Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  By contrast, Almina was thrilled when David Campbell turned up on her doorstep at Bryanston Square. She had not heard from him since he left Highclere. ‘She gave me a terrific welcome,’ he wrote, and then she whirled him upstairs to show him round her wonderful hospital and meet all the patients. She was thrilled that he had been awarded the Military Cross and made him promise to come again the following week so she could spoil him and take him out to lunch.

  16

  The Promised End

  Highclere in 1917 echoed with ghosts. It was virtually shut up; Lady Evelyn was the only member of the family still spending most of her time at the house. Lord Carnarvon was back and forth between London and the Castle, depending on the state of his health and the need to work on estate matters. Almina hated to leave Bryanston Square unattended, but she fretted about her daughter and popped down for the odd weekend to be with her.

  Eve missed Porchy and was lonely and unsure of herself; she was sixteen years old with a sense of waiting for her life to start that was exacerbated by the nation’s endless suffering. The house felt sad without the bustle of the hospital, which Eve had enjoyed, and although she was naturally inclined to work hard on her lessons, it was difficult to feel confident about a bright future. The old path for a girl in her position – the debutante season that would lead to making a good marriage – was something of a sideshow compared to the trauma the country was experiencing. Eve looked forward anxiously to her trips to town and her parents’ visits, and devoured the letters from her brother that connected her to a bigger world.

  When her father was at the Castle they dined together in the State Dining Room, seated below the Van Dyck portrait of Charles I on horseback. The wonder of a house like Highclere is that, although change rages around it, its physical fabric stays so recognisable. There is a comfort in the way so many things endure. Eve might have been lonely sometimes, but she could never feel completely lost when she was at home in the house she had lived in all her life, a house that was a monument to her family’s permanence.

  Eve and her father had always been devoted to one another and now their conversations about estate business, the war and the hospital brought them even closer together. Lord Carnarvon was desperate to get back to Egypt and resume his life’s work, and Eve, who was as fascinated by the elegance of Ancient Egyptian art as her father, loved to listen to his plans for resuming the excavations. There was sporadic news from Howard Carter, who had reported for duty in Cairo and been assigned to the Intelligence Department of the War Office. He wrote to tell Lord Carnarvon that he had been able to undertake some clearing work in the Valley of the Kings, but there could be no real progress until the war was won.

  One topic that, given his instinctive reticence, Lord Carnarvon probably chose not to discuss with Eve was his concern to avoid giving up any of the land at Highclere to the government. Since 1916 there had been a policy of land requisition, with compensation for owners, so that more food could be produced. But Lord Carnarvon found the official agricultural policies absurd. He had written to his sister in December 1916, ‘Most of the agricultural schemes I see mooted are too foolish for words. As if you could sow wheat on commons in that casual way.’ He was doing everything he could to keep enough men at Highclere for the farm to continue to function, and was convinced that this would be a more efficient way to maximise output than handing over land to be farmed by strangers on behalf of central government. Carnarvon had asked his long-serving agent, James Rutherford, to write to the authorities to request a dispensation for Blake, the head gardener, removing his obligation to volunteer. ‘It is far more important that the Hospital should continue to be supplied with fruit and vegetables than that Blake should be put to some unsuitable form of labour.’

  Aubrey and Mary were occasional visitors to Highclere and Eve looked forward especially eagerly to their arrival now that she was a teenager and often starved of company. Aubrey had always been a favourite of both his niece and nephew and they adored him, but his elder brother was troubled by some of the conversations that went on around the dining-room table. Politics could not be kept off the agenda when Aubrey was around and his views were becoming more and more controversial. He was increasingly voting with the Labour Party and the pacifists in the House of Commons. Mary cautioned him that Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper baron who owned both The Times and the Daily Mail, had a habit of destroying the reputations of men like Aubrey. Look at Lord Lansdowne, who had been vilified for writing that ‘the prolongation of the war [would] spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it.’

  But if ever there was a time for the pacifist position to be taken seriously, it was the second half of 1917. The Allies’ prospects were worsening by the day. Field Marshal Haig was insistent that the Germans were on the brink of collapse and that the war of attrition was working, but that simply wasn’t borne out by results. In reality the Germans benefited hugely from two developments. Firstly, they managed to knock Italy out of the conflict in just two months through superb logistical management, and thereby prop up the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire a little while longer. Then, in December, the demoralised and defeated Russians sued for peace. Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states were all turned into a German protectorate and forty German divisions could be transferred from the Eastern to the Western Front. The Central Powers believed the end was in sight. They were to make one last huge effort to break through on the West and defeat the Allies. Morale in England could not have been lower. Eight hundred thousand British soldiers were killed or injured in 1917.

  The end of the year saw inches’ worth of ground gained and then lost, a depressing back and forth across the bog that had been northern France. The British Army’s attack at the Battle of Cambrai utilised tanks as well as a lighter, more mobile artillery, and was planned with the benefit of aerial reconnaissance. Initial gains couldn’t be held, though, and the British were fought back by German storm troopers.

  At the same time as the deadly dance on the Western Front was claiming more lives, Lord Porchester was rejoicing over the telegram for which he had been waiting almost a year. The 7th Hussars were being sent to fight the Turks. Mesopotamia had claimed the lives of thousands of British and Indian men after the humiliating siege of Kut al-Amara, but the pressing need to defend the oil fields hadn’t abated, and since then there had been a change of fortunes. Two hundred thousand men deployed to the region had succeeded in taking Baghdad in March 1917. Porchy was going to join a brigade of reinforcements who were needed to respond to the rumoured counterattack from the Ottoman Army.

  The war in Arabia was the last campaign in which there could still conceivably be a role for the cavalry. Only a few months beforehand, Field Marshal Haig had finally given up on his cherished urge to deploy them against the German trenches, when he had ordered a mounted unit to wait for a breakthrough at Passchendaele and then rush through the lines to attack. The breakthrough never came, the horses churned the ground to even stickier mud and the plan to use the cavalry in France was at last abandoned. But the desert sands of the Middle East were very different: there were no heavily defended trenches to contend with. Porchy’s regiment joined a force being shipped from India over to Basra and from there they began the 500-mile march on Baghdad.

  The troops’ enthusiasm for finally seeing some action evaporated almost instantly in the ferocious heat. Even as they set off, Porchy and his men heard that there had been 360 deaths from heatstroke the previous day. It was blisteringly hot by day, freezing by night, and dysentery, malaria and sand-fly fever were rampant.

  Allied High Command were proved right about the usefulness of highly trained men and horses, though. One band of men rode hard into the desert away from the Euphrates to cut off the flank of the Ottoman Army, and Porchy and his men mounted an ambush on the Aleppo road to pick up the Turkish forces as they retreated. It all worked exactly as planned, and the Ottoman 50th Division was
defeated. But, even in the midst of this low-casualty success, a boy’s own adventure compared to the slaughter in France and Belgium, there was horror. Porchy came upon a cave in the hills of the desert in which an entire Arab village had taken shelter from the conflict. They had been completely cut off by the Ottoman Army and hundreds of people had starved to death. At first he thought there was no one left alive, that the cave was full of emaciated corpses, but then he saw that a few of them were still clinging on to life. The regiment of happy-go-lucky Anglo-Indians, who had been playing polo just two months before, were incredulous at the fate of these civilian men, women and children. When they desperately tried to feed the villagers their rations of condensed milk, it was more than the Arabs’ wasted frames could take. The last remaining survivors died in the soldiers’ arms.

  The war turned up suffering everywhere – there was a never-ending supply of it – but at Bryanston Square there was an enclave where it could at least be alleviated with expertise and patience, and in comfort. The contrast between what the men had seen and what they experienced under Almina’s care was almost surreal, like the sickening disconnection between starving villagers and condensed milk.

  Sidney Roberts was sent to Lady Carnarvon’s hospital from France with a shattered right leg. The orderly who dispatched him said he was sending him to Lady Carnarvon’s place ‘because they liked good surgical cases there.’ Sidney captured the oddness as well as the luxurious ease of life at ‘48’ perfectly when he wrote to thank Almina and told her what he particularly remembered. There was the exquisite breakfast in bed served by Almina’s butler, while the footman politely enquired not whether he would like to read a paper, but which paper he required first. Like so many of Almina’s correspondents, Sidney was obviously much cheered by the banter of the Irish nurses. Dr Johnnie had also made a great impression. He was undoubtedly an excellent doctor but apparently he never really got the hang of the X-ray machine. At Sidney’s first examination he turned various switches on and off in ‘an experimental way’ before saying brightly, ‘Well, the whole place will probably blow up. You don’t mind do you?’ It’s a good thing Sidney Roberts was inclined to laugh, because one can’t help thinking that some of Almina’s patients might have taken that quip rather hard.

  Sidney was out by Christmas 1917 and able to go back to his parents’ place in Worthing with his leg in a splint. Not all of Almina’s patients survived, though. Sid Baker arrived at Bryanston Square at about the same time as Sidney Roberts, but all Almina’s skill and nursing couldn’t save him. When he died he left a little daughter and his widow, Ruth, who wrote to thank Lady Carnarvon for not merely sending a beautiful wreath but actually attending his funeral. There is the familiar moving struggle to express limitless gratitude and appreciation. ‘I am unable to find words to express my thanks for your sweetness and kindness.’

  It was the end of the most terrible year. Battlefields all over the world were still filling up with corpses, and cities were acquiring more widows like Ruth. Whoever officially won the war, it was starting to feel impossible to establish what victory would look like. The moral and mental exhaustion was too great to allow any meaningful assessment.

  As the Carnarvons embarked on 1918, they had dramas of their own to focus on. In the middle of January, the Earl spent a morning out shooting with a friend and was just finishing lunch at the Castle when he was taken ill with agonising abdominal pain. Almina received the telegram at Bryanston Square and dropped everything to race down to Highclere, fetch her husband and bring him back to the hospital, where he was immediately operated on for appendicitis. Almina’s longstanding colleague, Sir Berkeley Moynihan, who had rushed to help, told Lord and Lady Carnarvon after the operation that with half an hour’s delay, the Earl might have died. Lord Carnarvon wrote to his sister Winifred to tell her what had happened and attributed his recovery to ‘the skill and devotion of my wife’.

  The Earl’s lucky escape had to be set against the loss of Alfred de Rothschild just three weeks later. The old man, who had never recovered his joie de vivre after the outbreak of war, had been getting frailer and frailer for years. He died on 31 January after a short illness. Almina was already exhausted, and had only just recovered her calm after her husband’s close-run thing. Now she was devastated. Lady Evelyn came to London the moment she heard the news and found her mother weeping uncontrollably at Alfred’s deathbed in Seamore Place.

  Alfred was buried with great ceremony at the Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery in north London the following day. His extraordinary generosity and boundless affection for his family had sustained Almina in the enviable position of being both well loved and also gifted with every material thing she desired. His loss was a terrible blow and was to have profound implications for Almina’s future life.

  Almina had lost her father, just barely saved her husband and had a son fighting in the Middle East to worry about. Once more she threw herself into her work; it was the best possible distraction. Lord Carnarvon remained in London until March, recovering from his operation and fretting about Porchy. Every time he received a scribbled message from him, he rushed round the corner to Winifred’s house to read it to his sister. He was also worried about Aubrey, whose record of voting with Labour had made him so unpopular with his Conservative constituency that he’d left the country for Italy and Albania, leaving Mary to deal with the fallout.

  The news from the Continent was all bad. The Central Powers judged that the time to secure a decisive victory was now, before the US troops could arrive in France in big enough numbers to make Allied victory all but inevitable. General Ludendorff planned a spring offensive for the Western Front, and threw every last resource into the battle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand men were made ready and on 21 March, vast quantities of artillery pounded the British positions. The German Army proceeded to advance forty kilometres and the British fell back to Amiens, retreating over the fields of the Somme that they had been inching across for the last three years. It was only when the landscape reasserted itself and the heavy German artillery became bogged down in the mud, that the offensive slowed. British reinforcements were sent in to Amiens in red double-decker buses and the two armies paused to assess.

  It was the biggest movement in any direction since 1914 and, with hindsight, the start of the end of the war, but it was also the end of Field Marshal Haig’s dominance. He placed himself under the command of an outstanding French General, Ferdinand Foch, and on 26 March, General Foch was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied forces.

  The Germans were still advancing and on 13 April Haig told his troops it was ‘backs against the wall’, urging every last man to ‘fight on to the end’. Everyone was praying that the US Army under General Pershing would deploy in time to give the Allied forces the boost they so desperately needed. The Germans lost at least 110,000 men at the Battle of the Lys, and the Allies even more. But by the end of April it became clear that the Germans were overextended and undersupplied. The British, for all that they had lost the ground they had spent years defending, had in fact conceded little more than a muddy swamp. By 29 April the extraordinary German advance was again temporarily halted. The outcome of the war was felt to hang in the balance. Both armies gathered their forces, called up more reserves, and then Ludendorff moved emphatically against the French, northeast of Paris at Aisne, catching them completely by surprise. The German Army reached the River Marne and Paris was within sight. Kaiser Wilhelm was elated – the Germans thought victory was near. Their elation was short-lived.

  The Battle of Château-Thierry on 18 July was a day of fighting as ferocious as anything that had been seen earlier in the war. But now, finally, the American Expeditionary Force had arrived: hundreds of thousands of untraumatised, well-rested men. It was a turning point. American machine gunners fought alongside French colonial troops from Senegal and beat the Germans back. At last the Allies had gained the initiative.

  Summer 1918 saw a series of strategic wins, but men kept
dying and Bryanston Square was still full to the rafters. Major Oliver Hopkinson of the Seaforth Highlanders was wounded for the third time in France in 1918, and to his relief it was serious enough for him to be evacuated back home. He had pleaded to be returned to Lady Carnarvon’s hospital. ‘If you knew what a difference it made to me the last time I went to France, knowing that if hit again I should have every chance of being under your special care …’ he wrote to Almina when he was discharged from the hospital for the last time.

  Almina became firm friends with some of the returning men and invited them to Highclere to take their convalescence there. Kenneth Harbord was with the Royal Flying Corps and had spent a month at Bryanston Square in 1916. British pilots in the First World War were incredibly lucky to survive being shot down because, unlike their German counterparts, they were not issued with parachutes. If they were hit they had no option but to try to land their plane safely. Many of them suffered horrific burns because the planes caught fire on the way down but they couldn’t bail out. Kenneth Harbord survived this ghastly Hobson’s Choice not once but twice. He had asked to be passed fit after his first crash landing and recovery, but he got shot down again and was back in Almina’s hospital at the end of 1917. He again recovered and Almina, who was deeply impressed by his bravery, invited him to spend the weekend at Highclere with Lord Carnarvon.

  Almina was naturally thinking of the good it would do Kenneth Harbord, but she was also worried about her husband. He was having a dreadful few months and needed cheering up in good company. His childhood friend Prince Victor Duleep Singh had died of a heart attack in June in Monte Carlo. Victor had been an immoderate eater all his life and by the end he was clinically obese. Lord Carnarvon was utterly cast low. He was also furious with Aubrey, who had got the Carnarvon name mixed up in a libel trial.