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 that 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.
On entering Erddig Park and its silent green acres, Ellen Penketh might well have felt she had been cut loose from all that was familiar. What was one to do here on an afternoon off? How would she get into town? Wrexham was an unrefined market town with three dozen breweries and a large mining industry. Who would her suppliers be, and wouldn’t she spend half her time getting fagged walking to and fro the great Park? Did Mrs Yorke really think she’d get Ellen on a bicycle, like her own and Mr Yorke’s?
December was a bitter month to start work in the basement of a great house, but it was also a sociable, merry time of year. Marriage had turned the Yorkes into a gregarious couple, and their entertaining in this first year reached a climax over Christmas and New Year. Louisa’s visitors’ book records eight to dinner on Christmas Eve, eleven to lunch on Boxing Day, fourteen to lunch on 29 December, ten to tea on 14 January, twelve for ‘luncheon, tea & acting’ on the fifteenth, twelve to dinner on the twenty-second for ‘music & glee singing’…and so it went on. Mrs Penketh was thrown in at the deep end.
We can hold up a mirror, as it were, to Louisa’s diaries for clues of what was going on below stairs while she and Philip socialised and played the piano upstairs. But we can also reimagine it vividly, thanks to the near-untouched servants’ quarters still in existence at Erddig today. Ellen Penketh entered the house on her first day in much the same way that the modern visitor does–through the outer yard, its central midden then heaped with straw and dung from the stables. Here she dismounted from the trap and was helped with her trunk–her worldly possessions–by Thomas Goulding, the 17-year-old groom. There might well have been more than one man pressing to help, for the 32-year-old Mrs Penketh was unusually attractive for a cook-housekeeper.
I can see her looking around, taking in the pleasant cluster of out-buildings in warm red brick and the series of yards made for gossip, with runs and warrens perfect for errands and flirtations. (Groom Thomas Goulding was to marry laundry maid Edith Fairman; groom Ernest Jones married head nanny Lucy Hitchman; while head housemaid Martha Harvey snared the estate foreman, widower William Gittins.) A small door over a worn flagstone step took Ellen Penketh from the inner stable yard to the female preserve of bakehouse, laundry and scullery, huddled conspiratorially around a small, sunny brick yard.
So, with some raising of eyebrows, the new cook-housekeeper was welcomed–the eighth in as many years since the sainted Mrs Rogers’s departure. Ellen was led past an excessively dingy scullery and meat pantry on either side of a mean corridor (a vision of Mrs Armitage’s servant quarters at Chaseley Field might have sprung to mind, all fresh paintwork and electric lighting), and she was brought to a halt outside the kitchen door. Maids must have enjoyed watching the reaction of each new cook to the kitchen. Open that door, and you enter a different dimension. No doubt Ellen Penketh gratified the girls with a Lancastrian expletive as she took in the soaring ceiling and the large Venetian window looking on to the garden outside. Three great, rusticated arches housed a brand-new coal-fired range and an enormous hotplate with a surround of glazed white tiles. Above the arches was painted the slightly forbidding Victorian adage ‘WASTE NOT, WANT NOT’.
It is still an impressive room today, with its long, scrubbed, central table, the hanging hams above, the ranks of dressers and mahogany cabinets filled with the copper batterie de cuisine–jelly moulds, sauté pans, stock pans, fish kettles…But despite it being at ground level and not (like so many kitchens) underground, the room is strangely gloomy. The window is generous but it faces east, the view hemmed in by a cedar and a Scots pine. The walls back then were painted a depressing combination of beige and dark brown. It was a place of work rather than pleasure. A grandfather clock next to the far door ticked loudly. Ellen Penketh was led through this door and up a short flight of stairs to her accommodation.
It was certainly a step up in the world of service, once you’d added a ‘housekeeper’ to the title of ‘cook’. There were all manner of extra privileges which Ellen–never having worked in a house big enough to warrant a housekeeper–had only half guessed at. The cook’s bedroom at Erddig was a poky, oddly shaped room opposite the kitchen, its window half obscured by a lean-to shed. The housekeeper’s quarters above, on the other hand, comprised a delightfully airy bedroom and adjoining sitting room with views both to the east and west, each with a marble fireplace. You might well get ideas above your station in a set of rooms like this. The views to the front of the house were tremendous: the sweep of green escarpment, the far Denbighshire hills (with the iron winding gear of Bersham Colliery’s pithead to the fore), the setting sun and a crow’s-nest view of visitors arriving and departing. To the back, the servant runways could be spied upon, the tradesman’s bell observed and maids let in after dark by lowering a key in a basket attached to a string.5
The housekeeper’s suite occupied the short brick link built between house and kitchen in the nineteenth century. Its position was symbolic: she was the link, the conduit between servants and mistress.