by Tessa Boase
Three days after war was declared, Wrest Park was accepted by the Admiralty ‘for the use of men (not Officers)’. On 6 August Nan made the two-and-a-half-hour journey by steam train up to Ampthill, Bedfordshire, then was driven by motor car to Wrest where she ‘outlined everything’ to the outdoor staff and land agent Argles. ‘The furniture was being cleared before we left the house. On Friday Barrie gave us £1,000 for the hospital, and I spent the day struggling to form our list of nurses and procure dressings in the face of a thousand other people doing the same!’ Writing to a Miss Constance C. Bloomfield at the War Office one week later, Nan informs her that the house is being equipped with 130 beds, ‘but 70 more could be procured on a few days’ notice, making in all 200 beds. A matron and staff of certified nurses have been engaged, and all expenses of upkeep will be borne by Lord Lucas.’ She adds, in deference to Bron’s natural reticence and his job as President of the Board of Agriculture: ‘We are anxious to keep this offer out of the papers if it can be so arranged.’
This simply was not possible. The story was irresistible: a great country house, a Liberal Cabinet Minister and the involvement of playwright J. M. Barrie. Wrest Park and its war efforts were very much in the papers from that moment on.
III
Apply To Mrs Mackenzie
‘They’ve all gone,’ Nan wrote in her diary on 10 August, 1914. All the young officers had quietly vanished to France with their regiments. ‘One is talking with a man one day; by the next he has disappeared.’ Not Bron, now 38, who was held down by his job in the Cabinet. ‘It’s ghastly for Bron,’ wrote Nan, ‘but he is working 15 hours a day, which helps him.’ Really, though, it was ghastly for her. ‘No news, but many apprehensions and [at the back] of all the sickening gnawing sense of being left behind.’
Nan was not one to be left behind. She was a restless, independent, fearless young woman in search of a big project. In her twenties she had rejected the Church of England and embraced Theosophy, the alternative religion of the day with headquarters in California. She then served as a ‘directress’ of a Theosophic school in Cuba, before following the anthropologist, and Balkan expert, Edith Durham to Montenegro, acting as ‘bottle washer’ to the Red Cross unit during the Balkan Crisis. At 34, she was still addicted to travel and adventure. The sudden imperative to turn Wrest Park into a hospital was both a gift to a hungry woman like Nan, but also an inhibition. It meant she could no longer keep moving at whim.
Her great friend Angy Manners was busy organising her own nursing party, shortly setting off for Belgium to tend to the wounded. All Nan could do was ‘give’ Angy a couple of her nurses recruited for Wrest Park. ‘I feel disgruntled with everything,’ she wrote, ‘but perhaps by waiting one will get the real job.’
If Wrest Park Hospital did not feel like the ‘real job’ to Nan, might this have affected the way she went about recruiting staff? She had little experience of hiring or managing servants. While her cousin Ettie, Lady Desborough, kept fifteen domestic servants (including two footmen) at their London house alone, Nan and Bron had made do with a cook and parlourmaid in Pimlico. Equipping and staffing a great house like Wrest for a speculative future had an air of fantasy about it. Nobody knew how long this war was going to last, or if the country house hospitals were going to be needed at all.
How did the Honourable Nan Herbet find her housekeeper? By the 1911 census Hannah Mackenzie can be found working, aged 29, as housekeeper of a newly built Lutyens mansion in the village of Overstrand on the north Norfolk coast. Overstrand was known as ‘the village of millionaires’ for its concentration of large new houses and moneyed types who descended during the summer months. The house was designed at the turn of the century for the 2nd Baron Hillingdon, a retired banker and Conservative politician who wanted to make a great statement. Overstrand Hall is impressive, with that Lutyens-esque air of having always been there–all Jacobean timbers, flint and stone facings, brick and tile inner courtyards. It was a house where the social season mattered. Queen Alexandra was a visitor to the Hillingdon family, and there were frequent house parties that attracted actors, authors and poets.
Hannah was 32 years old when she arrived at Wrest, either from Overstrand Hall (which was to transform itself into a ‘luxurious’ nursing home for officers), or from closer to hand; she had family connections in Bedford. It was in some respects a strange job for an upper servant to jump at, since it came with no future guaranteed; but perhaps it appeared as a way of doing something in August 1914.
In those first few months of war there was feverish activity among those who were left behind. Women everywhere tried to ‘do their bit’. All the women on the Isle of Wight were busy making soldiers’ pyjamas. The women of Bedford were stitching hundreds of ‘special slippers’. Nan’s cousin Ettie set up a work party at Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire: by 11 December, 995 garments had been sent to hospitals and soldiers abroad.3 Nurses were everywhere in short supply. Thousands of women joined the VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment), received basic medical training and went to the war zone as unpaid nurses, cooks, clerks, housemaids, laundresses and drivers. Or there were the less glamorous FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry): women who drove ambulances, scrubbed and disinfected wards, ran soup kitchens and hot baths for dirty soldiers.
The war demanded manpower. A leader in The Times called on those employing ‘men in unproductive domestic occupations, both in and out of doors’ to encourage them to join up–footmen, valets, butlers, boot boys, grooms, gamekeepers. By the spring of 1915 women began to be recruited for the munitions factories; they were not paid the same as the men, but they earned substantially more than they did as maids. In all, between 1914 and 1918 almost four hundred thousand male and female servants left domestic work for positions in the armed forces or to do war-related work.
Loyal old retainers, who couldn’t imagine another world or social order, stayed on at most estates. But at Wrest Park there were no loyal retainers, save for head gardener William Mackinlay. He and his team of a dozen old-timers stayed put throughout the war, clipping the verges and pruning the roses of the handsome formal gardens; leading the carefully booted horse and its mower over the acres of lawn, earning 18s, 19s and 20s a week (around £39 to £43 in today’s money). There was also irascible old John Land in the gamekeeper’s cottage; and in the Lodge, land agent Cecil Argles, 42, who had worked for Bron these past nine years.
There was, however, no resident female staff. Nan Herbert had to start from scratch, recruiting not only housemaids and kitchen staff but nurses too. The most obvious first appointment was the housekeeper, who could then be relied upon to recruit the young girls herself. Within days Hannah was procured, swiftly installed and was placing advertisements in The Times: ‘Wanted, Scullerymaid. 6 in kitchen: wages £20. Apply to Mrs Mackenzie, Wrest Park Hospital, Ampthill’, reads one. Another in the same column seeks a ‘Third Parlourmaid, to wait on doctors’ and nurses’ dining room: wages £20’. Their wages are equivalent to around £860 today, per annum.
There is a wartime photograph of Nan, snatched off guard in crumpled nurse’s apron, cigarette in hand, face split by a gap-toothed grin. She does not look like the chatelaine of a country house. Nan saw Hannah as a kindred spirit: someone her age, not over-serious or pompous. Hannah had, so they say, a refreshing (and sometimes devastating) directness of manner. To Nan–uncomfortable with unctuousness and subservience–this felt like an advantage. Certainly Hannah felt the same about her new mistress, who seemed, at this stage, bracingly liberal. No obsequious bowing and scraping required; no head butler to cramp her style. This was going to be a house run entirely by women.
In her diary Nan refers to her housekeeper simply as ‘Hannah’, rather than the conventional courtesy title of ‘Mrs Mackenzie’, and is a keen, not unaffectionate, observer of her foibles. (In contrast, Hetty the cook is always ‘Mrs Geyton’.) Hannah was Nan’s right hand, her lieutenant, in that first frantic month of setting up.
IV
Trans
formation
The visitor to Wrest Park walks up six stone steps into an elegant, marble-floored oval hall with wood panelling and, above, cavorting white putti. From here, double doors open on to a further, stirringly theatrical double-staircase hall, big enough to hold fabulous receptions, flooded with light from a lantern roof above and hung all around with gold-framed portraits of family and royalty. This hall–the centrepiece of Wrest Park–did not change. Everything beyond it did. Hannah’s first job was to oversee the transformation of the house. Ante-library, drawing room, library and print room were to be turned into hospital wards. A team of ageing gardeners and odd-job men rolled up and dragged the fine old Turkish carpets down to the cellars below, along with all of the paintings, eighteenth-century furniture, Beauvais tapestries, swagged velvet curtains and Fabergé eggs. All that the housekeeper was supposed to cherish and conserve as part of her job was gone.
The crystal chandeliers were bagged in white sheets. Wooden ladders went up and walls were covered with yards of pale calico, nailed into place over flock wallpaper and gilded mouldings. Electricity was temporarily installed, lamps dangling the length of each ward. Fireplaces were partially bricked up–much more fuel-efficient (and kept like that to this day). Each of these great rooms opened up one on to the other in an enfilade – an unbroken chain of high-ceilinged space running almost the length of Wrest Park. Twenty tall windows looked southwards on to the elevated terrace, the immaculate French parterre below and eighty acres of eighteenth-century landscaped gardens. The ground floor was to be known as ‘A Ward’. The mistresses of other country-house hospitals were more fanciful in their naming of wards (‘Cuckoo’, ‘Nightingale’, ‘Forget-me-not’). At Highclere Castle Lady Almina insisted that each wounded officer had his own room, down pillows, linen sheets and silver-service dinners. But Nan was an ‘A Ward’ sort of woman: no-nonsense, pared back, direct.
Using her friend J. M. Barrie’s gift of £1,000 (about £43,000 in today’s money), Nan set about procuring 130 standard-issue hospital beds (narrow, iron, with wheeled legs) and vast amounts of bed linen and blankets, along with a team of laundrywomen equal to the task. The old Wrest laundry cupboards would not suffice: this required organisation on an institutional scale.
The first-floor bedrooms were converted into ‘B Ward’. Four-poster beds, mahogany dressing tables and mirrors spotted with age were carried down the great curving staircases to the basement. In their place, rows of iron beds were arranged to face the windows, creating ‘quiet, homely and comfortable’ wards with other-worldly, distant views of the dome-topped Pavilion reflected in the still surface of the Long Water canal. The top floor of Wrest Park, up in the eaves, traditionally housed the housekeeper’s bed-sitting room and the maids’ dormitory. This is where the nurses were now to sleep–but did they require better furniture and effects than domestic servants? These rooms were last furnished in the early Victorian era: they were spartan and of their time (threadbare squares of carpet, beds 2ft 6in. wide instead of the standard 3ft). Yet this was a war, and the nurses were there to serve the soldiers.
This muddying of hierarchies was already throwing up awkward questions for the housekeeper. Should the nurses’ beds be less or more comfortable than those of the soldiers? Should they be allowed more, or less privacy than the housemaids? And where did all this leave Hannah Mackenzie vis-à-vis her mistress, who was to work simply as Nurse Herbert–or indeed vis-à-vis Miss Martin of the Metropolitan Hospital, who was soon to be Sister in Command of Wrest Park? There was no precedent for this new order; Mrs Mackenzie was required to muddle through. Nan showed the real order of things by appropriating for herself the sunny, spacious housekeeper’s bedroom and sitting room at the west end of the attic corridor. These rooms she filled with precious furniture (including ‘the Seaweed Cabinet’) and valuable oil paintings (one Claude). ‘My jolly sitting room on the top floor’ became her lair, her place of retreat from the intensity of hospital life.
Domestic servants were now to sleep in the service wing to the east of the house, a small townscape of buildings twice as long as the chateau itself grouped around a central square. This was the domain of coach boys, grooms, valets and gardeners. Now scullery maids, housemaids, parlourmaids and laundry maids would invade the men’s realm–an apt metaphor for what happened on the Home Front during the Great War. For the first time since the wing was built, women would sleep in close proximity to men. The traditional role of housekeeper as moral guardian was going to be impossible to maintain. But, as Nan shrugged, it was wartime. There were different priorities now.
The service wing was also to serve the soldiers as they arrived, shunted by train and motor ambulance straight from the trenches. Nan put the estate carpenters to work converting the stable block into a bathing house and stripping room. All this meant that the maids’ bedrooms, the laundry rooms, kitchen and housekeeper’s room would be placed very much at the heart of the drama. Those wounded ‘Tommies’–their people, after all; the working classes–would enter Wrest Park by way of the servants’ quarters.
‘A week of unceasing scrimmage of work over Wrest’, wrote Nan in her diary on Sunday, 16 August,
with the result that we have the entire place stripped–beds in, walls covered, 20 nurses on the list, extra milk, eggs, vegetables arranged for, sewing organized in the village, cook engaged and stores arriving, and everything so near completion that we could start work on Tuesday or Wednesday, if necessary. Miss Bennett, the matron of the Metropolitan Hospital, arrived yesterday and was ravished by it, as we indeed intended she should be.
There is something of the capable commanding officer in Nan’s summary. Might it have dawned on Hannah, at this early stage, that her mistress had not only taken over the housekeeper’s private rooms but also her role in management? Equally impressed by Wrest Park Hospital was Dr Beauchamp, friend and doctor to the aristocracy. Sydney Beauchamp had been greatly involved in the setting up of the hospital, and he found it hard to let go. On Monday, 17 August ‘he was so carried away by enthusiasm, that he undertook to see Wrest inaugurated himself’. The stage was set–yet Wrest’s future still hung in the balance. It had been offered as a naval hospital, but now it did not look as if it would be needed. The Allies were increasingly mired in the bloody business of halting Germany’s advance through Belgium and into north-eastern France.
No one quite knew what was going to happen next.
V
Anything To Make The Boys Happy
Wrest Park’s call to action came three weeks later. On 5 September Lord Knutsford, chairman of the London Hospital, telephoned Bron at his Commons office and asked if Wrest might be used as a convalescent home for his wounded soldiers. Two days later, sixty-six men were moved from their beds in Whitechapel and sent to Bedfordshire. These were the very first of Britain’s war wounded to leave hospital, and the newspapers were quick to put a positive, patriotic spin on the story: ‘A party of sixty-six British soldiers, delighted that they were taking another stage in the journey back to the Front, left London Hospital yesterday afternoon for a convalescent home’, reported the Daily News.
They will be cared for at Wrest, the fine mansion near Luton which Lord Lucas has placed at the disposal of the War Office. In all probability they will be the first batch to face the enemy a second time. As they clambered into the motor-cars lent by members of the Royal Automobile Club they were confidently asserting that in a week at most they would be starting back for France.
The villagers of Silsoe waited all afternoon to see these ‘Heroes of Mons’. As the motor cars finally drove past the thatched and terraced cottages, they stared hard at this first physical proof of battle. For them, this was where the war really began. Here were British men with bandaged heads, men with crutches–just one month after their flag-waving departure. It had been hard to take in, this past month of banner newspaper headlines, that Britain was really at war; that ‘destruction, and agony on a scale monstrous beyond precedent was going on in the
same world as that which slumbered outside the black ivy and silver shining window-sill’, wrote H. G. Wells in Mr Britling.4
After the initial panic buying of food, ‘the vast inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself’. ‘Business as Usual’ became the slogan of the moment, along with ‘Leave things to Kitchener’. But here it now was: the proof. The crowds at the estate gates–mostly women and children–waved their Union Jacks and ‘cheered lustily’, coaxing a smile from the ‘dust-stained, khaki-clad visitors’. Their tunics, noted the greedy-eyed reporter from the Bedfordshire Times, were ‘more or less stained, and bore evident marks of conflict’.5
The motor cars purred through Wrest’s black and gold gateway, flanked by French-style lodges, along a tree-lined avenue towards the mellow eighteenth-century-style chateau. It was early September and the estate was green, fruit-heavy, hushed. A Red Cross flag floated lazily from the roof. As the soldiers stiffly unfolded themselves from back seats, organised their slings and crutches and limped towards the front entrance, they might well have thought themselves to be arriving at Louis XIV’s Versailles.
Perhaps, for these first brave arrivals, the steps were lined with uniformed maids, headed by housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie. More likely, though, the girls were supplanted or obscured by twenty nurses in snowy aprons, collars and cuffs, headed by Miss Martin and Nurse Herbert. And so from the initial, excited anticipation and massed endeavour of all those women at Wrest, the faintest of battle lines began to be drawn. There were the nurses…and there were the domestic servants.
