The Housekeeper's Tale

by Tessa Boase

  What had seemed a straightforward, even banal case (servant steals money) was, it turned out, not at all straightforward. It touched on incendiary issues in the relationship between mistress and servant, even between the upper and lower classes. There was a suggestion of bullying, and real fear. There was collusion between suppliers and cook-housekeeper: a favoured relationship which finally went awry. There was the peculiar matter of the gold sovereigns disappearing from the bag, which did not quite ring true, and the suggestion that someone else had ‘been at the bottom of the whole mischief’–yet the ‘destitute’ Mrs Penketh was clearly not spending the money on herself. And there was the odd retraction of punishment from Squire Yorke, who managed suddenly to transform his vendetta into an act of mercy.

  After a brief retirement, the magistrates returned to the court. They had considered the case, said the Chairman. It was to go for trial to the Assizes. Bail was offered on a surety of £100, which, to applause, Mr Yorke agreed to provide, presumably through gritted teeth (it is around £5,700 in today’s money). For him, this was the worst-case scenario.

  ‘She is at large’, wrote Louisa the next day.

  As soon as she was released from Wrexham Magistrate’s Court Ellen Penketh travelled by train back to Manchester, to her mother’s shop, where she was compelled to stay until the trial. But to Louisa, the genie was out of the bottle. That day Mr Wootton the butler delivered to Mr Yorke his copy of the Wrexham Advertiser with a more than usually mask-like face. The paper served Wrexham and all its surrounding towns as far as Chester and Ruthin, and was much read by the middle classes. On that day, stories ranged from the Welsh-language movement gaining momentum, to Stoke-on-Trent workhouse paupers refusing to eat their Monday mutton broth, to the regular column by Miss Ida Meller, ‘Fashion and Things Feminine’.

  There it was, on page seven, in large font:

  The Serious Charge Against an Erddig Housekeeper.

  Extraordinary Proceedings. Prosecutor Wishes to Withdraw. Accused Sent to the Assizes.

  The article took up a good half-page. Louisa and Philip bravely went visiting on their bicycles. ‘The great topic of conversation is the 9 days wonder of Wrexham, namely the misdoings of our former cook’, she wrote that night. Now that the stakes were so much higher, she had to maintain her dogged conviction of Ellen Penketh’s guilt–and her friends were quick to support her, rounding on the ‘thief cook’ where previously they had praised the lightness of her drop scones and moistness of her Madeira cake.

  ‘We hear so much against the woman’, Louisa wrote, ‘that Philip is going to withdraw the bail.’ Gossip had come to their ears that Mrs Penketh–rather than turning up at court and surrendering bail–was simply going to disappear. Manchester would swallow her up and she would never be heard of again. The careful and precise Philip Yorke was enraged. And so, five days after her reprieve, Ellen was without warning rearrested at her mother’s shop, handcuffed and transported fifty miles south to face her former master in Wrexham Magistrate’s Court again on Tuesday, 1 October. Here, bail was formally withdrawn. ‘The prisoner will be only too glad to release Mr Yorke from his surety,’ snapped her barrister, Mr Downes Powell, incensed by such unwarranted shilly-shallying. He had an alternative: Mr Willis Sterrett (a blacksmith) and Mr Wright (a storekeeper) would become surety for £50 each. Mrs Penketh was not without friends.

  As the Wrexham Advertiser reported the following Friday (‘Mr Yorke withdraws his Recognizances’), ‘Mr Sterret was accepted, but Mr Wright was not, and the prisoner, therefore, left the court in custody.’

  XI

  You Scolded Her

  The road from Wrexham to Ruthin Gaol rises then drops into classic northern Welsh scenery–all high hills, brown-purple slopes and sheep, everywhere, grazing on the intensely vivid green of the fields. Ellen Penketh would have seen none of this from her closed police carriage. This upper servant was about to enter her second gaol in twelve days.

  Ruthin is a prosperous little market town with exhilarating views of the Clwydian Hills–and of the shingled roof and bell tower of its Pentonville-style prison, which lies at the bottom of steep Clwyd Street. There is no mistaking the purpose of this building, with its sheer stone facade, small, square windows and a doorway halfway up the wall in the courtyard for access directly onto a gallows platform. Ruthin’s most recent (and only) execution was in 1903. It was to be the last, for the Victorian prison of one hundred cells was closed in 1916 and merged with Shrewsbury Gaol.

  The drill here was much the same as at Shrewsbury on entering: a ‘vigorous medical check and regular bath against fleas, lice and mites’. The earthenware bath was reached by mounting three stone steps–at the top of which Ellen Penketh might have hesitated, seeing the scum of others clouding the surface. She was issued with the drab prison uniform and taken to her cell, four paces long by three wide, and the heavy door was bolted shut.

  Most female prisoners–nationally a thousand admitted every week by 1895–were there for drink or prostitution offences. There were just six cells for women at Ruthin, two to a floor of a three-storey wing that looked west on to the laundry room below and the meandering River Clwyd. Here Ellen and her cohorts were put to work. Reporters Mayhew and Binny described such labour in The Criminal Prisons of London, and Scenes of Prison Life in 1862: the ‘bare red arms working the soddened flannels against a wooden grooved board’, and ‘turning the handles of the wringing machine’, all glimpsed through a ‘dense white mist of steam’.14 They worked in silence. ‘No singing, no whistling, no attempts to communicate by signs or writing. No unnecessary looking around’, read the rules framed on Ellen’s wall. In the exercise yard, men wore peaked caps that covered their faces entirely, like sinister masks with eyeholes. By eight o’clock, after an unvarying supper of oatmeal gruel, she was back in her gaslit cell in the twilight: put to work sewing, knitting or weaving, and counting the days.

  ‘I do not like motors and I think I never shall,’ Louisa had pronounced, but on Monday, 2 December she overcame her aversion in order to travel to Ruthin for the trial of Ellen Penketh.

  The Yorkes were lent a chauffeur-driven car by their friends the Frazers, which was able to halve the three-hour carriage journey as they sat in the back on upholstered leather. As they puttered deeper into Denbighshire at twenty miles an hour, the place names became stranger: Coedpoeth, Bwlchgwyn, Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd. They were entering a foreign country. Louisa bore her carsickness bravely. It was nothing, after all, as to what was about to happen. She had thought of little else over the past weeks, to the extent that she was sick of the whole subject. ‘I meet with so much sympathy on all sides & so many letters come on the subject of the cook that it is getting rather wearisome’, she had written on 2 October. She left Erddig in the care of a new housekeeper, the 60-year-old chapel-going Miss Brown, who would do no cooking, merely ‘superintend’. Kitchen maid Lizzie Copestake had been promoted to the post of cook.

  The Yorkes checked into the Castle Hotel in Market Square, a ‘high-class family and commercial hotel’ with Puginesque tiled floors, panelled walls and an excellent view of H. M. Prison directly below. They had stayed here before–‘three days of worry and expense’–talking to their barrister before the case was then postponed.

  Ellen Penketh had, by now, spent two months in Ruthin Gaol waiting to be called to trial. Today she was handed back her creased civilian clothes and led, probably on foot, the back route to the Ruthin Assizes (thus avoiding Market Square and the eyes of the breakfasting Yorkes). Philip and Louisa might not have had much appetite for an Edwardian breakfast anyway. They put on hats and heavy coats and left the hotel, turning left down steep Well Street and into the blinding morning sun. Past a Methodist chapel, right along Record Street, past the County Constabulary to the imposing classical portico of the Ruthin Assizes. Up five steps, through four stone pillars: by now Louisa’s heart was thudding, as she knew what was coming.

  ‘What brutes Barristers can be’, she wrote with
feeling that night. ‘How can anyone respect them.’ Mrs Yorke had again been summoned to the witness box–this time for two hours. The Ruthin Assizes was imposing, with its gaslit brass candelabra, spectators’ gallery and glass-domed ceiling shedding light on the accused. Where Wrexham County Court’s inquisitors were pedantic, the barristers at the trial today were flamboyant, cunning, bullying. Mr Artemus Jones, assigned to defend Ellen Penketh, was a barrister well known on the North Wales circuit, and he used every well-worn trick in his repertoire.15 First he tried to expose Louisa as a silly, feather-brained woman, a period cliché that would have infuriated her.

  ‘Should you be wrong in saying to the jury that you did not know very much about housekeeping accounts?’ asked Mr Jones. ‘The housekeeping accounts, to put it mildly, are rather confused?’

  ‘Not my book, no,’ replied Louisa firmly; ‘not at all.’

  ‘Then I may take it that the housekeeper’s book was in an upset state?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘In point of fact, am I not right in stating that you didn’t know the state of the accounts until your solicitor helped you?’

  ‘I gave the prisoner money to pay bills,’ said Louisa, doggedly sticking to the essence of the case, ‘but later I found that the bills had not been paid.’

  ‘I am not asking you that,’ retorted Mr Jones. ‘Is it not a fact that you have had several conversations with your solicitor because you were not able to understand your housekeeping accounts?’

  This was not true, she told him. Mr Artemus Jones then moved on to the need for economy at Erddig.

  ‘In getting the prisoner to keep the accounts instead of the expert agent you were economising, were you not?’

  ‘We tried to,’ replied Louisa. How she must have hated this line of attack.

  ‘Because your family was a growing one, and your expenses were going up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jones asked her if she ever complained to the prisoner about the rising expenses. ‘And–I am not suggesting that you are a severe person–you scolded her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And because you did so she kept back some of the accounts?’

  Again and again, Louisa Yorke was led down the barrister’s blind alleys until Mrs Penketh’s villainy looked either improbable or entirely justified, given the apparent heartlessness of her master and mistress. First, Mr Jones pointed out, Philip Yorke offered bail. ‘And then after two or three days your husband changed his mind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And without a word of warning this woman was dragged handcuffed from Manchester to Wrexham.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was handcuffed,’ said Louisa, perhaps with a fleeting memory of Ellen Penketh the person, the friend.

  ‘Did you know she was dragged from Manchester to Wrexham by the police?’ persisted the barrister.

  ‘Dragged!’ protested his counterpart, Mr Ellis Jones Griffith, prosecuting.

  ‘Brought or taken, I suppose Mr Jones means,’ came the dry voice of the judge.

  ‘A pictorial phrase, which you should be able to appreciate, Mr Griffith,’ hit back Mr Artemus Jones with customary brio. As the men in court laughed knowingly, Louisa braced herself, wondering what was to come next.

  ‘Do you tell the jury that you think this woman pocketed the amounts which are missing?’

  ‘I don’t know at all,’ came her faint reply.

  The first day’s hearing ended on a salacious note. Under cross-examination, the Yorkes’ solicitor Mr James admitted that enquiries had been made ‘as to whether the prisoner was in a certain condition’, his justification being that this would have had a bearing on whether she was likely to surrender bail. ‘A mysterious detective from Salford’ had been used by James & James to make these enquiries as Mrs Penketh ‘lay at home’ in Manchester.

  ‘This was a most malicious slander on the woman,’ cried Mr Artemus Jones. ‘What grounds had you for circulating it?’

  Mr James retorted that he had not circulated it; he had merely heard that the woman was ‘unwell’.

  ‘From whom did you hear about this woman’s condition?’

  ‘Mr Capper told me.’

  But the story, evidently, was untrue.

  Louisa and Philip spent a sleepless night at the Castle Hotel. The day had not gone well. Tuesday could not be expected to go much better, as Mr Jones Griffith had to attend a funeral and so ‘an underling’ would take the case for the Yorkes. ‘Oh, what worry for us!’ Louisa was doubly disadvantaged because Ellen Penketh did not appear as a witness, so she had to bear the brunt of the cross-examination herself–and it was of such a personal nature. Her battered little dark green cash book with burgundy spine and edges, combed through by both barristers, contained all the private excitement and extravagance of newly married life and motherhood–things such as ‘baby’s 1st bonnet, 9s’ and ‘ribbons for him, 2s/10’. Then there was the ‘portrait of myself in black dress with amethyst necklet’ paid for in August 1906 (£5 10s), along with £5 spent on a portrait of Simon Yorke, then aged two (£5 is around £300 in today’s money).

  Why wasn’t Ellen Penketh called to the witness box? We are by now longing to hear her voice–for her to stand up in court and say her piece. There are big unanswered questions, side-stepped in court, which tantalise. Who was Mr Yorke alluding to as being ‘at the bottom of the whole mischief’, leading the cook-housekeeper astray? How had Ellen tried to rob her father of £10 (around £600 today)? Had she dosed herself with one of the lead-based ‘abortifacients’ women could buy for a few pennies at a chemist’s shop–or was her ‘condition’ a malicious rumour of Mr Capper’s? And what was it really like to work for Louisa Yorke? Ellen remains a potent silent witness to the story. A defendant only became competent as a witness in 1899, and many didn’t take this option. Perhaps Mr Artemus Jones knew that the 37-year-old Lancastrian cook-housekeeper would not perform well under pressure; that she would instinctively crumple before the Yorkes. Perhaps the story of the missing gold sovereigns did not quite stack up.

  At the close of proceedings Jones addressed the all-male jury, drawn from various property-owning locals. He asked the men to consider one question, and one question only: had the prisoner ‘fraudulently converted the money to her own use’? There was, he said, no evidence to suggest this. In summing up, he contended that Mrs Penketh had done ‘the most natural thing in the world’ in asking the tradesmen to ‘keep over’ accounts until the following month, in the face of Mrs Yorke’s grumblings. When the prisoner lost the money, he said, she did not like to speak of it, and hoped gradually to make it up. Indeed, how would she dare speak of it? It was ‘quite natural’ that she would tell her mistress nothing of this loss.

  ‘She was a poor woman,’ Mr Artemus Jones reminded the jury; ‘not like her employers and others, idlers on the great highway of life, whose actions would be entirely different.’ I imagine the eyes of the male jury sliding from Louisa Yorke (reddish hair, large hat, stout figure encased in black), to Ellen Penketh (slight, handsome, her face a picture of remorse). The final twist of the knife, for the Yorkes, was Mr Jones’s reiteration of the cook-housekeeper’s wages–the ‘princely salary of £45 a year’, given to a woman who handled ‘hundreds of pounds a month and thousands of pounds in the course of a year. If any woman ever had a chance of fraudulently converting money to her own use,’ Mr Artemus Jones concluded, ‘it was the prisoner.’

  The judge, it appeared, had already made up his mind and he directed the jury thus. From her attitude in the box, he said, Mrs Yorke ‘did not seem to be a hard woman, but a kind lady’. He commented on the improbability of the story about the loss of money near the bank at Wrexham. It was not every day, His Lordship remarked drily, that £130 in gold ‘rolled about the streets of Wrexham without the police hearing about it’. He also commented on the absence of Ellen Penketh as a witness (which was not strictly correct conduct for a judge): ‘If there was any doubt about it, the jury would probably h
ave liked to have seen the prisoner in the box,’ he said; ‘but for some reason she had not been brought forward as a witness.’

  Ellen sat with her eyes cast down. The two warders rested impassively on either side, waiting for the sign to escort her back to prison. The jury retired to deliberate.

  XII

  ‘White-Washed By Un-Civil Law’

  ‘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.’