Inside the elite British college for the world’s best nannies, FT Magazine, April 2023
Cover story for the FT Magazine focused on Norland, a British college for aspiring nannies with a reputation for supplying staff to the rich and famous.
Extract
In 1989, María Teresa Turrión Borrallo arrived at Denford Park, a grand country house in the English county of Berkshire. The property, which has a Tuscan-style colonnaded entrance and sits on 120 acres, was then the home of Norland College, an institute widely accepted to be the most prestigious and thorough nanny-training establishment in the world — the go-to place both for students seeking employment with the rich and powerful, as well as for employers anxious that their children be carefully moulded — ideally by someone else — into the next generation of rich and powerful.
Borrallo, who grew up in Palencia in northern Spain and whose “great passion and life” is children, according to an interview with her brother in 2014, packed away her personal clothing in favour of a matronly uniform: knee-length beige dress with a white collar, brown bowler hat with an embroidered N, white gloves and a hairnet to secure her regulation bun. She would wear it daily for the duration. At a welcome ceremony for her cohort, she lit a candle and signed a code of conduct dictating that she would never do anything to harm her “charges”, as Norland calls the children its students work with, or the reputation of the institution. As the flame burnt bright, she became a “Norlander”.
Norland’s curriculum promised that Borrallo would be instructed not just on sleep and weaning, but also on how to quickly mend a sagging hem, how to identify a dessert fork and other details that cater to the predilections of wealthy or aristocratic families. Her new life would not be easy and would require long hours and curtailed liberties, especially if one ended up, as many Norland nannies would, “living in” with one’s employers. No late-night visits from boyfriends, no hangovers, no spontaneous evenings out. A Norlander who trained in the 1930s described the job as “a little like giving yourself to the Lord”. There would be psychological pressures too, notably the emotional weight of the bond between nanny and child, with issues of pay, servitude, even eventual resignation, in the background of every hug, every bedtime story.
Founded in 1892 as the UK’s first childcare training college, Norland was the brainchild of educator Emily Ward, an admirer of Friedrich Frobel, who invented the kindergarten movement. Ward spotted a gap in the market in the Victorian upper-class thirst for childcare: create trained professionals rather than the illiterate lower-class housemaids who had previously taken on much nursery work. Such women, “gentlewomen” as Ward called them, should be from middle-class families, could charge superior fees and, in turn, would reassure parents that they were providing the very best for their offspring. Essential to this vision was that such women share the “habits and manners of her employer”, according to an official Norland history authored by Penelope Stokes in 1992.
Today, some 30 years after she graduated, you can see Borrallo in full Norland uniform in the background of photographs of the royal family, tending to the needs and whims of the future king Prince George and his siblings, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Borrallo has worked for Prince William and his family since 2014 and is referred to by current Norland staff as simply “the Royal Nanny”.
Norland has a tradition of supplying nannies to the aristocracy. Its graduates have worked for the Queen of Serbia, the Infanta doña Beatriz of Spain and the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The Grand Duchess Kirill of Russia, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, praised her children’s nanny Marian Burgess for her service throughout the 1917 Russian Revolution. “Weeks of sleepless nights — surrounded as we were by bloodshed, murder and terror — her courage never gave way,” she wrote.
By the time of Borrallo’s arrival in Berkshire, Norland had been grinding out nannies for some of England’s most influential families — the Cadburys, Reckitts, Rowntrees and Rothschilds — for decades. Few Norlanders struggled to find employment. In 1972, a Norland nanny was hired to look after the spawn of Stanley Johnson, including the future prime minister Boris. Their nanny was a “tower of strength who steered the long-haired, eccentric, collapsing Johnson clan through Brussels . . . where our father, Stanley, was one of the first British civil servants working for the European Commission,” Johnson’s sister Rachel later wrote.
