by Tessa Boase
Duties? Responsibilities? Difficulties? Louisa’s horror at what lay ahead might seem an odd reaction for a woman spectacularly rescued from spinsterhood. But as everybody knew, big houses were all about management–management of money, and management of servants. Louisa had experience of neither. They were married two months later, and set off on a cycling tour of Britain ‘like two school children out for a holiday’, returning to Erddig on 30 May 1902: ‘Church bells cannoning, crowds of people cheering, two triumphal arches (made by workmen on the estate)’, wrote the new Mrs Yorke in her diary. She felt ‘like a Queen’.
III
Much Troubled About The Servants
Louisa set about the job of chatelaine as if she had spent her life waiting for the challenge. She pulled Erddig’s old china out from the pantry, rearranged the furniture, rehung pictures and sorted ‘My Philip’s clothes’ until she felt she could ‘breathe better’. Then she turned her attentions to the servants.
This was not a straightforward matter. Since the first Simon Yorke, there had grown up a tradition of paternal benevolence towards servants. Generations of the same local families worked for successive Squire Yorkes; marriages were encouraged, even connived at by their employers. Contemporaries thought that the Yorkes were ‘soft on the servants’, and the fact that more portraits had been painted of them than of family members was seen as both eccentric and slightly distasteful. Like all Yorke wives before her, Louisa had to take on board the Erddig way of doing things. But as far as she could see, it wasn’t working.
‘I am much troubled about servants’, she wrote just weeks into married life. ‘I do not know of a housekeeper yet. Mrs Holm cannot come. I shall also want a laundry-maid, & kitchen-maid & house-maid. No “beer & skittles” for me, as Philip has often told me. I own I over-work, but what am I to do!’ While it ‘poured in torrents’ outside–‘Wales is certainly a very rainy place’–she sat ensconced in the empty housekeeper’s room, trying to make sense of how a big house should be run. ‘I spent the greater part of the morning in the basement & giving orders all round.’ When not downstairs, she was turning out the attics, battling dust and damp in a summer that proved to be ‘as cold as November’.
The work sapped her. Six weeks after moving into Erddig Louisa took to her bed, doubled up with abdominal pains. She lay high in a threadbare chintz four-poster in the white-panelled bedroom she had picked as her own–much the cosiest, with views directly over the formal parterre gardens to the canal beyond–while her ‘excellent’ new head housemaid Martha Harvey stoked the coal fire. (Harvey doubled as Louisa’s lady’s maid, pinning up her hair and seeing to her clothes, just as Philip made do with help from butler and coachman instead of a valet: an economy which would not have done at all in grander households.)
One by one, servants old and new processed before Mrs Yorke to be interviewed. ‘What a farce’, she wrote, ‘to be in bed.’ Her new home had nine family bedrooms, two state bedrooms, a grand saloon, a music room, a tapestry room, drawing room, dining room, Chinese room, library, gallery and chapel. In Philip’s parents’ day it employed twelve indoor and thirty outdoor servants. If the house was to come to life once again, to receive guests and accommodate future children, it was going to need more than the current pared-back team. But as fast as Louisa hired them, so her problems seemed to escalate.
‘I am having great trouble with the numerous servants’, she wrote again on 17 July. ‘Some are too noisy, some too grand, some find the work too much. I wonder if I shall ever be quite settled.’ Men and women were appointed and sacked left and right. ‘We are going to have many changes here. The groom is going, the housekeeper, the kitchen & scullery maids also the gardener & woodman. When shall we be settled!’
For the most part, Philip stood by and watched–though he was coerced into accompanying his wife into the laundry to give ‘poor Annie, the laundry maid, notice. She is to leave on Saturday.’ But he was unfortunately absent for Louisa’s ‘awful’ two-and-a-half-hour interview with the agent Mr Hughes, who flatly refused to show her the estate and household expenditure books. How else would she learn how money was managed? ‘I must have the accounts done differently’, she wrote with vexation.
Gardener and bailiff Mr Ford was given notice after two years’ service, turfed out of his rent-free berth at Erddig Lodge. ‘He is sad at having to go’, Louisa noted, ‘but he is not man enough for the place.’ Was anyone man enough for Louisa Yorke? Her married status seems to have empowered her, rendering her faintly terrifying–no longer the crushed spinster, mortified for forgetting her lines at the Cattle Show play. ‘It is a great move to give up old customs of twenty years’ standing’, she wrote in self-justification, ‘but I feel that some reforms must be made at once.’
In many respects, Louisa was just the woman for the job. But she was also inexperienced, insecure and highly anxious about money. She knew that the key to getting the household running smoothly, and above all economically, was a good housekeeper. The retired Harriet Rogers, cook-housekeeper to Philip’s parents until 1896 and Philip’s nanny before this, hovered offstage as a daunting example of what Louisa had yet to find. Philip sent regular gifts of money to this Victorian paragon of self-sacrifice, who lived nearby and paid regular visits.
But where, in 1902, did you find a Victorian housekeeper? With the coronation of the new King, the dawn of a new century and the formation of the Labour Party in 1900, the British working classes were beginning to kick against the unquestioning hierarchical subjugation of the Victorian years. It was an era of growing tensions–between the extravagant, frivolous lives of the rich and smart, and the narrow, hard existence of the working classes. Domestic service was still the largest single female occupation, but there was a distinct shortage of younger women for the bottom rungs of the ladder. Between 1901 and 1911, the number of maids aged 14-plus willing to go into service dropped by over 62 per cent.3 The Harriet Rogers type of housekeeper–self-sacrificing, dutiful, identifying closely with the family–was a dying breed. Her replacements were a mixed bunch.
On 12 August, Miss Mackreth arrived at Erddig, a middle-aged lady of refined manner who requested the title ‘Lady Housekeeper’ in deference to her alleged past connections. ‘Lady Helps’ were a shortlived vogue of the era, a solution to the new shortage of suitable candidates: gentlewomen who had fallen on hard times and who could be turned into upper servants. But in practice, it rarely worked out. Like the governess, she was neither in one world nor the other, and in a house with several servants she was inevitably a source of friction.4 Still, Louisa was hopeful. ‘It is such a comfort’, she wrote, ‘to have Miss Mackreth here, a lady, who will help us to economise…I fear [she] will find it very hard work to cut down expenses but she will have a good try to do so.’
The two, briefly in league, travelled into Wrexham by pony and trap ‘to interview Miss Whiting about servants’. Miss Mackreth told the employment agency exactly what she was after–but then found herself without a job after just two months. ‘I am going to have a cook-housekeeper again’, wrote Louisa–someone who would both put in the hours and, in this combined role, save the Yorkes money. On 7 October–the day Louisa was examined by her doctor and diagnosed as having an ovarian cyst–she and Philip went ‘by train to look for a housekeeper. Capital woman, but she will not come so far as Erddig.’ One week later she got up from her sickbed again ‘to interview Mrs Jonathan…She is a nice & very sensible woman.’
The robustly down-to-earth Welshwoman Mrs Jonathan started work as cook-housekeeper on 18 October, the day that Mrs Williams, ‘the poor old cook’, was shown the door. Louisa had ‘a long talk’ with Mrs Jonathan, knowing that in a week she would have to leave home for some time. She was to be operated on, in Manchester. She would have to let go of the reins, which was not a comfortable thought for the formidable Mrs Yorke.
IV
A Very Capable Little Body
Mrs McTaggart, the matron, tut-tuts when she hears of the troubles of p
oor Mrs Yorke, not six months married. Nurse Crighton shakes her head in sympathy as she straps Louisa into the hated tight belt she must wear ‘for a year and a day’ to help her heal. There is also Dr Sinclair, who visits and examines and would rather talk of the servant problem than his patient’s reproductive system. He promises to mention her plight to some of his respectable clients in large houses around Manchester. The whole of Clarence Lodge, upstairs and downstairs, is keenly aware that Mrs Yorke of Erddig Hall is in want of a cook and a housekeeper, or possibly a cook-housekeeper.
Word spreads. It travels around the sedate, walled suburb of Victoria Park, with its gabled family houses and maids in neat print dresses scrubbing down front doorsteps (home to the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her young daughters; also to the late Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown). It passes through the knotty heart of Manchester to the smoke stacks of Pendleton in the north-west, where cotton mills and factories for dyeing, printing and bleaching judder and clang.
Word of Mrs Yorke’s predicament passes around the cramped slums and filthy ginnels, entering the servants’ hall of a wealthy industrialist’s modern mansion, Chaseley Field. Here the widowed Mrs Hannah Armitage lives in some splendour, ministered to by twelve female servants. Her late husband Joseph John Armitage commissioned this sumptuous Victorian house of encaustic tiled floors, vaulted ceilings, elaborate fireplaces and heavily panelled doors. It was built with new money, and everything, from the electric light bulbs to the plumbed-in closets, is top of the range.
Ellen Penketh, 32, is second in command in the kitchen. For a working-class woman born in the industrial north-west, this is a prestigious job. The Armitages are like royalty in Pendleton. Her old master’s father, Sir Elkanah Armitage, went into the cotton industry aged eight and died £200,000 the richer (£14 million in today’s money). But Ellen is anxious about her future, as it’s known among the servants that Mr Armitage has bequeathed the house in his last will and testament for use as a school. The cook has it on good authority that Chaseley Field is to become Pendleton High School for Girls–and where will this leave the servants?
Ellen’s mother, Mrs Lucy Penketh, also lives in Pendleton. Single-handedly she runs a grocer’s and off-licence at 37 Buxton Street, a store (or ‘badger’s shop’ as it’s called in these parts) sitting between a saddler and a calico printer’s. I imagine Ellen visiting her mother to discuss this latest work possibility. Wrexham–that’s Wales, i’n’t it? How big is Erddig Hall? How many mouths to feed? Her father Thomas Penketh, a wheelwright, is not at home to give his opinion: he lives and works thirty miles to the west in Liverpool. Above the shop live Ellen’s younger sister Mary, 29, blind and a remarkable dressmaker; her 23-year-old brother William, a butcher; and Percy, baby of this family of ten children, now 22 and a clerk for a colliery. There’s also ten-year-old granddaughter Lucy, born in Liverpool to eldest son Haugh.
On Thursday, 20 November, Ellen Penketh asks the cook for a few hours’ leave. She travels by the new electric tramcar into Manchester Central, changing lines to journey south-east to Victoria Park. The fare is two pennies. She has on her large black Sunday hat, skewered to the front of her head with two hatpins, and a dark shawl crossed tightly around her body. Underneath is her one smart white blouse with wire-stiffened collar and a full-hemmed heavy skirt falling to just above the ankle.
Mrs Yorke receives Ellen in her bed-sitting room at Clarence House. She is pale and drawn after four weeks spent convalescing and her long, red, frizzy hair is loose since she has stopped pinning it up. The unconventional nature of this interview is perhaps remarked on and lightly laughed off by Louisa, encouraging a peculiar intimacy between these two women not so far apart in age. Mrs Yorke runs through the recent troubles at Erddig. She does not see that each candidate’s unsuitability speaks of her own inexperience.
Ellen listens deferentially, warming to this lady so unlike Mrs Armitage. Mrs Yorke seems almost sisterly, conspiratorial. By the end of their meeting she wants this job very badly, even if the pay at £45 a year–£2,500 in today’s money–is less than she had hoped for. (Country-house housekeepers might now expect to earn around £65; cooks £50 to £60.) Louisa, in her turn, is rather pleased with the way things have turned out. She likes the fact that Ellen Penketh is an outsider, removed from Wrexham and from Wales, from basement politics and decades of tradition. She is satisfied to have found her herself. Every new mistress likes to appoint her own deputy, and here in Manchester Louisa feels she has gained some perspective on the situation and finally chosen well.
Her diary entry for that night is positive: ‘After tea Mrs Penketh who wishes to come to Erddig as cook, came to interview me. She seems a very capable little body & most anxious to come. She also knows of a kitchen maid.’ Two days later she writes to Mrs Armitage of Chaseley Field for a ‘character’–Ellen Penketh’s all-important reference. The response is positive, for the next time we hear of Ellen she has the courtesy title of Mrs Penketh, and is installed as cook-housekeeper of Erddig Hall.
With Louisa’s return a month later, a golden era was to begin at Erddig. She had departed a sick woman, leaving a malfunctioning big house. She came back on 28 November 1902 healed, doubly determined and with a key new member of staff to help her succeed. There was a certain amount of jostling and repositioning, naturally, on her return, but she would have none of it: ‘A great many things went wrong and I scolded right and left.’ Mrs Yorke’s scolding was becoming quite a feature of basement life at Erddig. But one thing was different: ‘Mrs Penketh, the new cook is going in most splendidly’, she wrote on 12 December. Three days later the new head gardener Mr Brown arrived, together with a new butler, Mr Wakefield–‘very large but very active’. Her team was finally in place. Mrs Yorke had now only to focus on her husband, suffering from ‘the most awful rheumatism & lumbago. He can hardly stand upright.’
Louisa’s own health worries seemed too insignificant to mention, but they were most peculiar. Her diary notes a near-constant feeling of indigestion and sickness. On Boxing Day Mrs Penketh pulled off a triumphant ‘huge lunch party of 11’, after which Louisa felt ‘rather bad & went to bed early. Queer malady I am suffering from.’ Meanwhile Nurse Crighton’s detested belt was cutting into her waist most painfully, and her green satin dress had got so tight across the chest that she had to have a humiliating false front of four inches let into it. ‘All my clothes are getting tight’, she wrote, ‘though there is no cause for it!’
The fashion for ladies at the time was for a flattened, low ‘monobosom’, a tiny waist and a jutting behind–achieved by tight lacing into the uncomfortable ‘swan bill’ or ‘S-bend’ corset. Queen Alexandra carried off this look with great elegance despite her advancing years (she was now 57), but it was an impossible fashion for anyone wishing to move freely, as Louisa certainly did. Her expanding shape flummoxed the local doctor, Dr Williams. ‘I think he is inclined to give me up as a “bad job”’, she wrote. ‘I still feel so dreadfully fat.’ He did have a possible theory, but this was surely so unlikely that Louisa could not yet bring herself to write it in her diary. Dr Sinclair, her Manchester surgeon, was called to give a second opinion. He pronounced that she ‘had gout and gout only & must have abdominal massage and the Baths in Bath’.
V
Put To Work
There is an imbalance in this story, which up until now is all Louisa’s–her wooing, her wedding, her moving like a hurricane through Erddig Hall. Now that her mistress is finally ‘settled’, we can turn to the story of Ellen Penketh.
Ellen was born in 1870, the third of ten children, in Sutton Heath–a district of St Helens, Lancashire, which during Ellen’s childhood exploded in size. There were over a dozen working mineshafts with their attendant iron winding houses and pithead gear. There were brick factories and potteries with towering chimneys and foul-smelling waste. There was a thriving industry in clock- and watchmaking, and plenty of wheelwrights, such as her father, to service the carriages and omnibuses t
hat competed alongside train and canal transport between the two great industrial hubs of Liverpool and Manchester.
It was a harsh, noisy, polluted place to be a child, where the maiming and death of working men was a fact of daily life; but it was a vigorous, thrusting environment for all that, and a close-knit community. Many Penkeths lived in Sutton Heath; a good number still do. Married at 23, Mrs Lucy Penketh was either expecting or nursing a child (and sometimes both) for the next thirteen years. Three died; seven survived. The National Census tells us that the family moved around the area in search of work: from Sutton to nearby Rainford; to Melling on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in Merseyside; to Pendleton in Salford, crowded suburb of Manchester. Like her siblings, Ellen went to school, which from 1880 was compulsory up to the age of ten, learning to write in curling italic letters and to calculate in pounds, shillings and pence. Then she did what many Lancastrian girls ended up doing. Rather than work in a factory, she chose to go into service.
The 1891 census finds Ellen, aged 21, working as a ‘waitress’ in the home of William Saxon, a solicitor in Altrincham on the outskirts of Manchester. A waitress was employed by middle-class families to receive visitors, open doors and wait at table. The upper classes had footmen. Working as a servant was then seen as the more respectable or ‘refined’ choice, with more chance for advancement and self-betterment. Domestics looked down on ‘factory girls’, but both worlds could be terribly harsh. In 1881, when Ellen was 11 years old, a third of the inmates at Pendleton Workhouse, Manchester were former domestic servants–including three housekeepers, all widowed. The professions of other female inmates (fustian cutter, flax tenter, cop reeler, throstle spinner) conjure vividly the thundering machinery and complex enormity of the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately both professions sucked women up and spat them out.