by Tessa Boase
The month of September 1914 was to be remembered as ‘among the happiest weeks’ of Dr Beauchamp’s life. It was, in retrospect, a soft beginning for Wrest; a sort of prelude before the ghastly business of war surgery began in earnest. There was a delightful novelty to having working-class Tommies in one’s home. The day after the men’s arrival, Bron posted a rubber stamp and ink pad for the hospital chequebook, along with some Virginia cigarettes and twelve fishing rods and tackle (a ‘source of untold happiness and innumerable wiles’, according to Nan). The men, Bron wrote to his cousin Ettie, were said to be ‘extremely happy and very jolly’. In the midst of this determinedly upbeat letter he added that his cousin Aubrey Herbert was reported ‘wounded and missing’.
There was competition among every woman in the house for ‘the boys” approval. These were women who had no children. They were women whose sweethearts were away at war: women far from their families, whose brothers and brothers-in-law were at the Front. They had been working in female domains for longer than they cared to remember. Nurse Piper, Nurse Simpson, Nurse Warner, Nurse Mandler, Nurse Camm, Nurse Riley, Nurse Burdon, Sister Rogers and Sister Martin: all had their own stories. The maids too, those unnamed young girls photographed in kitchen and dining room; all carried private anxieties.
Hannah Mackenzie was one of twelve children, of which there were three brothers. To begin with, first- and second-born William and James, at 40 and 39, were too old to be called up. But 26-year-old Alick, her favourite brother, was sent off to the Front with the Cameron Highlanders 2nd Battalion after a military career in India. Her older sister Jessie had two sons, both of which were to leave for France: 19-year-old Samuel and William, who signed up in Glasgow aged just 16–one of the many thousands of Kitchener’s ‘boy soldiers’ who lied about their age. Her younger sister Nellie, newly married to Lance Corporal Hugh Munro of the Cameron Highlanders, had recently bid goodbye to her husband, like thousands of other women. So Hannah had enough to occupy her mind and was, in the words of her mistress, ‘thankful to be engrossed in work’.
The influx of these boisterous soldiers gave Wrest’s women an unexpected blast of light relief. You could not go for a walk around the grounds (and there might, these days, be any number of hollow excuses to do so) without coming across a dozen men in khaki or blue sitting along the canals that encircled the gardens. Here, on grassy banks under weeping willows, these young men tried to forget what they had seen in France. A pet swan drifted curiously from fishing rod to fishing rod–and Nan was everywhere with her Kodak box camera (slogan, ‘You press the button, we do the rest’), recording Wrest’s ‘brilliant career as a Convalescent Home’. Dozens of small black-and-white photographs pasted into the scrapbooks show soldiers posing beneath classical Roman statuary; soldiers sitting thigh to thigh with brilliant-white-clad nurses on the steps; soldiers holding up their fishing catches, eels included.
‘The astonishing assortment of fish were then carried off to the kitchen’, wrote Nan, ‘as old Mrs Geyton could always be prevailed upon to fry them for the men’s supper.’ Mrs Geyton, she adds, was a ‘great character’ who (as in most upper-class descriptions of their cooks) ‘flung saucepans about when angry, and was inordinately extravagant’. She was also profoundly maternal, doing anything ‘to make the boys happy’.
There was fishing, and there was dressing up. No country house was complete without its fancy-dress box; the rage for dressing up among the aristocracy reached a kind of frenzied peak in the pre-war years. Wrest Park’s Victorian costume box was unearthed by the ‘little cockney’, Private Summers–and from that time on evening concerts were ‘in steady demand, especially as extra beer was served’, wrote Nan, herself a veteran of fancy dress and witty skits. ‘We nurses sat on the stairs, the convalescents in the hall singing, reciting and dancing.’ And the maids? I imagine them peeping through half-open doors, or craning down from the balcony up high.
During the American Ambassador’s time the great Italian tenor Caruso had sung for guests in the grand Staircase Hall. Now, ‘Paddy, dressed in a tabard of the de Grey coat of arms, danced Irish jigs in a corner, and Private Whalley in a very décolleté dress with bulging front, pursued Dr Beauchamp to ask him in ringing whispers “about the baby”.’
Hannah loved all this tomfoolery and high jinks. She is remembered by her great-nephew as a lover of practical jokes; a fan of the whoopee cushion, the little packet of itching powder, the stink bomb. When housekeeper to the Vanderbilts in 1920s New York, she would fill the fountains with spent champagne corks just for the wicked pleasure of seeing the butler jump with fright when he turned on the jets of water in the morning and the corks bounced down the marble staircase, bang bang bang! (this became one of Hannah’s favourite anecdotes). But where, in the new hospital hierarchy, would she have sat? Nan writes of the nurses’ inhibitions, ‘torn between extreme conventionality and a desire to follow the ways of Mount Olympus (the front seats where Bron, guests and I were sitting), uncertain whether to look embarrassed or to applaud’.
Throughout Britain, working-class soldiers were at that moment infiltrating wealthy homes, chipping away at deeply ingrained social structures. How it must have perturbed the girls’ Victorian parents. ‘Whatever you do’, cautioned one upper-middle-class mother to VAD hopeful Sybil Warren, ‘you are not going to nurse. You can go [to the war] as a pantry maid, but not as a nurse.’ She did not want her daughter dealing with the ‘lower classes–Tommies’.6 These boys had shaken up sedate, provincial England. On Sunday, 16 August 1914 the population of Bedford doubled when 17,000 Highland Territorials arrived in town, after an exhausting journey on no fewer than sixty-seven troop trains. The young men were billeted with Bedford’s unsuspecting citizens (payment 3s for officers, 9d for soldiers, per day). The ‘bare-kneed clansmen’ with their pipes and drums shook Bedford ‘out of the doldrums’, according to the local paper. The town’s young women were so smitten by these ‘strapping, brawny visitors’ that there were many marriages (and babies conceived) before the troops’ departure nine months later. A columnist for the Bedfordshire Times–a ‘bitter kiltless civilian’–writes disapprovingly of certain ‘things happening in the dusk’ along the riverbanks of the Ouse.7
For all that Wrest was a closed world, Hannah Mackenzie was able to read about the Highlanders in the paper. Their arrival in Bedford was a huge event–so huge that King George V visited the town that October to view the Territorials parading en masse with pipes and drums. There would be a full-blown Highland Games held the following Easter on the sports fields of Bedford Grammar School, Bron’s alma mater. It’s hard to appreciate today, but these were foreigners, to those southerners in a pre-television age, with strange accents and even stranger dress: sporrans, kilts, spats, hose tops, glengarry bonnets. There was a continuing obsession with bagpipes in the local press: a total of twelve pipe bands had arrived in town along with the troops.
Hannah was a Highlander, yet she had spent many years working in England, seldom making the long journey back home. I can picture her, seized with a longing to hear the pipes and the drums again, making her excuses for far-flung shopping expeditions by motor omnibus to Bedford (a twenty-mile round trip). The occasional scenes of ‘disgraceful conduct’ outside the pubs would have transported Hannah to the mean streets of Inverness and her youth. The rugged accents of those Seaforths and Argyll and Sutherland laddies made her realise just how far she had travelled in her thirty-two years. And yet, at the sound of the bagpipes, an instant lump might have formed in her throat. She was so far from home.
The thin-faced marching men in diamond-patterned hose tops and navy glengarry bonnets brought to mind her favourite brother, young Alick, whose battalion was sent to the Western Front that December. He must have heard good things about Bedford from his countrymen, for he moved there after the war, got married and set up a business selling pianos. Many Highlanders returned to see the women who had looked after them like foster-mothers before their tearful departure by trai
n for the Front. Bedford was the furthest most of them had ever travelled in their young lives.
VI
It Was Her Character
There were the ‘boys’–and there were the men.
Hannah Mackenzie enjoyed the company of Tommies as much as any woman, but her eyes were on those who mattered. Lord Lucas was a remote figure in London. Far more important in her day-today life was Dr Beauchamp. Sydney Beauchamp, 53, was the darling of private practice: ‘his character was one of singular beauty’, wrote a friend, remembering how at Caius College Beauchamp was known as ‘the Lovely B’.8 Nan observed her housekeeper’s machinations. ‘Hannah handled any man of importance with supreme skill’, she noted. ‘She studied Dr Beauchamp and attended to his needs until she had him tied to her little finger.’ Later, when the clipped and precise Major Churton arrived from the War Office as resident surgeon, ‘Hannah flew straight to him like a bird.’ I look again at that wartime portrait of Hannah Mackenzie and imagine the full force of her charm: the directness of her grey-eyed gaze, the amused yet firm mouth. ‘She was attractive to men,’ her great-nephew Ross told me; ‘it wasn’t so much her looks–it was her character.’
There was one other man who demanded very special attention. Nan’s diary makes no overt mention of Hannah and J. M. Barrie, but the evidence suggests a keen sympathy, even close friendship between the two. Barrie was the literary and theatrical giant of his day. Aged 54, the previous June he had been made a baronet by King George V (having refused a knighthood in 1909). This same year he made £45,000 (around two million pounds today) from a mixture of plays, revues, sales of books and investments. His name was rarely out of the West End or off Broadway–four one-act plays ran in London during 1914. He was, back then, so much more than Peter Pan (now in its tenth year and a Christmas fixture), but for all his towering success and wealth he was a very private man.
Barrie was small–just over five feet, with sunken blue eyes, a huge domed forehead and a deep, mournful voice. He was a compulsive storyteller, with his distinctive Scottish accent, beginning his tales with ‘I always remember…’ He disliked small talk, preferring to get straight to the nub of the matter. When Barrie went up to Wrest from London for the weekend, the fun began in earnest: cricket, croquet, billiards, theatrical revue, fancy dress–yet there was an intensity about him that could go either way. Biographers describe him as entertaining, charming and immensely generous. He could also be selfish, moody, and proprietorial. He had a habit of planting postage stamps on new friends’ ceilings by flicking them up on a coin: there they stayed as badges of ownership. This was very likely his first action on meeting the men of Ward A, because Barrie felt unambiguously possessive of Wrest Park Hospital–just as he felt a fierce affection for Nan and Bron Herbert, friends of just two years. ‘I’m hoping, if you have time, to hear from “our” hospital’, he wrote to Nan that September.
And then he was among them, shaking the slim hand of housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie, complimenting her on arranging his room in the ‘Bachelor Wing’ so finely when most of the house had been so very thoroughly institutionalised. ‘Ah, a fellow Scot!’ I imagine him saying. ‘From Inverness, you say? We must talk, Mrs Mackenzie, we must talk. I was in the Highlands myself just this last August, when war broke out you know. Odd to be fishing in the glens at that time…’
Would Hannah have been overawed by him? I don’t think so. I see our housekeeper, pink faced, strut back to her office in the basement to tell head housemaid Maggie and Hetty the cook about her new friend Mr Barrie. ‘Something special for dinner tonight I think, Mrs Geyton. And a drop of our best Scotch from the cellars.’ This is not so very fanciful. Compare the early stories of James Matthew Barrie and Hannah Mackenzie.
Barrie was born in a cramped cottage in Kirriemuir, Angus in 1860, the ninth of ten children. His father David was a handloom weaver, and the family–though upwardly mobile and with a great belief in education–were poor. Barrie was plucked from Kirriemuir by his ambitious eldest brother Alexander and educated in Glasgow, then Dumfries and finally Edinburgh University. After a spell on The Nottingham Journal, he caught the train south to London to try his luck.
‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make’, he once wrote.9 And of Scottish people who share a home: ‘the affection existing between them is almost painful in its intensity’. By 1914, J. M. Barrie could count among his friends some of the greatest talents of Edwardian England: the architect Edwin Lutyens, artist William Nicholson, writers Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. That summer, just before the outbreak of war, he dined at the writer Maurice Baring’s then walked back with the Chancellor Lloyd George to 11 Downing Street, talking all the way. You could get no higher than this–yet the Kirriemuir boy in him, the Peter Pan figure, was consistently agog at his good fortune.
Hannah Mackenzie was born in 1881 in Inverness, her childhood spent in a succession of streets clustered around the mouth of the city’s port: Glebe Street, Waterloo Place, Tanners Lane. Her parents were Jessie and James Mackenzie, a reliably fertile couple who produced twelve children over twenty-four years; Hannah was the fifth-born. Father James was a master shoemaker, an artisan. According to the census returns he had also done stints as a stone dresser, a fruiterer-greengrocer and a ‘general labourer’. Jobs were scarce in the Highlands, and with twelve mouths to feed, you did what you could.
The two eldest sons William and James appear in the 1891 census as a compositor (a printer’s typesetter), aged 17, and a painter, aged 16. At least three of the Mackenzie girls went into service, working their way to good positions within the English upper classes. In 1901 Hannah, aged 19, had left home and was working for a loom dresser in Lanarkshire as a general domestic servant, the bottom of a hierarchy of four. She moved on, and on again, pushing ever southwards: as many moves as it took to get the top job.
VII
Blood Feud
The story of Wrest Park Hospital–‘Wrest in Beds’, as Barrie liked to call it–has all the right elements for a J. M. Barrie play. As with Peter Pan and The Admirable Crichton there is an almost Shakespearean removal to somewhere ‘other’, an Eden-like place apart. For those men who have witnessed the carnage of Liège, Mons and Ypres, Wrest is indeed a kind of Neverland. There is a potentially explosive triangle of the three women in command: Nan Herbert, Sister Martin and Hannah Mackenzie. There will also be a forbidden love affair, intermixing of the social classes, death, and yet more death. Lurking in the background, Prospero-like, is the figure of Barrie–controlling, stage-managing, listening: noting down incidents for future use. (Private Paddy, who slept with a fishing rod so that he might have first chance in the morning, cropped up in the 1917 play Dear Brutus.)
If this were a J. M. Barrie play, the first act would now be drawing to a close. Wrest Park Hospital is no longer needed as a convalescent home, the War Office decrees, as there are ‘no more convalescents available’. After just one month of ‘unbelievable happiness’ for all, it closes on 8 October 1914. The curtain rises again on 20 November that same year. On a bitterly cold Friday night a hundred bloody, broken and lice-infested soldiers are being stretchered in, fresh from the Front. There is now an operating theatre at Wrest Park, X-ray rooms and inexhaustible hot water for the line of baths in the stripping room (or ‘Louse House’). There are four ‘ambulance cars’ parked in the stable yard. The hospital has, in this short space of time, moved up a gear. It is now being run on a ‘base hospital’ footing as a unit with nearby country-house hospital Woburn Abbey. It receives its wounded direct from the Western Front.
The nightmare of the war is being discovered at first hand. With the arrival of the soldiers a direct contact is established between the quiet life of a Bedfordshire village and the grim business of shot, shell and bayonet. Yet the tone of Nan’s letters to Bron in London is upbeat, invincible–what one might, in 1914, describe as very British.
The work has been terrible, but I begin to
see chinks of daylight ahead, and I think in a week it will be going more or less like clockwork. They underestimated the number of nurses needed, and we’ve had to pour in whatever help we could get; but it’s been almost impossible to get even temporary ones…The men are rippers and are already feeling and looking better, and the wards are beginning to buzz with faint talk and ribaldry.
Where is Hannah in the midst of all this? Mackenzie family legend has it that Hannah once worked as a matron in a war hospital. It’s hard to see where she fitted this in (including the training; it took three years just to qualify as a nurse). She was, we must assume, talking about Wrest Park. She was the housekeeper, but perhaps she felt like the matron. The men saw her as the matron. She was matronly! Always ready with her sympathetic tone, a rallying quip, a special treat, a cigarette. Whereas that wee slip of a thing, Miss Martin…Matron? Och, Ward A was in a terrible muddle, that was plain for all to see.
For several weeks there was no time for Nan to write in her diary. She took up her fountain pen again to record the disintegrating relations between staff at Wrest Park Hospital. Miss Martin was the problem. ‘Poor Miss Martin now began to show how extraordinarily unfit she was for Matronship, and the inevitable troubles followed’, Nan wrote. ‘She tried to please all and in so doing failed to please any; she failed in the handling of the domestic staff, which was natural enough, but also failed to inspire the Doctors with confidence.’ There is a photograph of Miss Martin posing timidly in the Italian gardens. All is lush and in full flower; it must date from that ‘blissfully happy’ month of September, but our Matron looks faun-like and hesitant. The doctors were right: ‘poor Miss Martin’ does not inspire confidence.
‘She was always afraid of being short of nurses’, Nan continued,
and ransacked the country for them. All through those weeks an assortment of nurses came and went–two or three who drank, one who took drugs, stewardesses [kitchen staff] who wanted to do war work, and probationers [trainees] who preferred sharing a chair with a patient to finding an empty one!
