Annie F. Butler.
Born ca.1883. Aged 18 in 1901, working for Jane [Janie] Sillars.
Emily Owen.
Born ca. 1889. Aged 22 in 1911, working for the Woodmans
Louie Hurst.
Born ca. 1887. Aged 34 in 1921, working for the Woodmans.
If you’re interested in the broader subject, Selina Todd’s article, is informative:- ‘Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950’, in Past & Present, Volume 203, Issue 1, May 2009, Pages 181–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtp014.
Biddy, Tibby and French Bessie, by S. C. P. (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier). I initially thought this was published in 1900, but I think it was mentioned in the press in 1897 – whether or not it was an identical edition. It also seems to have appeared as three individual titles in 1871. The anonymous S. C. P. also wrote other titles in the publisher’s ‘Sixpenny Books for Young People’ series.
Here’s a taster of Biddy:- the opening of Chapter 1.
Biddy worked hard, and got few thanks for it, – poor Biddy! She was maid-of-all work in a large family; and it was, “Biddy, do this,” and “Biddy, do that,” from the time she got up in the morning, till she tumbled into her hard bed at night. She had come to Glasgow from Ireland a warm-hearted, impulsive girl; but had been gradually going through a hardening process, till she was practically saying in her heart, “I care for nobody, for nobody cares for me.” Mrs Pettigrew, her present mistress, was just and faithful in all her dealings with her, and valued Biddy highly as an active, honest, efficient servant; but she was “only a servant” to her, and any other girl who worked as well could have supplied her place; and she never dreamt of the large fund of love lying unkindled at the bottom of that servant’s heart, which a little kindness and sympathy on her part would have touched like a spark amongst gunpowder, and brought forth blazing into loving action.
Mistresses lose much who have no sympathy with their servants. How many hearts are saddened and steeled for want of it, even as Biddy’s was!
Parkinson’s Law was apparently a saying coined by Cyril Parkinson in 1955. But today, I’m watching time expand to fit the work available, rather than the other way round. In our case, the work we expected to take four or five days, began at the end of one week, ran through last week and is still ongoing halfway through this present week. And I’m the site manager – but only insofar as I’m chasing up workmen and trying to keep the residents of Testosterone Towers happy.
You mean we have to keep looking at THIS?
Aged people and neuro-divergent people really do struggle with chaos and uncertainty, and there are bucketloads of chaos and uncertainty round here. It makes them uncomfortable and on edge.
Fortunately, I work part-time. The rest of my time is being spent making futile attempts to keep everything else under control. Testosterone Towers’ residents have clean, dry, ironed clothes. They can see as much carpet in our lounge as the slow progress of the work elsewhere will permit. (I can’t put things back in their rightful places whilst there are still dustsheets, plentiful dust, and ongoing work all over the place.)
The residents are fed on time (because one of the residents is comforted by timetables); and the supermarket shopping is still happening to the usual plan. I’ve been using oven-ready meals.
What is harder for me is endeavouring not to annoy the most easily annoyed resident. As for keeping tabs on the project, my struggle is to keep a balance: enough for my efforts to be perceived as diligent, without actually annoying the working people I’d rather not offend!
I’ve booked a cleaning team for next Tuesday. But will they be able to come then? Watch this space.
I’m working, but my mind is scattered and my physical surroundings are a nightmare. This is not the place to describe the unique hell of a redecorating project where everything is in boxes, piles or under dustcloths; floors are paint-and-plaster-dusty; deadlines are consistently missed; explanations are sketchy; and it emerges that the 9-5 by which I have structured the past 42 years is a concept entirely alien to our decorator. As is the concept of Monday-to-Friday. Hence the total absence of workers today.
Lounge? LIVING Room?
Throughout the pandemic, I managed the 9-5 quite effectively from my home-office alcove. Small, cramped, but entirely within my control. Take me out of my alcove into another room in which one can neither lounge nor live comfortably, and I am like a fish out of water. I need two small coffee tables – but the tables are glass – the mouse is ill-at-ease on them. And I’m accustomed to using a mouse rather than the trackpad. Makeshift arrangements make this just about workable. I have carved out a whole morning of peace and solitude, and by and large, it’s working.
Yes, it’s stressful. And I’m not alone – I live in Testosterone Towers, where habitual stress is bad enough, but habitual + domestic upheaval stress makes things extraordinarily difficult, and my caring responsibilities are challenged to the max. (Remember, I said that I’m annoying? I am reportedly becoming more annoying by the day, and I don’t seem able to help myself inadvertently doing it. It’s not that I don’t try to be good, either.)
Can I blog about research today? No, I don’t think I can. I’ve just ordered all the tech I need for my forthcoming oral history project – that felt like quite an achievement! – and I have just received a wee book that a kind Ancestry-user sent me about their ancestor, who happens to have been the brother of the professor I was researching in my post-Christmas idleness. The best thing I can do this morning is to read it from cover-to-cover, then get back to compiling a repertoire list that I started last night. (My need to occupy the lounge – ha! lounge?! – may be keeping Testosterone Towers from their daytime TV, but last night I found I could perform activities like searching the British Newspaper Archive quite effectively, whilst ignoring the TV entirely, happy in the knowledge that Testosterone Towers is not being inconvenienced at all.)
I saw an academic event on Eventbrite that I’d have liked to sign up to, even if it’s a non-working day. I dare not sign up to it. I can’t imagine the redecorating being finished by Tuesday.
My apologies for moaning. Maybe things will be better by this time next week!
Followers of this blog will recall that our Edwardian home was rewired at the end of November. ‘We’ don’t take kindly to upheaval, of which there was plenty, so I had to unpack and put back a lot of goods (including hundreds of books) afterwards – notwithstanding the need for remedial decorating – in order to make the place bearable for Christmas. Note the ‘We’ and the ‘I’.
Redecorate: Magnolia and White
Today, the remedial redecorating commences (not a DIY effort), so I’ve been repacking goods all over again. I’m the youngish, averagely fit one – and I’m already knackered! Even my FitBit agrees. My back has only just recovered from November/December; my fingers are sore; I’ve run out of empty boxes (how, I can’t imagine); and am almost out of floor on which to stack stuff. We have too much stuff.
I have done my employed research for the week. Does anyone else working from home recognise this kind of thing?
‘I thought you might have started cooking dinner by now?’
‘But I work until 5 …’
And I did work. Then I cooked. Then I packed and stacked, and continued stacking and packing this morning. The lounge looks like a library on the move – and is now so much smaller, in terms of cubic air volume, that it’s actually perceptibly warmer with the same heater settings.
But even women who feel as though they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming back to the 1970s, against their will, have their limits. The kitchen is being decorated first, so it’s fish and chips for tea. There will be no cooking here.
Research?
I’m only contemplating research to the extent of acquiring a decent recording device this weekend! I’m starting an exciting new research project soon, and as soon as the ethical approval process is complete, I’ll be raring to go. Monday will see the Magnolia and White project going on elsewhere in the house – hopefully my own working environment will by then be spick-and-span – with me sitting enjoying remote training to ensure that the new research project goes well.
Now, what colour shall I inject into my magnolia and white dining room to make it a joyful zone in which to work …?
Monday mornings are contracted research time. And research there will be. I have a couple of things to proofread, for a start, quite apart from picking up the threads after last week’s chaos.
The Thrills
Reader, if you like the thrill of the unexpected, and a break from normal routine – go for the total rewiring of an Edwardian house. The chasing round the landscape for TrashNothing and Facebook Marketplace free cardboard boxes. The filling and stacking of them. The hotel stay, the restaurant bills, and the, ‘Could you possibly come back a day later? Making sure your ceiling doesn’t come down is going to add a bit of time to the job’ kind of thrill.
There were three high points: we went to the cinema. Unheard of! I swam lengths for a solid hour in the hotel pool. And discovered that Terikyaki salmon fillets are my absolute favourite food. Other than that, it was a question of just getting through the experience of being away from home, and without my own car. In a room with one desk and one chair, but two occupants, I never felt less like trying to do any research, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t expected to.
Chaos
And then we returned home. The Edwardian house is now rewired (ceilings intact); spotted with plaster patches in walls and ceilings – meaning I’m currently getting redecorating quotes – and it was so dusty that we were grateful to have arranged a full, in-depth clean. And of course, everything needs unboxing. But not everything all at once, right now, if decorators are to start doing things to walls and ceilings! My books are back on shelves, though I don’t know for how long – still, they give the impression that everything is settling down again.
Unsettled
But worst of all, it seems that some of us are very, very unsettled at such major upheaval. And it feels as though I’m on the receiving end. I never want to hear about our discarded lampshades again! But I will. Repeatedly. (Frankly, I don’t CARE if our old dusty lampshades were discarded without our agreement. Now we have new ones.)
And … Breathe!
It will be with a great deal of relief that I open my work laptop tomorrow morning, take a deep breath, and try to think only about research for 3.5 solid hours!
A smell. (My nose is as finely-tuned as my ears are not.)
A melting fuse.
One thing led to another, and we’re getting the whole old house rewired this week. I’ve rearranged my part-time morning and taken my part-time day off. And I’m not going through to Edinburgh. With everything packed up in boxes during the upheaval, and ourselves displaced, I simply can’t get on. I hesitate even to tackle emails, in case I forget where I got to in the different aspects of my work. I can’t simultaneously get my head around the intricacies of research, which explains why I’m not blogging as much as usual.
It appears that the ‘semi’ part of my retirement is to be dedicated to caring for the old house. (Elderly houses have their own unique requirements and challenges, different to older humans. At least Himself doesn’t have dodgy ceilings and won’t need redecoration.)
In semi-retirement, it falls to me both to coordinate things – and sometimes repeat things. (I’m the only one with hearing aids. Although this is disputed, I find they work fine, as evidenced by the fact that I get to repeat what the electrician said!) And, particularly but not entirely, because a rewire is stressful for all concerned, I find myself on the receiving end of quite a few adverse comments. (I’m apparently frequently very annoying.)
I’ll be glad when this week is over. My kind and unfailingly courteous historical publishers await me!
