Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  On 15 May the Allied commanders met in London to discuss the launch of Operation Overlord, as the Battle for Normandy had been code-named. General Eisenhower was in overall command of the operation and on 6 June 1944 he signalled that it was beginning. There had been a last-minute doubt because of the weather, which was unusually bad: the landings would be scuppered by heavy seas. But if the Expeditionary Force missed this window of opportunity, it would be a month before the next full moon allowed for another go. The build-up of hundreds of thousands of men couldn’t possibly be concealed for that long. Eisenhower gave the order to press ahead.

  All over the south of England, people came out of their homes to watch as tens of thousands of aircraft headed for France. Catherine had recently moved back to London to rejoin Pen and Gar at her house in Wilton Cresent. The three women ran to a window to stare, to hope that this was indeed the beginning of the end. The nursery teachers, the evacuees, Mr Pell and the entire household staff, Mrs Stacey and her children, the Home Guard up on Siddown Hill: at Highclere everyone poured out of the castle and watched as the sky turned black with the mass of tiny triangular dark outlines, streaming towards France. One person in particular was transfixed by the sight. Joan Taylor knew that this meant the invasion had started and that somewhere on the rough seas between England and France, her husband Robert was sitting in his tank, waiting for a landing craft to dock and the order to advance.

  In fact, Robert embarked from Southampton three days after the initial assault. By that time more than 200,000 men had been offloaded from landing craft onto the beaches of Normandy or dropped inland from aircraft. Around 60,000 vehicles and more than 120,000 tonnes of supplies had also been shipped. In many places the hard-fought-for element of surprise made all the difference: German officers were off duty, the troops scrambled to meet the invading forces. On other beaches, notably the one code-named Omaha, Allied losses were devastating. The US forces landing at Omaha lost fourteen out of sixteen tanks and all the men inside them.

  Robert was with the 7th Tank Regiment. They were destined for Gold beach, with eighteen Churchill tanks, 25-pounder guns strapped to them, as well as barrels of oil and extra ammunition for gunners already in France. As the landing craft pulled out of the lee side of the Isle of Wight, the seas grew rougher and the men eyed one another nervously. Soon the waves were battering the shallow-hulled ship. First one tank broke loose and then another. The guns were smashing against one another, several barrels of oil burst open and a slick oozed into the sea. Robert held his breath as the captain assembled everyone on deck. He was on the brink of giving the order to abandon ship. Then, as they neared the French coastline, the winds dropped.

  The landing craft had to reverse to have any chance of offloading the tanks. The cruiser HMS Ajax and the destroyer HMS Argonaut were shelling the German gun emplacements high up above the beach, trying to give the tank regiment some cover as the men waded onto the sands. They had to work in the oily slick of the waves to free the tanks as quickly as possible, a cacophony of shells exploding all around them. Almost before he knew it, Robert was rumbling forward to do battle. The regiment was detailed to move towards a crossroads at Ouistreham. As they left the beach and started up a hill, their liaison officer was standing with his head out of the turret when his ear was cleanly sliced off. They lurched to a halt and Robert ordered Corporal Duck to bandage the man’s head. They left him by the side of the road in the hopes that a medical team would pick him up. Robert assumed command of his tank.

  When they reached the top of the hill, he gave the order to slow so he could scan the low woods 100 yards in front. The crackle and boom of battle sounded infernal. He could see the enemy, straight ahead. Robert ordered his gunner to open fire. They had only fired three or four shells when the tank to their left received a direct hit and the turret was carried into the body of the vehicle, destroying everyone and everything. It was as if the men had never been.

  Robert hardly understood, it had all happened so fast. Then the tank to his right was hit. Suddenly there was a roar as a shell passed through his tank from underneath him. It decapitated his operator but passed straight through the armour and out of the other side without exploding. Corporal Duck called up to Robert, ‘Are you all right?’ Robert was concussed, half unconscious. He put his hand up to his face—it was covered with bloody gore and brains. ‘My god, my face has gone,’ he whispered.

  ‘Get out, get out!’ yelled his corporal. The gunner was still alive and climbed out through the hatch as Robert scrambled down behind. The gunner was only eighteen years old. He started to scream and wouldn’t stop. Robert realised in that instant that he could still see, and hear, and that it was not his brains all over his face. Pain began to spread through his shoulder and hands where they were full of splinters of metal. He grasped the boy’s shoulder firmly and told him, quietly, to hush. The three men tore off strips of their shirts to make rudimentary dressings to staunch the flow of blood and started to crawl back to the first-aid station. They passed more eviscerated tanks on their way, averted their eyes from the bloody fleshy mess that used to be their comrades.

  When Robert got to the medical station he was cleaned up, given drugs for the pain and told that he would be flown back to England and taken to a military hospital in Derby. He nodded his head but he couldn’t take anything in. ‘How many died?’ he asked. ‘Did any get through?’ ‘We don’t know yet,’ the nurse told him. ‘We don’t know much.’ The next thing that Robert remembered was arriving at Derby. When he asked again how his unit had fared, this nurse looked away when she answered him. ‘Pretty well, I think.’ The 7th Tank Regiment had in fact lost more than half its men within two hours of landing on Gold beach.

  Robert was in hospital for nearly a month. By the time he was discharged at the end of the first week of July, approximately one million men had been landed on the beaches of Normandy and were pushing further into France, driving the Germans back relentlessly but at heavy cost.

  Joan Taylor came to visit her husband in Derby. He looked bloodied and bruised but he was alive and she wept to have him safe. The thing that scared her most, as she kissed his scratched face and stroked his hair, was the glassy look in his eyes. Robert knew that he and his corporal and gunner had only survived because the shell that struck their tank had exploded outside rather than inside with them. For the rest of his life he remembered the way the tanks around him had disintegrated, their cargo of men evaporated along with them. Nothing left to identify, nothing left to bury. He smiled at his wife when she asked him, ‘Tell me what happened, darling’, but he never did, not properly.

  Robert spent a few days with Joan at Highclere, where Lord Carnarvon congratulated him on a brave job well done. Robert wasn’t sure about that but there was no time for reflection. He was declared fit enough to return to his unit; the battle to liberate France was ongoing and he was needed. So he took his leave of his wife and headed back to France, just in time for the Battle of Falaise.

  In Italy news of the extraordinary Allied achievements in northern France cheered Henry Porchester and his men. Their own battle was slow, tricky work that was wearing everyone down. Henry was set to have a dangerous summer.

  19

  The Beginning of the End

  Between the beginning of May and the end of September 1944, Henry Porchester and the Blues and Royals inched their way along the broken roads and through the booby-trapped medieval hill towns of some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe. As the cold wet winter gave way to a warm spring, there were days of startling loveliness; days that might have been a pleasure, in another time, if it weren’t for the fact that they had to creep into houses looking for the remnants of the German Army and hoping they wouldn’t step on a mine or get shot in the back.

  Henry and his troop were part of a reconnaissance unit, pushing cautiously onwards ahead of the rest of the 8th Army up the eastern flank of the country. They were searching for signs of where the enemy might still be in hidi
ng or where they might have left a little trick to catch the Allied forces out. The Germans had become experts in laying traps, some of them extraordinarily ingenious, and Henry was part of the intelligence-gathering team that had to send information back down the line. Whole towns had been turned into obstacle runs and killing fields. Buildings were demolished to slow access and machine-gun nests set up to mow down the Allied soldiers as they picked their way through the rubble. Abandoned vehicles were fitted with trip wires that set off charges the moment a door was opened. Explosives were strung through trees so that whole avenues would explode around the advancing troops. Anything movable might be wired: Jerry cans, oil drums, abandoned rucksacks, a tempting crate of wine. Anticipating and evading the Germans’ latest strategy was dangerous, exhausting work. One thing that helped enormously was that some of the soldiers Henry and his troop were fighting alongside were veterans with a stock of hard-won experience. Some of the Blues and Royals had been out in the field for four years and in Italy for a year. They were deeply familiar with the Germans’ tactics. Even so, it was a battle of wits and nerves and it took its toll.

  On 16 May a detachment was ambushed and Ian van Ammel, a friend of Henry’s, was taken prisoner. Henry wrote to his father that it ‘seems so odd since I was playing bridge with Ian three weeks ago.’ Two weeks later, on 1 June, Gavin Astor’s jeep was found just outside Gamberale. It was a total wreck, burnt to pieces and perfect booby-trap fodder. Henry Porchester was sent out to reconnoitre the area. He reported that there were no signs of blood on or around the wreckage. He could only hope that Gavin was now a prisoner of war.

  On the opposite side of the country, the US 5th Army had finally taken Monte Cassino after four long, bitter months and four waves of attacks that cost 55,000 Allied soldiers’ lives as against 20,000 German. General Clark diverted from pursuing the fleeing German Army, and on 4 June marched into a virtually abandoned Rome. The empty gesture, in direct defiance of the orders of his commanding officer, astounded his subordinate officers. The result was that the Germans were allowed to fall back and dig in again across the country from just north of Pisa to south of Rimini. The Italian campaign was set to rumble on for many more exhausting, bloody months.

  Catherine wrote to her son in June, thrilled that the Allies were nearing Rome. ‘I hope and pray St Peter’s will be spared—and my dear Father the Pope.’ Rome was indeed spared, though since it had been declared an open city by the two opposed armies, it had never been targeted. There was in fact a startling consensus that the great historic towns of Italy should be protected. Aside from Rome itself, Florence, Siena and Orvieto were also relatively unscathed. Not that Italy escaped devastation: Naples was not the only great historic city to suffer carnage, and of course the human cost of the campaign was vast, but there were considerable efforts made to preserve the exceptional fabric of Italy. Catherine would surely have been delighted, if perhaps rather confused in her loyalties, to learn that two German officers had in the autumn of 1943 convinced Church authorities and their own commanding officers to use German army vehicles to remove the contents of Monte Cassino’s library and picture gallery to Rome for safekeeping. Local people were paid in extra food rations and cigarettes to assist in the removal of the entire community of monks and more than 80,000 books and manuscripts and 100,000 prints, as well as countless paintings by Old Masters. The abbey had been founded in 529 AD and its library was described by historians as ‘a treasure literally without price’. This prescient forethought saved more than a hundred lives and an irreplaceable resource for humanity.

  Catherine was about to start new work and had just bought a flat when she wrote to her son. Penelope’s return to the UK and to living with her had revitalised her desire to be in London, but though she loved the house at Wilton Crescent it was really too large for her, Pen and Doll. The new flat was on Hay Hill, just off Berkeley Square, Catherine told Henry. She was about to start work with the Women’s Legion in a soup kitchen down at the docks in the East End, where some of the poorest people in London were still struggling to recover their lives in the aftermath of the Blitz. One gets the sense that Catherine was finally starting to come through the dreadful sadness brought on by her loss of Geoffrey, and even to manage her anxiety over Henry. Her faith undoubtedly helped her, and she reported to her son that she had been seeing lots of friends and felt really well. She had even been learning to cook, under Doll’s supervision. The previous night Doll had bought a week’s meat rations and hovered at her mistress’s side as Catherine attempted a mixed grill of liver and kidneys. The results were pronounced extremely delicious.

  Porchey came to have tea with her and inspect the new flat. He was preoccupied with his divorce. Catherine gathered that he’d served notice on Tilly and that he and Jeanne had had a farewell party as they were not supposed to meet in public while the case was being put together. ‘She’s madly in love with me,’ Porchey confided to Catherine. ‘And do you know, I think she’s absolutely wonderful.’ Catherine was sanguine and also a little sceptical. After all, she did know Porchey really quite well and she suspected that he might grow restless again once the divorce was settled. She was not the same woman she had been when they were married. Her experience as Geoffrey’s wife, and above all as his widow, had given her great confidence and skills of self-reliance. She only smiled at his comments and wished him well.

  The main topic of conversation at Porchey and Catherine’s meeting, though, was not his divorce but their daughter’s marriage. At the beginning of June, Gerrit van der Woude had telephoned Lord Carnarvon at Highclere: he would very much like to give him a drink at the Ritz the following week. Porchey was not at all surprised. Pen had been fizzy with joy for the last few months, talking of Gerrit in terms that suggested he was indispensable to her happiness. Gerrit had now won over both Penelope’s parents—it was impossible to argue with the evident happiness of their daughter. Besides, she was a sensible girl with sound instincts and not inclined to flights of romantic fancy; they trusted her judgement.

  Porchey gave his blessing over drinks at the Ritz. His only concern was that they should not rush into marriage until the war was well and truly over. In any case, Penelope couldn’t countenance getting married until her beloved brother was home, so the young couple agreed to a slightly longer engagement than they really wanted. For now it would be kept a private matter. The public announcement would wait until they could set a date for the wedding. Two days later Almina came to lunch with Catherine to discuss the wonderful news and both Pen and Catherine wrote to Henry to tell him. ‘Your father found Gerrit absolutely charming,’ wrote Catherine. ‘We are all really so happy and Pen is almost beside herself. The only thing now is that we so desperately look forward to you coming home.’

  Penelope went to Highclere two weeks after she became engaged, for ten days’ holiday. It was the first time off from the Foreign Office she’d had since her day at Christmas and she was exhausted. Her father had told her that Robert Taylor was recuperating at the castle and she went to see him and meet his wife, Joan. She found them both tense, unable to let go of each other’s hands as they talked. Pen was moved by Joan’s fortitude despite the prospect of her husband’s imminent return to the battlefield. Beneath the carefully upbeat general conversation was a thick anxiety. There were no illusions left for Robert. He knew what the battle that was waiting for him looked like. He had been so lucky once; could his luck possibly hold long enough for him to see the end of the war?

  Pen found Harcourt ‘Crinks’ Johnstone down there too, also resting up, but there was plenty of activity. Her father was busier than ever with Claims Commission business, and to his delight he had just been promoted to Colonel. He hosted a meeting on post-war agricultural policy. People were starting to believe that the war would actually end, and to prepare accordingly.

  One visitor to Highclere during Pen’s stay who certainly had no doubts about the war having entered its final stages was General Patton. Since playing his part i
n Operation Fortitude to perfection, he had been given command of the US 3rd Army as they readied to make their push south and southeast from the Normandy beaches. He was now preparing to leave for northern France to meet his troops, who had been moved across throughout July. He and Porchey must have met when General Patton was out raising morale among the US troops who were waiting to be sent to France. In between his work on Operation Fortitude, Patton visited a great many US bases. Porchey travelled all over southern England for his work and was often at military functions. One imagines that they would have recognised something of the kindred spirit in each other. They were both bluff and direct, with an irreverent sense of humour. Porchey had suggested that he come to lunch at Highclere if he found himself in the area.

  General Patton arrived on a beautiful summer’s day accompanied by his ADC and laden with goodies—golf balls, crisps and tinned food, mostly—for Lord Carnarvon to pass on. The power of American largesse was still proving effective, even as the conflict started to draw to a close. The golf course was still a wheatfield but at least Porchey could practise some driving shots.

  There were just eight for lunch and it was a small and convivial group. Patton was on excellent form, his spirits restored by the prospect of getting back into the field. ‘When we get to Normandy,’ he confided to Porchey, ‘I have one plan and one plan only. I don’t care what Monty says, I’m determined to get to Berlin before those goddamned Russians.’