LiveTheirStory

Sarah Shanks was the younger sister of Ann, and like her went into domestic service at a young age, to the local curate in Colne, near Bluntisham. Unlike Ann, however, Sarah remained unmarried, and moved away to service as a housemaid in a girls’ school in Lambeth, where she is documented in 1861. Such ‘dame schools’ were quite common, this one run by three sisters and having just 23 pupils.

Sarah stayed in London and moved into service with a German merchant and his family in Camberwell, recorded in the census of 1871. Ten years later, however, she was living alone in Shelly Row in Cambridge, and described as a ‘Bible Woman’, possibly able to live on her own means from years of saving. She died in 1886, aged just 52.

Sarah was one of the legions of female domestic servants documented in Victorian census books. Their story was often one of a few years’ service followed by marriage, but she took a different track, remaining single and working. We will never know if this was a deliberate choice, but her faith and her early experience in an all-female space were surely factors in her life story.