pound project was launched to reevaluate and reinterpret the Service Wing. I was quite

heavily involved. As part of the project a team of costumed interpreters were put in

place. We were in costume, we were in character and we were talking to the public about our

lives, our hopes, our dreams, as well as interpreting the daily life and chores of servants. And

I say 'we' because I was one of them. I played the first kitchen maid Mary-Anne Bulmer but

I was also in charge of the team, leading up what people were saying, why they were

saying it and making sure that every visitor that came here got a really good experience

and learnt an awful lot too. But behind that project was a lot more work and I've come

here today to meet Dr Andrew Hann, one of English Heritage's historians and one of the

leading lights behind the project as it unfolded. Andrew, tell what was your role on the project?

Well when I first arrived at English Heritage in 2007 this was my first job so it was really

exciting to get into the Service Wing exhibition and I was able to look at the servants and

find out a little bit more about them and do a little bit of genealogy research so that

was my first introduction to English Heritage. And it was quite a big project wasn't it?

From what I understand the whole Service Wing was essentially empty, it wasn't really open

very often, there was a table in the kitchen and nothing else and we didn't know anything

about the people who had worked in it. Yes we didn't know much about them at all. When

we started the project it was basically being used as a service yard. There was a paint

store in the laundry and some of the other rooms were being used as a wood workshop and

that sort of thing so it really was a lot of conservation work that was needed. But

also we didn't know much about the servants who'd been there as well. Luckily we discovered

that there'd been a fire in 1880 and that the kitchen had had to be extensively reserviced,

so the 1881 census was the obvious place to start. And so, I took the list from there

and just started working my way through it and finding out about the various people as

I went along, and Avis was one of them. And that's why it was 1881 wasn't it? That's why

this whole project has always been set in 1881 using recipes from the 1880s and slightly

afterwards because of that big fire and then the fact that we've got the census. Yes it

was, the decision was taken because we had a detailed record of the fire, we had some

plans which showed what had happened after the fire in terms of reconstruction so it

was a win on all fronts really. Tell me a bit more about the characters who inhabited

the Service Wing because we're very focused on Avis Crocombe in this set of videos but

of course Avis wasn't alone was she? She wasn't, there were two kitchen maids and there was

a scullery maid who worked in the kitchens. Annie Chase the scullery maid and Mary-Anne

Bulmer of course the first kitchen maid. There was also lots of other people working within

the Service Wing. There was Fanny Cowley the dairy maid and also a couple of people working

in the laundry. And then we had all the outdoor servants who I did a little bit of research

on as well, so the gardeners and the gamekeepers because we knew they would have some sort

of interaction. And of course there were indoor servants as well weren't there because we've

always focused on the kitchen and to some extent the laundry, the dairy, some of these

outdoor characters the gamekeepers and the gardeners but indoors there's a whole other

world and I suppose it's easy to look at a house like this and see it a little bit like

a swan serenely going along but what you've got is this huge number of people underneath

as the legs. There are, there was about 25 to 30 servants who had some involvement at

the house in the 1880s and that's when you've just got Lord and Lady Braybrooke. Their daughter

Augusta has just left to get married so there's just the two of them there and obviously their

guests when they have them, but it's a really large entourage to really serve two people.