Woodruff, Dorothy
Dorothy Woodruff (1890-1973)
It is always nice when a visitor arrives at the Heritage Centre to seek further information about a past family member. We like a challenge and can usually offer a little more information on the spot but usually after further research. In this case, it was Ian Laybourn who was seeking information on his grandmother Dorothy Woodruff, pictured left. He knew that she had worked as a domestic servant in or around Bellingham in the early years of the 20th century and remembers her gleefully telling him as a young boy the gory story of the Lang Pack of Lee Hall and the bungled burglary of 1723!
The story of Dorothy Woodruff consists of a few snapshots as she did not leave big footprints of her time at Bellingham. Further research, however, enabled the Heritage Centre to piece together the early life of Dorothy Woodruff as a domestic servant, which may be taken as a pattern for thousands of young girls of the time.
In the days before the Great War, the future for boys and girls, after leaving school at the age of 14, was limited and fairly predictable. Boys would often follow their fathers as shepherds, miners, railway workers, blacksmiths, masons, labourers or shopkeepers. Girls would enter domestic service, whether helping their mothers at home or working for others elsewhere. Until the comparatively recent arrival of electricity and domestic appliances, keeping house was a full-time occupation and labour intensive, especially if large numbers of children were involved, as was usually the case.
In the case of shepherds, boys would learn the job from their fathers, assisting them with clipping and dipping, when there was usually an understanding between schools and shepherds that boys would be absent at these crucial times of the shepherding year. Attendance at local marts and shows, as well as collecting peats, might also fall into the same category.
In the case of the mining village of Plashetts, the School Log noted that boys were actively encouraged to leave school as soon as possible to go into the mine upon which the village owed its existence, especially during the First World War when many miners had volunteered for military service.
As regards girls, the Plashetts School Log noted, with some concern, that “the big girls are too often kept at home to assist mothers” especially, it might be assumed, during the final days of pregnancy or after giving birth. In the case of the large families at Plashetts, girls would often find themselves helping exhausted, probably anaemic, mothers look after another new arrival to join a succession of new arrivals, born at roughly two-year intervals. Families of ten or twelve children were not uncommon and would be the result of the whole of the mother’s child-bearing life, leading to clinical exhaustion, depression or anaemia.
An escape from family life was for a girl to go into service for a local family or, if she did not mind moving away, in one of the “big houses” or country mansions that were dotted around Northumberland and often occupied only in the summer months.
Dorothy Woodruff was born in Heworth on 17th November 1890 to Robert and Catherine Woodruff and the 1891 census records shows that she was the youngest of three children. By the time that she was aged ten in the 1901 census, Dorothy found that she was one of seven children, and the 1911 census records that Robert and Catherine had produced eleven children, though two had died. Their two-room house would have become very crowded and, with so many mouths to feed, money would have been tight.
Dorothy’s movements between around 1904, when she left school, and 1911, when she is recorded as a domestic servant at Hesleyside, near Bellingham, remain unclear. At some time, she left the family home in Heworth, crossed the River Tyne and travelled from Newcastle Central station to Bellingham and the North Tyne Valley. She possibly worked at Lee Hall, where she learnt of the story of the Lang Pack, and later moved to Hesleyside; both Lee Hall and Hesleyside were on the Hesleyside Estate of the Charlton family and movement of domestic servants would have been easy.
Hesleyside was a relatively modest mansion of 28 rooms, the ancestral home of the Charlton family, head of the four graynes, or clans, of the North Tyne: Charlton, Robson, Milburn and Dodd. It should be noted that Dorothy’s service at Hesleyside was not directly for the Charlton family, who had rented Hesleyside, at this time, to wealthy merchant Thomas “Prosperity” Bell (1842-1914). The 1911 census records that he had a 21-room town house in Newcastle for his wife, two children (from 11) and seven servants.
Upon her arrival at Hesleyside, Dorothy would have found that she was one of four domestic servants under the supervision of a Housekeeper. The Charlton family came from a Roman Catholic background and had built St. Oswald’s church in Bellingham. Catholic families often advertised for senior domestics of the same faith and housekeeper Bridget Rowney was a Catholic. The 1911 census gives details of the domestics’ date of birth and origin:
| Bridget Rowney | (1873) | Dunbar |
| Mary Jane Sheppard | (1878) | Norham on Tweed |
| Jane Raw | (1883) | Darlington |
| Tomason Dysart | (1891) | South Shields |
| Dorothy Woodruff | (1890) | Heworth |
It is difficult to track down the early lives of domestic servants, two of whom from the Bellingham area are pictured (left) dressed in their uniforms. They moved around quite frequently, often moving with the family to another of their residences or taking a better position with another family. They appear on the census records every ten years but, having no property qualification, were not on the annual Electoral Register until 1928 when women over 21 received the same voting rights as men. Most of these domestic servants would hope to get married – when the cycle of service would start all over again!
In the years following the end of the First World War, the age of the domestic servant was waning. Many women had become more independent during the war years and were aware of wider career opportunities. In addition, the large estates found themselves in financial difficulty and many of the “big houses” were mothballed, abandoned, or finally demolished, as in the case of Haggerston Castle, home of the Leyland family.
Dorothy returned to Heworth and on 27th December 1913 married John Robson, a machinist at the CWS Cabinet Factory at Pelaw on Tyne. Dorothy would have known John for several years as both families lived in High Lanes. The 1921 census records John and Dorothy living with their daughter Margaret at 36 High Lanes, the two-room house where John had been brought up.
The Charlton family retained the hunting rights of the Hesleyside Estate as this photograph of 1910 shows. It is unlikely that Thomas Bell, who was 68 at the time, would have followed in person but this did not stop a party being organised in the Charlton tradition for grouse shooting on the Hesleyside Estate.
Stan Owen
