The German war plan demanded the overthrow of France within forty days. Berlin launched thirty-four infantry and five cavalry divisions westwards. The Belgians resisted bravely and managed to check the overwhelming German advance, but only for a time. Within a fortnight the fighting had displayed the terrible destructive force of modern industrial weapons, massed machine guns and gigantic artillery pieces.
In London Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum was appointed secretary of state for war on 5 August; he alarmed some of his colleagues in the War Cabinet when, contrary to the conventional wisdom, he warned that the war could be a long one. He insisted on keeping two divisions in Britain, against the threat of invasion.5 On 7 August Kitchener called for 100,000 volunteers. The response was instant. The Times reported, ‘The crowd of applicants was so large and so persistent that mounted police were necessary to hold them in check, and the gates were only opened to admit six at a time.’ Some 2,500 men a day were volunteering and in London a hundred men were sworn in every hour.6 When reports came back of Austrian atrocities in Serbia and of German atrocities in Belgium and France, opinion hardened.
The enthusiasm and eagerness to get to the Front were widely shared. One young aristocrat was ‘afraid of missing anything before the war was over’. Lord Tennyson, grandson of the poet, dressed and packed in feverish haste to get there on time.7 Many of those who were stationed around the Empire with their regiments felt they were missing the most important moment in their country’s – and their own – life. Families with landed estates sent their sons off to war and did everything they could to help their staff and their tenants do the same. Many landowners kept jobs open for men who volunteered, and allowed families to live rent free until their menfolk returned.
*
FOR ELIZABETH’S four surviving elder brothers – Patrick, Jock, Fergus and Michael – there was simply no alternative. Patrick was already in the Scots Guards, Jock and Fergus were in the Black Watch and Michael, who had just completed his first year reading agriculture at Magdalen College, Oxford, volunteered for the Royal Scots at once. He wrote to his mother, ‘It’s rather funny thinking of me as a soldier, I don’t quite feel one yet and I’m afraid I’ll never look the soldier Fergie looks.’8
Wars – even those expected to be short – add a sense of urgency. Marriages took place quickly all over the country. On 9 September Fergus wrote to his mother that he and his fiancée Lady Christian Dawson-Damer* had decided to get married the following week.9 Almost immediately afterwards there was a second family wedding – Jock married Fenella Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis.† Both bridegrooms then went off to join their regiments.
Elizabeth later recalled the thrill of those first days of anticipation and upheaval. Schoolroom routine collapsed and she remembered ‘the bustle of hurried visits to chemists for outfits of every sort of medicine and to gunsmiths to buy all the things that people thought they wanted for a war and then found they didn’t’.10 A week after her birthday and the declaration of war, she travelled up to Scotland as the family did every year in early August, to prepare for the Glorious Twelfth and the opening of the grouse season. This year was different. Gone were the convivial gatherings of the house party, the candlelit dinners, the songs around the piano, the hearty breakfasts, the assembly for shooting every day, the fierce but friendly cricket matches.
Like many great country homes, Glamis was at once converted for hospital use, receiving wounded or sick soldiers sent to convalesce after treatment at Dundee Infirmary. The great table was taken out of the dining room and beds were moved in. A nurse, Helen Anderson, was appointed to supervise medical care. Casualties were dispatched from Southampton to Dundee by train – a thirteen-hour journey – often wrapped only in blankets, their uniform cut away around their wounds.11 Many of the men had never seen such a place as Glamis, and they gazed at the great castle and grounds in astonishment. They were shown around and each given a white bed along the panelled walls of the dining room, as well as a nightshirt and a set of warm clothes.12
The billiard room became a collecting depot for winter clothing for soldiers and the billiard table was stacked with thick shirts and socks, mufflers, belts and sheepskins to be made into coats and painted with a waterproofing varnish. Official supplies, not least of greatcoats, lagged behind demand, and the Strathmores aimed to provide every man in the thousand-strong local Black Watch battalion with a sheepskin. Socks were packed with presents of cigarettes, tobacco, pipes or peppermints in the toe.13 As Elizabeth recalled, ‘during these first few months we were so busy knitting, knitting, knitting and making shirts for the local battalion – the 5th Black Watch. My chief occupation was crumpling up tissue paper until it was so soft that it no longer crackled, to put into the lining of sleeping bags.’14
Lord Strathmore too was involved in war preparations: as lord lieutenant of Forfarshire he chaired the local territorial defence associations, and was also charged with instructing farmers and landowners in the county what to do with their crops and livestock in case of invasion. This required caution, so as not to alarm people; there was already an atmosphere approaching paranoia, as reported by his daughter’s governess: ‘Mysterious lights have been seen all along this coast at night & cannot be traced. Forfar is supposed to be a hotbed of spies. Lady S is very funny. She heard that 2 Dundee butchers (I think it was) were willing to supply sheepskins for the famous coats at a reduced rate – one of them named Miller she said she would not employ as she suspected him of being a spy & wishing to ingratiate himself – & also that his name was in reality Müller!’15
*
WHILE ELIZABETH Bowes Lyon’s relations were each doing what they could for the war effort, one of the most significant events for her personally at this time was the arrival in the family of a new governess. Beryl Poignand was to be a friend, almost a co-conspirator, throughout Elizabeth’s teenage years and an important confidante thereafter.* Elizabeth’s letters to Beryl give not only a glimpse of the world in which she grew up, but also a unique insight into her character. She was a fine letter writer all her life and her personality – lively, kind, mischievous – sparkles across the folded pages in their small blue envelopes. Beryl’s own letters home provide further valuable information and a vivid picture of the family in wartime.
Miss Poignand’s appointment seems to have come about through a French ‘holiday governess’, Madeleine Girardot de Villers, whom Lady Strathmore had engaged to take over – temporarily, as they all thought – from Käthe Kübler in July 1914. Elizabeth evidently got on well with Mademoiselle Girardot. A sheaf of dictées in the Glamis Archives dating from August and September 1914 shows a diminishing number of mistakes, with increasingly pleased comments by the governess. To one of these Elizabeth added cheekily, ‘elle est la meilleure pupille que j’ai eue’.16
Madeleine Girardot had been a trainee teacher at the Maison d’Education de la Legion d’Honneur, the school founded by Napoleon for the daughters of members of the order, at Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris. There she had made friends with Beryl Poignand, a young Englishwoman who also taught at the school. Beryl, who was born in India in 1887, was the daughter of an Indian Army officer; the Poignand family claimed descent from a physician at the Court of Louis XVI who had fled to England. She had had a good education and, having returned from France in the summer of 1914, was now living with her recently widowed mother in Farnham in Surrey. It was probably at Madeleine Girardot’s suggestion that she wrote to Lady Strathmore offering her services as governess.
Lady Strathmore, struggling to balance the demands of two convalescent hospitals (she had set up another at St Paul’s Walden), four sons at the Front or about to set off, and a husband and two daughters for whom she had to maintain a home, was relieved. She replied to Beryl Poignand that she sounded very much like what she was looking for, ‘a lady who can teach and speak French and also able to teach English’, and asked if she would be prepared to come for a few months.17 The offer was accepted; L
ady Strathmore wrote again promising to order the necessary books from the Army & Navy Stores and added: ‘I do hope you will be happy here. Elizabeth is really a delightful companion – very old for her age – and very sensible. So that you will not have a child with you always.’18
Miss Poignand arrived at Glamis station from London one evening in late November 1914, and was shown to a spacious tower bedroom, with a fire burning brightly and supper awaiting her in the comfortably furnished schoolroom. ‘No electric light here – chiefly lamps everywhere & gas in the corridors,’ she reported to her mother. ‘It is an old place, you would love it, all nooks & corners & stairs up & down & long passages – many floors of stone of course.’19 Bathing arrangements were a matter of wonder after the more modest comforts of a villa in Farnham.
The maid brings in tea – lights my candles & goes off with my sponge & towels to a Bathroom some little way away – of which I think I have the sole use – to get to it I pass through a large bedroom & along a corridor & down a few stairs. Arrived there I find a huge hot bath set – the Bath is enormously deep – a large blanket spread on the ground & beside the Bath a carpeted step ladder by which one mounts in order to descend into the Bath. There is also a spray & douche apparatus.20
With her pupil there was an instant rapport. ‘I like Elizabeth very much & I think we shall be great friends,’ Beryl wrote. Their daily routine was quickly established: chapel – wearing the prescribed lace cap – and piano practice for Elizabeth, breakfast at 8.45, two hours of lessons followed by three-quarters of an hour out of doors and a further hour’s lesson before lunch. Then they were free to go out again until the last lesson from 4 to 5. There was family tea around a large table at 5, Elizabeth’s last meal – except for the occasional apple – until her bedtime at 8 p.m., after which Beryl was served her supper in the schoolroom. This was a mere four hours of lessons a day, and three on Saturday: it was probably at least an hour a day shorter than Fraulein Kübler’s timetable. Even so, it was a challenge for the new governess. Despite her immediate affection for Elizabeth, she worried that ‘it is not too easy teaching her. I have to make things as interesting as possible or she would easily get bored I think. She is intelligent – it is a wonder to me that she knows all she does – her education has been rather quaint.’21 Moreover, Lady Strathmore’s enthusiasm for a more rigorous academic education for her daughter was lukewarm. ‘I don’t know if very advanced mathematics are required for Elizabeth’s exam,’ she said to Beryl; ‘but I do not wish her to take anything very advanced. I am not a believer in very high mathematics for girls.’ Beryl was amused and relieved, since maths was not her own strong point. She reassured her employer that ‘ordinary Arithmetic’ was all that was required.22
Elizabeth enjoyed the new regime: three years later, looking back on ‘those happy days’, she described a typical day. The timetable has evolved a little, starting at 8 a.m. with a history lesson which is interrupted by the breakfast gong. Afterwards she and Beryl do some arithmetic, also interrupted, this time by Nurse Anderson, who comes rustling and panting up the stairs for a chat. This is followed by a trip down to the Oak Room for hot chocolate, biscuits and jokes, ‘the first & last manufactured by the Lady Rose Lyon’, and a walk through the pinetum. At lunch they ‘eat an ’orrid amount’, and go for another walk afterwards. Then ‘back to the schoolroom for a bit. Eat enormous quantities of Vida bread, at tea, & a few “plaisanteries” with Mike.’ After tea, she added innocently, ‘I sleep before the fire while Medusa [her nickname for Beryl] reads about Queens of England.’ Then they would visit the soldiers’ ward for a lively game of whist before supper, and eventually ‘wander bedwards, tired, but let us hope happy!!!’23
Beryl Poignand noted her pupil’s liveliness and quick interest in the world about her. When the newspapers arrived in the morning, Elizabeth ‘simply pounced’ on the Daily Mail, provided for her personally. Her loving relationship with her parents was plain to see: they were devoted to her, and she was very attentive to both of them. The governess’s letters home paint an appealing portrait of Lord Strathmore as a gentle, humorous man who was immensely fond of his children and grandchildren, ‘especially of E. who is very sweet with him, always looking round to see if he wants anything – & lighting his cigarettes etc’. He was occasionally querulous, a characteristic which Beryl observed that his family ignored; but like many fathers of the less domineering sort, he was used to that. ‘No one ever communicates with me unless they want to be paid something,’ he was once heard to say. There was nothing stiff or pompous about him or his wife. ‘He always arrives late for meals, & consequently is miles behind everyone else – if the footmen have left the room he sometimes asks Lady S. to throw him some pudding & if the sweet is a “dry” one she throws it across the table & he catches it in his hands or on his plate or sometimes doesn’t catch it at all.’24
Lady Strathmore emerges from Beryl’s letters as the hub of the family, energetic and admirably generous in her provision for the convalescent soldiers. She and her daughters dressed very simply, Lady Strathmore mostly in black ‘with lace ruffles’, while Rose wore a white silk blouse and a tweed walking skirt with a golf jacket. Elizabeth’s usual garb was a navy-blue dress with a white yoke and cuffs, often with a jacket like her sister’s. There was no need, Beryl assured her mother, for smart clothes at Glamis.25
Letters arrived sporadically from the two Bowes Lyon sons at the Front. One beautiful November morning when the sun sparkled on a thick frost at Glamis, Beryl recorded that Lady Strathmore had heard from Patrick and Jock in northern France, where the 5th Battalion The Black Watch had just come under fire. They had taken German trenches but had not advanced. A fortnight later Jock wrote again: they usually spent three days and nights in the trenches, or longer if the firing was lively, before being relieved, which meant walking nine miles back out of enemy artillery range before they could have any rest. He had not seen a mattress since leaving Dundee, he said. Sleep was impossible at the Front: as an officer he had to remain alert, for they were barely 200 yards from the German lines. Another letter spoke of the intense cold, of the slimy mud in the trenches, and of Jock’s bitter disappointment to find that some of the cooked pheasants his mother had sent him had been badly packed and had rotted before arrival. The Glamis cook at once set to work preparing more.26
Fergus, by now a captain, was still at Aldershot, where he had been sent at the beginning of the war to train new recruits in the 8th Battalion The Black Watch; it was not until the spring of 1915 that he went with the battalion to France. Michael’s reserve battalion of the Royal Scots had at first been sent to Weymouth; in November they were suddenly moved to Sunderland and ordered to dig trenches. At Glamis the family could only suppose there was an invasion scare. In December he was sent to France, not to the Front but to Rouen, whence he dispatched cheerful letters home. It was a beautiful city full of fine churches, he wrote; but he had no intention of entering any of them, having had far too much sightseeing forced on him by his mother and sister Rosie in the past. He had been given the task of censoring soldiers’ letters home, and quoted some of them: ‘P.S. please excuse writing but I am rather drunk’; ‘What is Tom a’doin’ – ’as ’e ’listed or is ’e a coward – or is ’e after Nell – ’cos if so tell ’im I’ll break ’is d— neck when I come back.’27
Elizabeth was still in touch with Fraulein Kübler. Her former governess sent her a long letter from Belgium, where she was nursing German soldiers. She was convinced that her country’s cause was a righteous one and that the Kaiser had done all he could to stop the war.28 Elizabeth seems not to have been impressed; her new governess recorded that she wanted to give up her German lessons and learn Russian instead, a wish frustrated by Beryl’s ignorance of that language.29*
It was now clear that the war would not be over by Christmas. Young British women also wanted to play their part, and Elizabeth’s sister Rose decided to train as a nurse. She enrolled at the London Hospital, which was off
ering three-month courses, and left Glamis in early January 1915 to join several of her friends training in the capital.
At the end of its first year, the convalescent hospital at Glamis was commended for its good work, especially with men suffering from shattered nerves. It was run with the minimum of regulations – ‘this hospital treated its inmates neither as prisoners nor as children, but as privileged guests.’30 Several were Highlanders, young and shy; one who had barely spoken a word had a visit from his sister: ‘the nurse said he was so pleased & his eyes filled with tears when he knew she was coming,’ Beryl wrote to her mother.31 Those members of the family who were there ‘contended with one another to make the wounded soldiers feel at home’. One of their patients told a visitor, ‘my three weeks at Glamis have been the happiest I ever struck. I love Lady Strathmore so very much on account of her being so very like my dear mother, as was; and as for Lady Elizabeth, why, she and my fiancay are as like as two peas!’32
Lord Strathmore found it harder to make contact with the soldiers: ‘he is terribly shy,’ Beryl Poignand commented; but after a few days he was talking animatedly to those with whom he had a cavalry background in common. ‘Today he very politely (Elizabeth says) introduced himself to the 5th Dragoon … Elizabeth is very funny about him & takes him off sometimes – quite nicely of course – she is devoted to her parents.’33
In this environment most of the soldiers quickly relaxed; they explored the Castle and its grounds, they were taken for outings in the motors, attended the chapel, played billiards and gathered around the piano singing heartily. Until she departed, Rose played such favourites as ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You’ or ‘The Sunshine of Your Smile’.34 One evening Rose dressed David up in her own clothes, with a hat and a thick veil, and introduced him to the soldiers as her cousin. He played the gracious lady so successfully that the deception was complete. When the soldiers discovered their mistake there was much mirth, and serious danger that future lady visitors would be greeted with guffaws of ‘I know you!’ After Rose left for London a gramophone was acquired for the men, but it was considered a poor substitute for her piano playing.35
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