Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

Of all the owners, the most tiresome was the fifth Baron Penrhyn. At his immense, neo-Norman castle in North Wales the largest pictures had been stored in the garages, which still had the big doors needed for horse-drawn carriages and could take in even the tallest – Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I on horseback, which is thirteen feet high – but some of the smaller canvases had been stacked on edge in the dining room and elsewhere. The castle was felt by many visitors to be pulsating with ghosts – sinister dark shapes flitting along corridors, sensations of icy cold in some rooms – and perhaps it was these that drove his lordship to the bottle. At any rate, the National Gallery staff found him insufferable – witness a letter from Martin Davies to Kenneth Clark, his Director in London, written in the spring of 1940:

  For your most secret ear: one of our troubles at Penrhyn Castle is that the owner is celebrating the war by being fairly constantly drunk. He stumbled with a dog into the Dining Room [where 200 pictures were stored] a few days ago; this will not happen again. Yesterday he smashed up his car, and, I believe, himself a little, so perhaps the problem has solved itself for the moment.

  Friction with the owners was disagreeable, but infinitely more dangerous was the swift advance of Hitler’s armies to the Channel coast in the summer of 1940. All at once German bombers, flying from captured airfields, became able to reach any part of the United Kingdom. Even North Wales might not be safe, for Liverpool and Manchester were high among the Luftwaffe’s targets. A new plan was suggested: that the National Gallery’s pictures should be evacuated to Canada – but Clark disliked the idea, because so many ships were being sunk by U-boats in the Atlantic; and when he put the proposal in a memorandum to the Prime Minister, it was roundly dismissed. Back came a note in red ink, the same day: ‘Bury them in the bowels of the earth,’ wrote Churchill, ‘but not a picture shall leave this island. W.S.C.’

  The only way to render works of art impervious to bombs was to store them underground, and a search for possible sites in tunnels, caves and mines brought up two leading contenders: Westwood, an immense, disused stone quarry south of Bath, and Manod, an old slate quarry far to the north in the wilds of Snowdonia.

  Part of Westwood had already been cleared of rubble and used as a mushroom farm, but now a separate area of 25,000 square feet was developed to make a secure repository for objects from the British Museum and the V & A. The stone walls were treated with a sealing compound to repel damp, and air conditioning was installed to maintain the correct degree of humidity. Persistent stories claimed that the Crown Jewels were stored at Westwood, but the rumour has never been confirmed, and the jewels’ wartime whereabouts have never been revealed. From the V & A came carpets, tapestries, furniture and a large collection of watercolours. The Elgin Marbles had already been consigned to the obsolete Aldwych tube tunnel in central London, but many of the British Museum’s other priceless artefacts went to Westwood, including Greek and Roman statues; and at one point J. C. Gadd, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities, amused himself by inscribing on the wall of his office a memorial in cuneiform, which, being translated, read:

  In the year of our Lord 1942

  The Sixth year of George, King of all lands,

  In that year everything precious,

  The works of all the craftsmen

  Which from palaces and temples

  Were sent out, in order that by fire

  Or attack by an evil enemy they might not be lost,

  Into this cave under the earth

  A place of security, an abode of peace,

  We brought them down and set them.

  Of all the sites chosen, the most impregnable was the Manod slate quarry in Snowdonia, with its entrance 1700 feet up on the slopes of Manod Mawr, approached by a narrow road that wound up for four miles through the mountain wilderness. Nearly a hundred years earlier, a horizontal level, or entrance tunnel, had been driven through layers of hard slate rock, and inside a series of huge caverns had been excavated, some of them 100 feet high, protected by a natural roof of rock nearly 300 feet thick. One of the chambers was so vast that it was nicknamed ‘the Cathedral’.

  An immense amount of work was needed to make the quarry suitable for its new role, the first task being to increase the size of the entrance from a six-foot square to an opening thirteen feet six inches high by ten feet wide. Inside, the floor was levelled by removing 5000 tons of slate rock, and the headroom of the entrance tunnel was increased to allow lorries to drive in for a quarter of a mile to a transit shed.

  Outside the mine, one essential modification was made to a railway bridge near what Clark called ‘the hellish town of Blaenau Ffestiniog’, once the Slate Capital of Wales, where the surface of the road had to be lowered by two and a half feet so that lorries carrying the biggest pictures could pass beneath the arch. What looked at first like a simple task – the cutting away of some rock – turned out to be more complicated, as the pillars of the bridge were found to be resting on shale, and deep concrete footings were needed to support them.

  After various delays, the refurbishment of the mine was not completed until the beginning of August 1941, and only then did the first pictures arrive, brought by lorry from their temporary resting places in Bangor, Caernarvon and Aberystwyth. Photographs show the immense triangular crate known as ‘the Elephant Case’, containing Charles I on Horseback and The Raising of Lazarus, poised precariously on the back of an ancient looking truck as it crawls through the stony wilderness. In spite of the alterations to the Ffestiniog railway bridge, the crate jammed on the underside of the arch, and the driver had to reverse and make another approach. Only when he let down all his tyres did the irreplaceable cargo squeeze past – as Clark himself described it, ‘grinding under, scraping over, the huge packing case passed through’. On the final approach, up the narrow road, precise timing of journeys was needed, for there were no passing places, and if two heavily laden vehicles had met head-on, one of them might have had to back for miles.

  Inside the mine, paintings were unloaded from lorries in the transit shed and moved to their assigned places along a narrow-gauge railway by men pushing and pulling high-sided wagons or a specially built bogie seventeen feet long. Because the mine was exceedingly damp, six separate brick buildings with concrete roofs had been constructed inside it to house the pictures, each with its own air conditioning to control temperature and humidity. The system was primitive: electric fans blew air over trays of dehydrated silica gel, which absorbs moisture, and when the trays became saturated, they were taken away and dried out in a row of domestic electric ovens. Laborious though it was, the process effectively prevented the growth of mould, and the inner buildings were maintained at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit and 42 per cent humidity – an atmosphere which proved as good as that in the National Gallery itself. Since oil paint and tempera tend to degenerate if deprived of light, low-level illumination had to be maintained for twenty-four hours a day, and a powerful diesel generator proved a crucial back-up investment, as the mains electricity often failed in bad weather.

  The main drawback of the air conditioning was that the reduction in humidity threatened to destabilize the roofs of the caverns, which were inspected frequently by safety men who went up long, extending ladders kept in position by other workers holding ropes, and tapped at the rock with hammers. The sound revealed the state of the roof at that point: if tapping produced a hollow sound, it meant that the area was unstable – in which case loose rock could be dislodged deliberately, or holes could be drilled and the dangerous area pinned to firmer rock above, with chains slung beneath suspect patches to give further protection.

  In spite of constant vigilance, on 9 March 1943 a heavy fall smashed through the rear wall of Building No. 2 and damaged some of its contents. ‘One Poussin torn but repairable stop,’ Davies cabled London. ‘One Ruisdael slightly damaged stop trivial scratches on three others stop building now being cleared of its contents stop.’ The incident alarmed officials of the National Gallery so much that
they prepared plans for removing the whole collection from the quarry; but they were reassured by positive reports from civil engineers. The pictures stayed put, and no more major rockfalls occurred.

  Throughout the rest of the war the Gallery maintained a staff of fifteen men at Manod, and two picture restorers worked away, cleaning and repairing, in a daylight studio constructed near the entrance to the mine. But the hero of the mine was Martin Davies, who, Kenneth Clark remembered,

  had always been a solitary character, and was said by his contemporaries in Cambridge to have emerged from his rooms only after dark; so this sunless exile was not as painful to him as it would have been to a less unusual man. In the morning he would emerge, thin and colourless as a ghost, and would be driven up to the caves, carrying with him a strong torch and several magnifying glasses. With these he would examine every square millimetre of a few pictures.

  The wisdom of moving the pictures to Wales was demonstrated again and again: between October 1940 and April 1941 the National Gallery was hit by bombs nine times, the worst attack coming on 12 October 1940, when high explosive destroyed the room in which paintings by Raphael had hung. In spite of the danger, the dauntless pianist Myra Hess gave lunchtime recitals which became immensely popular, creating an oasis of calm and beauty amid the horrors of war. One of her most enthusiastic supporters was Joyce Grenfell, who came to the Gallery again and again to make sandwiches for performers and audience alike.

  While the nation’s treasures went to ground in caves and cellars, many householders buried their own in garden, orchard or field. Like hundreds of others the Earl of Limerick (a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front in the First World War) became convinced that invasion was imminent and decided to safeguard some of the family’s valuables. At home in Sussex he and his wife, who was Deputy Chairman of the British Red Cross, wrapped necklaces, bracelets and rings in oilcloth, packed them in a small brass box and buried it one evening in a woodland garden several hundred yards from the house. To define the position of the cache he composed a verse which he made his son Patrick (then nine) and daughter Anne (seven) learn by heart:

  Young, by a roundish pond, a cypress stood;

  North-east its stream, and in a little wood

  East of this pond a dyke’s north end is seen –

  Eight yards north-east of this we all have been.

  A little bridge of sleepers lies across

  A winter runlet, twenty-four yards’ course.

  Due west of this our cypress lies, and there,

  At three feet south its foot, the ground is fair.

  Many months went by before the family returned in search of their jewels. In the summer of 1940 Patrick, Anne and their small brother Micky were packed off to stay with cousins in America, and they did not return to England until September 1943. The elder children remembered the poem, but it was only in the summer holidays of 1944, with all fear of invasion gone, that they returned to the hiding place. They were disconcerted to find that the young cypress had grown several feet in their absence, and that near it were signs of disturbance. But the digger turned out to have been only a rabbit, and they recovered their little hoard intact.

  Twelve

  White Elephants

  The stately homes of England

  How beautiful they stand,

  To prove the upper classes

  Have still the upper hand.

  Noël Coward, ‘The Stately Homes of England’

  While bombs hurtled down on cities and industrial sites, and battle raged in the sky above southern England, another long-drawn-out struggle was in progress – on the land – to save country houses, long regarded as one of the nation’s glories, which were in mortal danger.

  In 1914–18, when the average survival time of a subaltern on the Western Front in France was three months, the fighting had claimed the heirs apparent of countless estates. After the Great War such premature losses were compounded by ever-rising death duties, which rose to 40 per cent on estates worth over £200,000 in 1919, to 60 per cent in 1939, and to 90 per cent in the 1940s. These swingeing increases put landed owners under such strain that in the years between the wars the countryside became a white elephants’ graveyard, with houses being demolished or burnt down at a terrible rate. The Second World War inevitably accelerated the decline – and as Evelyn Waugh remarked in an introduction to Brideshead Revisited, ‘It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and despoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.’

  Big country houses, isolated from unwelcome contact with outsiders by their parks and surrounding estates, made ideal centres for clandestine military activities. During the mid-1930s the Government had carried out a covert survey of buildings that might be taken over for national use in the event of war; owners were not warned that their properties had been earmarked, and now, in 1939, many were given only a week’s notice to quit. Some, at their wits’ end in the search for money or servants, were positively glad when the Government requisitioned their homes for occupation by the army, the RAF, a Government Ministry, a hospital or a school evacuated from a danger area.

  ‘Even the most unmanageable white elephant of a mansion is now securely harnessed to the wartime machine,’ reported Country Life at the end of September. ‘Indeed, the more rooms and wings and outhouses a residence possesses, the more desirable it has seemed’ – an observation which made no acknowledgement of the fact that military personnel were usually careless and philistine, and often riotous after dinner, with a propensity for smashing up, or even setting fire to, their gracious accommodation.

  The most active predator was Special Operations Executive, known as SOE, the sabotage and guerrilla-warfare organization charged by Churchill with the task of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ by sending in men and women to train, arm and generally encourage resistance movements in occupied territories. For its own training establishments and experimental stations in Britain SOE took over so many country houses that its initials were soon said to stand for Stately ’Omes Executive.

  Most of the bases were in the Home Counties, and arguably the grandest was Audley End House, palatial home of the Braybrooke family near Saffron Walden, south of Cambridge. Now much reduced in size, but still vast, it was once a royal palace, owned from 1668 until 1701 by King Charles II, who valued it for its proximity to the races at Newmarket. In 1940 the eighth Lord Braybrooke suggested that the military might take it over, but his offer was rejected – only for the Government to requisition the house in March 1941. After being put to various other uses, it became STS 43, training headquarters for the Polish branch of SOE – and it was lucky to survive, for the Poles laid explosive booby traps all round the grounds – even going so far as to pack an Adam bridge with explosives – in case the enemy should make a sudden appearance.

  Nefarious activities flourished in and around numerous other large country properties. At Wanborough Manor, the Elizabethan country house on the Hog’s Back in Surrey (Special Training School No. 5), SOE recruits received their initial instruction, not least in unarmed combat and silent killing. Brickendonbury Manor in Hertfordshire became STS 17, a school for saboteurs. The eighteenth-century, redbrick Chicheley Hall (STS 46) in Buckinghamshire housed Czech trainee parachutists. At Brockhall (STS 1) in Northamptonshire the celebrated Sergeant Harry Court taught recruits how to maim rather than kill Germans, his point being that crippled enemy took more looking after than dead ones. Arisaig House in Inverness-shire (STS 21) specialized in Commando techniques, and at Station XV, the Thatched Barn, a mock-Tudor roadhouse at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, trainees were taught to make explosive devices such as bicycle pumps which blew up when used normally.

  All these establishments contributed powerfully to the Allied cause. Yet there were two country properties which did more than all the others to turn the tide of war. One was Danesfield House, which looks out over the Thames from a plateau above the river between Marlow
and Henley; and the other was Bletchley Park, in the gentle farming country of Buckinghamshire.

  Danesfield, a huge wedding cake of a building, described by one inmate as ‘a pretentious edifice of whitish-grey stone, with castellated towers and fancy brick chimneys’, was of little interest to organizations like the National Trust or the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings; for although its site had been inhabited since Neolithic times, the latest edifice was scarcely forty years old – a mock-Tudor mansion built at the turn of the century. But – after being briefly occupied by eighty boys evacuated from Colet Court school in London – in its role as the home of the RAF Intelligence Branch it played an absolutely vital part in the war.

  As RAF Medmenham (named after the nearest village) it became the centre of photographic interpretation, analysing film taken by high-flying Spitfires, Mosquito fighter-bombers and other aircraft, and from this evidence divining enemy plans and intentions. Work at Danesfield began on 1 April 1941 with the creation of the Central Interpretation Unit, which brought together most of the RAF’s aerial photo interpreters for the first time.

  At the end of each photographic sortie a ‘first phase’ examination of the material was made at the airfield where the reconnaissance plane had landed, to pick out anything of immediate importance; negatives and prints were then taken to the CIU, where photographic interpreters known as PIs examined them minutely through 3D spectacles, comparing them with older pictures in search of anything that had changed. The stereo photographic techniques used, together with the PIs’ own skilled observation, enabled them to glean an extraordinary amount of information from blurred images, many taken from 30,000 feet.

  As the unit’s role expanded in 1942 and 1943, wooden huts proliferated all over the Danesfield grounds: increasing numbers of the staff were American – some came from the Hollywood film studios – and on 1 May 1944 the establishment was renamed the Allied Central Interpretation Unit. Many of the newcomers were civilians – and many of the British girls were still in their teens or early twenties. Among the ablest was the journalist Constance Babington Smith, known to her colleagues as ‘Babs’, who before the war had written articles for Aeroplane magazine. In 1939 she joined the WAAF and was seconded to the ACIU, where she played a key role in identifying the role of the V-1 flying bomb experimental station at Peenemünde, off the north German coast.