Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Preparations in the villages were directed by the Local Defence Committee. A careful survey was taken of wells – sixteen in all: ‘In Mr Hudson’s kitchen garden, one well. Depth of well 45' 6". Depth of water 26' 6".’

  All local telephone numbers were listed, including that of Major His Grace the Duke of Beaufort, whose number was 2. A stock of food was earmarked for distribution in case of invasion. Lists were drawn up of tools ‘available for use’: spades, felling axes, cross-cut saws and pickaxes owned by individuals. A decontamination station was established in the Estate Yard, with separate rooms for males and females. In the fields stout poles were set upright in five-foot-deep holes to deter enemy pilots from trying to land. Arrangements were made for the burial of the dead. As for emergency accommodation – the Memorial Hall would be the first line, backed up by the school, churches and private houses.

  At the beginning of September the village had been deluged with refugee children from Birmingham – to the satisfaction of Queen Mary, who sent her niece to the school, suggesting that some of the older pupils might like to come and give her a hand with the gardening. They came, and evidently enjoyed themselves. When one, George Brown, had his head cut by a flying stone, the teacher’s report diplomatically ascribed the accident to ‘over-eagerness, as the boys were hurrying to complete their assignment of work [i.e., having an agreeable fight]’.

  On 9 July 1940 the school had a narrow escape, when bombs – presumably jettisoned by a fleeing Luftwaffe pilot – fell in the lane during lessons without exploding. One landed within thirty yards of the building, and the crater was immediately put out of bounds. Then another was found near the first. All the children were marshalled in the hall, where they sang, played games and recited poetry before being shepherded out in the evening. A report described their behaviour as ‘splendid throughout the day’. Much of the village was evacuated, but on the evening of the 11th the second bomb was removed, and people returned to their homes – only for two more unexploded bombs to be discovered, dug out and dealt with.

  The Badminton Village Club did what it could to ‘provide comfort, amusement and refreshment at the lowest possible cost’, not only for local people, but also for soldiers stationed nearby. At the end of October 1939 the committee invited men from the detachment of Royal Gloucestershire Hussars at Hedington Camp to consider themselves temporary members, and in April 1940 extended the invitation to the 8th Gloucestershire Regiment, from which 120 men were guarding Queen Mary. The staff of the searchlight unit at Little Badminton were also invited – NCOs first, then privates – and finally membership was opened up to members of the Queen Mother’s household, ‘owing to their prolonged stay in Badminton’.

  Queen Mary inevitably felt cut off from the rest of the royal family, and frustrated by her inability to help them with the war effort; but she was kept in touch by frequent letters from her daughter-in-law, the Queen, who, with her husband, King George, was showing remarkable courage and resilience in comforting victims of the Blitz.

  Unlike Hitler, who refused to visit ruined cities in spite of the exhortations of his acolytes, the royal couple moved freely about the country, and an appearance by them always had a miraculously cheering effect on people who had been bombed out of their homes. Wherever the King and Queen went, picking their way among the rubble of shattered buildings, they lifted morale by the warmth of their response and their direct contact with working-class families. By no means all their excursions were in or near London: they also went far afield, to Plymouth, Sheffield and even to Scotland. They themselves lived partly in Windsor Castle, partly in Buckingham Palace, but travelled widely in the royal train, in which they sometimes spent the night out in the country, parked in a cutting or tunnel safe from air attack. They also tended to sleep in the relative safety of Windsor and return to London early in the morning, to give the impression that for most of the time they were in the capital.

  After Christmas 1940 the royal family drove to Norfolk for a short holiday. At Sandringham the big house had been closed and surrounded by barbed wire, so they stayed at Appleton, a smaller house on the estate which was warmer and made more comfortable by the importation of carpets and furniture from Sandringham itself. Protected by an armoured-car unit and Bofors anti-aircraft guns, they were able to relax and enjoy themselves, and the King went shooting pheasants in the snowy woods.

  Norfolk always attracted them. One January afternoon they drove out to visit the RAF’s 167 Squadron at Ludham, on the airfield just north of the village, not knowing that a plane had just been scrambled to engage a marauding JU 88. Hardly had they arrived when Pilot Officer Code and Sergeant Nash landed, having shot the German down. Code was elated to have got his first victim – and the King was no less delighted.

  In letters to her mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth lamented the barbarity of the Germans and the destruction they were causing; but she also comforted the old lady by sending news of her granddaughters’ progress. The Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were living at Windsor, where they were being taught mainly by their governess, Marion Crawford (always known as ‘Crawfie’), who wrote often to report on the strides they were making, both with their lessons and with their general development. For history, Princess Elizabeth’s tutor was the austere Henry Marten, then in his seventies, who had taught at Eton for more than forty years (and in 1945 became Provost of the College). He had been lecturing boys for so long that sometimes he would say loudly to the Princess, ‘IS THAT QUITE CLEAR TO YOU, GENTLEMEN?’ He thought his royal pupil showed exceptional promise, and compared her favourably with Etonians a year older. Such news must have been welcome to Queen Mary, but unfortunately any replies she sent appear to have been destroyed.

  Around Badminton the old lady did much to raise morale by visiting local people, evacuees, army units, hospitals and industrial sites. The house and village survived the war largely unscathed, and the Queen Mother remained there throughout. No mention of her temporary home appeared in the press, but from occasional reports of her surfacing at events in Bath, Cheltenham, Dursley and Malmesbury, any intelligent person could have formed a good idea about where she was living. In August 1942 the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, visiting Balmoral, suggested that she might like to go and live in Canada until hostilities ceased; but, nervous though she was, she stayed put.

  By the time she returned to London in June 1945 she had come to love Gloucestershire. She gave carefully chosen presents to each of the nine heads of departments on the Badminton estate, told one of them how happy she had been, and left with tears in her eyes. She magnanimously agreed that the Duke should inherit the Aga cooker which she had installed in the kitchen, and he reciprocated by writing off the wear and tear of carpets and furniture incurred during her occupation. Yet no one could account for two boxes which were missing after her departure. ‘Stokes says the smaller toothpick box was locked up with the silver cups in the cupboard in the pantry,’ Lord Claud Hamilton, Comptroller to Queen Mary, told the Duke in a letter of 20 June 1945. ‘Of the larger racing-scene box, Copple says it was withdrawn early. Stokes does not remember seeing it.’

  Another great house which survived with minimal damage was Chatsworth, the palatial home of the Devonshire family near Bakewell in Derbyshire. Its escape was partly due to the foresight of the tenth Duke, who knew that the Government would certainly requisition the immense building – with its 175 rooms, 17 staircases, 359 doors and 1,704,000 cubic feet of living space – unless he found other worthy occupants first. Reckoning that schoolgirls would make far gentler tenants than soldiers, he offered the place to Penrhos College, a Methodist boarding school on the seafront in Colwyn Bay, which was about to be requisitioned as a temporary refuge for the Ministry of Food.

  When the headmistress, Miss E. L. Edman, went across to Chatsworth with a colleague to carry out a reconnaissance, they were both staggered by the splendour of the house and its surroundings. Set in a 3500-acre park laid out by Capability Brown, with the Riv
er Derwent winding lazily below, and the hills all round crowned by woods as far as eye could see, the huge building presided majestically on a gentle slope. But the visitors, though overwhelmed, were put at ease by the welcome they received from the Duke and Duchess, who seemed too human and sympathetic to be the real owners of such a place.

  With agreement reached, frantic preparations went ahead at both ends. The Devonshires moved out to live at Churchdale Hall, another of their houses. At Chatsworth carpets were taken up from corridors, the Yellow Drawing Room was stripped of furniture; silk-covered and panelled walls were boarded over, and some of the most valuable paintings – the Rembrandts, Poussins, Van Dycks, Reynoldses, Halses – were stacked against bookcases. The main rooms were cleared in eleven days, as were the relics of a party held to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the Marquess of Hartington (heir to the Dukedom).

  In Colwyn Bay a mass of furniture had to be loaded into lorries: chairs, desks, beds, mattresses, to say nothing of twenty-six pianos. On 26 September 1939 some 250 girls aged eleven to eighteen, together with thirty-six staff, set off in buses for Derbyshire.

  As another mistress, Nancie Park, remarked, ‘Great Britain was never invaded during World War II, but Chatsworth House most certainly was.’ The girls were temporarily dumbfounded by the first sight of their new home: one of them always remembered how fountains were playing, ‘the stone was lit up with sunshine, and the house smiled a glorious welcome’.

  Recovering the power of speech and movement, they swarmed into the building and soon occupied almost all of it except the Library. New arrangements fell quickly into place. Assembly, morning and evening chapel were held in the Painted Hall, which was also used as a cinema. Piano lessons took place in the Chapel. The Large Dining Room, State Drawing Room and State Bedroom all became dormitories; thirteen bathrooms, and a limited supply of hot water, enabled each of the new inmates to have two baths a week. ‘The loos,’ one girl recalled, ‘were marvellous, like thrones.’ Great care was taken to minimize damage: dustless chalk was used on blackboards; there were no inkwells, and only members of the VIth form were allowed fountain pens. Running indoors was a punishable sin.

  In the bitterly cold winter of 1939–40 the lake froze, and on 20 January there were forty degrees of frost. At least the girls could skate and toboggan, but snow lay late into the spring, and – in spite of central heating and coal fires in some of the rooms – most of the house was icy. The roof leaked, and the electricity kept failing. When coal ran short, the staff were given permission to saw up fallen trees in the park and burn the wood on the fires. Black knitted tights, known as ‘passion killers’, became indispensable. It was hardly the girls’ fault that, as twenty-one of them slept in the State Drawing Room, their breath produced so much condensation that fungus built up on the backs of pictures left hanging. Sometimes the cold drove the inmates to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places. One day later in the war, as the Dowager Duchess was showing some US servicemen round the house, she took them to see the four-poster in which King George II had died. The bed was covered with protective sheets, and when the Duchess drew them aside, she flushed out five girls snuggled underneath.

  Food was meagre. One pupil remembered how, after school lunch, she and her friends were so hungry that they fried sausages over a fire, then cooked some tomatoes, then ate bread and fish paste. Another time a girl somehow acquired a can of baked beans, but, lacking a tin opener, in a fit of frustration threw her trophy into the fire, where it soon exploded, blasting super-heated tomato sauce over anybody in reach.

  In summer things were easier. Peggy Bennett, games mistress, became an ace at handling the thirty-inch Ransome automatic mower, and so enabled the girls to play tennis on eight courts marked out on the South Lawn. Lacrosse and athletics took place on the cricket pitch, but if games were cancelled because of bad weather the girls were obliged, for exercise, to walk up to the Hunting Tower, a turreted folly 400 feet above the house, built on the escarpment in the sixteenth century for Bess of Hardwick so that she could watch hounds running in the park below. Working parties weeded turnips on neighbouring farms and helped Mr Link, the head gardener, thin the vegetables planted in the herbaceous border and walled garden. In return, he sold the girls potatoes, which they baked on their form-room fires.

  Isolated though it was, the house did not escape the war entirely. Luftwaffe aircraft passed to the north on their way to bomb Sheffield, and to the south as they made for home. After a raid, fires burning in the city lit up the sky with a blaze of reddish gold, clearly visible from ten miles away. The arched beer cellar of the house made an excellent air-raid shelter, and while raids were in progress pupils and staff sat close together down there, eating cream crackers and Bovril.

  One day in 1940, when invasion scares were at their height, the Dowager Duchess took the headmistress off to a remote valley, to inspect some caves in which she thought the whole school might hide if the Germans arrived. Luckily this last resort was never needed; but the war edged nearer on a lovely summer evening in 1942, when it seemed almost as if the Almighty had scored an own goal. At the close of prayers, just after Miss Edman had intoned the words ‘The peace of God which passeth all understanding’, there came a shattering crash as a bullet smashed through one of the windows. Luftwaffe aircraft had been trying to bomb the factory in Bakewell which produced batteries for submarines, and peppered the north front of the house with cannon fire as they made for home.

  Later, in 1944, the moors above the park were taken over as training areas by troops, and one aggrieved local walker complained, ‘The military, whoever they are, are using live ammunition … On Friday, August 4th, Chatsworth House, grounds and part of the park were sprinkled with machine-gun bullets by the American contingent.’

  Many of the estate staff had disappeared into the armed forces, but the Duke agreed that if their service pay was less than they had been earning before call-up, the estate would make up the deficit. He also ordained that all their posts would be kept open for them, should they want to return when hostilities ceased. In the foresters’ absence, the woods were plundered for pit props by contractors, and 500 acres of immature trees were cut down. ‘I hear that the timber murderers have felled all we marked for them last Friday and want some more,’ wrote a member of the office staff. Late in the war twenty-five German prisoners, under a British foreman, were brought in to burn up the tops left in the cleared areas.

  During the war the Devonshire family suffered a major bereavement. There had been great rejoicing when Billy Hartington married Kathleen (‘Kick’) Kennedy, daughter of Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador to London, on 6 May 1944; but then, only four months later, he was killed on active service in Belgium, leaving his younger brother, Andrew, heir to the Dukedom.

  When Churchill declared victory in Europe on 8 May 1945, the girls at Chatsworth were playing cricket on the lawn; but the moment they saw a double-bed white sheet hoisted on the roof, they abandoned the game and sprinted for the house. Eager though they were to return to their proper base in Colwyn Bay, they had to wait for most of a year before they left Derbyshire in May 1946. After their departure the house was uninhabited except by two housemaids, Emily and Annie, who, in the words of Deborah Duchess, ‘perched in a distant room at the north end’.

  Chatsworth remained empty for years. When the tenth Duke died suddenly in 1950, the family was faced with appalling death duties of £7 million (some £180 million in today’s rates); but Penrhos’s occupation had been such a success that in 1951, when the Cold War threatened to turn hot, the eleventh Duke suggested to the headmistress that the school might like to return. Nothing came of this overture, or of the idea that the Red Cross might take the house over; but in due course, with tremendous courage and resolution, the new Duke and his wife, Deborah, decided to live in the house themselves. By selling land and pictures, and giving the magnificent Elizabethan Hardwick Hall to the Treasury (who passed it on to the National Trust), they paid off t
he death duties, refurbished Chatsworth, and in 1959 moved into it with their family.

  Vanbrugh’s splendid baroque Castle Howard, near York, was not so fortunate. Part of the house was let to Queen Margaret’s School for Girls, which had been evacuated from Scarborough, and early in the morning on 9 November 1940 a disastrous fire broke out, vividly described by Anne Hollis, a sixteen-year-old sixth-former. Woken at 5.15 a.m. by someone shaking her shoulder, she heard the matron telling her, ‘in a high-pitched, unnatural voice’, to get up and rouse the rest of the bedroom. Anne saw that, outside, the sky was a lurid crimson, and the woods were lit up by the same brilliant light. Then she saw flames billowing from the other side of the house.

  The girls rapidly dressed as they did for air raids – sweaters, socks, shoes and cloaks over their pyjamas. Holding wet sponges clasped to their faces, they made their way through dense smoke down to the shelter in the Underworld, a long, broad cellar with stone floor and walls and a vaulted stone roof, equipped for air raids with mattresses and rugs. Anne had just reached it when one of the staff appeared and asked for four or five sixth-formers to go up again and try to save some of the pictures.

  We made our way up the stone steps into the corridor which runs straight down the central block, and here we saw the fire. The far end of the passage was ablaze from floor to ceiling, and dull red smoke poured down the corridor.

  In V a [form room], the Reynolds Room, we found three staff tugging at the pictures – immense portraits, one of which took up nearly a whole wall. There was no time to unscrew the rails on which they were hung, and the ladders we had were not nearly long enough for us to be able to reach their tops, so we just had to tug at them until the wires broke and they crashed on top of us. Many of the pictures broke out of their frames when they fell, and the bare canvases were taken to the Long Gallery. Someone suggested getting into the studio and trying to rescue the priceless mirrors which hung there. On opening the door, however, we discovered that the fire had already claimed them, for the windows and mirrors were cracked and falling in, while flames licked up the wall …