ABSTRACT
Mary Ann Ashford was born in London in 1787 to a licensed victualler in the City, and by 1800 she was an orphan. Her relations wished her to take up needlework, but this independent-minded 13-year-old refused, since it was a highly seasonal trade, and she had no one to support her during periods of unemployment. Instead, Ashford opted to become a servant, much to the horror of her upwardly mobile family. Only her Aunt Margaret was willing to give her a place to stay when she was between jobs. Ashford changed employers many times throughout her seventeen years as a servant. She worked her way up to the position of cook and at one point had to fend off an abusive suitor. Ultimately, as the early sections of the excerpt below describe, she took a position with the chaplain’s family at the Royal Military Asylum (the RMA) in Chelsea. As explained earlier in the Education section of this volume, the RMA admitted primarily the children of NCOs and enlisted men in the British army who had died on active service, or soldiers’ children who had lost their mothers. Ashford never names the RMA, referring to it throughout (sardonically) as “Fairy Land”. On 3 November 1817, she married James Dallison, the sergeant-shoemaker at the RMA. Shortly after she gave birth to her sixth child, her husband died, and Ashford subsequently married Edward Green, the sergeant-tailor at the institution. They remained at the RMA until December 1835, by which time Green had become too infirm to continue working. After the publication of her autobiography in 1844, Ashford disappears from history. Sales figures for the book do not seem to be available, nor does it seem to have been reviewed. A number of historians have used Ashford’s book as a rare and valuable window onto servant life, but her struggles with the military bureaucracy are equally illuminating. Although Ashford may have been unusually determined, her dealings with the RMA commissioners clearly indicate that army wives were not necessarily powerless pawns meekly accepting military dictates. The poem with which she ends her book is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”. The minutes of a number of Royal Military Asylum Commissioners’ meetings, which are appended to the Ashford excerpt, bear out many of the claims she made in her memoir.
