Sixty years on Queen Anne

The first card in my mother’s index is dated September 4, 1961. It reads, in her typing: Cook-general. Household on Queen Anne Hill. Placed. Underneath, in pencil, she later added the cook’s name and a fee of forty dollars, and then, in a different pencil, the word Excellent.

That household is still a client. We will not say which, because we do not, and because they would not thank us. They know who they are, and they have been kind enough to let us say this much.

There were sixty-one cards by the end of 1962, most of them written in the summer of the World’s Fair, when every household on the hill seemed to have guests from somewhere and nobody to look after them. There are now a little over eleven thousand, though since 2024 they have lived in the Register rather than in the oak drawers in the front hall. The drawers are still there. So is the bell board my mother bought for eleven shillings when Larchcombe was sold, which has hung in the hall since we moved into Tarrant Place in 1968 and which, I am told, every candidate looks at while they wait.

Sixty years in figures

Since 1961 the agency has made 6,914 permanent placements and a great many more temporary ones; we did not count temporary placements until 1979. The longest placement we know of lasted forty-one years: a housekeeper placed in 1966, who retired from the same household in 2007 and was given, she told us, the room she had always slept in, for as long as she liked. The shortest lasted until lunch.

We have placed with three generations of some families and, in at least two, the grandchildren of the staff we placed with their grandparents. We have placed in Zürich since 1987. We have, as far as I know, never placed anyone with a household we did not first visit.

My mother would have been embarrassed by all of this. She thought that the best thing that could be said of an agency was that nobody had heard of it. I am inclined to agree, and so this is the last you will hear from us about anniversaries for a while.