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The servants' hall: A domestic history of Erddig
Life in a squire's household from the 18c to the present day. Illustrated with black-and-white period photographs.
- GenresHistory
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 6, 2025
If he had differentiated the Simons and the Philips it would have been 5 stars because sometimes I genuinely did not know what was going on
August 9, 2024
I’ve not seen a single episode of Downton Abbey – I’m a republican and a socialist, and am far more interested in the lives of working class people than the aristocracy.
This book about Erddig, a country house rather than a stately home, with particular reference to the people who worked for the Yorke family, would therefore have interested me in any case, but I have especially fond memories of my stay there, and I have loved every moment of reading Merlin Waterson’s account.
Erddig, a house which is now National Trust property, was in the late 1960s inherited by my father’s old pal Philip Yorke. Phil and Dad were in rep together in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after Dad left RADA in 1926, and went off touring round Britain with small fit-up theatre companies. When Phil’s older brother died, leaving him with enormous death-duties, he moved back to Erddig with another old bachelor, Uncle Hoo-Ha (the erstwhile actor Bertram Heyhoe), using the old Servants’ Hall for meals and abstemious living.
Phil invited Dad to come up for holidays, so my parents, together with the ‘lower division’ of their eight children, motored up to Wrexham in the family charabanc (one of Dad’s many old bangers, in this case a Commer Camper). Erddig was heaven for children, especially ones like myself who had devoured CS Lewis’s Narnia stories, E Nesbit’s tales about the Bastable children, Enid Blyton’s adventure stories, George McDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, A Little Princess etc.
Simon Yorke, Philip’s brother, had also been unmarried and something of a recluse, and Erddig Hall had barely altered since they were boys. There was no electricity, and all kinds of Heath Robinson contraptions that Phil had improvised - including a burglar alarm underneath a carpet on the stairs to entrap creeping burglars in the night.
There was a cabinet of curiosities in one of the ground-floor rooms - a huge museum-case filled with all kinds of exotic things brought back from foreign travels - skulls, weapons, natural history collections - but really the whole house was a giant cabinet of curiosities. We were allowed to roam freely, from the attic bedrooms where the servants had slept, the chapel with its pews and stained-glass windows, to the salons with their Gainsborough portraits. Down in the Butler’s Pantry, above the long wooden table where we ate, was a circle of Wilkinson’s swords, ready for the defence of the house. I once found an ornate invitation to Princess Victoria’s birthday party next to a pack of castrating rings for lambs. Phil had a passion for collecting things, until, he said, they got too expensive. These included horses (he had three ponies, all very naughty, who he allowed local children to ride), musical instruments (some marvellous contraptions involving handles, a wax cylinder on which we could hear the long-dead Caruso, a huge organ, and his own musical saw, on which, at a boy-scout bonfire in the garden, he played while Dad accompanied him on the ukulele) and bicycles (Phil would demonstrate the penny-farthing, at alarming speed, on the drive). In an upstairs gallery there was a huge doll’s house and rocking-horse. Part of the stables was home to a dusty, cobwebbed collection of old carriages, both horse-drawn and motorised.
Like I said, childhood heaven! I’ve been back to Erddig since, and I’m sure Phil must have been very happy before he died to have seen it so sympathetically restored, but I must confess to a twinge of nostalgia for the muddled, wild, dusty, unpeopled house we explored as children.
This book about Erddig, a country house rather than a stately home, with particular reference to the people who worked for the Yorke family, would therefore have interested me in any case, but I have especially fond memories of my stay there, and I have loved every moment of reading Merlin Waterson’s account.
Erddig, a house which is now National Trust property, was in the late 1960s inherited by my father’s old pal Philip Yorke. Phil and Dad were in rep together in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after Dad left RADA in 1926, and went off touring round Britain with small fit-up theatre companies. When Phil’s older brother died, leaving him with enormous death-duties, he moved back to Erddig with another old bachelor, Uncle Hoo-Ha (the erstwhile actor Bertram Heyhoe), using the old Servants’ Hall for meals and abstemious living.
Phil invited Dad to come up for holidays, so my parents, together with the ‘lower division’ of their eight children, motored up to Wrexham in the family charabanc (one of Dad’s many old bangers, in this case a Commer Camper). Erddig was heaven for children, especially ones like myself who had devoured CS Lewis’s Narnia stories, E Nesbit’s tales about the Bastable children, Enid Blyton’s adventure stories, George McDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, A Little Princess etc.
Simon Yorke, Philip’s brother, had also been unmarried and something of a recluse, and Erddig Hall had barely altered since they were boys. There was no electricity, and all kinds of Heath Robinson contraptions that Phil had improvised - including a burglar alarm underneath a carpet on the stairs to entrap creeping burglars in the night.
There was a cabinet of curiosities in one of the ground-floor rooms - a huge museum-case filled with all kinds of exotic things brought back from foreign travels - skulls, weapons, natural history collections - but really the whole house was a giant cabinet of curiosities. We were allowed to roam freely, from the attic bedrooms where the servants had slept, the chapel with its pews and stained-glass windows, to the salons with their Gainsborough portraits. Down in the Butler’s Pantry, above the long wooden table where we ate, was a circle of Wilkinson’s swords, ready for the defence of the house. I once found an ornate invitation to Princess Victoria’s birthday party next to a pack of castrating rings for lambs. Phil had a passion for collecting things, until, he said, they got too expensive. These included horses (he had three ponies, all very naughty, who he allowed local children to ride), musical instruments (some marvellous contraptions involving handles, a wax cylinder on which we could hear the long-dead Caruso, a huge organ, and his own musical saw, on which, at a boy-scout bonfire in the garden, he played while Dad accompanied him on the ukulele) and bicycles (Phil would demonstrate the penny-farthing, at alarming speed, on the drive). In an upstairs gallery there was a huge doll’s house and rocking-horse. Part of the stables was home to a dusty, cobwebbed collection of old carriages, both horse-drawn and motorised.
Like I said, childhood heaven! I’ve been back to Erddig since, and I’m sure Phil must have been very happy before he died to have seen it so sympathetically restored, but I must confess to a twinge of nostalgia for the muddled, wild, dusty, unpeopled house we explored as children.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews