by Tessa Boase
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
Part 4
Hannah Mackenzie
Wrest Park, Bedfordshire 1914–1915
It wasn’t so much her looks–it was her character.
ROSS MACKENZIE, GREAT-NEPHEW OF HANNAH MACKENZIE
Timeline
1914-1918
– The Great War. Some 400,000 servants leave to help the war effort.
1915
– The Tango and Foxtrot are the latest dance rage.
1917
– ‘Separate Fastener’ or Zipper patented. Cutex introduces liquid nail polish.
1918
– Representation of the People Act: all men and property owning women over 30 get the vote.
1922
– AGA cooker patented. BBC Radio launched: concerts and news from 6-10pm. First domestic refrigerator by Electrolux.
1923
– First fridge freezer by Frigidaire.
1924
– The Vac-Tric vacuum cleaner launched (£12 12s).
1925
– Toastmaster on sale–first fully automatic pop-up toaster.
1927
– The first talking picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson.
1928
– Women get equal voting rights.
1929
– General Election results broadcast on the wireless for the first time (Ramsay MacDonald becomes Labour prime minister).
1930s
– Corsets and bras transformed by elastic thread, or ‘Lastex’.
I
Not A Normal Auntie
In old age, Hannah Mackenzie was remembered for the nicotine stain in her shock of white hair and her fondness for shouting out, in a throaty American accent, ‘Now look here, sister!’ and ‘You bunch of bums!’ She was forceful, irreverent, a practical joker and a flirt. In her retirement she consumed one hundred Chesterfield cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch a day–delivered by relatives to her hospital bed in Northampton even as dementia set in. She also, evidently, had great charm.
Her career in domestic service spanned the Victorian industrialist middle classes, the Edwardian conservative nouveau riche, the liberal aristocracy during the Great War and the American super-rich of the Roaring Twenties. She went into service at the turn of the century, when whalebone corsets and gaslighting were the norm. She reached her prime twenty-five years later in a New York palazzo working as head housekeeper to the Vanderbilts, with shingled hair, silk stockings and a six-line telephone system. By any standards of domestic service, this was an unimaginable career for a working-class woman from Inverness.
This story shines a spotlight on one year of Hannah’s career–August 1914 to August 1915. It is a snapshot of a great house at an extraordinary moment in time: a critical juncture in British social history. Wrest Park in Bedfordshire was the first country-house war hospital to receive wounded soldiers from the Great War. It was one of many such hospitals, but an exemplary one, and the two women who ran it were among the first in the country to experience what the war actually meant in all its horror. Amputations, gas poisoning, shell shock, shrapnel wounds…the Honourable Nan Herbert and her housekeeper Mrs Mackenzie were witness to it all–and it changed them, perhaps fundamentally.
One year after her appointment, with Wrest Park Hospital at the peak of its efficiency, Hannah was forced to resign. ‘Downstairs’ had become ‘dangerous and disorderly’, an unhappy place for domestic staff to work–all, allegedly, her doing. What is more, the public-school-educated land agent Cecil Argles had fallen ‘violently’ in love with her. Housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie was the only thing, Mr Argles confessed, that stopped him from going mad.
In researching Hannah’s story I had no idea what, or how much, I would find. Many housekeepers typically left no trail behind them, especially when a great house such as Wrest Park changed hands after the First World War. All I had was one photograph–a formal portrait of two upper servants taken in 1914. The woman with a red cross on her implacable bosom looks at some imaginary point in the sky: this is the cook, Hetty Geyton. The younger, seated w
oman has an air of poise and composure: so much so, you might mistake her for the lady of the house, were it not for the bunch of keys in her lap. She is, for a servant, remarkably comfortable with the camera.
The Honourable Nan Ino Herbert kept a detailed diary of Wrest Park’s role in the Great War, probably with an eye to posterity. Today an annotated version survives with the family, typed out and pasted into a series of scrapbooks by her daughter in the 1950s. This has since become the official version of events at Wrest Park: a remarkable unpublished archive crammed with small black-and-white photographs. Domestic servants form just a footnote to the narrative, but it’s clear that they were a source of upset and constant anxiety to Nan. The real business to her was the war, the wounded soldiers and the smooth running of the hospital. Domestic spats were not meant to be a part of this heroic story. Yet Hannah Mackenzie jumps off the pages of Nan’s diary–feisty and strong-willed, a manipulative charmer, attractive to men. What the mistress wrote about the housekeeper is scant, but it is also telling. Here, clearly, was a ‘character’. Hannah’s audacious story seemed to capture the texture of domestic service during the Great War: uneasy, complicated, explosive.
Piecing together the fragments of her life involved much patient detective work. Biographies, letters, notebooks, census returns, shipping records, dusty archives–I trawled through them all. Once I had narrowed down the census returns to the right woman and sent off for her death certificate, I was astonished to find that Hannah had a living relative in Northampton with a clear memory of her.
Ross Mackenzie, her great-nephew, was born in 1947; Hannah was his favourite great-aunt from a large family clan now split between Inverness, Northampton and Australia. One snowy afternoon, over champagne, Benson & Hedges and egg mayonnaise bridge rolls, Ross told me all he could remember of Hannah, filling in the gaps in her story. It emerged that she went on to work as housekeeper to the greatest American socialite of them all–Mrs Grace Vanderbilt. Wrest Park was just one episode in a colourful career, imparted to the young Ross through well-oiled anecdotes. He remembered her fondness for practical jokes, and the way she ‘trotted round London with her handbag’ (crocodile skin; a gift from Jackie Kennedy). She smoked Cuban cigars. She could drink a man under the table. She was, in later life, deeply into séances and spirit friends. At her funeral in 1985, two brigadiers were among the congregation. Hannah, in the eyes of her great-nephew, was ‘such good fun–not like a normal auntie’.
I set out to re-examine Hannah Mackenzie’s mysterious disgrace at Wrest Park Hospital during this febrile era for domestic service. ‘Settled Hannah’s “holiday”’, wrote her mistress disingenuously on the last day of August 1915. The house had become ‘dangerous and disorderly’: what exactly did this mean? Was Mrs Mackenzie a troublemaker? Or was she working in an impossible situation? Hannah’s experience and her disgrace were perhaps indicative of an old order crumbling. Up until now, the role of housekeeper had been straightforward, even prescriptive. From the Great War onwards it was not at all so. The war acted as a leveller of hierarchies, and with their collapse the function of domestic staff was no longer so clear-cut–nor did the old servile reflexes come so easily. When a great house changed its use as dramatically as Wrest Park, from indulgent weekend chateau to war hospital, the role of the upper servants became still more unfamiliar and insecure. Mistress vied with matron, who jostled with cook and housekeeper for ascendancy. The kitchen was renamed the ‘Commissariat Department’; military men attempted to take over the managerial role of the housekeeper. There was all to play for.
Wrest gained a reputation as the War Office’s best country-house base hospital. It patched up the bodies of some two thousand men, sending them back to the Front to fight again until a fire led to its premature closure in September 1916. It was a shipshape place of ruthless efficiency: of timetables, mass catering, delousing and rehousing. It ran like a machine. But it was also a place of knotty and impenetrable human relations. There was passion and hatred in play here at Wrest; chaos and disorder, along with the raw realities of war. At the heart of this tale are our housekeeper, Hannah Mackenzie, the maverick spinster aristocrat she served and the land agent who fell for her. It is also a story about Scots in exile. Intriguingly, the most famous writer of his time, J. M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan), was a benefactor and regular guest at Wrest. He was a friend of the family; was he also captivated by the housekeeper? Everything we know about Barrie and Hannah Mackenzie suggests that this was almost certainly the case.
II
All Expenses Will Be Borne By Lord Lucas
It is important, first of all, to explain the kind of household that Hannah Mackenzie was about to join, and the unusual brother and sister at its heart. Bron and Nan Herbert were not interested in running Wrest Park as their country seat. They were two young liberals, radical thinkers (albeit with large private incomes), uninterested in a life of idle privilege. Nor had they any interest in beautiful objects, social rituals or domestic hierarchies. Bron Herbert inherited the house in 1905 at the age of 29, along with the title 9th Baron Lucas and 5th Lord Dingwall, on the death of an effete maternal uncle. It was a house he didn’t want, and initially he didn’t know what to do with it.
There is an air of unreality to Wrest Park, an eighteenth-century-style French chateau built in the 1830s, marooned in the flat farmland of Bedfordshire some forty miles north of London. Built as a pleasure palace, occupied intermittently, the house and all its trappings seemed to belong to another era. Bron was looking forward; Wrest–beautiful, graceful, enchanted–was resolutely of the past. The new Lord Lucas dealt with his inheritance by loaning the pick of its art treasures to the National Gallery and leasing the house to the US Ambassador, who triumphed by enticing King Edward VII to stay in July 1909.
‘Down to Wrest’, wrote Lord Lucas’s sister Nan in her diary in August 1909,
where we wandered about the incomparable gardens and through the empty house, which is filled with all the knick-knacks and little personal belongings and ghosts of two generations ago. How gloriously and selfishly absorbed our grandparents were in their possessions–and what would they have said could they have seen us–Bron a Radical and I a ‘Swabby’ (as he calls me!)–as their heirs!
(A swabby was a sailor.) When the US Ambassador Whitelaw Reid died in 1912, Wrest Park lay empty, apart from the odd ‘gay weekend’ for brother, sister and their witty, smart, bohemian circle, ‘taking the chef and extra staff with us’.
What was the point of these huge houses and their estates? Nan and Bron were no longer sure. Britain was changing. In 1909 the Liberal Chancellor Lloyd George proposed his ‘People’s Budget’ with the express intent of redistributing wealth. There was to be a supertax for the wealthy, increased land tax and inheritance tax–which would in part fund unemployment benefit, pensions and health insurance. The latter reached an unwelcome tentacle into the private world of mistress and servant. Out of the ninepence per week this insurance would cost, the employer would pay twopence and the employee twopence.
Then came the war. ‘It is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault’, wrote the new King George V in his diary on the night of 4 August 1914. ‘Please God it may soon be over & that He will protect dear Bertie’s life.’1 Bertie was the Duke of York, a teenaged midshipman in the navy. ‘First and foremost–keep your heads’, advised The Times two days later. ‘Be calm. Go about your ordinary business quietly and soberly. Do not indulge in excitement or foolish demonstrations.’ Finally, ‘Explain to the young and ignorant what war is, and why we have been forced to wage it.’ This, presumably, included one’s servants.
The outbreak of war, as experienced through the newspapers by those who lived ‘in the securities of England’, seemed ‘immeasurably remote from the real green turf on which one walked’, wrote housekeeper’s son H. G. Wells, now 47 and the literary celebrity of his day. His novel Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) tells us how the first two years felt for an upper-middle-class ho
usehold in rural Essex. It became one of the most popular novels of the Great War. Britain had not been at war like this for three hundred years, Wells reminds the reader. War ‘was a thing altogether outside English experience and the scope of the British imagination’.2 For the first two months Mr Britling was like an ‘excited spectator at a show, a show like a baseball match’. It was as if these large estates throughout Britain had been waiting for this awful, yet rather wonderful moment. At last they could prove their usefulness. When Germany invaded Belgium, the gentry rushed to offer their houses to refugees. ‘There was something like competition among the would-be hosts’, writes Wells; ‘everybody was glad of the chance of “doing something”, and anxious to show these Belgians what England thought of their plucky little country.’
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, the 5th Duke of Sutherland launched an appeal for country houses where wounded soldiers could convalesce. Two hundred and fifty homes were offered almost immediately, among them some of the country’s greatest landmarks–Dunrobin Castle in Scotland, Highclere Castle in Hampshire, Harewood House and Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, Leeds Castle in Kent, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. It was brilliantly obvious to Bron what he should do: Wrest Park was to become a hospital. With this masterstroke he was able to transform his millstone inheritance into something active and useful. His energetic sister Nan would run it for him; their great friend J. M. Barrie wanted to be involved, too.
