Philanthropic Endeavours

Teatree Undergardener was very much a woman of her time, being more than a little concerned about the plight of the poor on her husband Lord Trellising Undergardner’s massive Gloucester estate. The Undergardener family have been very much at the top of England’s aristocracy from the period of the Norman Conquest onward when Persimmon D’Un De Garde had the honour of holding William the Bastar… Conqueror’s armour for the new king, while he had his first piss on his new kingdom, just minutes after the battle of Hastings. For performing that noble service D’Un De Garde was granted several hundred acres of what was to become mostly the Gloucestershire County we know today.

Therefore, there were a good many of the poor of her husband’s estate for Lady Undergardener to take an interest in. What seemed to especially concern hr most was the lifestyle of the younger single men on the estate, who often had to do a lot of very physical hard work. In fact, it was whilst she was out riding one day whilst her husband was in London attending the House of Lords, that Lady Undergardener first came across one of her husband’s foresters chopping down a tree. Her ladyship noticed immediately that despite it being a quite chilly day, the labourer was already stripped to the waist, with sweat coating every inch of his firm muscular upper body. As she noted later in her diary, Lady Undergardener suddenly found herself very moved at his plight, and immediately dismounted from her horse and hurried across to the young man, eager to offer him what comfort she could.

Then, from that day onward, her life was never to be the same again. Wherever there were fit, young men, usually in a state of semi-undress undergoing hard physical labour that left their muscular torsos sheened with sweat, Lady Undergardener would be there to offer them succour. From manual workers on her husband’s estate to the coal workers in his coal mine and, later further afield whenever the British soldiery sweated under hot foreign suns, it was Lady Undergardener and her now ever-expanding coterie of young to middle-aged women of the aristocracy who would be there to take them in hand and offer them whatever relief they could.

It is for such sterling charity work that Lady Teatree Under Gardener is still rightly celebrated to this day.