years alongside the various Avis Crocombes. I absolutely loved my time as a kitchen maid

but why did you as English Heritage decide to put costumed characters into the Service

Wing? I think we were really keen to really bring the kitchens and the service range to

life so we really wanted to try and do something a little bit different and we wanted to make

the most of those days when we did have the costumed interpreters in there and the interaction

between the characters was really important, getting them to be real people and not just

generic cooks. And if it hadn't been for us portraying the genuine people then we wouldn't

have discovered the cookbook because it was actually through portraying Avis Crocombe

that Mr Stride got in touch with us and said he's got the cookbook so if that process hadn't

happened we may never have discovered it. And it was an absolutely stupendous discovery.

Not all of the recipes that we've shown in these videos come from the cookery book because

it is a snapshot. She's sort of filling in certain things from other books and actually

that means that what you've got in the cookery book is in some ways more of a representation

of the kind of recipes the Braybrookes wanted but couldn't get from their high-end cookery

cooks. I agree entirely, there are little marginal references where it actually says

'got this from Lady Braybrooke' or 'got this from the Field magazine' so we can see there's

this interaction going on between Lady Braybrooke and her cook so they're obviously close confidants

and they're speaking to each other on a regular basis and that's really great to know that

she's not just this faceless servants who's sitting in the service range; she's actually

someone who's regularly interacting with the lady of the house. And she's doubly not faceless

is she, because one of the documents that was with the cookbook is possibly a photograph

of Avis. Just possibly, yes. Just possibly. Talk me through this, tell me what we've got

here. What we have here is a photograph which has a date on it of 1886 and it seems to show

a man and a woman and we know it's from the TRobinson Art Photographer Studios in Shoreditch.

And the ages of the people in the photograph are about right, they would have been in their

late forties at the time and these people maybe look a slight bit older than that. But

on the other hand in a lot of Victorian photographs people do look somewhat older than perhaps

they would look today at the same age. They do, they would have had a relatively hard

life and what we know about Benjamin is that he'd been a butler because we've got the marriage

certificate. He'd been a butler working in Maddox Street which is probably not that far

away from where Avis was in Upper Brook Street. And that was the London home of the Braybrookes

wasn't it? It was. There's quite a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest it just

might be Avis.