by Tessa Boase
Part 3
Ellen Penketh
Erddig, North Wales 1902–1907
The princely salary of £45 a year.
MR ARTEMUS JONES, BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT ELLEN PENKETH
Timeline
1901
– Life expectancy for men is 45; for women, 49. First vacuum cleaner patented. Heinz Baked Beans first sold by Fortnum & Mason for 9 pence a can.
1902
– Pharmacy Act: dangerous chemicals no longer sold in domestic-shaped bottles.
1903
– Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and daughters start the Women’s Social and Political Union to campaign for women’s suffrage. The Daily Mirror launched, initially as a woman’s paper.
1909
– Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ speech, promising wealth redistribution. Persil washing powder arrives in British shops.
1910
– London’s Selfridges introduces a cosmetics counter, a year after the store opens. Pond’s Vanishing Cream and Cold Cream first marketed.
1911
– National Insurance Act: insures employees against ill health and provides some unemployment benefit. 1.4 million indoor servants working in Britain.
1912
– RMS Titanic sinks after striking an iceberg. Hullo Rag-time! opens at London Hippodrome and runs for 451 performances. Suffragettes resort to violence–‘deeds not words’.
1913
– Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison throws herself under the King’s horse on Derby day.
I
The Corridor
This story starts, and ends, with a photograph.
It is the one true–straightforward, unbiased–record to survive. And it is such a handsome photograph: the oval, clear face; the slightly amused eyes. By Edwardian standards of beauty, Ellen Penketh has a certain allure. There is something of the Gibson girl in that longish face and ‘sporty jaw’, the hair piled up on her head in the contemporary pompadour style (but not too high: she was a servant, after all). Yet she lacks the haughty, slightly pitying look of those Belle Époque women drawn by Charles Dana Gibson. Ellen Penketh’s expression is hopeful, like the posy of fake flowers she is holding. It is the sort of studio portrait a working-class girl might send to a fiancé–and it is in stark contrast to the photo gallery of stern-faced spinsters who line the basement corridor at Erddig Hall.
Servants who worked for the Yorke family in the early twentieth century tramped past these two dozen portraits daily on their way from laundry to scullery, butler’s pantry to servants’ hall. The passage is dark, as Erddig refused to succumb to the modern rage for electricity. It is also terribly cold, as the wind from the far Welsh hills lashes the west front with great determination, forcing leaves under ill-fitting doors and draughts through old sash windows.
The photographs are enlarged, retouched and boxed in by screeds of verse celebrating each individual’s years of service, their dedication, their preference for life at the big house to any other sort of life at all. ‘And for some thirty years and more/The cares of Office here she bore…’ is typical. How did the Yorke servants feel, hemmed in by all these loyalty portraits? There is Harriet Rogers (heavy-lidded stare, thickly veined hands), forty-four years in service first as nurse, then lady’s maid, then cook-housekeeper. There is gardener George Roberts posing with his wife, who holds in her lap a portrait of her mother, also in service at Erddig. John Jones (slightly boss-eyed, saw in hand) was photographed in 1911, thirty-three years after he entered service as a carpenter. The message is clear: stick with us and we’ll look after you. Erddig–or ‘Erthig’, to the Welsh–was an anchor in a fast-changing world.
Each poem, bashed out on a typewriter, is signed ‘P.Y.’–Philip Yorke–and dated 1911 or 1912. What happened to make Squire Yorke abruptly start this celebratory exercise in verse? Many of these servants were long dead or departed when he began his task–why the need to backdate so assiduously? And why were so many new portraits of old servants taken at this time? They were done, ostensibly, for continuity’s sake: the servants’ hall at Erddig is famous for ten oil portraits of servants, complete with rhyming couplets, commissioned by his grandfather and great-grandfather. But in truth, it was more complex than this. The answer is hinted at in the verse Philip Yorke II wrote for Miss Brown, housekeeper at Erddig from 1907 to 1914.
Twelve years or more did intervene
Before Miss Brown came on the scene…
Of Housekeepers we estimate
We had in turn no less than eight…
But since Miss Brown her rule begun
Our lot has well and smoothly run,
And the result may now be class’d
As worth the ‘fire’ thro’ which we passed.
P.Y. 1912
Five years previously the Yorkes had been caught up in a very public scandal–a scandal that did deep and profound damage to their patriarchal belief in staff loyalty. The woman at its centre worked at Erddig as cook-housekeeper for five years, then was purged from the family narrative. The portrait of Ellen Penketh did not make it into the basement passage, and her letters were destroyed. Remembered only as ‘the thief cook’, she moves today like a ghost through Erddig and its otherwise copious archive collection. She leaves few footprints.
I found myself returning again and again to the portrait of Ellen Penketh, to try to work out who she really was. This is an attempt to piece together her story.
It is a tale of two women, both middle-aged, almost friends across the mistress–servant divide. One is plain, the other rather handsome. They are tacit companions on a joint and surprising new adventure: running a large country house in the unknown territory of the Welsh borders. Yet the adventure ends badly and bitterly in the courts, with an unexpected outcome. The case of Ellen Penketh reminds us starkly how the upper classes relied on the most impoverished and powerless people for the administration of their wealth. Mrs Penketh shouldered enormous financial responsibility in return for a very low wage, and when the family’s impecunity was brought out into the open, she became the scapegoat. This is, essentially, a story about money.
We can follow both women’s narratives through the prism of Louisa Yorke’s Collins Pocket Diaries–forty-nine little leatherette volumes preserved to this day in the Erddig archive–and these diaries alone. The other woman, the housekeeper, remains resolutely silent. But there is enough information to extract a coherent and emotional account: one that closes with dramatic newspaper headlines and humiliation.
To understand the cook-housekeeper’s part in the tale, we must first understand her mistress. Mrs Yorke was not the average Edwardian mistress–nor was Erddig the average country house. Ellen Penketh was appointed to the job in fairly extraordinary circumstances. She was interviewed by Louisa Yorke, new mistress of Erddig, from Mrs Yorke’s sickbed in Clarence Lodge, a private nursing home on the outskirts of Manchester. It was November 1902–a year of optimism for Britain. The newly crowned King Edward VII was on the throne; the new Conservative premier, Arthur Balfour, was in office; and the bitter and interminable Boer War had finally ended. In the West End J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton had just opened, titillating audiences with its story of a butler who assumes control of his useless upper-class employers while marooned on a desert island. The explorers Scott and Shackleton were inching through the Antarctic, through unimaginable scenery, towards the South Pole.
Four weeks before her meeting with Ellen Penketh, Louisa had gone under the surgeon’s knife to have an ovarian cyst removed. It was a fraught operation, not least for a 39-year-old woman still hoping to have children, but it was successful, and in order to heal she had to stay motionless in bed with her knees strapped together. Louisa felt ‘more dead than alive’ as she lay recuperating. According to her daily diary entries she was lonely, cold and bored, and her mind was obsessed with the servant problems at Erddig.
Louisa was a doer. She could not bear to be laid up while chaos reportedly rei
gned fifty miles to the south. She drew up fidgety lists of what needed doing, while waiting for her husband of six months, ‘My Philip’, to visit by carriage. ‘I have a great deal of business to talk over’, she wrote impatiently to herself. Letters arrived from home that maddened her: ‘Oh! The trouble of the servants at Erddig. It is sad to contemplate. The new Housekeeper Mrs Osmond is to leave at once. She will do no work except arrange flowers!’ A friend came and told her (perhaps with some relish) ‘all about the cook worries at the house. Oh! How I wish I could get settled.’
Louisa wanted very much to be ‘settled’, but the enormity of the task before her was daunting. In marrying Philip Yorke, a 53-year-old confirmed bachelor, she had also shackled herself to his inheritance, a once-great house currently run on a handful of disgruntled servants. ‘I have, I think, undertaken more than I can accomplish’, she wrote in her diary, one month into her tenure at Erddig. ‘The management of this huge house with 6 female and 3 male servants is no joke.’
II
Unfashionable Creatures
Erddig is a dusky-orange slab of late seventeenth-century brickwork, aggrandised and lengthened in the eighteenth century by wealthy lawyer John Meller. It sits on an escarpment five miles into the Welsh border, every bit the imposing mansion house with its nineteen bays, three storeys, chapel and sweeping stone staircase. The house has two faces, and seemingly two personalities. Its west facade (austere, slightly forbidding, wind-harried) defensively fronts the bronze-tipped hills of North Wales. The sheltered, more kindly eastern face looks back towards England and all things soft and pastoral (pleached fruit trees, rose gardens, strutting peacocks, ornamental water features).
In Meller’s time, fifteen maids in the attic rooms serviced ‘Erthig’ (as it is known locally), a house laden with increasingly lavish treasures. But there was no son to inherit this wealth. Meller died a bachelor, and Erddig passed to his nephew, Simon Yorke, in 1733. The Yorkes were the opposite of the mercenary, meticulous Meller. Ordinary, unambitious, content with their status as moderately prosperous Welsh squires, they thriftily eked out the coal riches of the estate for the next one hundred and fifty years. Male Yorkes were named either Simon or Philip, and their outlook on life was similarly stolid. Successive Yorke wives railed over their husbands’ lack of elan, their dismal fashion sense or needless parsimony. As Elizabeth Yorke wrote to Philip Yorke I in 1770: ‘You give a sad account of Bath but you are such an unfashionable creature.’
Fashion rarely came to Erddig, distant as it was from the metropolis. When Queen Victoria made a tour of Wales in 1889, the wife of Simon Yorke III–the Queen’s god-daughter, no less–reasonably hoped to persuade the royal carriage procession at least to drive through Erddig Park on its way from Ruabon station to Wrexham. Unaccountably snubbed, Mrs Yorke gave up her lingering interest in court affairs and referred ever after to the Queen as ‘Old Mother Bunch’. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, she and her elderly husband scarcely left the house and its private grounds of 245 acres.
A strong sense of history, coupled with an obsession for cataloguing and hoarding, had by this time turned the house into something of a cluttered museum. To save Erddig and its contents for future generations, their son, Philip Yorke II, was required to make a financially advantageous marriage.
Philip’s father fixed upon local heiress Annette Fountayne Puleston, but it was a short-lived and unhappy match. After enduring a watercolour holiday for a honeymoon, Annette and her maid escaped by hitching a ride on a milk wagon from a house party in Denbigh–‘without ever wishing me Adieu or any one else in the house’, an anguished Philip wrote to a friend in 1877.1
It was, of course, a great scandal–not least for the rumour of an improper relationship between mistress and maid. The 28-year-old Philip left at once for the Continent and for the next sixteen years refused to come home, much to his parents’ sorrow. He filled his time with travelling, painting, writing and photographing: a married man shackled to a missing wife. When his Victorian parents died in the last years of the nineteenth century, Philip inherited the house. He was the fifth generation of Yorkes to do so, but what a sorry heir he made–a fiftysomething bachelor in all but name.
Erddig sat shrouded and silent, its assets (coal and farming) dwindling steadily. Not quite empty, though–it housed various ageing and quarrelsome servants. An agent, Mr Hughes, looked after the estate in the absence of any master. Working for Mr Yorke was not, at that time, a job that brought much satisfaction. Weeds sprouted on the terracing; rainwater left brown stains on the ceilings. His parents’ old cook-housekeeper Mrs Rogers left. Her replacement, Mrs Harrison, was often to be found in the kitchen ‘the worse for Beer’. She lost her job when her sideline in selling pheasants was exposed, at which point a furious Philip Yorke gave the butler, Mr Jones, his marching orders too.
A plaintive letter from Jones reveals the acrimony of Erddig’s basement life at this time. ‘I could do very well with a good sensible woman’, he writes in firm, indignant script to agent Hughes in 1897; ‘I am sure the house should be one of the happiest in the land, but it is one of the most miserable all through one person’–cook-housekeeper Mrs Harrison.2 Then the remaining laundry maid and housemaid gave notice. Who knew if Erddig would ever be inhabited again? For how could poor Mr Philip produce an heir?
His release came in the last year of the century with the news that Annette the bolter had died. Finally Philip was free to marry again–but the task was as much to find someone to take on Erddig as to take on himself, an ever more eccentric squire looking every bit his age.
An invitation to a house party at Erddig was tremendously exciting for Louisa Matilda Scott. The summons came from Mr Yorke in 1899, through mutual friends, when she was 36 years old and resigned to a life of good deeds and parsimony at her father’s vicarage in Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire. Louisa’s was a small, grey existence for an intelligent and sprightly woman. Entries in her Collins Pocket Diaries run along the lines of: ‘I am very much excited now about our Easter jumble sale’; and ‘Set to work and dusted hard til dinner’.
Red-haired Louisa was not a beauty, but she was one of life’s enthusiasts: she played the piano, rang the bells at church, skated, cycled and sewed with determination. Yet her various talents were seemingly not enough to attract a husband, and she judged herself harshly–such as the day she forgot her lines at the Grand Cattle Show play, aged 33: ‘I wish this day to be blotted out of my memory entirely…I never felt more humiliated and disgusted with myself in all my life.’ Louisa–Lulu to her family–was keenly aware of being ostracised by a younger, more eligible crowd: ‘I hear there is to be a ball at Elcott on the 18th’, she wrote, aged 35. ‘I wonder why I am not asked! No doubt for the same reason that I was not asked to Mrs Portal’s Dance. I wish I knew the reason, but I must try not to care!’
She was born the second of five daughters to the Reverend T. J. Scott, a bearded Victorian who earned, in his prime, £500 a year (around £27,000 in today’s money) and employed just one servant. (To put this in perspective, a carpenter at this time earned around £100, a doctor £350 and an upper-middle-class professional between £750 and £1,500.) Louisa’s annual allowance of £20 (around £1,000 today) was supplemented with gifts and odd jobs, such as five shillings earned for mending a carpet. One diary entry notes that ‘Mother gets up at 5 a.m. to open windows, etc.’, while she herself, with all her duties, would ‘become a skilled parlour-maid in time. Plenty of practise.’
On 13 July 1899 Louisa packed her one pretty frock (a fashionable white) and travelled to Oxford to meet her chaperone, Aunt Julia. From here the ladies journeyed by train to Wrexham, in the old Welsh county of Denbighshire, where they were met by the Yorkes’ quaint phaeton and driven the mile and a half to Erddig. There is a point on this journey, once the carriage swings in past the gate cottage and along the estate’s winding track, that the big house is suddenly revealed to the visitor, sitting commandingly among mature beech trees in the far dist
ance. Lulu and Aunt Julia might well have clutched each other’s hands for courage.
The house party consisted of ‘seven ladies, a young man and Mr Yorke’. Philip Yorke was wasting no time in trying to find a new wife, though so far his various proposals of marriage (written in rhyming couplets and neatly tied with a ribbon) had been politely rejected. Louisa saw past her host’s eccentricities. He might be unconventional, teetotal and vegetarian, but Mr Yorke was also ‘a paragon of goodness’, she wrote in her diary. Finally, during this three-week summer house party, she coyly donned her white dress. ‘How interesting!’
*
Theirs was a slow-burn courtship spun out over three more years, in which Philip’s pointed beard became ever more silver and Louisa’s eyes more deeply set. In January 1901, Queen Victoria died: her socially voracious son Bertie (‘Tum Tum’ or ‘Edward the Caresser’) became Edward VII. The first electric Christmas-tree lights went on sale; the first wireless signal was transmitted across the Atlantic (a thrilling, crackling exchange between Cornwall and Newfoundland). There was also the invention of the ‘vacuum cleaner’: too large for a normal house, but used most successfully the following year to suck up dirt at Westminster Abbey for King Edward’s extravagant coronation.
In the bleak chill of a Welsh winter Louisa visited Erddig again with her parents. It was January 1902; there was a magic-lantern show with slides of Philip’s travels; there was snow, and skating on the canal. When Louisa showed herself perfectly content to spend long hours ‘sorting & tidying & writing poetry’, Philip must have inwardly rejoiced. Here she was at last: a wife-cum-curator. And so, at the close of St Valentine’s Day, came the proposal that was to change Louisa’s life. At 12.15 a.m., under an ancestral portrait by Gainsborough, Philip asked her to become his wife. ‘It seems such a dream’, wrote the 39-year-old Louisa in her diary. ‘I can hardly believe it is true.’ (Though she must, surely, have had an inkling.) The next day she was thrown into a panic. ‘The sense of my coming duties & responsibilities almost frighten me, but I have Philip to help me in my difficulties.’