Knives Out - the cook and the surgeon of Bart's
This month, we bring you another guest post from curator and researcher Emma Shepley, continuing her exploration of St Bartholomew's Hospital in the 18th century through records in our collections.
This month is Women's History Month - but as the Historical Association have put it, "for many of us, our awareness of women’s history is still largely limited to a handful of famous queens, suffragettes and campaigners, plus the occasional Florence Nightingale". Emma's work has uncovered the lives of women whose work was essential to the running of the hospital, but who did not have the positions of power or status of male contemporaries like William Hogarth and James Gibbs. Read Emma's previous post, 'The Barberess of Bart's'.
‘Complaint of the Kitchen’
On Wednesday 15 May 1751 St Bartholomew’s Hospital kitchen was in chaos: ‘the Affairs of the Hospital suffer greatly… by the Incapacity of Faith Field, the Cook & Agnes Rose, her daughter & Assistant, by Reason of their Bad States of Health… there is no likelihood of their Recovery to be able to do their Duty…. Mr Treasurer is desired… to inspect into the management of the Kitchen’.
Surprisingly, there are no subsequent updates on the kitchen crisis in the governors’ minutes, but investigating Faith and Agnes’ lives, it is clear why the Treasurer’s enquiry ended here. Thirteen days after the minuted meeting, Agnes Rose died aged 47. She was buried on site in the hospital church of St Bartholomew the Less.
Two months later, the crisis is clearly resolved. Agnes’s mother Faith Field is once again listed in the annual staff accounts as Hospital Cook - one of only two salaried Barts senior officer roles held by women in the 1700s. Having run the Hospital kitchen for over twenty years, Faith’s survival and return to work, aged seventy or more, is nothing short of miraculous and she remained in post for three more years. Leafing back further through the governors’ minute books Faith’s connection to Barts can be traced beyond her work as cook, revealing a fascinating family history of hospital service.
In 1702 a young Faith Bunn married Londoner Nicholas Field. Nicolas had completed his barber-surgeons apprenticeship and in 1690 was appointed to the role of Surgeon and Guide (manager) to the Kingsland Hospital, Hackney - the hospital's 'out-house', or isolation home, for patients with infectious diseases, who would not be admitted to the main hospital site. Kingsland was originally one of ten medieval leprosy hospitals on the outskirts of London, but was treating syphilis, ague and fever by Nicholas’ time.
‘Remis and negligent’
Faith and Nicolas’ tenure at Kingsland was not without incident - Nicholas was cautioned twice by the hospital governors, once in 1693 for keeping the patients’ four pence weekly meat and drink allowance for himself, and the following year ‘for being remis and negligent’. He is however forgiven (although nurses were usually sacked for similar offences) and subsequently appears in the annual listing of Bart's officers, receiving a gratuity of £30 every year on top of his salary for his ‘extraordinary charge in curing the patients admitted to the Hospital’.
The couple lived in ‘Surgeon’s House’ - plans show it squeezed between the hospital itself and the medieval chapel, and their two recorded daughters, Agnes and Marcey, were both baptised at St John’s Church, Hackney in 1703 and 1706.
In January 1719 Faith herself is mentioned for the first time, but in unhappy circumstances: The Governors ‘ordered that the quarter salary of the Surgeon and Guide to Kingsland Hospital that will be due at Lady Day [March 25] next be paid to Mrs Faith Field, the Widow of Mr Nicholas Field the late Surgeon thereof deceased’ - a small consolation for the loss of the family’s main income and home.
‘Cooke of this Hospital’
How Faith survived for the next decade is not known, but she reappears in November 1732, as the successful candidate in a hotly contested election with voting by the governors for Cook to St Bartholomew's Hospital: ‘vacant by the death of Susanna Crane the several petitions of Sarah Crane, Faith Fields, & Mary Whitting… were read. This Court thereupon proceeded to the said election by Ballot and it appeared that upon counting up the number the said Faith Field had sixty nine votes… Mary Whitting had nine votes.. and Sarah Crane had two votes… Faith Field shall be Cooke of this Hospital & have receive the salary & perquisites thereunto Belonging during the Governors Pleasure’.
Faith’s landslide victory is undoubtedly due to connections forged at Kingsland - she probably prepared food for patients and took on aspects of hospital management. The wife of Nicholas’ Kingsland predecessor temporarily ran the hospital after her husband Richard Berry’s death. Faith’s new job was a moment of wider change for the Field family - just one month later 30-year-old Agnes married William Rose, a Hampstead ‘upholder’ (trader in fabrics and soft furnishing).
Faith now gets an annual mention in the Governors' Minutes - her name is written beneath the only other female officer - matron Anne Hyde - for years. Faith receives £10 bonus each year for good service - a substantial sum, easily covering a year’s rent or equipping a kitchen/replacing a wardrobe of working clothes many times over.
‘Off Pincock Street west’
The location of the hospital's kitchen at this time is not entirely clear. During Faith’s time as cook, the Hospital was a building site as Willam Gibb’s neo-classical courtyard emerges and the medieval hospital is demolished. 1700s hospital property plans note a large ‘Kitchen to St Bartholomew’s Hospital’ measuring 11 x 5m with a ‘back kitchen’ and buttery’ marked alongside. The location (off ‘Pincock Street west’, later Bagnio Court) places it some streets away from the main hospital site -perhaps a site demolition necessity of the time.
‘Boiled without bones’
The hospital food made by Faith, Agnes and their fellow workers was repetitive and basic by modern standards, distinctly lacking in fruit and vegetables, but more than adequate by standards of the day. In 1714 Dr John Radcliffe had left £500 a year to Barts in his will "for mending the patients' diet forever". A standard Sunday menu included 12oz of ‘Bakers Best wheaton Bread’ (roughly 12 slices), 8oz of beef ‘boiled without bones’, 1 pint of milk caudle in the morning, one pint of ale caudle at night, three pints of beer and a pint and a half of beef broth. Mutton, ‘the best Suffolk cheese’ and ‘the best Cambridgeshire butter’ are substituted for beef on other days of the week. Faith’s kitchen would be on constant churn, boiling up broth, caudles [wine or ale mixed with eggs, sugar, and spices], possets [milk curdled with wine or ale], and pottage [soups and stews] and shipping it out to the wards - none of it would have been served hot.
‘Age and infirmities’
Five years before the kitchen crisis of 1751, Agnes Rose, now a widow, had joined her mother at Barts as her assistant. Faith’s ‘age and infirmities’ meant she could ‘not able alone to perform the business of her place’. In the same year - a resolution is put to the Governors to ban the employment of anyone over the age of fifty but, hearteningly, this is soundly rejected because ‘a limitation in age may exclude many persons whose abilities may be serviceable to this Charity’.
Faith’s journey through the archives ends on 1 February 1754 when she was buried in the cross aisle at the west end of the hospital church of St Bartholomew the Less. Hospital management wheels spun and 14 days later Mrs Hester Flude (widow) was elected Cook by another landslide of 77 votes to ‘enjoy the Houses, salary and Perquisites thereunto belonging during the Pleasure of this Court’.
Widowhood and work
Faith’s life, like that of Barbara Adams, the hospital barber, shows how women worked in the 1700s. The hospital prohibited the employment of married women, but in Barbara and Faith’s cases, family trade and connections brought valuable jobs in widowhood with comparative security within the precariousness of life in Hogarth’s London.
Sources:
- Minutes of the Board of Governors: SBHB/HA /1/8 1689-1708, SBHB/HA/1/9 1708-1719, SBHB/HA/1/10 1719-1734, SBHB/HA/1/11 1734-1748, SBHB/HA/1/12 1748-1757
- Plan book, c. 1755-1762: SBHB/HC/46