A large mirror foxed with age hangs between the windows in the little wood-panelled lair of Erddig’s housekeeper. It rests on the mahogany work table, and anyone entering is immediately drawn to study their reflection in a way that would surely incense the writers of those Victorian servants’ manuals. But this wasn’t an instrument of vanity; rather, it was a classic piece of Erddig parsimony. By placing a mirror behind the single lamp on the table, you double the light source.
And so Ellen Penketh, paraffin lamp in hand, enters her snug berth from the dark corridor and sets the light down on the table. There is double the light, yes. But also double the damage. She looks at her tired eyes and drawn face, once so pert and hopeful. The house has taken her youth. She was 32 years old on arrival. She is now 37, and comfortably into middle age. Her feet ache, her hands are hardened and the gleam is fading from her eyes.
Two oval portraits of the Yorke children hang on the wall by her glowing coal fire. Master Simon, bonny in sailor outfit and hat with ribbons; little Phil, swamped in a white bonnet that frames his deliciously chubby face like a sunflower’s petals. Ellen has been intimate witness to her mistress’s blossoming with the fulfilment of late motherhood. She has cosseted those children as if they were her own–dressing their dollies in little outfits made by blind Mary, her seamstress sister up in Pendleton–how Mary lived to please those boys with gifts.10 And she would be a saint if she did not occasionally resent Louisa Yorke’s good fortune.
She had been Mrs Yorke’s accomplice for every exhausting household plan, from the repainting of the kitchen walls (deep blue, to set off the copper pans), to the incessant rearrangement of the Erddig china and silver treasures, to the plotting in detail of every ambitious dinner party. Ellen Penketh had seen, to be blunt, an anxious, frumpy woman transformed by marriage, motherhood and the luxury of not having to work for a living. Mrs Yorke was a kind-hearted woman, but she was also, by now, a bit of a tartar.
It all boiled down to the question of money. Erddig, with its reputation for generous hospitality, was floating on a raft of debt. In marrying a poor curate’s daughter instead of an heiress, Philip Yorke had sealed the estate’s downward slide. Erddig’s annual income of less than £5,000 (£290,000 in today’s money) came from the farms on the 2,500-acre estate, and the Hafod and Bersham coal pits, but it was being fast eroded by falling income from tenants and high taxation. Philip was also prone to extravagant (if much needed) estate improvements. Louisa, no stranger to money worries, was shocked to find out the extent of their debt. On 2 October 1903 she wrote in her diary, ‘Bank account is overdrawn to the amount of £1,500 which worries me very much indeed.’ This is around £86,000 in today’s money.
The cook-housekeeper was key in driving down costs. Every month, Mrs Penketh was obliged to tot up her spending with Wrexham’s various tradesmen and hand her account book to Louisa, who would sign it off and ask Philip to write out a cheque to pay the bills. Mrs Penketh would then take the cheque to the National and Provincial Bank in Wrexham, cash it and do the rounds with a chinking weight of money in her bag. On her return she would hand to Louisa the cash needed to pay the servants their total wages of around £22 a month (£1,300 today), plus their £3 ‘beer money’. Handling sums of £60, £100, even £180 were normal (from £3,500 to £10,300 today).
When the expenses tipped over her self-imposed budget, Louisa would write ‘Overspent’ at the bottom of the page and take out her guilt and anxiety on the cook-housekeeper. Regular ‘scoldings’ had become part of Ellen Penketh’s life, and she began to dread them. The other prong of this pincer movement upon Mrs Penketh was the new agent, whose study adjoined the housekeeper’s sitting room. The Victorian-minded Mr Hughes–he who had refused to let Mrs Yorke see the estate account books–had been dispatched. In the autumn of 1905 William Capper, 43, started work at Erddig. The heavy, leather-bound estate ledgers began to be filled in meticulously, inviting Louisa’s approval. ‘I interviewed Mr Capper the Agent for an hour. He seems a splendid agent & takes a great interest in everything.’ She was not a woman given to gushing–‘I wish the lawyer Mr James were a little more expeditious with his work’, she adds in the next breath.
Capper was soon all over the place like a rash. Overtly helpful, covertly watchful, he poked his nose into the doings of the cook-housekeeper, the work of head housemaid Matilda Boulter, the cellar of William Wootton the butler. He was not your usual Chester man, having done a long stint in the cattle auctions and stockyards of Bakersfield, California where he earned enough money to set himself up as an auctioneer and valuer on his return. Married to Clara, father to young Eric, Doris, Alicia and Donald, he lived in a large detached Victorian house in Wrexham with one maid-of-all-work.
Capper’s presence made Erddig’s servants twitchy. A letter from head housemaid Matilda (Tilly) Boulter to Mrs Yorke during the annual spring clean of 1907 hints at the tensions below stairs.
2 June: ‘Everything is going on quite alright & we are getting on…Mr Capper is often up so he can see how we are getting on & he knows there is a great deal to do.’
29 June: ‘I think we have done all that was on my list…Mr Capper was here this morning. I dare say Mr Capper tells you all about everything. He knows we have been busy. Now I expect Mrs Penketh & Mr Wootton writes to you about their part of their dutys.’ There is a sense of self-justification in her tone: she is getting her side of the story in first.
But the assiduous Mr Capper came at a price, and in order to cut more corners Louisa decided to take the household accounts away from the agent and give them instead to her capable cook-housekeeper. What effect did this have on the relationship of these two upper servants, side by side in the green basement corridor? A clue to their characters might be found in their signatures. Capper writes his very large, with scrolling flourishes, at the top of each page of the estate ledger. He is, at a guess, a dapper little man of unshakeable self-belief. Mrs Penketh’s is found in the ‘Time Book’ that records the servants’ monthly wages, each name signed off under her or her mistress’s eye. It is careful yet flamboyant, with more than the usual curls and whorls of the Victorian schoolroom. There is something devil-may-care in that sweeping kick of the k’s downward stroke.
This is, of course, pure speculation. As is this: did Mr Capper pop next door rather too regularly to give unwelcome help with the accounts? Did Ellen Penketh feel spied on and undermined? Did a faintly flirtatious friendship turn sour? Something happened–of this I am sure.