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.