Jeanie Nassau Senior, first woman civil servant

Jeanie Nassau Senior lived at Elm House Lavender Hill from 1860. It was on the site of Battersea Town Hall or, more correctly, Municipal Buildings but in Sybil Oldfield’s biography she described it as ‘ the palatial Art Nouveau edifice’ now Battersea Arts Centre! Jeanie is the first to feature in my Notable Women of Lavender Hill Walks. She was born Jane Hughes and was known as Jeanie, pronounced ‘Janey’.  She became the first female civil servant when she was appointed government inspector of workhouses in 1873 by the radical president of the Local Government Board, James Stansfeld. Her remit was to report on the education of “pauper girls”.

She is another woman whose legacy is not celebrated enough. Her brother Thomas Hughes, was  author of the popular novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). The comfortable country life of the large Hughes family  has been immortalised in the early chapters of his book.

 

Thomas Hughes MP sister of Jeannie Nassau Senior

Her life was a great ‘human story’ as she struggled with multiple bereavement, an unhappy marriage and cancer in order to rescue others more desperate and vulnerable still. Florence Nightingale told her she had been ‘a noble Army of one’ and later grieved that her ‘premature death was a national and irreparable loss’.

Her biography by Sybil Oldfield was only published in 2008 and draws upon previously untapped sources released only in 2000. They included letters written between her and her only child Walter and a network of friends, including including George Eliot who wrote about her, Millais who painted her, G. F. Watts, who also painted her – and whose muse she became, Julia Margaret Cameron who photographed her, Jenny Lind,  who sang with her, Clara Schumann played in concerts wih her, Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen who tried to seduce her and Tom Taylor playwright and his composer wife Laura Barker were near neighbours in Lavender Sweep as was Marie Spartali in Lavender Gardens and Marianne Thornton at Clapham Common.

 

 

Jenny Lind

Marie Spartali

Octavia Hll

Jeanie was born in 1828, the only daughter of. John and Margaret Hughes of the Manor House, Uffington, Berkshire and when Jeanie was seven they moved to Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire. She was the only girl among her six brothers. She was described as a winsome and vivacious young woman with a golden halo of hair and a magical singing voice. Her life in a quiet rural atmosphere centred round family, friends and neighbours. There are no photos of Elm House but there are of Donnington Priory.

 

 

Donnington Priory

She was devastated with grief after the death of her next oldest brother Walter (the first of many bereavements), when she became involved with Nassau John Senior the only son of  Nassau William Senior who was a well known political economist and close friend of her father. Jeanie later was to come into conflict with her father-in-laws  social and political views. It was he who had drafted the harsh New Poor Law of 1834, and believed, for example, that “a well-regulated workhouse” was the best way to prevent pauperism because the “dissolute poor hate its cleanliness.

The couple spent the early days of their married life at her father-in-law’s house in Hyde Park Gate, London, where Jeanie met many, of the leading religious, political and cultural figures of the day. Her musical training as a serious singer makes her a great social attraction at the dinner parties of her eminent father-in-law who paid for her lesson. Her difficulties started almost at once. Her husband  turned out to be lazy, weak and  workshy. He apparently, loved Turkish baths. No doubt, he had an overbeating father and was a disappontment to him. He could never hold on to the opportunities his wife secured for him, and condemned her by his indolence, to a lifetime of financial worries.

Jeanie’s painfully fraught family life, made great demands on her. In 1860 they moved to Elm House on Lavender Hill which became,for the next sixteen years the centre of her family life and progressive circle, where she was visited by distinguished friends. When she became mother to their only child Walter she threw open the new family home. Elm House, to her brother Hastings and his four little motherless children, as well Nell an unrelated motherless girl and her own and her husband’s widowed mothers.

Yet, she still had energy and emotion to spare for the larger world, and especially those whom her father-in-law had scorned. She visited workhouse inmates, supported a local industrial school for girls, and she helped Octavia Hill  in her housing projects for the poorest of the poor in Marylebone in role that was a combination of housing manager social worker.

Anny Thackeray (Ritchie), who was a good friend recalled In ‘From The Porch’ (1913) that Elm House in those days: had the : long, low drawing-room, with its big bow-window opening to a garden full of gay parterres where lawns ran to the distant boundary, while beyond again lay a far-away horizon. It was not the sea that one saw spreading before one’s eyes, but the vast plateau of London, with its drifting vapours and its ripple of  housetops flowing to meet the skyline. The room itself was pleasant, sunny, and well-worn. There were old rugs spread on the stained floors (they were not as yet in fashion as they are now); many pictures were hanging on the walls; a varied gallery, good and indifferent; … and then, besides the pictures, there was a sense of music in the air, and of flowers, and of more flowers. The long piano was piled with music books. ……Stately and charming people used to assemble at Elm House. It is an odd saying that people of a certain stamp attract each other. It was a really remarkable assemblage of accomplished and beautiful women who were in the habit of coming there, that home so bare, so simple yet so luxurious.’

Jeanie in her letters talked of providing soup with her mother Margaret to the people of Latchmere and she wrote a letter to The Times about the dreadful sanitation at the foot of Battersea Rise which had an open sewer arraigning the Wandsworth Board of Works but she wrote in her husbands name -her first foray into the public domain.

The Survey of London Battersea section states: In the 1860s, when a typical villa might let for £100–200, the Senior family managed to afford their residence at Elm House by means of Jeanie Senior’s own £400 a year, her husband Nassau’s salary from his partnership in his brother’s wine business, a £300 allowance from Nassau’s father, and £300 contributed by her mother, who lived with them and their son. This allowed a staff of up to six servants, though no carriage. But theirs was an unusual household, its financial stability shaken by the failures of an unemployed  husband and the commitments of an energetically philanthropic wife.

In 1866 the area was still sufficiently out of town for a ‘sadly ill and tired’ Octavia Hill to stay at Elm House for ‘some fresh air and quiet’. Soon thereafter almost the whole of the undeveloped ground on the north side of the road began to fill up with houses and shops along Lavender Hill. However.m

It was through Octavia, who was approached by James Stansfeld to take on the role of looking into what was happening to girls in the workhouses and after they left , but she felt she couldn’t and recommended Jeanie who by then had been involved in various philanthropic activities .

Mrs Nassau Senior (1828-187 Watts, George Frederic Wightwick Manor, Staffordshire (The National Trust).

Although Jeanie moved in Society, she would not have thought of herself in such terms at all. In fact, the family faced some severe financial struggles and, at one time, Jeanie gave singing lessons to supplement the family income. When her father-in-law died he cut of his son out of his will.

Jeanie was actively involved in a number of charitable undertakings and during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) was a tireless worker for the Red Cross, whose medal she received. She founded the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, a scheme which ‘had results of a most wide-reaching and beneficial kind, and the girls of England owe an incalculable debt to the unceasing toil and loving forethought of Mrs. Nassau Senior’.

In 1873 she was appointed by James Stansfield (1820-1898), President of the Local Government Board, as Assistant Inspector (and later Inspector) of Workhouses. He appreciated that she had the ability and empathy to take on the role.

She wrote an official report on pauper schools (‘Report by Mrs. Senior on Pauper Schools’, January 1874) which was critical of the existing arrangements, inevitably. Her report caused a public furore with a lengthy (and, on her opponents’ side, a very ungentlemanly) battle with the vested interests in the ‘workhouse establishment’, carried out largely through the letters columns of the The Times. Jeanie bravely (and politely) stood her ground but she had to resign as a result of ill-health in December 1874

Her detractors, who referred to her as ‘That Woman‘, afforded her no respite even when she was confined to her bed and dying of exhaustion and cancer. She fought the long defeat, from her bed, with the backing of Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, Octavia Hill, Lord Shaftesbury, Sir James Stansfeld and others, but it was too much.

Tom Taylor, her friend wrote in Memoriam in Punch 1877

Not for the bright face we shall see no more,
Not for the sweet voice we no more shall hear;
Not for the heart with kindness brimming o’er,
Large charity, and sympathy sincere.

These are not things that ask a public pen
To blazon its memorial o’er her name;
But, that in public work she wrought with men,
And faced their frowns, and over-lived their blame.

Yet never swerved a hair’s breadth from the line
Of woman’s softness, gentleness and grace;
But brought from these an influence to refine
Rough tasks and squalid, and there leave its trace.

Honour to him who in a sneering age,
Braved quip and carp and cavil, and proclaimed
A woman’s fitness pauper needs to gauge,-
In purpose strong, in purity unshamed.

For paupers too have sex: the workhouse walls
Hold mothers, maidens, and girl-babes, on whom
A woman’s eye with woman’s insight falls,
Sees its own ways for sunlight to their gloom.

And so this noble and brave lady turned
From glad life, luxury and thronging friends
That hung on her sweet voice, and only yearned
To guide her holy work to useful ends.

But Death to Life begrudged her, striking down
The task unfinished from her willing hands,
Leaving to women yet to come the crown
Of her left life’s-work, that for others stands.

Then lay and leave her in her quiet grave,
Where the sun shines undimmed, the rain falls clear,
And birches bend, and deodoras wave
Evergreen arms of welcome o’er her bier.

It is ironic that George Watts wrote in anger to his sexist patron: . I think when you read the biography of “That Woman”, for it is one that will be written, you will find that very few canonized saints so well deserved glorification, for all that makes human nature admirable, lovable, & estimable, she had very few equals indeed, & I am certain no superior.

It was not until 2000 that the letters and papers which had been stored in trunks and not rediscovered until her great, great grandson Graham found them in an attic. This was due to the protectiveness of her son Walter who had arranged and preserved all her letters with loving veneration. These letters to Walter and those from such eminent contemporaries including Watts, Jenny Lind , Anny Thackeray, Merrimee, Cardinal  Manning, Lord Shaftesbury, Florence Nightingale etc and with the sale of 25 letters to Jeanie from George Eliot at Sotheby’s which had been placed under an export ban suddenly  emerged to tell this remarkable women’s story.

The names and the people from servants, local navvies to Princess Christian who get mentioned in this wonderfully written biography and are brought to life makes it a compelling and engrossing read which I am still digesting.

I  have made contact with Graham Senior-Milne to tell him of the events in Battersea that include Jeanie. I did want to tell him about my tour and the immersive children’s Return to Elm House show which was inspired by Jeanie and her vision of fostering children and the proposal to have a Battersea Society commemorative plaque on Battersea Town Hall.

 

I told him about her neighbour and friend Marie Spartali the Pre-Raphaelite artist, https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/marie-spartali-pre-raphaelite-artist/also painted by George Watts and another overlooked woman who lived at the Shrubbery in Lavender Gardens and who used to meet her future husband at Elm  house and about Laura Barker composer   https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/laura-barker-1819-10905-composer and  her husband Tom Taylor playwright/editor of Punch nearby in Lavender Sweep House who held Sunday musical soirees where Jeanie sang for them. These were all homes of people who entertained and who knew each other and had mutual friends and acquaintances. For example, Ellen Terry who wrote effusively of the Lavender Sweep house and her friend Tom and she was briefly married to Watts when she was sixteen. He was friendly with Dickens, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll who took the photo of Lavender Sweep House. Jeanie was friendly with Kate Dickens and Anny Thackeray. Marie’s father, who was the Greek Consul,  hosted artists, writers and the Italian political activist attended parties at both houses.  Also another of my Notable Women of Lavender Hill Deaconess Isabella Gilmore of Gilmore House was a sister of William Morris who was a great friend of Marie Spartali who painted their home Kelsmscott House and Gilmore House was next door to the Shrubbery! So, it seems that my immediate neighbourhood at the top of Lavender Hill where I live was traversed by a lot of eminent Victorians which has been fascinating for me to research. It gives me a frisson to think of these eminent Victorians who lived so close by.

Gilmore House Clapham Common

 

 

Lavender Sweep House photo by Lewis Carrollp

Gilmore House Clapham Common

The Shrubbery