The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  And so Ellen Penketh, shopkeeper’s daughter, half walked, half ran in the luminous twilight of a September evening, to 68 Poyser Street, where she was taken in by another shopkeeper. Frightened and dishevelled, the ex-cook-housekeeper of Erddig Hall had little more than the clothes she was dressed in.

  On Friday the thirteenth, another long house party regrettably kicked off, despite the absence of the woman who normally drove Erddig’s engine below stairs. Nervous housemaids Jinnie Fairman and Edith Haycock showed Mrs Beryl Binning to her room and brought up hot water and afternoon tea. The next day Mr Yeates was welcomed, and on the Monday Mr Browne arrived. The talk of the drawing room (and of the servants’ hall below) was all of Mrs Penketh. Louisa told the dreadful story so many times her own diary began to sound repetitive.

  14 September: ‘Busy morning with Mr Capper. Alas! The Cook, Mrs Penketh, in whom I had so much trust, has robbed us of £500. She done it [sic] so very cleverly that hardly anyone could have found her out. Mr James came to talk about it but Mr Capper is the most practical. I fear we shall get no redress.’

  The Yorkes were not given to talking ill of their servants; quite the opposite. Their very tolerance had earned them, over generations, a reputation for being over-lenient. But in the company of their house guests, all with a view to express and a horror story to impart (not least the well-connected and forthright Beryl Binning), Louisa began to mouth the platitudes of the era. Vita Sackville-West parodied such conversations in her novel The Edwardians, based on her childhood at Knole in Kent. ‘“Servants are so unscrupulous, one can’t trust them a yard”,’ Lucy, Duchess of Chevron says to her friend Lady Roehampton. ‘“However long they have been with one,–even if one looks on them as old friends,–one never knows when they will turn nasty.”’11

  On 16 September, Louisa wrote in her diary that ‘Mrs Binning has had to part with her housemaid as I have parted with the Cook. It is sad to think how I have been cheated through thick & thin.’ The whole scenario touched a raw nerve for Louisa, just six years ago a spinster eking out an allowance of £20. Her social insecurity, her occasional heavy-handedness, her poor judgement when recruiting servants, her mismanagement of money…these things Louisa was aware of, and ashamed of, and her bubbling fury was as much directed at herself as at ‘the thief cook’. How could she have been so naive, so trusting? It was ruining the house party.

  17 September: ‘I spent most of the day looking for bills & cheques. Mrs Penketh is I believe at Mrs Edwards. She will, I expect, unless she pays the money, be in prison before long. Her systematic cheating is almost incredible after all our kindness to her.’

  The worst episode for the Yorkes was yet to come.

  Perhaps it was Louisa pushing for vengeance; wanting her pound of flesh. Or perhaps it was the massed outrage of their guests and social callers that drove the Yorkes into a corner. Either way, they decided to press criminal charges against Ellen Penketh. This catapulted the case into quite a different arena–one that the very private, mild-mannered Philip Yorke may not have reckoned on. By pressing charges, the serene, closed world of Erddig would be prised open, laid bare and judged. Philip (now a white-bearded 58) had intimate experience of the courtroom. As Squire Yorke, a gentleman with a reputation for philanthropy, he sat at Wrexham Magistrate’s Court as a Justice of the Peace. He was also twice yearly summoned by the High Sheriff of Denbighshire to sit on the jury at the Courts of Assize at Ruthin, the Welsh market town twenty miles to the north-west. He knew, therefore, of the trauma of the witness box, the tricks of the barristers and the brutality of those Victorian gaols. He knew, too, about the press.

  But Philip felt ill used, and he was a man who could not let a slight go unpaid for. Louisa’s diary indignantly recorded any knock to his reputation; any ‘insulting’ letters or ‘unfeeling remarks’. On 24 February 1905 she wrote that ‘Philip read to me some old letters of his past life. It is quite wonderful that all who tried to do him some injury came to grief.’ And now his trusting, good-hearted wife had been gulled by Mrs Penketh. Such was Philip’s anger at anyone laying a trap for his Lulu that he reached for the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut.

  At seven o’clock on the evening of 19 September, Inspector Tippett of the Denbighshire Constabulary walked purposefully down Victoria Road, left into Poyser Street and stopped at the doorway of number 68. He cast his eye over the corner shop’s tin advertisement boards–Zebra Grate Polish; Birds Custard Powder (No Eggs! No Risk! No Trouble!). He lifted his hand and rapped three times. By now curious faces were watching from windows and a crowd of children had gathered. ‘Ellen Penketh,’ said Inspector Tippett, ‘I hereby do arrest you on a warrant under the Larceny Act of 1901.’ She was handcuffed and propelled at a smart pace the half-mile to the police station on Regent Street. Here he read over the warrant. ‘Prisoner made no reply’, Inspector Tippett wrote in his ledger. She was shown into a brick-vaulted cell–one of five–and locked up for the night. If Ellen Penketh could not find bail for £50 (around £3,000 in today’s money), she would be taken straight to Shrewsbury Gaol until the hearing at the magistrate’s court in Wrexham in a week’s time.

  The ‘worry’ of what they had set in motion was ‘too awful’ for Louisa and Philip. Still–that night they ventured out locally to dine at Lady Egerton’s, transfixing the table with their shocking tale. ‘We opened our hearts to Major Leadbetter who has advised us to prosecute her.’ Did Louisa’s liberal conscience give her pause to consider the predicament of Ellen Penketh? If so, she did not record this in her diary. Or else she let Philip voice it for her: he was from this point on ‘kept awake at night’ by thoughts of Mrs Penketh’s ‘foolishness’. Two days later, he rose from his bed having had second thoughts: perhaps out of clemency, or through fear of scandal, or the dawning realisation of what his wife would be put through as primary witness–Louisa didn’t record her husband’s motive. Simply that, ‘He is going to try & withdraw the prosecution’.

  But it was too late.

  X

  Won’t You Help Me?

  Before her arrest, Ellen Penketh did not sit it out mutely above the corner shop at Poyser Street, waiting for the policeman’s knock at the door. She moved fast to try to set things right. What happened after her eviction from Erddig was told in court by Mr Davies, elderly clerk of solicitors James & James.12 It is fascinating for the glimpse it gives us of her background (all fear, mistrust and accusation), and the unique chance to hear her faint voice. The day she left Erddig Ellen bumped into, or sought out, old Mr Davies and told him what had happened. ‘He was rather interested in the matter,’ the court was told, ‘because he knew Miss Penketh, and he was also a tenant on Mr Yorke’s estate.’ Belonging to Erddig clearly inspired a kind of group loyalty–among tenants as well as servants.

  Ellen begged him to go with her to Manchester to see her family and ask what they might do to help. ‘She said she was rather afraid of facing her people herself.’ Mr Davies was a friend and he thought of her reputation, for she was kept company that evening by one Mr Wright, a storekeeper for the Corporation Electricity Department and a keen sympathiser in her plight (later to offer £50 bail). Mr Davies suggested she spend the night with his own daughter, Mrs Woollam, before journeying together to the train station the next day.

  I imagine this incongruous couple boarding the train for Chester and thence to Manchester: an elderly legal clerk, a terrified domestic servant. At Manchester station they board a double-decker electric tram bound for the western industrial suburb of Pendleton and its slums, and the shop of Mrs Penketh. ‘Go and see thy old mistress, Mrs Armitage,’ says Ellen’s mother. ‘She knows you wouldn’t be plutcherin owt, God help us. She’ll see thi’ right.’ So they walk, Mr Davies and Ellen Penketh, along the dirty road to more prosperous streets and hence to Chaseley Field–but the big house has now become Pendleton High School for Girls, a place of chalk dust and algebra. ‘Mrs Armitage has gone,’ says the housekeeper, ‘long gone. No, we don’t know where.�
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  Ellen is desperate; this was her last hope. She walks back home in tears–who else is there left to help her? ‘Your father,’ says her mother. ‘See what he can do to keep you out of trouble. Tell him you’ll happen go to gaol if not.’ And so Mr Davies, his confidence ebbing, takes the train west with Ellen the next day to Liverpool, to seek out Thomas Penketh the wheelwright. Ellen hangs back, nervous of her father’s reaction. ‘I dare na’,’ she says. ‘You talk to him first. Then I’ll come in.’

  Thomas is immediately suspicious. Here’s this man of the law, coming on behalf of his feckless daughter. ‘I’m not going to sign any paper,’ he says, backing off.

  ‘I have no paper for you to sign,’ says the mild Mr Davies, who later reconstructs the scene in court. ‘Miss Penketh wants to know if you can do anything for her, as her father.’

  Mr Davies explains that if a sum of £200 (£11,500) could be raised, then proceedings against his daughter might be dropped.

  ‘You might as well ask me to raise a million pounds,’ says Thomas Penketh. ‘I shall do nothing. She’s already tried to rob me of ten pounds.’

  Ellen is in the doorway, nervous. ‘Won’t you help me, Father?’

  ‘No, not in the least,’ he replies.

  On entering Shrewsbury Gaol, prisoners pass beneath a keep-like portcullis that separates them from the world outside; in particular from the neighbouring train station and all its bustle of departure. It is a Victorian gaol, known then and now as ‘the Dana’ after the medieval lock-up it came to replace. Today it has a reputation as one of Britain’s most overcrowded prisons. In 1907 it still had a gibbet for hangings. Ellen had not yet been convicted and her stay was short, but her treatment would have been no different to any other woman arriving in handcuffs. Female prisoners were met by a wardress, taken into a room and demanded their particulars, all entered in a ledger known as the ‘female nominal roll’. Today this massive tome is kept by Shropshire Archives–and there I found her committal, written over two pages in copperplate ink:

  Number 115: Name, Ellen Penketh

  Date & place of committal: 20.9.07 Wrexham Co.

  Offence: fraudulent use of cheques to the value of £210 12s. 1d. (larceny as servant)

  Committed to Denbighshire Assizes Ruthin Prison

  Education: 3

  Age, height and colour of hair: 37; 5ft; brn.

  Occupation: Cook

  Religion and place of birth: C of E; Rainford

  No previous convictions.

  Ellen was then told to undress, was relieved of hairpins and any jewellery and marched to a grimy bath of hot water. From this she was dressed in coarse prison garb and led to a numbered cell, not unlike a small pantry in a country house, where she was given a coloured, numbered medal to wear. The door clanged shut. No further instructions were given to ‘first-nighters’ such as Ellen.13 Instead, a printed tract on the wall listed the punishments for crimes such as ‘Not folding a bed in the proper manner. Not folding up clothes in the proper manner. Not washing feet twice a week, prior to using water to clean the cell.’

  It had come to this: the worst. Ellen Penketh had one week to wait for her court hearing at Wrexham and possible release, but how optimistic was she? She had written a desperate apology to Mr Yorke, but here he was, still pressing charges. She would at least have a chance to put her side of the story to impartial ears, but the money was–apparently–gone. Every day, every hour, every minute of that week, her mind must have worked over the details of what had happened. The tangled knots. The half-truths. The muddle well meant, but now gone poisonous. The missing sovereigns. There was also, perhaps, a mounting sense of fury.

  ‘After all our kindness to her’, the outraged Louisa had written in her diary. But what of the many kindnesses of Ellen Penketh? All done in the line of duty, maybe, but delivered sincerely nonetheless. It was as if she had never existed in their lives; never cooked Louisa a Charlotte russe, never taken little Phil to see the chickens and collect the eggs, never collaborated with her mistress in each triumphant bout of entertaining. If you were a titled or upper-class lady and you ended up in prison–as so many well-heeled suffragettes resorting to violent tactics now did–you were set free pretty smartly, thanks to your connections. But if you were unknown and friendless, you would end up getting prosecuted and thrown in gaol. Ellen Penketh was probably under no illusions as to what would happen next.

  ‘This was a terrible day’, wrote Louisa on Thursday, 26 September. ‘At 10 we went off in the carriage to appear in the Courts against Mrs Penketh.’ Wrexham Magistrate’s Court dealt with dozens of small cases monthly, and its judgements were in keeping with the times. Crimes that autumn ranged from the theft of thirty-four rabbit skins (for which one boy of 13 got seven days in Shrewsbury Gaol followed by four years in a reformatory, his 12-year-old accomplice six strokes with a birch rod); to the theft of chickens (two months’ imprisonment and hard labour); to the theft of two pairs of corduroy trousers and a waistcoat from the Workhouse (seven days’ imprisonment). Ellen Penketh was collected at dawn from Shrewsbury Gaol by a police officer, driven by horse and closed carriage the thirty miles to the courthouse on Wrexham’s Regent Street and led to the dock. Here, standing between two warders, she faced her employers once again.

  But to surprised muttering, Mr Churton (acting for James & James) announced to the magistrate that in the light of Mrs Penketh’s ‘very repentant letter’, and the fact that she had been in prison now seven days, Mr Yorke wished to apply to Their Worships for consent to withdraw the prosecution. Mr Yorke believed the prisoner ‘had been led away by some person whom he need not mention, and who practically had been at the bottom of the whole mischief’. There was murmured consultation on the bench, then, ‘Silence,’ called the Chairman. ‘Pray silence in court.’

  An expectant hush: the blood sings in Ellen Penketh’s ears. Louisa looks mutely at her gloved hands, clutched together. The Chairman clears his throat. ‘While appreciating Mr Yorke’s kindness and goodness of heart,’ he pronounces, ‘we are of the opinion that, in duty to the public, the case should be proceeded with. Please to call the first witness.’

  Louisa was to find herself in the dock giving evidence while Ellen Penketh sat and listened. The tables were spectacularly turned–and Erddig’s informal accounts-keeping system was laid bare. ‘Prisoner was housekeeper in her employ for five years all but two months. It was part of her duty to keep a rough book containing tradesmen’s accounts,’ began Mr Churton. He went on to list the cheques cashed by Mrs Penketh and the accounts left unpaid with tradesmen. It looked, on the surface, baldly incriminating. Then it was the turn of Mr Downes Powell, defending. Finally, we come to the nub of Ellen’s predicament:

  ‘Did the prisoner ever tell you when you interviewed her that she had kept some of the accounts back?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Louisa.

  ‘Did she tell you why?’

  ‘She said she did this because she did not wish the bills to appear too high.’

  ‘Had you been grumbling at her?’

  ‘Yes, for her extravagance.’

  Extravagance. This was a sin to Louisa, curate’s daughter–yet her conscience was troubled and guilty. To avoid her mistress’s anger, Ellen Penketh had deliberately begun to lower the accounts, suppressing bills with a nod here and a pleading word there, among her very understanding suppliers, who perhaps couldn’t resist the charm of Erddig’s personable cook-housekeeper. She would, she told them, make it up over the next few months.

  This was fine, if messy, until Ellen Penketh apparently lost a large sum of money.

  ‘Did she then tell you how she had lost it?’ asked Mr Downes Powell.

  ‘She said she found her bag open, and that she had lost a hundred and thirty pounds,’ responded Louisa (this is around £7,500 in today’s money).

  ‘Did she say where?’

  ‘No…She said that [it was] after she had cashed the cheque for two hundred pounds, and was on the way home
.’

  ‘Did you not ask her why she had not told you about the loss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was her reply?’

  ‘That she was afraid to let me know.’

  If this was true, it was entirely plausible that a servant would be terrified of confessing to such an enormous loss. Ellen Penketh was then forced to try to pay back the amounts owing to suppliers out of her own meagre savings: accounts that had been suppressed over twelve months by a total of £142 19s 7d (around £8,200 today). This was clearly impossible on a salary of £45 a year.

  ‘Do you know that when she left Erddig she had no money?’ the barrister persisted.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Louisa, ever more faintly. She would not look at the prisoner.

  ‘And that the servants made a collection for her in the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, during the time she has been in your service,’ he asked, ‘have you noticed her dressing extravagantly or making a big show or anything of that sort?’

  ‘No.’

  And now came that technique beloved of all barristers: a meaningful pause.

  Mr Bevis, manager to grocers Messrs Dutton & Co., was called to the witness box. The teetotal Philip Yorke suspected that Mrs Penketh had abused an account for wines and spirits in his name–in other words, that she was not only a thief but a drunkard too. This was swiftly demolished in court, with proof that the sum owing on this account–£27 18s 7 1/2d (around £1,600 today)–was a reasonable bill for the cook of a busy country-house kitchen. Next came Woollam the butcher and Pritchard the draper, each with stories of Mrs Penketh’s attempts to pay back the money owed, followed by two cashiers from the National and Provincial Bank. Then it was the turn of Erddig’s agent, Mr Capper. He pointed out that Mrs Penketh’s story about losing the money after leaving the bank ‘couldn’t be very true, or it would have been heard about in the town’. When Mrs Yorke asked the accused why she hadn’t mentioned the loss before, Capper informed the court, Mrs Penketh answered that she ‘had often wanted to do so, but had not the courage’.