From Downstairs to Downing Street
They were two grand family houses 40 miles apart. One, in London’s Notting Hill, a huge white affair on four floors with seemingly endless rooms, was where Amy Patterson lived; the other, in Reading, Berkshire, red‑brick and rambling, was where Violet Welland spent her days. Both young women were below stairs, Amy a parlourmaid and Violet a nursery nurse.
Here begins a storybook tale of social mobility. For the granddaughter of these humble domestic servants is Theresa May, the Home Secretary and possibly the next Tory prime minister. Amy’s son Hubert, a vicar, married Violet’s daughter Zaidee, and Theresa was their only child.
It is an uplifting journey over the course of a century from Downstairs, when the two young women were lowly maids, to Upstairs, with their 58-year-old granddaughter at the heart of government.
Both Granny Amy and Grannie Vie – as they were privately known in the family (though in her presence the ‘very correct’ Violet insisted on being called ‘Grandma’) – were decisive women who knew their own minds. This may explain why their cherished, state-school-educated granddaughter has gained a reputation as a resolute minister. But as in all families, especially in the hard times of the early 20th century, the story of Granny Amy and Grannie Vie is more than one of smooth advancement. There is tragedy, too.
So let us go back more than a century, to 1901, when Amy, then 22, was living and working in Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill – a neighbourhood now full of multimillion-pound mansions where fellow Tories David Cameron and George Osborne used to live. Tallish and dark-haired, Amy was one of four servants in the household of a rich widow from Liverpool, Caroline Henderson, and her two unmarried daughters.
Amy had just returned to London after two years in New Zealand. She had been sent there by her father, himself a butler in service, to work for a family in Christchurch. But she grew homesick for London and her family, and sailed back to Britain.
It was a prescient decision. For on the return voyage she met the man who was to become her husband, Wimbledon-born regular soldier Tom Brasier, whose family were carpenters and builders. He disembarked when the boat docked in India, to return to his regiment, and Amy continued to Southampton. But a romance had started, one which, for much of their courtship, had to be conducted long-distance.
No one is quite sure why, but it was another eight years before Amy – by then 31 – married Tom at a non-conformist chapel in Fareham, Hampshire, after which he was posted back to India and she went with him. She gave birth to two boys in India, though one died in infancy. Later, after they returned to Britain, another three children came along. One of these was Hubert, who would become an Anglican vicar – Theresa May’s father.
He was born in 1917 during the First World War, in which his father Tom served with gallantry and was decorated, rising to sergeant major in the King’s Royal Rifles.
Theresa’s other grandma, Violet, meanwhile, was only seven in 1901 and living with her family in Reading, though they hailed from Plymouth. By the time she was 17, she was living and working in a smart, detached house in the town, occupied by distinguished Australian astronomer Walter Duffield and his wife Doris.
She was their nursery nurse, looking after their 11-month-old baby, Joan. Not much over 5ft in height and slender, she fell in love with a leather worker and salesman, Reginald Barnes, from Milton in Hampshire. Hers, too, was a love that had to be put on hold for most of the First World War, as Reg, a private in the Army Service Corps, set sail to fight in the East Africa campaign.
He took with him a photo of Violet that she gave him, on the back of which she had written a beautiful and emotional message displaying her deep love for him. She wrote, with charmingly muddled grammar: ‘To Reg from Vie with fondest and truest love with all good wishes for great success in East Africa.
‘The ocean between lies such distance be our lot Should thou never see me? Love: forget me not.’
Like Amy’s husband, Reg mercifully returned safely, and they married in Reading a year before the war ended, in 1917, when Violet was 24.
A year later, tragedy struck. Within a week, both her father William, a store porter, and a brother died in the great flu pandemic.
Suddenly Violet’s mother was a widow, and while no one in the family can be sure, the deaths may have been why Violet, like Amy, left it uncommonly late (for those days) to start a family. What is likely is that because times were hard, she had to delay having children to continue working.
Reg and Violet moved in with her suddenly widowed mother at 156 Southampton Street, where Reading’s trams trundled past the front of the terraced house and the loo was in the backyard. An aunt also moved in with them. Violet would live in that house for most of the rest of her life.
She was 30 when their first child, Maurice, was born in 1924. Four years later, daughter Zaidee arrived – Theresa May’s mother.
The choice of this unusual name doesn’t indicate, as has been speculated, that Theresa May could have some Middle Eastern ancestry. The truth is simply that her grandfather Reg chose the name of his son and his wife chose the name of their daughter.
A regular churchgoer (as is Theresa), she probably picked Zaidee because it was the name of Abraham’s wife in the Old Testament.
Theresa’s grandmothers Amy and Violet were classic women of their times, hard-working, resolute and uncomplaining. But by the time the Rev Hubert Brasier and Zaidee Barnes were marrying at St Giles Church, Reading, in June 1955, one of their mothers was already a widow. Amy had been without her husband Tom, who had heart problems since 1951 and died in his 70s.
‘I remember her as an old lady in a wheelchair who bore her problems well,’ says Amy’s grandson and Theresa’s paternal cousin, Alan Brasier, 69, a former textile-firm executive living in Gloucester. ‘She was kind and honest, a straightforward person who knew her own mind. And she was the type who would not tell anyone if she was feeling poorly; you had to worm it out of her.’
Could some of this toughness have been passed down to her politician granddaughter? Some 18 months ago, after Theresa May was diagnosed with diabetes and learnt she would have to inject herself with insulin at least twice a day for the rest of her life, she shrugged it off as ‘just part of life’, adding, ‘It doesn’t and will not affect my ability to do my work.’
As the story of her family unfolds, it is intriguing to discover the Home Secretary is not the only success story of her generation. Three of the grandchildren of parlourmaid Amy and her soldier husband Tom became university professors.
There’s Theresa’s cousin Clive Brasier, an expert on tree diseases, who is visiting professor at Imperial College and emeritus mycologist with the Forestry Commission; her cousin Andy Parrott, professor of psychology at Swansea University and an authority on the effects of recreational drugs on the brain; and her cousin Professor Martin Brasier, of Oxford University, who was one of the world’s leading experts in microfossils.
‘My grandmother was wonderful, even when she was very frail, very blind and deaf,’ recalls Andy, 51. ‘After she was widowed, she lived with us at my parents’ house in Surrey for several years while I was at school. She would listen to the BBC Home Service with an earphone rigged up by my father and knit woollen squares to send to Africa and other poor areas.
‘She was always sending off cheques as well, though she didn’t have much money of her own. But she cared. And she was always interested in what we were doing at school. So lively, and very proud of the family.’
Tragically, Martin Brasier died in a car crash a few days before Christmas. Martin, a popular figure with long grey hair, had lived long enough to join a mass gathering of around 50 members of the Brasier family last summer, including Theresa and her husband Philip May. ‘We talked a lot about Gran and how she and Tom had produced a family she’d have been proud of,’ says Andy. ‘She was such a central figure.’
Martin’s death tragically mirrored that of his uncle, Theresa’s father, the Rev Hubert Brasier, who was also killed in a car crash in 1981.
As for Granny Amy, she spent her last years in a nursing home in Oxford, and died in 1967 aged 88. Violet, too, outlived her husband by many years. Reg was 78 when he died in 1970, 18 years before Violet followed him aged 94.
Life was not easy for her, since she was in a wheelchair until her death because of a smallpox vaccination that went wrong. She also had to endure the pain of her daughter Zaidee – Theresa’s mother – also being in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis and predeceasing her by six years; Zaidee died a year after her husband’s fatal car crash.
Yet Glenys Barnes, who is married to Theresa’s cousin Adrian, an aircraft-systems-safety engineer, remembers Violet as a woman who never let life get her down. ‘Grannie was quite a force,’ says Glenys, who lives in Wiltshire. ‘She was a tiny lady, but very positive, very determined and very, very forceful.’ Who would doubt that Theresa May has some of this in her as well?
As for the imposing Notting Hill house where Amy was a parlourmaid more than 110 years ago, it’s now a block of modern flats, one of whose residents is the television-property-show presenter Kirstie Allsopp.
The Reading house where Violet was a nursery maid is now the home of a professional family. The distinguished astronomer Walter Duffield, who employed Violet in 1901, went back to Australia and established the country’s first solar observatory. He died in 1929. His daughter Joan – the baby whom Violet had nursed – died last November aged 104.
Regrettably, neither Amy nor Violet lived long enough to see their granddaughter take her first step on the political ladder in 1997 by becoming the Member of Parliament for Maidenhead. But how proud – and astonished – they would have been to discover that in just two generations, a woman in their family was not sweeping out grates, but just one step from 10 Downing Street.
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Here begins a storybook tale of social mobility. For the granddaughter of these humble domestic servants is Theresa May, the Home Secretary and possibly the next Tory prime minister. Amy’s son Hubert, a vicar, married Violet’s daughter Zaidee, and Theresa was their only child.
It is an uplifting journey over the course of a century from Downstairs, when the two young women were lowly maids, to Upstairs, with their 58-year-old granddaughter at the heart of government.
Both Granny Amy and Grannie Vie – as they were privately known in the family (though in her presence the ‘very correct’ Violet insisted on being called ‘Grandma’) – were decisive women who knew their own minds. This may explain why their cherished, state-school-educated granddaughter has gained a reputation as a resolute minister. But as in all families, especially in the hard times of the early 20th century, the story of Granny Amy and Grannie Vie is more than one of smooth advancement. There is tragedy, too.
So let us go back more than a century, to 1901, when Amy, then 22, was living and working in Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill – a neighbourhood now full of multimillion-pound mansions where fellow Tories David Cameron and George Osborne used to live. Tallish and dark-haired, Amy was one of four servants in the household of a rich widow from Liverpool, Caroline Henderson, and her two unmarried daughters.
Amy had just returned to London after two years in New Zealand. She had been sent there by her father, himself a butler in service, to work for a family in Christchurch. But she grew homesick for London and her family, and sailed back to Britain.
It was a prescient decision. For on the return voyage she met the man who was to become her husband, Wimbledon-born regular soldier Tom Brasier, whose family were carpenters and builders. He disembarked when the boat docked in India, to return to his regiment, and Amy continued to Southampton. But a romance had started, one which, for much of their courtship, had to be conducted long-distance.
No one is quite sure why, but it was another eight years before Amy – by then 31 – married Tom at a non-conformist chapel in Fareham, Hampshire, after which he was posted back to India and she went with him. She gave birth to two boys in India, though one died in infancy. Later, after they returned to Britain, another three children came along. One of these was Hubert, who would become an Anglican vicar – Theresa May’s father.
He was born in 1917 during the First World War, in which his father Tom served with gallantry and was decorated, rising to sergeant major in the King’s Royal Rifles.
Theresa’s other grandma, Violet, meanwhile, was only seven in 1901 and living with her family in Reading, though they hailed from Plymouth. By the time she was 17, she was living and working in a smart, detached house in the town, occupied by distinguished Australian astronomer Walter Duffield and his wife Doris.
She was their nursery nurse, looking after their 11-month-old baby, Joan. Not much over 5ft in height and slender, she fell in love with a leather worker and salesman, Reginald Barnes, from Milton in Hampshire. Hers, too, was a love that had to be put on hold for most of the First World War, as Reg, a private in the Army Service Corps, set sail to fight in the East Africa campaign.
He took with him a photo of Violet that she gave him, on the back of which she had written a beautiful and emotional message displaying her deep love for him. She wrote, with charmingly muddled grammar: ‘To Reg from Vie with fondest and truest love with all good wishes for great success in East Africa.
‘The ocean between lies such distance be our lot Should thou never see me? Love: forget me not.’
Like Amy’s husband, Reg mercifully returned safely, and they married in Reading a year before the war ended, in 1917, when Violet was 24.
A year later, tragedy struck. Within a week, both her father William, a store porter, and a brother died in the great flu pandemic.
Suddenly Violet’s mother was a widow, and while no one in the family can be sure, the deaths may have been why Violet, like Amy, left it uncommonly late (for those days) to start a family. What is likely is that because times were hard, she had to delay having children to continue working.
Reg and Violet moved in with her suddenly widowed mother at 156 Southampton Street, where Reading’s trams trundled past the front of the terraced house and the loo was in the backyard. An aunt also moved in with them. Violet would live in that house for most of the rest of her life.
She was 30 when their first child, Maurice, was born in 1924. Four years later, daughter Zaidee arrived – Theresa May’s mother.
The choice of this unusual name doesn’t indicate, as has been speculated, that Theresa May could have some Middle Eastern ancestry. The truth is simply that her grandfather Reg chose the name of his son and his wife chose the name of their daughter.
A regular churchgoer (as is Theresa), she probably picked Zaidee because it was the name of Abraham’s wife in the Old Testament.
Theresa’s grandmothers Amy and Violet were classic women of their times, hard-working, resolute and uncomplaining. But by the time the Rev Hubert Brasier and Zaidee Barnes were marrying at St Giles Church, Reading, in June 1955, one of their mothers was already a widow. Amy had been without her husband Tom, who had heart problems since 1951 and died in his 70s.
‘I remember her as an old lady in a wheelchair who bore her problems well,’ says Amy’s grandson and Theresa’s paternal cousin, Alan Brasier, 69, a former textile-firm executive living in Gloucester. ‘She was kind and honest, a straightforward person who knew her own mind. And she was the type who would not tell anyone if she was feeling poorly; you had to worm it out of her.’
Could some of this toughness have been passed down to her politician granddaughter? Some 18 months ago, after Theresa May was diagnosed with diabetes and learnt she would have to inject herself with insulin at least twice a day for the rest of her life, she shrugged it off as ‘just part of life’, adding, ‘It doesn’t and will not affect my ability to do my work.’
As the story of her family unfolds, it is intriguing to discover the Home Secretary is not the only success story of her generation. Three of the grandchildren of parlourmaid Amy and her soldier husband Tom became university professors.
There’s Theresa’s cousin Clive Brasier, an expert on tree diseases, who is visiting professor at Imperial College and emeritus mycologist with the Forestry Commission; her cousin Andy Parrott, professor of psychology at Swansea University and an authority on the effects of recreational drugs on the brain; and her cousin Professor Martin Brasier, of Oxford University, who was one of the world’s leading experts in microfossils.
‘My grandmother was wonderful, even when she was very frail, very blind and deaf,’ recalls Andy, 51. ‘After she was widowed, she lived with us at my parents’ house in Surrey for several years while I was at school. She would listen to the BBC Home Service with an earphone rigged up by my father and knit woollen squares to send to Africa and other poor areas.
‘She was always sending off cheques as well, though she didn’t have much money of her own. But she cared. And she was always interested in what we were doing at school. So lively, and very proud of the family.’
Tragically, Martin Brasier died in a car crash a few days before Christmas. Martin, a popular figure with long grey hair, had lived long enough to join a mass gathering of around 50 members of the Brasier family last summer, including Theresa and her husband Philip May. ‘We talked a lot about Gran and how she and Tom had produced a family she’d have been proud of,’ says Andy. ‘She was such a central figure.’
Martin’s death tragically mirrored that of his uncle, Theresa’s father, the Rev Hubert Brasier, who was also killed in a car crash in 1981.
As for Granny Amy, she spent her last years in a nursing home in Oxford, and died in 1967 aged 88. Violet, too, outlived her husband by many years. Reg was 78 when he died in 1970, 18 years before Violet followed him aged 94.
Life was not easy for her, since she was in a wheelchair until her death because of a smallpox vaccination that went wrong. She also had to endure the pain of her daughter Zaidee – Theresa’s mother – also being in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis and predeceasing her by six years; Zaidee died a year after her husband’s fatal car crash.
Yet Glenys Barnes, who is married to Theresa’s cousin Adrian, an aircraft-systems-safety engineer, remembers Violet as a woman who never let life get her down. ‘Grannie was quite a force,’ says Glenys, who lives in Wiltshire. ‘She was a tiny lady, but very positive, very determined and very, very forceful.’ Who would doubt that Theresa May has some of this in her as well?
As for the imposing Notting Hill house where Amy was a parlourmaid more than 110 years ago, it’s now a block of modern flats, one of whose residents is the television-property-show presenter Kirstie Allsopp.
The Reading house where Violet was a nursery maid is now the home of a professional family. The distinguished astronomer Walter Duffield, who employed Violet in 1901, went back to Australia and established the country’s first solar observatory. He died in 1929. His daughter Joan – the baby whom Violet had nursed – died last November aged 104.
Regrettably, neither Amy nor Violet lived long enough to see their granddaughter take her first step on the political ladder in 1997 by becoming the Member of Parliament for Maidenhead. But how proud – and astonished – they would have been to discover that in just two generations, a woman in their family was not sweeping out grates, but just one step from 10 Downing Street.
Looking for a new job or staff for your home? See our online jobs here www.jobs.lady.co.uk