Charlotte Huggett

Independent-minded nanny of the Edwardian school

Charlotte Mary Huggett, nanny: born Wateringbury, Kent 11 November 1903; died Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire 3 September 2003.

Charlotte Huggett was one of the last of her generation of nannies who emerged from a meagre rural background to bring independence of thought, example and a strong sense of self to dozens of children across 70 years of influence.

She was born in 1903, the third of five children of an agricultural labourer and his wife in Wateringbury, Kent. It was an upbringing of a kind that Flora Thompson gently romanticised in Lark Rise to Candleford, and although Charlotte Huggett described her family in Gloria Wood's 1993 television series The Nineties as "very, very poor, but very, very happy" this phrase disguised the additional realities of childhood illness and death, robust Edwardian medicine, and her mother's violent mental instability.

Charlotte was not expected to live when she was born; she was too small, underweight and pallid, and was pushed to the end of the bed to fade away. But in the event it was her younger brother who died, at three months of whooping cough, then her younger sister of diphtheria, her elder brother of meningitis, and her father, in 1917, when Charlotte was 13, of a heart condition. A year later, her mother, who had made another of her recurrent attempts at suicide, was admitted to a mental asylum, where she spent 49 years, the rest of her life.

This catalogue of illness, death and domestic distress should have been interrupted in 1912 when the family had put enough money by to emigrate to Canada. They bought tickets, to travel on the RMS Titanic, but at the last minute they were unable to go because Charlotte herself had caught diphtheria.

Effectively alone in the world and homeless on the death of their father, Charlotte and her elder sister and lifelong friend, Dolly, went into service. Charlotte told a lie about her age to get her first job as a nursery maid, pretending that she was two years older than she actually was. From about 1917 until 1928 she took a succession of nannies' jobs with families in London and the Home Counties.

The effects of her mother's illness haunted her throughout her mature life, bringing her nightmares and bouts of sleep-walking. She decided never to marry and have children, in case mental illness passed through her to another generation.

Instead, Charlotte Huggett devoted her life to other people's children. She found a long and settled employment, from 1928, with the family of Francis and Sylvia Dixon at Greenfield Manor near Watlington in Oxfordshire. Her first task, in the second or third week of her appointment, was to accompany the three Dixon children to, around and then home from Egypt, where Francis Dixon was in charge of irrigation engineering in the State Domains Department of the Egyptian government.

The Dixons were resident in Egypt, and over the next few years Huggett ferried the children back and forwards to Cairo in the school summer holidays. Meanwhile at Greenfield she ran the long, winding manor-house in a dip in the Chilterns, which had gardens, barns, some cows and a field or two, but no gas, electricity or main drainage.

She moved on from the Dixons to be nanny to the Madden-Simpson family, spending six years with them in England, Scotland and, for a two-year period, in Chile, where John Madden-Simpson was a director of mines. One of "her" children, the painter Anne Madden, remembers how Huggett always kept the children busy, at dressing up, putting on plays, making costumes out of crêpe paper, and in Chile making imaginative houses out of eucalyptus branches. They went on long walks, looking for antlers in Scottish forests, collecting leaves and berries in English woods, and learning the names of all the wild flowers and their fairies.

Huggett went back to Greenfield in 1940, and she and Sylvia Dixon, now returned from Egypt, ran the house and its land with efficiency and precision, creating a home for their own and for evacuee children. There she became a landgirl, tending the two Jersey cows and brushing them until their hair shone, organising the dairy, making butter and jam, and as the Second World War progressed, forming a local Nannies' Spitfire Fund to raise money to pay for a Spitfire.

Although she settled in a cottage in Watlington in the 1950s, Charlotte Huggett never really retired, but continued to look after children and the children of "her" children in the area until the 1980s. Known in Watlington from the White Mark to Couching Street as "Nanny Huggett", she swung into the life of the town, working in the hospital, and volunteering to answer Wilfred Pickles's questions when the radio programme Have a Go came to town in the mid-1950s. "Nobody else dared to do it, so I did."

She began a new life of involvement and travel of her own, singing in the Oxford Bach Choir and the Watlington Choral Society, taking coach trips to see her sister in Hastings. She kept on making friends well into her seventies and eighties: "I've just met this nice new family in Watlington, and I'm inviting them to tea." (Tea was invariably bridge rolls with Shippam's fish paste, Mr Kipling lemon cakes, and strong tea with sterilised milk. If there was any cake left over, you had to take it away with you.)

Nine times she flew to Canada to visit distant cousins, but rarely, if ever, did she reflect on her first failed attempt to cross the Atlantic. Huggett had much humour, but little sense of irony, and no sense at all of her own extraordinary bearing, and the effect she had had on those lives that came into contact with hers.

Charlotte Huggett bustled. In the kitchen, pots and pans, knives and forks, moved with the speed of light into and out of drawers, up and down from shelves. The sprouts were drained, the gravy made, the joint ready precisely on time and on the table. Everything was organised, everything had its place, and when Nanny was about you knew exactly where the string was, where the pinking scissors were should you need them, or the glue.

So timely was she that she began making her Christmas cards in August - with last year's cards, and with pinking scissors and glue - and she signed herself "Nannie", a spelling peculiarly her own; and so thrifty that she would wash clingfilm and hang it on the line to dry. "You'll never get to Canada that way," she said, when she saw a friend throw away a plastic bag.

When she was pleased she would give a prolonged series of nods; when put out her response was an unmelodious "tchlock" that came well lubricated from somewhere to the front of her palette. Even up to the moment her heart stopped she continued to bustle, whether it was up and down a hospital corridor, or moving at a rare pace along the walk between her cottage and Watlington High Street pushing her wheeled Zimmer frame in front of her, and buying from The Granary a piece of cheese so small that a mouse would scorn it.

I visited her during an earlier spell in hospital in 2001, and asked her what she would like: "Egg sandwiches," she said. Bringing her the egg sandwiches the next day, I reminded her it was general election day. "Oh, but I haven't voted . . . Which way did you vote?" "Liberal Democrat." "Ah, that's good; my father was a Liberal."

James Hamilton