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 distance. 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!’
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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.’
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’.