The Dark Story of Britain's Most Forsaken Royal Retreat: Osborne House

On the north coast of the Isle of Wight, looking out across the Solent towards Portsmouth, stands an Italianate palazzo that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built between 1845 and 1851 as their private family retreat. It cost two hundred thousand pounds. It contained forty bedrooms, a Marble Corridor, a Council Room, and a Swiss Cottage in the grounds where the royal children learned cookery and carpentry. The Queen gave birth to her last child there in 1857. She entertained Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie there in the summer of the same year. She wrote despatches from there to her generals during the Crimean War. And then on 14 December 1861, her husband died at Windsor of typhoid fever, and Osborne House was never the same house again. For the next forty years, Victoria insisted that the bedroom Albert had used during the previous summer's residence be maintained exactly as he had left it - hot water at seven in the morning, clothes laid out, pens sharpened on the writing slope, his chamber pot scrubbed with vinegar, his nightshirt folded and placed under the pillow. The chambermaid who carried out that routine, day after day, year after year, was a Suffolk woman named Hannah Spurgeon, and she was still doing it on the morning of 22 January 1901, the day Victoria herself died in the bedroom next door. This is the story of a house that was not a retreat but a shrine, of a widow's grief institutionalised as household labour, and of the servants - English, Scottish, Indian - whose lives were spent maintaining the fiction that a dead man was still in residence. Three names should not leave this house unspoken. Hannah Spurgeon was a nineteen-year-old chambermaid when she arrived at Osborne in 1861 and was responsible for the Prince Consort's bedroom for forty consecutive years; Edward VII pensioned her off in 1901 on forty pounds a year and a cottage at Cowes, and she died there in 1906. Frederick Abel was Albert's private secretary from 1857 and was retained as Keeper of the Prince's Apartments from 1861 until his retirement in 1875, ensuring for fourteen years that the Prince's pens were sharpened and his unanswered letters laid out daily as if the dead man might yet reply. Mohammed Bakhsh was a kitchen assistant brought from Agra in 1890 to work under the Munshi Abdul Karim, preparing Indian dishes for the Queen in the Durbar Room kitchen; on the morning of 23 January 1901, within twelve hours of Victoria's death, Edward VII gave him two hours to pack his belongings, ordered his papers burned in the kitchen courtyard, and had him escorted from the estate. He returned to India and was recorded in the Agra census of 1911 as a labourer in his brother's house, aged thirty-eight. On this channel, we tell the story of every great English house through the names the official guidebook forgot. We work from the household ledgers, the wages books, the parish registers, the obituaries in the county press, the burial records of village churchyards, and the surviving private diaries kept by servants and secretaries. We are not interested in the brass plaques in the Marble Corridor. We are interested in the chambermaid who scrubbed the chamber pot for forty years, the kitchen assistant whose recipes were burned within hours of his employer's death, and the private secretary who entered the date in a dead man's ledger on the first morning of every new year. Osborne House is one of the most visited royal residences in England. Three hundred and fifty thousand people walk through it each year. They see the Durbar Room and the Swiss Cottage and the bathing machine on the beach. They do not see the names. This documentary restores them. Subscribe to British Manors for more deep investigations into the hidden histories of Britain's great castles, palaces, and royal residences. New documentary every week. Comment below with the next house you want investigated - the manor, the castle, the abbey, the lodge - we read every suggestion and we build the channel from your requests. British Manors. The hidden history of the buildings that shaped England. Sources and further reading: A.N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life, Atlantic Books, London, 2014. Helen Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy, Hutchinson, London, 2011. Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, HarperCollins, London, 2000. Stanley Weintraub, Albert: Uncrowned King, John Murray, London, 1997. Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant, The History Press, Stroud, 2010. Michael Bloch, The Duke of Windsor's War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1982 (for the Royal Naval College Osborne cadet records, 1903 to 1921). Robert Lacey, Royal: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Little Brown, London, 2002 (for the 1954 public opening of Osborne). Jane Roberts, Royal Landscape: The Gardens and Parks of Windsor, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1997.