‘The whole affair is scandalous’, wrote Louisa that night. ‘All the evidence was against the prisoner, also the Judge, but the Welsh jury said she was not guilty.’ What rankled most for the Yorkes was the barrister’s summing up. ‘Idlers on the pathway of life’, as Louisa recorded it–a phrase never to be forgotten. She was forced to stay in bed until 11.30 a.m. the next day to recover from ‘all the worry’. What had gone wrong for them? It had seemed such a black-and-white case: Mrs Penketh ‘stole the amount of £500, yet she was let off free, by a Welsh jury. There is no justice at all.’ Licking their wounds, the couple left deepest North Wales for the sanctuary of Erddig and the outraged support of their friends. As the North Wales Guardian and Wrexham Advertiser were trawled for juicy details of the trial (almost a full page in each), there was much muttering about all things Welsh.
‘There is a rumour that the jury were bribed at Ruthin’, wrote Louisa, still consumed by the trial four days later. ‘There can be no other way of accounting for the miscarriage of justice. We had many visitors and all were very sympathetic.’ But the wheels of the big house had to keep on turning. There was a new housekeeper at the helm, a slew of female staff about to leave the following year (perhaps out of sympathy for Ellen, or tarred by association with her), and the difficult matter of a pay rise for staff following the impertinent insinuations of Mr Artemus Jones. The old worry of unsettled servants reared its head again, distracting Louisa from the Penketh saga: ‘There is great excitement in the house with regard to precedence among the Servants. I wish these things could be settled without my being worried.’
But for Philip, who had only his charitable institutions, his cataloguing of papers and minimal contact with his two young sons to keep him distracted, the court case bit deep. Not only had their financial difficulties been exposed in public, but to be slandered as ‘Idlers on the pathway of life’! The Penketh episode scarred him. He sacked his lawyer, stopped his payments to charities and unsuccessfully tried to close a public footpath through the estate. He became obsessed with setting the record straight. ‘Philip is still dreadfully worried about the Ruthin affair and is trying to vent his rage in the newspapers, but none of the Editors care to take it up’, wrote Louisa a week after the trial. There was an unsettling liberal wind blowing through society, and an increasingly militant atmosphere between ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’. Tales of outrageous slights against the upper classes were no longer the stuff that sold newspapers.
And so Philip Yorke had to content himself, slightly pathetically, with his great verse marathon in the servants’ basement corridor. Perhaps, after all, what mattered most was that the remaining servants took his side and believed in his munificence. Five years later, when the gossiping girls from Ellen Penketh’s day had moved on, her epitaph was typed up for all to read, framed within housekeeper Miss Brown’s eulogy–whose
…coming we may here remark
Brought to a close a period dark,
For long on us did Fortune frown
Until we welcomed good Miss Brown,
One whom this latter did replace
Did for five years our substance waste,
As foul a thief as e’er we saw,
Tho’ white-washed by Un-Civil Law.
And what of Ellen Penketh? The trail from here goes cold. ‘The accused was discharged’, ends the report in the Wrexham Advertiser. Discharged to scenes of jubilation and support from her Wrexham friends, it would be nice to think–though it is unlikely they would have managed to make the long journey, let alone the stay overnight. Perhaps Mr Artemus Jones stood her a glass of port wine at the bar of the Wynnstay Arms, as he basked in the familiar glow of another court victory. She won no damages; her reward was her liberty.
Ellen would never work as a housekeeper again–her notoriety, and lack of a character reference from the Yorkes, would surely see to that. She returned to Manchester, to her family, and is found by the 1911 census living at home above the Pendleton shop with her mother and blind sister Mary, listed as a ‘Domestic Cook’ aged 41. The appalling death toll of the First World War probably robbed her of any last chance at marriage–but it also provided an opportunity for women like Mrs Penketh to break free from domestic service. According to her death certificate she found work as a cook in a Manchester hotel, dying of a stroke at 63 in a state-run old people’s home of a thousand beds next to Hope Hospital–the site of the old Salford Workhouse. She died in 1932: four years after women got the vote on the same terms as men.
Louisa Yorke lived through two world wars to die, aged 87, in 1951. At some point she made the very surprising decision to keep the small portrait of Ellen Penketh, tucking it into an oval frame on the back page of a family portrait album. Perhaps she buckled before the Yorke family tradition of documentation. Perhaps, with Philip’s death (aged 73) in 1922 and the passing of time, she remembered those first five happy years of her married life with more fondness. Mrs Penketh was, after all, a significant part of this era. Maybe the evident unsuitability of her peculiar bachelor sons for the inheritance of Erddig made her wistful for its heyday.
So there it rests, with Louisa’s firm hand underneath in ink: ‘Mrs Penketh. Cook at Erthig from 1903 to 1907’. The story of her misdeeds passed into family legend, warping with the years until she was recalled by upstairs and downstairs as not only ‘the thief cook’ but the drunkard, too–tales which became the National Trust’s official version when Erddig, in parlous decay, was transferred to the Trust by ageing bachelor Philip Yorke III in 1973.16