World Demand For English Nannies

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31091, 21 June 1966, Page 2

World Demand For English Nannies

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SERENA SINCLAIR)

“Mummy! Mummy! Nanny’s packing her bags! What’s happening?” “Nanny is off to Bahrein.”

Nanny can write her own ticket, too. The English nanny will be considered Britain’s top export long after the Beatles have passed from the scene. And with increasing affluence around the world, with more and more troubled parents hungry for the firmness their young badly need, the English nanny is permanently in demand.

Almost no-one—at least among one’s professionalworld friends—can afford her. “Where’s the servants’ wing?” she will ask crisply once she has crossed your threshold. “What time are the meals served?”

Nannies have rules, and even if today's households are run more casually. Nanny is not going to be. And it is precisely because she is running things and running them her way that many a young British mother decides on an "au pair” girl instead.

“We’ve worked our way through nine," one couple reported, “of which three were gems and one had to be booted out to the Y.W.CA. before violence ensued.” A living-in aid like this gives freedom—but at a price. “Taking on a foreign au pair girl is like adding yet another youngster to your household —they’re always under 20 and often eat up your ’phone bill, let alone the goodies in the fridge. Yet I prefer it to a nanny—l couldn’t bea* my child to be formed and swayed by someone in such a formal way,” said one mother. Although nannies expect a living-in staff and are known to shove a mother’s birthday-present-dress for their charge right to the floor of the wardrobe if they do not approve of it, au pair girls have simpler demands. What they want is time free and plenty of fringe benefits like a private television set. But the foreign girls come

and go in a household, while a nanny—the old-style nanny, that is--likes to dig in for a long steady career. Noone watches more keenly to see if there is a new baby expected. A sigh of deep relief—she will be needed for another few years yet. The nanny-training schools are full, and more and more girls of 18, having passed their examinations, are happy to enroll for 20 months or more of intensive training. This can cost them 1000 dollars at a school such as one in London’s Chelsea. There they get certificates which make crowned heads

in other parts of the world salaam with respect Certainly the “go-anywhere" aspect is one of nannydom’s greatest lures to the young today. The profession ranks with that of secretary, air hostess, and model in its freewheeling possibilities. One of the nicest nanny stories came from a fashion trade man whose resident nanny was a solid frumpish girt. One day, just to add some pleasure to her life, he took her to a fashion show in his salon. She was riveted by the elegance of the models, went straight back to his house, and began experimenting with makeup. After she left, he lost track of her for a few years. Then he suddenly, began getting fashion orders from a very chic shop in the ChampsElysees. Nanny—the newly glamorous nanny—had married a wealthy French businessman with his own group of shops and was urging her husband to patronise her former employer.