Give it to her straight
IT was with joy that I read of the use of a goffering iron (). When curator of the Costume Galleries at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, I was taught to goffer by 93-year-old Annie Wilkinson, who had been a laundry maid at Warter Priory. She remembered laundering 1,000 dinner napkins each week and instructed me in the way they should be folded. She then tied them up in bundles with tape. On being summoned to the housekeeper, she was told that the bows on the tape weren’t straight and bravely answered: ‘Please, ma’am, I was trained as a laundry maid, not a bl***y milliner.’ She lost her position with dignity and went on to become maid to a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
