In most big Edwardian country houses, upper servants were still fastidious about maintaining their dignity and superiority. They ate apart, they socialised apart and they issued orders, ringing their bells to be waited on. But life in the smaller country houses, especially those some way from London, did not slavishly follow these examples. The Yorkes were not titled aristocracy, and the atmosphere at Erddig was different. Ellen Penketh might have expected intimidating new rituals, isolating deference from lower servants, icy silences over dinner (not talking at meals being one of the edicts of servant conduct manuals). She might well have dreaded her first month, inexperienced as she was. But the Yorkes’ benevolent treatment of staff over generations had fostered a more intimate, informal atmosphere. It was Christmas, and talk was all of the servants’ ball.
On New Year’s Eve Ellen and her girls stuffed, trussed and roasted a goose for the Yorkes’ house party while plotting and preparing for their own evening in high spirits. Every hotplate on the hob held a simmering pan, filling the room with steam (two hours to cook carrots, recommended Mrs Beeton; just twelve minutes for Brussels sprouts).6 Later the big table was pushed against the wall, the gramophone was installed with Mr Yorke’s permission and best dresses altered with sashes and corsages for dancing–the military two-step, the waltz, the ‘circle and chain mixer’ with men and women grasping alternate hands, skipping down a long chain to a couple of fiddles. The Christmas Ball was a long-standing tradition for the servants at Erddig, with forty heads recorded in 1904, rising to sixty in 1905.
This was all new to Louisa Yorke, too–finally asked to the ball aged 39, now chatelaine of the big house. Her diary entry for New Year’s Eve reads: ‘We had goose for lunch & the servants had a regular jollification downstairs. Most of the day was spent in preparations & at 9pm they gave a Ball in the kitchen. We went to look in at 9.30 & much enjoyed it. They danced til 3am.’
Did Ellen expect such ‘regular jollifications’ as she found at Erddig? She would have written long letters home describing her change in circumstances. Glimpsed obliquely through Louisa’s diary, we can see her settling in to her new life. On Saturday, 21 February 1903 there was an outing for the upper servants: ‘Brown, the gardener, Wakefield, the butler, Mrs Penketh, housekeeper, & Harvey, head housemaid went to the dance at Rhos last night and much enjoyed it.’ In May, much of the household, led by the Yorkes, travelled five miles in convoy to Ruabon to see ‘Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show’. ‘Many of the servants went & enjoyed it immensely.’ This was the last such outing for Brown the gardener, sacked a fortnight later for a night ‘out on the spice with Wakefield’. ‘Philip will not stand drunken-ness’, wrote Louisa. ‘This is the second time.’ There were lines that could not be crossed. But the Yorkes would look after you. On 8 January, ‘Mrs Penketh fell down & hurt her cheek & nurse took her to the Surgery.’ They also looked after their servants’ souls. Daily prayers were led by Philip in the chapel at 9 a.m., with hymns from the two dozen Erddig favourites (‘Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep’; ‘Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might’). On Sundays, servants were encouraged to go by dog cart, if not raining, to their preferred local church or chapel, and so achieved something of a life apart from the big house.
In March that year Philip and Louisa departed for a three-month tour of friends and relations, leaving the servants to get on with the annual spring clean. Had Ellen Penketh ever been left unsupervised for so long? Together with Hughes the agent, she and Wakefield were effectively mistress and master in absentia while complex and chaotic renovations were carried out at Erddig. The entrance hall was to be papered ‘with very thick paper (embossed) at 1/- a yard’, Louisa noted a month before her departure; ‘The Library ceiling is also to be done, also the State bedroom & landing ceiling & the Chapel lobby & landing above are to be papered & the ceilings done also.’ This, together with painting work, was to cost ‘not more than £50’ (£3,000 today).
Just two months into her new job, an immense amount of trust had been placed on the shoulders of Mrs Penketh. It is important to register this, because when Louisa turned against her cook-housekeeper, she did it so viciously that it is tempting to presume the seeds of disenchantment were already there. But I have mined Louisa’s collection of Collins Pocket Diaries for clues that might tell against Mrs Penketh. There are none to be found.
Wakefield the butler, on the other hand, did not distinguish himself. While the Yorkes were away they received ‘the most terrible news from home’. The exquisite crystal chandelier in the saloon had fallen down and smashed into tiny pieces. ‘Wakefield was cleaning it & evidently twisted it round to the left & the whole thing fell down. Such a lot has been broken: it is too sad to think of.’ Louisa privately thought the ‘top heavy’ butler had been drinking. When she returned to Erddig and discovered he was not managing his ‘boys’ properly, Wakefield’s career was in jeopardy. His dispatch is not mentioned in her diary, but records show that William Monk Wootton joined as butler this same year, moving with his family into Erddig Lodge on £55 a year (£10 more than Mrs Penketh’s wages), his 18-year-old son Sydney taken on as hall boy. Wootton was to stay with the family for a decade.
Louisa’s mood was quite the reverse with Ellen Penketh. The new cook-housekeeper seems to have been her mistress’s most intimate confidante, being the first at Erddig to hear of Mrs Yorke’s extraordinary news. Louisa was not fat–she was pregnant. She could now let out her dresses with impunity. On 16 April she wrote in her diary: ‘I have written to tell Mrs Penketh of my good news to come.’ On 22 May the Yorkes finally returned, catching the train to Wrexham. ‘It was so delightful to be met by the new India-rubber tyred carriage’, wrote Louisa, now eight months pregnant, but still anxious to walk the grounds of Erddig the moment she got home. Later she ‘went with Mrs Penketh to see all her little chickens and ducks’.
The scene as described by Louisa seems idyllic and joyful. It is also illuminating: Ellen had taken on the working-class women’s tradition of keeping poultry in the back yard for pin money now that she had some space (and, apparently, freedom) to do so. She was showing herself to be practical, resourceful…even maternal. She was also ensuring a supply of fresh eggs for Erddig. On all accounts, Louisa–accustomed as she was to doing odd jobs for odd shillings–must have applauded her cook-housekeeper.
Ellen Penketh is not mentioned again by name in her mistress’s diary for four years.
With the birth of the red-headed little Simon Yorke IV, Louisa’s focus shifted upstairs. ‘I love the nursery better than any other room in the house’, she wrote in July 1903. Having waited forty years for this moment, she couldn’t stop ‘baby worshipping’, despite the new nanny hovering in the wings, soon to be joined by a nursery maid to help keep the baby’s meringue-like frilly bonnets goffered and beribboned, as was the fashion.
Nanny Lucy Hitchman, 26, was a butler’s daughter who had heard about the vacancy at Erddig on the servants’ grapevine, having previously worked with head housemaid Martha Harvey at Henley Hall in Ludlow, Shropshire. The following year Sarah Rudge, 33, also arrived from Henley Hall, taking up the post of head laundry maid: three old friends, each now at the top of her field.
One can easily imagine a clique forming, with the inevitable in-house politics. But if it was a clique, it may have been a happy one. From their almost constant appearance in Louisa’s diaries, servants are abruptly dropped as a topic because, presumably, all was well below stairs. There is just the odd predatory male servant who gives trouble. (‘Footman left for impudence’…‘The groom is a worry but I will make him leave the house at 10 p.m.’)7
While Louisa stalks the nanny and the ‘blue carriage’ out in the gardens, it is time to return to the basement, to try to piece together the texture of Ellen Penketh’s life. A cook-housekeeper was essentially a cook, but with extra responsibilities and double the dose of in-house politics. Dovetailing the two jobs together was a way of smaller houses saving money, but in a large house such as Erddig, trying to exist thriftily on decreasing sources of income, it was a difficult role to pull off–especially with a master and mistress bent on both economising and entertaining.
The ritual went thus: all week, Louisa and Philip would cycle or trot around Wrexham in the carriage paying visits and leaving visiting cards. On Saturday they sat at home in the grand saloon, coal fires blazing, waiting for visitors (and sometimes none came, as the Welsh rain poured down). They would also receive guests, without warning, on any day of the week. In the back of the Erddig visitors’ books is a running tally of calls received and calls made, trapping the socially incontinent Yorkes into a cycle from which there was no escape. They received, on average, seven or eight visitors a day.
‘Tea’ for an Edwardian country house was a set ritual: small cakes, biscuits, one large cake on a stand (fruit, caraway seed or Madeira), hot teacakes and thin sandwiches, laid out in the drawing room by the fire. Butler or footmen hovered throughout. Downstairs in the kitchen, baking for their lives, were cook-housekeeper Mrs Penketh, kitchen maid Lizzie Copestake and scullery maid Annie Parry. While kitchens elsewhere were now widely using gas ranges (some even the new electric ovens), Erddig had a coal-fired range–stoked, naturally, with coal from its own estate.
A kitchen range was a temperamental monster to control. With every new posting cooks had to learn how to master their monster, playing the damper controls to get the right results. If the wrong dampers were left out, the firebox might melt and the boiler crack. Each cook had her own methods of testing the heat with flour or paper. Mrs Black’s Household Cookery and Laundry Work of 1882 gives the following guidelines:
1. If a sheet of paper burns when thrown in, the oven is too hot.
2. When the paper becomes dark brown, it is suitable for pastry.
3. When light brown, it does pies.
4. When dark yellow, for cakes.
5. When light yellow, for puddings, biscuits and small pastries.
Ellen Penketh had most probably used a gas-fired range at the suave Chaseley Field in Manchester. It was also unlikely that she had worked with a wood-fired bakehouse, such as Erddig boasted, dedicated to daily bread making. Unlikely, too, that she had catered for such numbers as regularly descended on the big house.
Take, for example, the summer of 1905. ‘There are to be 4 big parties on one week’, Louisa noted in her diary on 11 June. ‘I hope I shall survive’–but she is confident that ‘Our Cook & Butler are quite equal to it’.
20 June: 60 to tea, for the Meeting of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
21 June: 66 to tea, Chester National Science Society.
23 June: party for the ‘out-door work people’ and their wives. A ‘meat tea’ and a band.
24 June: 71 estate children to tea, 50 adults; races and games.
6 July: Roman Catholic ‘Treat’; 430 guests.
15 July: Garden party and band for 50 people.
That is around 750 people over six days. The baking done, Mrs Penketh, her girls and the young footmen would carry cakes, biscuits and sandwiches outside and arrange the tea on long tables in the garden, squinting up at the grey clouds and calculating how long they might have before it all had to be carried inside again. For baby Simon’s first birthday on 24 June 1904–‘One of the most important days of the year’, wrote Louisa–‘We had 250 people to his party. A thunderstorm came on & spoilt a lot of the cakes. I had to have the tea indoors…It all went off splendidly.’