The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery

by Bailey, Catherine

  At the time Flower was writing, the plan was to evacuate the records to Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset, and to St Luke’s Hospital in Market Harborough. While the Keeper’s memo does not reveal why John believed the castle ‘might be a good place’, it is clear his offer was politely refused. ‘I did not feel I could accept His Grace’s offer,’ Flower informed the official at the Office of Works. ‘I told him that your office kept a register of buildings available for similar purposes during an Emergency. His Grace agreed that I should write to you and that you would let him know whether you could accept his offer to have the castle put on the list.’

  The previous year, realizing that armed conflict with Hitler’s Germany was inevitable, the Committee of Imperial Defence had instructed the Office of Works to compile a register of buildings that could be utilized when war came. Britain’s historic houses played a key part in the plans for mobilization. They offered large-scale accommodation that could be adapted to a variety of purposes – hospitals and convalescent homes, intelligence and military headquarters, billets and training premises for the armed forces, even prisoner-of-war camps.

  The register, detailing which buildings would be requisitioned and for what purpose, was top secret. That it remained secret was imperative. Not only was the committee anxious to prevent disclosure of its plans to the enemy, it was also keen to avoid the volume of protest that would erupt were the register to come to light. If there was a war, Britain’s historic homes were to be compulsorily requisitioned: their owners would have no say over the purpose for which they were being taken over, or any right to reject the government’s decision.

  When John telephoned the Keeper of Records, neither he nor Flower knew that the Ministry of War had already staked a claim to the castle. Its size and its commanding position meant that it was ideally suited as a military headquarters. On the government’s secret register, it had been earmarked as a billet for troops.

  And yet at the eleventh hour, just seven weeks before war was declared, the decision to use the castle as a military headquarters was reversed.

  Out of the blue, on 12 July, Flower received a short communication from Edward Normann, the Assistant Secretary of Defence at the Office of Works: ‘Arrangements have now been made for Belvoir Castle not to be used for billeting purposes, so you can proceed to make arrangements for evacuating there.’

  No explanation was given for the last-minute switch. But, clearly, the decision infuriated senior officials at the Public Record Office. Far from believing the castle to be a ‘good place in an Emergency’, as John had suggested, they regarded it as hopelessly ill suited to their needs. In every respect, it failed the criteria they had so carefully laid down.

  The search for an emergency repository for the records had involved months of investigation. The Keeper of Records, in a memo written after the war, explained the factors that had governed the search: ‘There were two main dangers to which records might obviously be exposed in time of war: aerial bombardment and invasion. There was obviously very little we could do as a direct precaution against the dangers arising from invasion. Aerial bombardment was, from the first, the danger which those responsible for the custody of the records were bound to take mainly into account.’ With this in mind, the Keeper had explored the possibility of storing the records on the Piccadilly Line beneath Aldwych station. But as his investigation concluded, ‘It was found that the tube as a whole was too damp for the storage of documents for any length of time.’ He had also considered using a special train, which, should it become exposed to attack – either from the air, or by invading enemy troops – could be moved at short notice from its siding. Finally – early in 1939 – he had selected the two emergency repositories: the prison at Shepton Mallet and the hospital in Market Harborough. Located as they were in sleepy market towns, both were thought to be discreet, secure locations.

  Unlike Belvoir.

  ‘I wish I could consider it a safe place,’ Michael Dawes, the Deputy Keeper of Records, lamented to his colleagues after seeing the castle for the first time: ‘It is a landmark for miles around and I can quite imagine the Germans bombing it for the sake of effect, or attempting to seize it for a time and overawe the neighbourhood.’

  To the senior officials at the Public Record Office, the government’s abrupt decision to evacuate the nation’s most important historical documents to a building that was dangerously vulnerable to enemy attack appeared cavalier. No clearer indictment of the mistrust with which the Keeper of Records regarded the castle can be found than his decision – on the day war was declared – to send the most valuable document in his collection elsewhere.

  On the evening of 3 September, a small, unmarked van left Chancery Lane. Travelling under armed guard, it headed west out of London. Its precious cargo, wrapped unobtrusively in brown paper, lay beside the driver on the front passenger seat. The parcel contained the Domesday Book. It was on its way to Shepton Mallet Prison, where it was to be hidden in a secret hiding place in the women’s wing for the duration of the war.

  So why, given that Belvoir Castle was infinitely better suited to military requirements, had the government suddenly changed its mind?

  From the outset, it was John who had pressed Whitehall to use the castle as a repository for the records. In doing so, he had joined a queue of anxious dukes. In the weeks leading up to the war, rather than see their historic homes wrecked by troops, the Dukes of Marlborough, Bedford, Portland, Devonshire, Beaufort – and others – had been quick to offer their houses to the government for non-military use. For the most part, the offers had been accepted: Blenheim, Woburn and Welbeck had been taken over by the security services; Chatsworth had become a girls’ boarding school; and Badminton a country retreat for the elderly Queen Mary – the widow of George V.

  John knew the Prime Minister personally; he also knew the members of his Cabinet. It looked as if he had pulled strings to stop the Ministry of War from taking over his castle. But was it because he had simply wanted to prevent it being used as a billet for troops?

  Or had he had a specific interest in the records?

  What I found curious was that, from the moment the first convoy arrived at Belvoir, John had insisted that two classified documents – a summary of the records stored at the castle, and a plan of the stacks, showing exactly where they were located – should be kept in the Muniment Rooms.

  I found this detail in a report, filed by Mr Gilkes, the caretaker appointed by London to look after the records. He had travelled up to Belvoir with the first convoy. ‘Everything is in order here,’ he informed the Keeper a few days later: ‘Every bundle is sorted and stacked. The slips are sorted in a leather box and I have a plan of the stacks, so bundles can be found at a moment’s notice. These are kept with a Summary of the Records in the Duke’s rooms.’

  By Act of Parliament, the records had to be accessible to government departments and court officials at all times. It was Gilkes’s job to locate and retrieve them. Tens of thousands of bundles were stacked along the passages, and in the ballroom at the castle: without the summary and a plan of the stacks it would have been impossible to find any particular bundle.

  But why had John insisted that these two important documents be kept in his rooms? Though he had been appointed temporary custodian of the records, they were not his business. Was it because he had wanted to be able to locate specific records himself?

  Gilkes’s report hinted that John might have had some ulterior motive in pressing the government to use the castle as an emergency repository. But there was no further correspondence to suggest what his motive might have been.

  I drove away disheartened. Once again, I had drawn a blank. It had been raining all day; gloomily, inching my way through the traffic, I mulled over the precarious state of my research. A depressing pattern was emerging. Every avenue of enquiry seemed to lead to a dead end. Either that, or it compounded the mystery behind this man. The search for the missing letters had revealed that John had cre
ated not one but three gaps in his biography; his encrypted letters had proved impossible to decipher – unless a cryptologist could make something of them. I had spent weeks chasing the mystery behind the circumstances of his death inside the Muniment Rooms, yet all that I’d managed to establish was that there had been something he had wanted to finish before he died. I had talked to the family; I had talked to the servants: I had run out of leads to follow.

  And yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had overlooked a crucial element, one that was important in a way that I didn’t yet understand.

  One detail, which the servants had supplied, was particularly baffling. A few days before he died, John had made an unusual request. Flouting a centuries-old tradition, he asked that his body should remain in the Muniment Rooms until the day of his funeral. At Belvoir, the burial of a duke had always been a very public event. His predecessors had been laid out in the Guard Room, where hundreds of the family’s tenants and employees had filed past their coffins.

  Even in death it seemed John was wedded to these rooms. His singular last wish was yet another mystery, as seemingly insoluble as whatever it was that he had regarded important enough to risk his life in order to finish. Why had he needed to be in the Muniment Rooms to finish whatever it was that he was doing?

  Why these rooms and not elsewhere?

  It was then that it dawned on me that I was faced with a puzzle that no one else had tried to solve. The Muniment Rooms had been sealed immediately after John died. They had been frozen in time. They were exactly as he had left them. I thought of the large, black Bakelite telephone on his desk and the vintage Anglepoise lamps with their round-pin plugs and braided gold flexes. In one of the drawers of the desk I had found packets of the brand of cigarettes that John had liked to smoke; in another, I had even come across a half-filled ashtray. Were the traces of whatever it was that he had wanted to finish still there?

  15

  I was anxious to make an early start. The next morning, I left London at seven. It was soon after nine when I drew up at the gates below the castle. The morning was cold and overcast. There had been a hard frost overnight and a thin mist hovered over the fields in the valley. As I drove up the narrow track through the woods, the mist thickened. At the top of it, coming over the brow, I could barely make out the castle. Its lower floors were obscured: only the Gothic turrets were visible, ghostly shapes, rising out of the fog.

  I parked my car on the terrace by the battlements. The oak door to the portico loomed ahead. It was thirty feet high, and the Duke’s crest, emblazoned in gold and peacock blue, glinted above it, a tiny splash of colour in the murk. I tried the small priest’s door inset in the corner of it. It was locked. The other entrance was on the opposite side of the castle. In the thick fog, it was impossible to see more than a few yards. Hugging the pale stone walls, I walked the two hundred yards or so around the battlements.

  A small door led into the estate office. Stopping briefly, I collected the key to the Muniment Rooms. Then I cut across the ground floor of the castle through the passages in the old servants’ quarters – past the entrance to the spiral staircase that ran up to the Central Tower, then left, into the long passage by the servants’ hall. I saw no one.

  It felt odd to be turning the key to the rooms. I had searched them many times before, but this visit was different. Previously, I had been looking for letters; this time, I did not know what I was looking for.

  I began in the room where John had died. First, I went through the cases looking for things that I might have missed on a previous search. Then I pulled out the sofa and looked behind it and underneath it. Next, I examined the floor for loose-fitting boards – places where something might have been concealed. I did not find anything. Then I checked Room 2 and the six cases along the passage. Again, I could see nothing of note. I repeated the process in Rooms 3 and 4.

  It was when I got to Room 5 that I realized there was one place I had not searched.

  Trunks and boxes, stacked one on top of the other, crowded the centre of the small room. Situated at the foot of the Round Tower, it was little more than a cupboard off Room 4. I had already had a quick look inside the trunks on the top of the pile. They had been empty. But I had not looked through the others. I had assumed they were empty too.

  There were twelve boxes in total: gun cases, metal hatboxes, old leather suitcases and sturdy-looking wooden boxes that had once stored breakable items. The ones at the bottom of the pile were awkward to get at; four of the larger trunks had been stacked on top of them.

  I levered the first trunk from the pile. It was black and made of metal and had thick brass studs. John’s initials were stamped on the side of it. Dating from the end of the nineteenth century, it was a travelling trunk – the type that would once have been strapped to the roof of a horse-drawn carriage. The other three trunks were smaller and easier to shift. But when I tried to move the box underneath them, it was too heavy. I lifted the lid. To my astonishment, it was crammed with letters. There appeared to be several thousand in total. They were still in their envelopes, neatly tied in bundles with slivers of pink ribbon.

  My first thought was that this was the missing correspondence that I had been searching for all along. But, flicking quickly through the bundles, I saw that the letters were not confined to the missing months in 1894, 1909 and 1915, as I had hoped. They spanned fifty years, starting in the 1870s. Mostly, they appeared to be addressed to John’s mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland. The family crests and stately addresses of the correspondents were embossed on the backs of the envelopes – men and women who had belonged to the Upper Ten Thousand (the term used in the late nineteenth century to denote Britain’s ruling elite). This was a huge cache of letters: they looked important. So why had John left them to gather dust in these trunks?

  It was when I began to go through them that I realized their significance.

  At first sight, it seemed these were letters that John had not managed to look at before he died. They were unlike any others I had seen in these rooms. John’s comments filled the margins of the letters that he had catalogued in the blue files; he had added dates to those that were undated; he had inserted the full name or title of the correspondent when it was unclear. The pages of these letters were unmarked. There was nothing to suggest that he had begun the process of sifting through them. They appeared to be original source material – the raw material from which he had intended to construct what would have been a long series of blue files.

  But it soon became clear that he had in fact been through them. John had rifled these bundles. The months in 1894, 1909 and 1915 were missing. The gaps in the correspondence coincided precisely with the gaps in the blue files.

  On close analysis, it seems that John had been working on these letters when he died. They explain why, after he fell ill in April 1940, he had refused to leave the Muniment Rooms. They also explain why, in the two years leading up to his death, his days and nights had been spent in them.

  The letters belonged to Violet, Duchess of Rutland. In creating the gaps in the family record, John had had plenty of time to work on the rest of his family’s correspondence. But he had had to wait for his mother’s papers. It was only after her death in December 1937, when her letters finally came into his possession, that he could complete the task of constructing his version – the authorized version – of this period in his family’s history.

  It was a formidable undertaking. Violet, Duchess of Rutland, was born in 1856. Over the course of her lifetime, she had been an inveterate letter writer: frequently, she wrote to those she was closest to several times a day. When John inherited her correspondence, the collection encompassed many thousands of letters.

  In a note written shortly before her death, Violet had expressed the wish that her son should be the arbiter of what was left for history to judge of her life: ‘He [John] may look and destroy, or keep everything,’ she had instructed. The task had consumed him. From the moment she died, he had
rarely emerged from the Muniment Rooms.

  Yet still, in April 1940 when he fell ill, he had not completed the work he had begun in December 1937. Some three thousand of his mother’s letters remained to be sorted.

  These were the ones that I had found in the trunks.

  John had failed to mark these letters because he hadn’t had time. As he was dying, it was the pruning of these letters to which he had had to give priority. In doing so, for the first and only time, he had deviated from his own exacting standards.

  His previous excisions had been meticulous. His passion for history meant that he saw himself as both curator and censor: this was why the dates that signalled the beginning and end of the gaps that he had created had been so precise. But he had approached the last of his mother’s letters in a panic. Instead of reading through them, he had reached straight for the envelopes. He had known exactly what he was looking for: postmarks dating from the three periods which it had taken him twenty years to obliterate from the rest of his family’s correspondence. Had he thought that he would have time to return to them, had he intended to read through them, it was a method he would never have chosen. The postmarks on the envelopes were not always clear; often, the ink was blurred, or the hand stamp only half rolled. Without reading the letters, he could not be certain whether there were any he had missed. Scrupulousness had been John’s hallmark, yet in his haste to remove the evidence that he believed to be incriminating, this fallible method had been the one option open to him.

  I had not doubted that John had something important he wanted to hide, but this pointed to something of vital importance.

  There was an intense pathos in this immensely rich man spurning the trappings of wealth to die in discomfort for the sake of these letters. For John to have walled himself up in these dank rooms must have required a remarkable act of will. He was gravely ill: his body must have craved rest and comfort. Instead, ignoring its demands, and against the advice of his doctors, his overriding concern had been to finish the process of sifting his mother’s letters. Something had hounded him up until his last breath. Whatever it was, he had made its concealment his final act.