Emily Faulder, Co-founder of Universal Aunts
Emily Story Faulder (1883-1974), was the first child of Joseph Sewell Faulder and his wife Emily Story and was my Great Aunt.
Gertrude Maclean together with Emily Faulder set up Universal Aunts
in 1921 as the original concierge service although very much focusing on looking after children – particularly those travelling alone.
Their website reports:
Having found a partner, Miss Emily Faulder, she [Gertrude Maclean] started her business in a little room behind a bootmaker’s in Chelsea. Their lease did not allow them to work in the afternoons, so they went, with their papers in a capacious knitting bag, to Harrods’ Ladies’ Rest Room where they received clients and applicants on a sofa in the corner. So began a business that by its 80th year had employed over three quarters of a million men and women, and undertaken over a million services.
A typical advertisement would read:
Universal Aunts (Ladies of Irreproachable Background): Care of Children; Chaperonage; House Furnishing; Shopping for the Colonies; Research Work. ANYTHING FOR ANYONE AT ANY TIME.
In April 2004 The Times (Valerie Grove), in a profile reported:
The Princess of Wales started her career with children as a Universal Aunt. Monica Dickens, ex-deb, worked for them as a cook and kitchenmaid, and wrote her first novel, One Pair of Hands, about it. When Winston Churchill’s widow Clementine found her eyesight failing in 1976, Universal Aunts supplied readers-aloud. Mrs Dale, of Mrs Dale’s Diary, applied for work as an Aunt when widowed. The ageing Sir John Betjeman, in Chelsea, would always proffer a glass of champagne to the departing Aunt.
