Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  In early September, Mrs Saunderson received from her employer a list of names of house guests who were expected the following Saturday morning; it was to be the largest house party in several months. Porchey had rekindled his friendship with actress Jeanne Stuart, the one who hadn’t quite made the final cut as the new Lady Carnarvon two years previously. He had persuaded her to come for a couple of days away from the grimness of London, to enjoy the fresh air, peace and good food at Highclere. Rather sad, he rang Tilly to tell her his plan. ‘The thing is, if you’re going to abandon me, you can’t expect me not to look for other company.’ She replied that she quite understood. His brother-in-law was also staying. Bro was terribly in need of some relaxation himself as his work as an MP continued to take its toll.

  The party was a success. Porchey felt lighter and more himself than he had since Tilly’s departure. He invited several of his closest friends, all of whom commented on his more cheerful aspect and said how much they enjoyed Jeanne’s company. It was the start of a long-standing relationship between Porchey and Jeanne, one that lasted far longer than his marriage to Tilly.

  In the closing months of 1941, Britain’s attention was concentrated on the war in North Africa that had been waging since Italy’s opportunistic invasion of Egypt in May 1940. Following initial British successes against the Italians, Hitler had despatched Rommel into battle; his Afrika Korps troops had proved far more effective than the Italians, and the British had been fighting tough battles for months. In November General Auchinleck launched Operation Crusader to try to secure a decisive victory and relieve the Siege of Tobruk, a port city vital to the Allied war effort. On 7 December the good news for which Churchill had been desperate arrived on his desk. The siege had been broken and Rommel’s troops had fallen back.

  The good mood lasted a matter of hours. Later that day Downing Street received a communication from the White House. The Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii. Four US Navy battleships had been sunk and another four seriously damaged. One hundred and eighty-two aircraft had been destroyed; 2,402 American servicemen killed and more than a thousand injured. The following day US Congress voted 470 to one in favour of declaring war on the Axis powers. The United States was now fully engaged.

  While he acknowledged the horrific scale of the attack, and the loss and fury felt by the American people, Churchill could not help but reflect that with the United States’ entry into the conflict, the Allies’ chances had just been given a war-winning boost.

  Lt. Commander Geoffrey Grenfell, Catherine’s second husband.

  A letter from Henry, Catherine’s son, to her husband Geoffrey who was serving in the Royal Navy.

  The Home Guard at Highclere in 1944.

  Children’s dormitories were created in the bedrooms on the top floor of the Castle.

  Highclere welcomed several dozen evacuees from London during the Second World War.

  A glamorous Tilly, Countess of Carnarvon, with the evacuee children September 1939.

  Nurses working at Highclere with their young charges. The Castle must have seemed like a fairytale to the young visitors, although touchingly this handmade card from one of the evacuees shows they thought of the Castle as a home like any other.

  The 6th Earl of Carnarvon in uniform in 1943 and Henry, Lord Porchester, in uniform in the same year.

  Porchey, The Earl of Carnarvon, had re-joined the 7th Hussars. Shorncliffe, Kent, spring 1940.

  Lady Penelope Herbert married Captain Gerrit van der Woude of the Grenadier Guards in April 1945. (Picture Acknowledgment i4.1)

  Highclere Parish Church.

  Mrs Geoffrey Grenfell (Catherine), Porchey, their son Henry and Almina, Countess of Carnarvon at Penelope’s wedding April 21st 1945.

  (Picture Acknowledgment i4.2)

  Porchey lived life to the full in the 1950s and 1960s. (Picture Acknowledgment i4.3)

  1987: the butler, Robert Taylor (left) with Henry, the 7th Earl of Carnarvon, when they rediscovered the Egyptian treasures hidden away between rooms for over 60 years.

  (Picture Acknowledgment i4.4)

  When Porchey wrote his memoirs in the 1970s he described Catherine as his ‘beloved wife’, he had loved her deeply for many years. Catherine’s portrait hangs once more back in her sitting room at Highclere Castle.

  (Picture Acknowledgment 17.1)

  17

  Shoulder to Shoulder

  Overnight, Pearl Harbor galvanised virtually unanimous American public and political support for the Allied war effort. There was profound shock, and a sense of outrage that Japan had attacked without a formal declaration of war. On Monday 8 December the United States of America declared war on Imperial Japan. Recruitment offices all over the country stayed open throughout the night as tens of thousands queued to join up. On 11 December Germany declared war on the United States.

  The speed at which the US armed forces recruited and mobilised troops, and with which the United States shifted its economy on to a war footing, was astonishing. In 1939 the US Army numbered 100,000 men. By 1945, 14.5 million Americans were in uniform.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor was part of a wider strategy to advance Japan’s interests in southeast Asia. It had been making inroads into European-controlled areas in Thailand and the Philippines throughout 1941. But the Allies were totally unprepared for Japan’s attack on Malaya on 8 December. It took the advancing Japanese Army two months to push the Allies up the Malayan peninsula to Singapore, site of the supposedly impregnable Royal Naval base, which it captured in just over a week along with 80,000 British, Indian and Australian men, who were enslaved in Japanese internment camps for the rest of the war. Churchill described the fall of Singapore as the ‘worst disaster’ and ‘largest capitulation’ in British history. It triggered total war in the Pacific.

  Tilly had spent the last two and a half years hoping that the States would afford her a place of safety. Now the Japanese had brought the fight to America. The Wendell family had been urging Catherine to join them for eighteen months; she had always refused, feeling her place was in her adopted home country, with her immediate family. But she and Porchey were immensely grateful to have American relations who could offer a refuge to their daughter. Except that, at the beginning of 1942, it seemed there were fewer and fewer refuges left anywhere in the world.

  Churchill urged the country to hold steady, and there were determined efforts in every sphere to keep morale up. At Christmas, three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Porchey’s friend Sidney Beer and his wife came to stay at Highclere. Beer was an obsessive music fan, a generous patron of the arts and an excellent amateur conductor, as well as being a wealthy impresario and racehorse owner. One evening, listening to gramophone records over port and Stilton, Sidney told Porchey he was going to do his bit by funding an orchestra. Good as his word, that year he formed the National Symphony Orchestra. With his own contacts and those of his friend Malcolm Sargent, the most famous English conductor of his era, Sidney’s orchestra comprised some of the best musicians then working in London. Many of the wind players performed in between their duties in the RAF Central Band or the various Guards’ bands.

  Highclere continued to be a hive of activity. Porchey plugged away at the Claims Commission, making endless rounds of inspections of his area, taking a sandwich lunch and a Thermos of tea to have in the back of his car. He had been assigned a driver, Trooper Bloss, who was a Yorkshireman of extreme adaptability and mildness of temper. He was adept at swapping rabbits shot on the estate for a parcel of contraband lamb chops under the counter at a local butcher’s. He was also sanguine in the face of Lord Carnarvon’s irritation when he repeatedly got lost as they were trying to find the site of some complaint that needed investigating. On one occasion, when they had circled helplessly on unmarked roads outside Devizes for what felt like hours before Porchey recognised something and managed to navigate them in, Bloss remarked to a furious Lord Carnarvon that if His Lordship had known the way
all along, he could perhaps have said so.

  Porchey was extremely fond of Bloss, who proved his worth repeatedly. It was his suggestion that they mount a small red and blue pennant (the colours of Highclere Castle’s flag) on the Vauxhall, with the happy result that army convoys thought the car belonged to a general and moved their vehicles to one side when Porchey swept past. Bloss would load for Henry when he went out to shoot for rabbits or other game at Highclere. His bluff Yorkshire humour tempered young Lord Porchester’s natural enthusiasm for the coming fight with some down-to-earth common sense. Bloss’s attitude was that duties must be done, but you might as well try to stay alive. Porchey’s advice was similar: he reminded his son that ‘a live subaltern was better than a dead Victoria Cross’.

  In June a division of Canadian troops arrived to train at Highclere. They caused Miss Stubbings no end of headaches as they drove across crops and left piles of empty petrol cans and trees cut down to no purpose across the park. The number of men billeted at the stud was now stretching the capacities of the local utilities; the estate’s water reservoir was perilously low.

  If the Canadians were not terribly popular with Miss Stubbings, she was probably the only woman for miles around to feel indifferent to their charms. For many of the young nurses and teachers attached to the nursery school (to say nothing of local girls and the Highclere maids), the Canadians were very welcome indeed. Taking their charges for walks through the village or to church on a Sunday afforded plenty of opportunity for interaction with handsome young men in uniform. Before long, their possibilities for assignations received a significant boost thanks to a change of routine up at the castle.

  The bombing campaign against Britain was ongoing, despite the failure of all-out Blitz. Hitler needed to secure Britain’s surrender, and the sooner the better. So blackout continued to be a way of life for all Highclere’s residents. The castle was never deliberately targeted by the Germans, but they seemed to think the old lime kilns at Burghclere, just four miles from the Castle, were an arms dump, so plenty of bombs fell on the estate.

  One night, after the Home Guard had cranked up the siren for yet another air raid and the nursery school staff had frantically shepherded their charges all the way down from the castle’s turrets to its cellars, the decision was made to move the children’s sleeping quarters. Their cots were set up in rows in the Library. Most of the teachers and nurses remained in their bedrooms on the top floor of the castle, but a den with a sofa was established in the northeast corner turret of the Library’s gallery, and every night a single member of staff took a turn to keep watch over the children. The turret’s windows were easily wide enough to admit a soldier determined to meet his girlfriend, the main thing was to slip quietly across the gravel and avoid the night watchman Stratford, and his dog. The new sleeping arrangement was judged a complete success, much better for everyone.

  In between the occasional love affair, the nursery school staff were run off their feet and often cold, tired and hungry. In the wake of the move, the children’s playroom had to be shifted to the Dining Room. (From now on the family took their meals in what had been Catherine’s sitting room.) Restrictions on coal meant that it was hard to keep their bedrooms warm at night, and hot water either for themselves or the children was often in short supply. Baths were shared, with the cleanest going first and the grubbiest small child going last.

  Feeding the children continued to be a challenge, both in terms of logistics at mealtimes down in the servants’ dining hall, and in getting hold of enough supplies. Monsieur Pascal had been succeeded by Monsieur Pavillard, who brought in his son and had two additional ladies to help as kitchen maids. The school’s presence meant that Highclere’s kitchen staff had been receiving extra rations ever since January 1940, but by the summer of 1942, the entire household must have looked back on those early days of rationing with longing. At first it was just bacon, butter and sugar that were restricted. Gradually more and more items were added to the nation’s coupon books. By the mid-point of the war, virtually everything was rationed: milk, cheese, eggs, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereal, sweets, canned fruit and all meat including offal and sausages. The only things that were—in theory—freely available were fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, game and bread, though in practice most people’s ability to get hold of fish and game was very limited: by 1945 supplies had dropped to just 30 per cent of their pre-war levels. Highclere residents were lucky on that score: the estate’s market garden kept them in carrots, potatoes and spinach, and its woods and downlands kept them in rabbits and game, from partridges to venison. The efforts of Highclere’s gamekeepers and the wily Trooper Bloss were very much appreciated. So too were the members of the Women’s Land Army, who worked in the market gardens and up at the stud, looking after the few remaining horses and staffing the farm.

  On 23 August the Axis powers launched an offensive to gain control of Stalingrad in the southwestern Soviet Union. It would prove to be probably the single most decisive battle of the war; even at the time, everybody knew it was a strategic showdown. Churchill and Roosevelt had no confidence that the Russians would be able to hold the Germans off, but Stalin staked his country’s survival on the battle.

  Two days later there was shocking news for Catherine and Porchey. Catherine was sitting down to listen to the wireless at her cottage in Windsor. Gar had come to visit and the two were just about to have tea when the headlines were announced. The Duke of Kent was dead, killed in a tragic accident in Scotland when the Sunderland flying boat he had been travelling in, on his way to inspect RAF bases in Iceland, had crashed into a hillside in thick fog.

  Catherine was distraught. She had seen the Duke and Duchess of Kent only two weeks previously, when she had gone back to London to stay for a few days at her house on Wilton Crescent. Princess Marina had given birth to Michael, her third child, on 4 July, and Catherine had been anxious to congratulate her old friends in person. Now Prince George was dead, leaving Princess Marina with a six-week-old baby and two other children.

  The Duke of Kent’s funeral took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 29 August. His widow was inconsolable; most of the congregation was in tears. Both Porchey and Catherine attended, and though Catherine was devastated, she said afterwards that she had found it impossible to cry at the time. It was all too dignified and it was so impressive the way the Royal Family stood united in grief. Later, though, she wept uncontrollably, firstly for the loss of her friend of twenty years’ standing, who had been her champion and seen her through the dark times of her divorce and Geoffrey’s death. She also cried for the loss of Geoffrey, whom she had not been able to bury; one of the many millions of war dead who lay where they fell.

  By the time of the Duke of Kent’s death, Catherine had been in Windsor for a little over a year, volunteering in canteens near Slough and spending time with her son. She’d made the decision to delay her return to London until after Henry had finished first school and then his military training. The plan was that he would join the Blues and Royals, the Royal Horse Guards, in the summer of the following year. Most of his courses would take place in barracks close to Windsor.

  Catherine tried hard to be cheerful, but between the death of one of her dearest friends and the sense that she was in limbo, waiting for Henry to join up and be deployed, the autumn of 1942 was a long struggle against melancholy. Porchey did his best to distract her by taking her on visits to the cinema. Her correspondence with Pen was always a tonic for her spirits. Penelope was still thriving at Foxcroft but more and more insistent that she must come home. She would be eighteen in March of the coming year, and she wanted to celebrate her birthday with her parents and her brother, before Henry left for the war. She hadn’t seen any of them for more than two years. Porchey and Catherine were still wary about the dangers of allowing her to come, but they were desperate to see her, and Pen’s argument that she couldn’t possibly miss Henry’s send-off carried a lot of weight. Three years of war had taugh
t them all that the opportunities to embrace the people one loved must be seized.

  Pen had been taking a secretarial course as preparation for finding useful work when she returned to Britain. Porchey wrote to her that he was immensely proud of her determination to contribute to the war effort. In his day there would never have been any suggestion that girls of their class should seek employment, but the war had changed everything. All women between twenty and thirty without children were required to carry out war work. Penelope was still too young to meet the age requirement, but she had no thought of waiting two years for her name to come up on a recruiter’s list. She, like her brother, was full of patriotic energy. Two years in the States without her parents had also made her independent. Apart from her desire to do her duty for her country, she must also have relished the prospect of a job in London, her own money and the freedom the two things would bring. She couldn’t wait to get back.

  Catherine wasn’t alone in feeling low that autumn; Porchey was also badly hit by the death of the Duke of Kent. The two men had been comrades in arms in their youth, in the days of trips to the theatre and evenings at the Embassy Club, but they had relied on each other in more weighty matters, too, whether at Porchey’s wedding to Catherine or his attempt to plead on George’s behalf with Edward VIII during the abdication crisis.