Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Fifteen minutes later we were sent for again, as the priceless old books in the Tapestry Room and corridor had to be saved at all costs. By then the fire was well up to the Studio, and the whole lower end of the corridor was a blazing inferno. Red-hot timbers were crashing from the roof, and through the haze of smoke and flame we could see that the Studio, V b [form] room, the office, the headmistress’s room and the dining room – which contained several mirrors each worth £2,000, priceless Canalettos and several family portraits – were nothing but a smouldering ruin.

  The corridor was knee-deep in water, as the hoses bringing water from the lake had at least been persuaded to work (no fire engine arrived for two hours), so we used our cloaks for carrying the books in, and when we reached the Long Gallery we dragged them along the floor; my cloak was in ribbons by the end of it …

  By then it was about 7 am, and the fire was at its height when an air-raid warning came through. It was the only time of day when the staff began to look desperate, for they suspected that, drawn by the glow (which must have been seen for miles and miles), enemy planes would be returning to bomb what they supposed they had set alight. Nothing happened, however. Then breakfast miraculously appeared, and plates of steaming porridge were passed down to everyone, for the kitchens were in a safe quarter of the castle.

  I was sent with another girl to stand guard in a little corridor which led off the shelter into other parts of the building. Water was pouring on to us from the corridors above. Then we went outside and saw the exterior of the building blazing.

  Above us, 100 feet high, towered the dome, and already flames were licking through its windows … The garden was full of stuff which had been rescued from the house – bedding, clothes, carpets, books, pictures and crosses, vases and altar cloths from the chapel lay everywhere. All this had to be somehow moved again, for it was pouring with rain, and everything was getting ruined. Somehow or other it was got into the staff flats, whither we were all sent too, as the dome was falling in, and it was not safe to be anywhere near it. Molten lead splashed all round as it finally crashed, and the timbers which constituted its framework were left stark and glowing against the sky until they too fell in.

  The cause of the fire was never precisely established, but the trouble seems to have started in one of the eighteenth-century flues which twist through the walls and had never been swept. Caked soot probably started to smoulder, and the heat burst through a wall immediately behind a cupboard full of paper, which ignited at once.

  Miraculously, no one died in the blaze, but many of the girls and staff lost all their belongings. Besides the celebrated dome, some twenty of the house’s rooms were destroyed, including the Garden Hall and the High Saloon, with their eighteenth-century interiors painted by Antonio Pellegrini. For the rest of the war the south-east wing and much of the central block were left open to the sky; but, after being granted an exceptionally long, nine-week Christmas holiday, the 100-odd girls of Queen Margaret’s returned to the front of the building, where fourteen rooms were put at the school’s disposal. The house was cold, and still damp after its sousing during the fire, and the girls had to eat their meals in the antiques corridor.

  Stately homes were not the only rural casualties of the war. Many fine gardens also went to ruin. If a property was requisitioned, the military had neither the time nor the skill to maintain the house’s immediate surroundings, and nature soon destroyed man’s efforts, reducing lawns to hayfields, borders to riots of undergrowth, hedges to belts of tangled forest. Beyond the gardens, parks also fell into dereliction, or were ploughed for growing wheat.

  One park which survived intact was at Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland, where a herd of unique wild white cattle had lived for centuries. Primeval creatures, they regulate their own existence without interference from humans; during the war they were never bombed, and although their number fell from forty to twenty-nine, it built up again soon afterwards.

  The Tudor castle, in contrast, received some rough treatment. For six years it had stood empty, peopled (in the opinion of a later owner, Sir Humphry Wakefield) only by spirits. Yachts and aeroplanes, he reckoned, had called the previous owners, the Tankerville family, away, allowing the castle’s world-famous ghosts to take over. In his view, it was the spirits who arranged for irresponsible Canadian troops to be billeted within the massive walls, and to start ‘a controlled house fire’ which destroyed the dark Victorian panelling and heavy plaster in the North Wing, leaving only the original stone, ‘firm and sound’. Miraculously, the rooms were restored with national funds – only for the ghosts to provoke another blaze of destruction, this time in the East Wing, described in a letter to the owner, from a Canadian officer:

  Should I tell you this? But it remains a glorious memory of the perfect Christmas. Frost-cold was everywhere and the snow had drifted deep against the outer doors. Ice hung in frozen spirals from roofs, broken drains and gutters. We had a bonus delivery of Christmas liquor, returning our much-needed will to live. Ghosts, drink, happiness, all ‘free spirits’ for sure. An open fire roasted a massive carcass. I hope it wasn’t [one of] your rare cattle. The fire cracking and pungent smell is with me for all time. The fires blazed into the dawn morning as the troops stripped all-manner of wood from the walls of our great meeting hall.

  The carcass on the spit may well have come from the park. But when rain fell on the remains of the Victorian plaster, and that too came off, in Sir Humphry’s words ‘the return to the medieval was complete, with the revelation of fine stone-work and well-crafted masonry’. The soldiers’ philistine rapacity had laid bare many secrets:

  We can now see a wall built out to twenty-feet-thick to repel cannon fire in the early 1500s. We can now see flagstones laid over cobbles for the royal visit [by King James I of Scotland] in 1603. We can see sets of spiral steps, that could help an invader, removed in the 1500s and changed to latrines.

  What heritage or planning officer, what professional aesthete, would dare remove Georgian, let alone 1500s, plasterwork with the off-chance of exciting masonry below? Only the ghosts could achieve that, with their most carefully-controlled ‘accident’.

  Fourteen

  Plane Fields

  Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

  I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

  Where never lark or even eagle flew –

  And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

  From a poem by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr, an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force, killed when his Spitfire collided in cloud with another plane over Digby in Lincolnshire on 11 December 1941

  At the start of the war there were only fifteen active military airfields in East Anglia, and only one of these had hard runways: the rest merely had marked grass tracks. Aircraft were taken into hangars for maintenance, but for most of the time they stood in the open, dispersed round the perimeter of the field, and they were usually neither protected nor concealed. Sometimes they were partially hidden under trees, and sometimes covered with camouflage netting; but this took so long to put on and remove that its use was soon discontinued. Air-traffic control was extremely primitive, as many aircraft had no radio, and pilots came in to land after a glance at the windsock. For night operations, landing strips were marked by oil-burning gooseneck flares. During the Munich crisis in 1938 ground defences were set up on airfield perimeters, and searchlights were deployed in adjoining fields.

  Come 1939, rapid change set in. All over the east of England sites for new airfields were found, and construction began – with brutal disregard for the old patterns of the landscape. Fences, hedges and gates were ripped out; ditches and ponds were filled in, farm buildings and cottages demolished. To the consternation of country folk, who were used to walking everywhere, traditional footpaths were suddenly severed by new fences, so that they had to
make lengthy detours to reach their destinations. People travelling by bicycle also found this no small aggravation. Farmers were dismayed for a different reason: at a moment when the Government was urging them to grow more corn, they saw thousands of acres of good land being taken out of their hands – and they were understandably annoyed when military personnel stationed on outlying sites started blazing trails through cornfields to make short cuts to their headquarters.

  The expansion was extraordinarily rapid. By the end of the war there were forty-seven airfields in Norfolk alone, and thirty-two in Suffolk, two-thirds of them built during the conflict. Some, like RAF Bassingbourn, south-west of Cambridge, had been laid out with grass runways before the war. The site had been chosen because the boggy ground, between tributaries of the River Cam, often produced mist, which was considered a good form of camouflage – but it also had the disadvantage of becoming so soft in wet weather that even light bombers such as Bristol Blenheims gouged channels out of the grass when taking off and landing. For the new base, three converging hard runways were set out in a triangular A pattern so that they could be used in any wind; at first they were surfaced with asphalt and painted in stripes, to camouflage them, but later they were replaced with concrete.

  Another base bedevilled by soft ground (and frequent fog or low cloud) was Ludford Magna, at 430 feet above sea level the highest airfield in Lincolnshire, yet known from the state of the ground as Mudford Magna. The station’s first commanding officer, Group Captain Bobby Blucke, described the place as ‘a joke in very bad taste played by the Air Ministry at our expense’.

  New airfields were greedy. For each take-off and landing strip a belt of land 200 yards wide was cleared and graded. Centred along this main strip was a concrete runway fifty yards wide and at least 2000 yards long (that alone took up twenty acres – the equivalent of eight full-sized football pitches). Such was the stress exerted by heavy bombers that the concrete had to be six inches thick, laid on a base of hard core and covered with asphalt.

  The construction of one airfield could swallow 90,000 tons of aggregate and 18,000 tons of dry cement, some of which was conveyed to the site by steam-powered lorries. All round the new field, outside the runways, ran a perimeter track fifty feet wide, with another thirty feet of ground levelled and cleared on either side. Along the track were concrete hard stands, set well apart so that in the event of an attack aircraft parked on them would not all be destroyed in a single conflagration, and damage would be minimized if there was an accident when bombing-up. Two, three or four hangars up to 300 feet long occupied even more space, as did rows of Nissen huts clad in sheets of hooped steel, which soon became ubiquitous. Electricity was laid on to all but the most remote stations, which relied on their own generators.

  Another change, necessitated by the new fields, was the provision of piped water. Most farms and outlying cottages had no mains water, but relied on springs, wells or underground tanks which collected the run-off of rain from house and barn roofs. On the wartime bases, in contrast, a regular supply was essential, for fire-fighting as well as for drinking and washing. The result was that water-storage tanks – big, square boxes on top of scaffolding towers – began to spike the low East Anglian horizons. The new airfields were also more sharply defined: no longer surrounded by friendly hedges, they were encircled by barbed wire for greater security.

  One of the most destructive, in environmental terms, was RAF Great Dunmow, in Essex, where building began in 1942 on the ancient parkland of Easton Lodge, once the home of Daisy, Countess of Warwick, mistress of King Edward VII and celebrated for the extravagance of her parties. Unfortunately, the park was ideal for an airfield, as the land was almost completely flat, stretching across the top of a low hill, so that there were no obstructions around it. Ten thousand trees, including 200 mature oaks, were felled, and their stumps blown out, to make room for three concrete runways and an encircling perimeter track, and in 1943 the 386th Bombardment Group of the US Air Force moved in.

  The new airfields brought thousands of contractors, servicemen and women into the East Anglian countryside. On the base at Ludford Magna there were nearly 3000 men and 300 women, most of them living in Nissen huts scattered about various farm fields on inconvenient sites north of the village.

  In the midst of all the building and flying, indigenous inhabitants carried on as normally as possible. Early in the war at Bardney, in Lincolnshire, people thought the townie evacuees dumped on them ‘rather odd’ and nicknamed them ‘Fish and Chips’. When trenches were dug across the green and covered with boards and sandbags, children were told that the work had been done so that they could play trains. Barter of eggs, butter, corn, pig meal and cigarettes was soon flourishing. Mrs Smithson, with her trap and pony, Dolly, organized street collections of salvage, and in the matter of amassing aluminium cooking vessels and iron railings, Bardney had the best response in the county – a triumph for which the locals were congratulated by a parade through the village, led by Billy Butlin, pioneer of holiday camps, riding in a large model ship.

  Then, in 1942, two farmers received orders from the War Office, requisitioning some of their land, and the construction firm Moss moved in with a swarm of Irish labourers. At first people thought they were going to build a munitions factory, but the project turned out to be an airfield. As the foundations of three concrete runways were laid to the north-east of the village, one of the farmers, Mr Laughton at Thickthornes, was offered alternative land, but refused to move, so that the airfield had to be built round him. Soon 2500 service personnel arrived to swell the community, greatly increasing the level of social activity. Local people went up to the airfield for dances, and the airmen came to the village pubs, to the Methodist Hall, to the canteen of the garage at Alderlea, and to families’ homes.

  Besides its main bases, the RAF had nearly fifty Satellite Landing Grounds (SLGs) – fields used by maintenance units, and also for storage and as dispersal points, which reduced the number of aircraft that might be destroyed or damaged by Luftwaffe attacks on bomber or fighter airfields. The SLGs were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, so that they blended into the countryside. Runways were grass, and buildings were camouflaged or sited among trees.

  Such was the demand for more stations that the RAF considered resurrecting the First World War field on Salisbury Plain, on a 300-acre site a few hundred yards to the south-west of Stonehenge. Fortunately the plan was dropped: had it gone through, it would have furnished the Luftwaffe with another target and substantially increased the chances of England’s most celebrated prehistoric monument being blown to bits. There is even a rumour that the airmen recommended demolition of the standing stones, on the grounds that they were a flight hazard.

  Most of the new fields, with Nissen huts made of hooped steel, were a good deal less comfortable than the old, in which airmen had been housed in brick buildings. Also, for safety, new living quarters were often sited a long way from operational areas. One new base, Metheringham, built in the winter of 1942–3 on the flat fenland south-east of Lincoln, was so cold and damp that men slept in their greatcoats. Eric Brown, a flight engineer with 106 Squadron, had bitter memories of his time there:

  It was a terrible place, cold, bleak, isolated. We faced a two-mile walk to our huts, which were as bad as you would find anywhere in the RAF. They were draughty, ran with condensation, and we had so little fuel for the single stove that some of the Aussies on the squadron took to stealing other people’s doors to burn. By the time I left there was hardly a lavatory door left.

  Senior ranks were generally far more comfortable. At Woodhall Spa, also in Lincolnshire, which opened as a bomber base in 1940, the officers’ mess was the Petwood Hotel, formerly Petwood Park, once the home of Grace Maple, of the furniture family. Built in the early years of the twentieth century, in heavy Tudor-Jacobean style, the house had been a fashionable Edwardian health resort, served by through trains from London; in the First World War it had become a convalescent home,
and now it was taken over again by the military.

  The need for modern bases was driven partly by the increase in size and weight of the RAF’s bombers. The Hampdens, Whitneys and Wellingtons which began the offensive against Germany were too slow, too limited in bomb-carrying capacity and too poorly armed to be war winners. At least they had the merit of being able to land on grass. But it was in 1942, with the emergence of the four-engined Avro Lancaster, developed out of the underpowered Manchester, that concrete runways became essential.

  ‘Indisputably the great heavy night-bomber of the Second World War,’ wrote the historian Max Hastings, ‘the Lancaster inspired affection unmatched by any other British heavy bomber … Cruising at 216 mph, intensely durable and resistant to punishment … beautiful to the eye and carrying the bomb-load of two Flying Fortresses at 20,000 feet, [it] ranks with the Mosquito and the Mustang among the great design successes of the war.’ A Lanc, powered by four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, could carry 14,000 lb of bombs and had a range of 1660 miles. In its final form it could accommodate the monstrous Grand Slam bomb, at 22,000 lb the largest carried by any aircraft in the war.

  Lancasters were still supplanting earlier types when Bomber Command launched its first mass attack, on 30 May 1942. Frank Mee, the boy with a passion for dancing who lived at Norton-on-Tees in Co. Durham, could identify all the planes that took part. He was already something of an aircraft expert, since he frequently rode shotgun when his father, a haulage contractor, delivered material for the construction of runways.