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varied, of course, from house to house. Children’s nursery furniture was expensive to buy but ravishing, such as elaborately built dolls’ houses with their own custom-made exquisite furniture. In her memoir
A Nice Clean Plate
Lavinia Smiley tells us that the nursery at Parham had its own pantry, a lift to bring food from the kitchen, a telephone, a rocking horse, a piano and toys, clothes and medicines, ‘all of it as bright and pleasant as could be’. You can see how some of these childishly pleasant nurseries, even the ones less elaborately tricked out, were preferable to the chilly atmosphere of the parents’ drawing room.
    All children must grow up and eventually Sybbie and George will need to be educated. Generally, children were educated at home until the boys were sent to boarding school at around the age of six or seven. Few aristocratic girls went to school, although some of the cleverer ones might have demanded it. Instead they were taught by governesses – a tradition that was beginning to die out by the 1930s, although not completely for some while after that.
    It stands to reason that the education a girl received was only as good as the governess that taught them, and this standard varied wildly. While education for upper-class boys and young men had long been taken seriously in schools such as Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Ampleforth, that of the girls was less well established. Schools for girls were far from non-existent – there were some well-known good ones, such as Sherborne School and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, as well as many Catholic convent schools – but they tended to focus on music, dancing, languages and social skills rather than aiming to get their pupils into university, where they might study medicine or law. Upper-class young ‘gels’ were still largely expected to acquire their position in life through their marriages rather than their careers. Of course, for many, after the First World War, marriage simply wasn’t an option; the 1921 census made it clear – there were nearly two million more women than men. Yet, for the majority, their education had prepared them for little else. Despite this, in the 1920s, university became an increasingly popular option for the female sex – of the 1,679 people that obtained degrees in 1922, 20 per cent were women.

    A watercolour sketch of Eton College, 1880.
    Amongst the working classes, education had steadily improved since the 1870 Forster’s Education Act, which filled in the gaps where existing school provisions were inadequate. Constant amendments to educational law and discussions led by the likes of Keir Hardie, arguing that education should be free and open to all, encouraged many families to send their children to school. This meant that even the likes of Daisy, born at the very tail-end of the 1890s and the lowest of the low in the social scale, would have had basic literacy and numeracy skills.

    Sarah Bunting
    In series five, we see Daisy embark on a new educational quest, aided by Miss Sarah Bunting, a schoolteacher in the village, played by Daisy Lewis. To prepare her part, the actress read a biography of Winifred Holtby, a progressive young woman from Yorkshire in the 1920s. ‘So I put Sarah as well schooled but not upper class. I think she comes from a wealthy farming family, so she had governesses and could have gone to Oxford University,’ she explains. ‘I feel like Sarah represents a new class of that time, because she is highly educated but has taken on the socialist doctrines she was exposed to at university. Coupled with her experiences during the First World War, I think that’s why she decides to return to the place she grew up. But it all also means she has been galvanised in her views about the landed gentry.’
    Daisy’s education would have been deliberately basic – it was called ‘elementary education’ because it aimed to teach only the fundamental elements of knowledge (the ‘three Rs’ –