Favourite Recipe; Cooking in a Brothel, a Workhouse, and an Asylum

My grandmother was a fabulous cook, and baked some of the best cakes I've ever eaten. Her fruit cake was delicious, but for some reason I used to aspire to bake a sponge cake that was as light and airy as hers. It was many years after her passing when, as an adult, I admitted this aspiration to my own mother. I was astounded to learn that her lighter than a feather, and airier than air sponge cakes came out of a box!

I enjoy cooking immensely. It is some kind of magic, an alchemy of sorts, to take a group of individual ingredients, and conjure them into something delicious. I wish my grandmother had lived longer for so many reasons, one of which being that I could have learned so much about cooking from her. Her recipes were never written down, with the exception of the back of the sponge cake mix box! I'm told her measurements were along the lines of 'a pinch here' and 'a splash' there; the mark of a truly talented cook.

It's possible that she inherited her talents in the kitchen from her father, who she once said had been a chef in a big restaurant. This may have been a bending of the truth, by a fair margin.

William Nicholson Edgill was born on the 2nd July 1871, in Romiley, or Denton, Manchester. his parents were married later in 1872, at the Liverpool register office, just two months after Elizabeth, his first wife, had died. His father, also named William Nicholson Edgill, had worked for a long while as the Clerk to the Guardians of the Chorlton Workhouse, and had been the Superintendent registrar for the Chorlton area. His mother was Hannah Standring, the daughter of James Standring, an omnibus company owner and entrepreneur. I believe that William (junior) was born at Rose Bank, Gibraltar Lane, Denton, an address given in his father's probate record. I have not, however, been able to locate a birth certificate, or an 1871 census return for him, or his mother Hannah Standring, and her older children.

Rose Bank, Gibraltar Lane

William was 20 when his father died. The 1891 census, taken shortly after his death, recorded William as working as a warehouseman. At least one sibling had started out working as a warehouseman, before becoming a clerk, like their father. Considering the family’s connections to the Chorlton Union I imagine that William worked in the Poor House warehouse, keeping a track of incoming and outgoing stock, although this is pure imaginative speculation.

It appears that William married a Mabel Cowan in 1894. Mabel was the daughter of a tea agent, Henry Cowan, and presumably this was a good match. At this time William was soundly in his father’s footsteps and working as a poor law officer. 

Something, however, went wrong with their union, and by the 1901 census William was living in London, registered as married, and working and residing apart from Mabel, in a large restaurant on Kensington High Street, called The Golden Bells. Mabel Edgill cannot be found in this census, nor can Mabel Cowan, or Edghill, however a widow named Mabel Hill married a Thomas Blezard in May 1916. I have found no evidence of a divorce or an annulment and can find no evidence to suggest that Mabel married a different William Nicholson Edgill, or married anyone with the last name Hill. I can only assume that the marriage for some reason broke down, William ran off to London and Mabel started a new life as a widow, using the last name ‘Hill’, which is close to the name ‘Edgill’. 

The Golden Bells Coffee Palace and Restaurant was situated at 87 High Street, Notting Hill Gate.

Liverpool Mercury, 1886

It must have been a fun place, as the management regularly ran competitions to elicit business.

In 1891 The Golden Bells was known as a temperance hotel.

And in 1898 The Westminster Budget raved about the Golden Bells’ Christmas Goose Club!

Here is an extract from this Christmas Goose article, which explains a little about the enterprise.

"The array would have elevated Dickens's Tiny Tim not only to the second heave of delight, but right away to the paradise of good things itself. The grey fog that sometimes hangs about Bayswater floated in little golden-coloured clouds round the yellow gas-lights. It made the birds' rose-pink beards look crimson, and gave to their Lifeguardsman-like chests a fulness that did not really form part of themselves. But there, at Golden Bells restaurant, close by Notting Hill Gate, they hung; up the road, round the corner, along the back street; not only a regiment, but an army, really a wall, of turkeys, and a pavement of geese; and others lay quietly in crates, in boxes, and in hampers- the grand total was over 5,000. The interesting fact was that they were poor men's birds, and that they had all been sold, and, what is more, paid for."

The article goes on to explain how local people across London could pay a small amount each week, over ten weeks, to cover the cost of all their family would need for a Christmas feast. The club was offered to people via the Ragged School Union, and Golden Bells was a depot, to which the holiday fare was delivered, and from which it was then distributed to the club members via large vans all across the city.

I have wondered if one of the gentlemen in this picture was William Nicholson Edgill.

By the time William was found working at The Golden Bells, it is likely that the temperance movement had moved on. On the 13th August, 1905, the Kensington News reported that police had raided the hotel, and had arrested the manager, and night porter for running a brothel from the property. The manager was sentenced to 6 weeks hard labour, and the night porter received 4 weeks hard labour!

It seems that the establishment kept its poor reputation. This postcard, from 1907, depicting the town of Notting Hill, and dripping in satire, renamed the hotel ‘The Golden Fleas’.

As much as William may have been enjoying life as an employee in this 'fancy' restaurant/brothel, he was soon, once again, attracted to a career serving the poor, this time as a cook, instead of a clerk. The Brighton Gazette reported, on the 5th December, 1907, that the Guardians of the Brighton Poor House wished to hire an assistant cook. A certain William Edgill, from London, had applied and there was some discussion over whether or not the job should be given to him, or a local person.

It seems that despite the opposition to an outsider being employed by the workhouse, William got the job, which explains how William came all the way from Manchester to Brighton, where he met Alice Funnell, my great grandmother. Just two years later, on 26th June, 1909, William Nicholson Edgill married Alice Funnell. Their marriage certificate recorded him as a bachelor, not a divorcee, or a widower, which leaves to me to guess that he was possibly guilty of bigamy. Their first child (Mary Margaret Louise) was born in 1910, when her father's occupation was recorded as a master fishmonger.

By 1911 our chef had left the fish shop of Brighton and had gone with Alice to work below stairs for a grand house in Hampshire. This may have been an effort for them to work and live together. William was the cook, and Alice the house parlour maid. As a housemaid it would have been difficult for Alice to get work that was not a 'live in' position. Living and working together in live in positions, however, meant that they had to leave their first child and daughter (Mary Margaret Louise) in Brighton with a relative.

The next job that William took was a position, again, in a place ripe for social change; the Banstead Lunatic Asylum. William and Alice's second child, and first son (and the third generation of William Nicholson Edgills) was born in Epsom, in 1913. The family of 4 lived at Potters Cottages; accommodation provided for workers of the Banstead Asylum. On baby William's birth certificate his father's occupation was recorded as 'cook at lunatic asylum'.

Banstead Asylum went through a great deal of change in the time that William worked there. It changed from Banstead Lunatic Asylum to Banstead Mental Hospital in 1918, and then Banstead Hospital in 1937. Throughout that time William changed from being a cook to working as a nurse, possibly due to the work needed in World War I. At the time of their youngest daughter's birth in 1915 William was recorded as being a cook at an institution, yet by the time their youngest child was born in 1922 William was a 'male nurse'. William continued to work as a psychiatric nurse until shortly before his death in 1938, at the age of 67. He died of tuberculosis, a disease so very prevalent in this era.

So my Granny wasn't entirely wrong; he had worked in a big restaurant (or rather, brothel), but also in a workhouse, mansion house, and hospital for the mentally ill. And he had also finished his career working as a psychiatric nurse, possibly helping men who were traumatized by their awful experiences in one of the world's most bloodiest and traumatic of wars.

Whilst she may not have been telling the whole truth about her father's work, her own abilities in the kitchen certainly suggested that he had some expertise in the culinary arts, which she most definitely inherited. 40 years later and my mouth still waters when I think about that delicious fruit cake of hers!

#Edgill