The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  The reason is obvious. The Yorkes loved entertaining, and as Louisa grew in confidence, so did their numbers of guests. She kept a list of all house-party guests in Erddig’s visitors’ book:

  1902–32

  1903–68

  1904–90

  1905–86

  1906–120

  1907–113

  These visitors might stay for one or two nights, but many stayed for two weeks or more, all requiring elaborate meals, clean linen, coal fires and extra laundry. It was like running a hotel. Servicing all this were fourteen hard-pressed indoor servants, costing in all around £22 a month. Compared to most big houses at the time, Erddig’s entertaining was relatively modest (and certainly more strait-laced; Louisa would never have facilitated bed-hopping in the manner of those upper-class hostesses). Elsewhere in Britain the Edwardian house party was reaching its apogee–the ‘Saturday-to-Monday’, where one arrived with several trunks of clothing and a lady’s maid; where gargantuan meals were consumed at least four times a day; where champagne was served ‘at moments when a glass of barley-water might have been acceptable’.8 The Yorkes’ gesture to the era was to throw a really big dinner party, in the pillared dining room hung with ancestors, about four times a year. The table laden with heavily decorated Victorian dishes was now a thing of the past. These days it was all about originality, sleight of hand, little amuse-bouches; the wow factor, if you like.

  Louisa was initially an insecure hostess, recording slights and successes in her diary. But she soon got into her stride, clocking up ‘great’ successes and ‘fair’ successes, invariably involving music and games after dinner–and one lampshade going up in flames, extinguished by Wootton and the footman.

  It was considered ‘modern’ to be in revolt against extravagance and outdated Victorian customs, a fashion that suited the straightforward Louisa and her teetotal husband. To have just eight dishes served at dinner–soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweet, hors d’oeuvre and perhaps an ice–was considered modern.9 Great importance was attached to the entrée, known as the ‘cook’s high-water mark’, because it gave scope to the cook’s talent in preparing and decorating ‘made dishes’ served in decorated shapes and moulds. At Erddig, Mrs Penketh’s high-water mark included her Vol-au-Vent of Chicken; her ‘Chicken Shape’ and Oyster Patties (turned out and plated up on the long kitchen table by paraffin lamplight). Dozens of these copper entrée moulds still sit today in the mahogany kitchen cabinets, waiting their turn: little prawns, lobsters, tomatoes; fish shaped as a child might draw them.

  Louisa reached her own high-water mark in 1906 when she began recording her table plans, decorations and menus in the back of the visitors’ book. She was developing a confident artistic eye, revelling in the modern ‘rage’ for table decorations. On 30 October, when twelve came to dinner, the long, polished table was decorated with Erddig’s prize-winning chrysanthemums, Gloire de la Reine roses and long boughs of red Virginia creeper, an autumn feature of the house’s west face. Daringly there was no starched white tablecloth. The guests ate turtle soup, turbot in lobster sauce and ‘artistic vegetarian entrée’ (Mrs Penketh’s chance to show off), followed by saddle of mutton, pheasant, Charlotte russe, fruit salad, cheese capons, roast chestnuts, pears, grapes and apples. (Charlotte russe–a dessert of Bavarian cream set in a mould of sponge fingers–seems to have been one of Mrs Penketh’s specialities.)

  Conversation, as the guests sipped their ‘sun-dried’ turtle soup, might have touched on the many welfare reforms under way following the Liberal Party’s landslide victory that year: free school meals for children, pensions for the elderly, labour exchanges for the unemployed…Brave ideas, certainly, but who was going to foot the bill?

  One month later twelve more came to dinner, entering the dining room to admire the great Gainsborough portrait of Philip Yorke I, the new oil portrait of Mrs Yorke in her amethyst choker, the magical effect of the pier-glass mirrors throwing back the flickering candlelight, and the table piece–single white chrysanthemums and plumbago cardinals (‘the most lovely’, noted Louisa). They ate Palestine soup (made with Jerusalem artichoke), whitebait, sweetbread, boned turkey, partridge, jelly, chocolate mould and cheese capons, rounded off with home-grown apples and pears, Erddig’s prize-winners at the recent Chester show.

  These menus are today on display in the dining room at Erddig. I quote them in full because it seems important to remember who created rather than wrote them; who stirred the lobster sauce, whipped the egg whites, decorated the vegetarian savouries so as to make the guests gasp with pleasure. Important, not least because the cook-housekeeper of these years has since been denied a part in the Erddig narrative. Ellen Penketh, kitchen maid Lizzie Copestake and scullery maid Annie Parry must have felt a keen share of the hostess’s triumph as the heaped and elaborately garnished serving dishes were borne upstairs by the young footmen.

  On a day such as this the kitchen team would also have cooked a large breakfast, provided lunch for guests (cold cuts, savouries crafted from last night’s leftovers, rissoles, salads) along with the usual vegetarian dish for Mr Yorke (savoury rice, macaroni cheese, stuffed eggs), lunch for the servants’ hall (thirteen mouths including their own, plus up to twenty outdoor servants and any visiting lady’s maids and valets), lunch for the nursery upstairs, all puréed and crust-free according to Lucy Hitchman’s specifications for Master Simon and little Phil. And by the time poor Annie Parry had finished washing it all up in the dank scullery, standing on duckboards at a low sink, rubbing at the copper pans with turpentine and fine brick dust, it was time to start baking again for that afternoon’s tea.

  It was hard, hard work. On top of this, at the end of the day the accounts had to be done by the cook-housekeeper. Ellen Penketh would wipe her hands on her apron and make her way heavily down the long green basement corridor to the housekeeper’s sitting room.

  VIII

  Overspent

  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.

  IX

  The Thief Cook

  Twenty-two guests stayed at Erddig during the month of August 1907. On Monday ‘the glorious twelfth’–the start of the grouse-shooting season for most country houses in Britain, but not for Erddig and its vegetarian squire–Ellen Penketh cooked her last dinner party.

  It was, Louisa concluded, a triumph: ten guests on either side of the long dinner table with host and hostess at opposite curved ends, facing each other over vases of pink and white sweet peas and maidenhair fern. Louisa ignored Mrs Beeton’s rule that ‘no strongly scented flowers’ should be used as table decorations–Erddig’s sweet peas made one perfectly giddy with their summer perfume. The china she chose was Blue Spode. Footmen Arthur Barker and Fred Jones carried dish after dish from the fug and bustle of the kitchen up the short flight of stairs to the dining room: julienne soup, salmon, sweetbread, saddle of mutton, velvet cream, marble jelly, cheese straws and dessert apples. After dinner there was music and song by ‘Dr da Cumbra & Miss Sturkey’ in the Chinese room, lit by the eighteenth-century French ormolu and crystal chandelier.

  There was nowhere better than Erddig in the summer, Louisa had long thought. The estate was an idyll where the world was kept at bay–and the world was more than usually intrusive that year. There was much worrying talk of a war with Germany. On 31 August the new Liberal Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman brokered the ‘Triple Entente’ between Britain, France and Russia to counter the sinister triple alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Closer to home, the suffrage movement kept up its shrill protests in public places, capitalising on February’s morale-raising ‘Mud March’ in which three thousand women–Marchionesses, maids, textile workers, factory girls–had trudged in the rain from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall in London to plead the cause for women’s suffrage.

  Louisa floated around the rectangular canal on Sunday 8 September with her boys, now aged four and two: ‘I took the chaps in the punt & again used my new Punt Pole which is a beauty.’ She had no premonition of the bomb that was about to explode in her and Philip’s lives–and neither, perhaps, did Ellen Penketh. When it came, it came out of the blue.

  Monday, 9 September 1907: ‘Mrs Penketh who has been cook here for 5 years is a regular professional thief. She has stolen & robbed goods & money to the amount of £500. Mr Capper & I interviewed her.’

  Hyperbole. Repetition. Louisa is in a fury, writing in a tone not previously seen in her diary. Her very language seems to have changed, or coarsened: are these the choice phrases of Mr Capper? Most awkwardly the Yorkes have guests staying, Gwen Darley and Stephen Donne, who are of course avid to hear more, servant stories being the bread and butter of polite conversation. The following day Mr Capper is invited (or invites himself) to lunch. With two extra pairs of ears in his audience he waxes lyrical, puffed up with the drama of the whole outrageous story. Downstairs in the gloomy blue kitchen Lizzie and Annie garnish cold cuts and fry up rissoles as best they can, for Ellen has disappeared, leaving her work undone and the basement in uproar.

  ‘Mr Capper came to lunch and told more & more tales of Mrs Penketh’s misdeeds’, writes Louisa. ‘Mrs Penketh is gone off for the day. We had not much heart to do anything so we sat & bemoaned our fate.’ What Capper had discovered, as he began to ask questions one day in Wrexham, was that the Yorkes owed vast amounts of money all over town. Their account with Henry Woollam the butcher was unpaid. Pritchard & Co., the general drapers, was unpaid. Dutton & Co., the grocers, had not been paid since November 1906, and the amount owing had grown to £200 4s 10d (an a
stonishing £11,500 in today’s money). In all, £361 12s was owing on the Yorke account books–while a further £142 19s 7d was owing off the books, for bills which had been quietly suppressed with the suppliers’ collusion. It was a huge amount of money: £500 (around £28,700). So what, he demanded to know, had Mrs Penketh been doing with the money Mrs Yorke had been giving her? The cheques had been cashed, and the Erddig account book marked ‘paid’ against each supplier. But they had not been paid. It was all in all a blistering vindication of Mr Capper’s original contention: if the household accounts had been kept under his control, none of this would have happened.

  The next day Philip Yorke, who usually avoided unpleasantness or confrontation of any kind, cycled to Wrexham to see the family lawyer, Mr James. He returned with James, who interviewed the woman Louisa was now calling ‘the thief cook’. Her anger was unabated. ‘She is thoroughly frightened & a good thing too’, she wrote that night in her diary. ‘She was told she must leave today. She left at 7.15 wringing her hands.’ What Mrs Yorke didn’t know was that the servants had quickly pooled together what little money they had–£2 (£100 today)–to save Ellen Penketh from destitution, as she had nothing to her name. Whether through pity or affection we don’t know, but they also worked out a place for her to stay the night, late as it was: she could go to Mrs Edwards, who kept a corner shop in Wrexham. Mrs Edwards, who did much upholstery work for Erddig, had a daughter who was engaged to a Gittins–a family of long association with the servants’ hall. Gussie, the 16-year-old nursery maid, was a Gittins. Perhaps it was her suggestion.