Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  The Castle had its own laundry on the northern edge of the estate. When a new laundress was required in 1915, a servants’ employment agency was engaged to find a suitable candidate to ensure an efficient supply of clean linen to the hospital; Harriett Russell was recruited with her husband Harry, and the estate paid for their removal expenses from Folkestone.

  Highclere was of course well used to receiving guests, but still, the maids had to double up in their bedrooms, since they were to make way for all the arriving nurses; and everyone, from the kitchen staff to the housemaids and the footmen to the gardeners, had to brace themselves for an enormous increase in their workload. Almina’s vision of her refuge for the men stipulated that the patients would be served their meals either in their rooms, if they were not well enough to leave them, or at a large table at the end of the North Library, behind the gilded columns. In either case, they would be waited on by footmen. In effect it was like moving a house party of fifty people into the Castle, on a permanent basis.

  Streatfield and Mrs Macnair, who had replaced Mrs Bridgland as housekeeper by 1911 were instrumental in making it all happen. Mrs Macnair received her orders from Lady Carnarvon in the sitting room as usual, but now they concerned the nurses’ accommodation and the best foods to give men recovering from fractures or dysentery. Almina had adopted the nurse’s uniform she wore throughout the war when working, but her new occupation in no way countenanced any change in the interactions between her and the staff. Almina might have had a job to do, but she was still Her Ladyship.

  Almina reported an upbeat spirit of willingness in her household staff as they helped her to make Highclere ready for its first new guests. They must have been run off their feet, but of course they were also involved in an important element of the nation’s war work. For everybody, keeping busy was a welcome distraction from wondering when the call-up might come, for themselves or their husband or son. And then again there were some members of the household who considered that, given the usual strict regime of Mr Streatfield, it was a pleasure to have some new blood around the place, a different set of tasks and plenty of new faces.

  So it was all change at Highclere. Almina decided that the Library would be used as the men’s day room. None of the furniture was moved out but additional chairs were added, so that there was ample space for the men to sit and play cards or to read the books. The room runs the width of the house and is elegant but supremely comfortable. The leather-bound books and veneered wooden shelves, the oriental rugs and the lamps on low tables next to overstuffed sofas make it feel like a place to sit by the fire and be soothed. The French windows open straight out on to the sweep of the drive and look out over the gardens, so on a sunny day the room is flooded with light, and within moments you can crunch over the gravel and feel springy lawn beneath your feet.

  Everything had been designed to make Highclere’s luxurious country-house lifestyle available to the injured soldiers; Almina had re-imagined the Castle as a therapeutic space, one where the atmosphere in the Library or the excellent cooking from the Castle’s kitchen was as important as the services of the radiologist she planned to bring down from London. The first patients arrived in mid-September, members of the Seaforth Highlanders and the Royal Artillery, who had fractures, gunshot wounds and no doubt a large dose of what would soon be called shell shock, and what we now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. No wonder they reported that when they first laid eyes on Highclere, it felt as if they had arrived in Paradise.

  11

  Paradise Lost

  As soon as the call for men went out, Highclere answered. Most of the male staff worked on the estate, as gardeners and foresters, gamekeepers and grooms. Naturally they had to ask permission from their employer to go. Lord Carnarvon let it be known that any man who wished to volunteer would be guaranteed his job when he returned. Lord Carnarvon also offered to pay the men’s wives half their wages to ensure the families had some income. Arthur Hayter, who had started as a groom and risen to be the head man in the stables, volunteered and was told he was too old, but six other men had gone by the beginning of September.

  History chronicles the bravery of the men joining up – as it should, given that by December 1914 over one million men had enlisted in Kitchener’s New Army, and recruitment was maintained at 100,000 a month until August 1915. But the flip side of the coin is the movement in the other direction: 24,000 men a week coming back wounded.

  The clearing hospitals in France and Belgium were extremely rudimentary and barely able to cope with the huge numbers of casualties. They were desperately short-staffed. The Royal Army Medical Corps had 1,509 officers and 16,331 other ranks in 1914, and all its procedures were based on experience gained in the Boer War. Conditions in France and Belgium were very different. Bacteria lurked in the soil that was being dug out for trenches; it caused gangrene, which was the biggest killer of soldiers who made it back to a clearing hospital, and tetanus. Typhoid was rife throughout the Western Front and isolation units were often not a top priority, so more men died from infection. Doctors resented the fact that they were expected to turn their hand to anything rather than being encouraged to specialise.

  Once the wounded had been evacuated from the field and transported from their unit base, via a dressing station, to the clearing hospital, triage could be carried out. But it was haphazard at best. Surgeons would walk the rows of stretchers lined up under a makeshift cover and have to assess who to give basic treatment to there in the field, who to send home for operations that could only be performed in a fully equipped hospital, and who to allow to die. The lucky few whose injuries merited an attempt to treat them but were too serious to be seen by a doctor in France, got put on an ambulance that bumped its way to the nearest working train station for return to England by boat. The journey from battlefield to a hospital at home could take up to three weeks. Plenty of men died en route.

  Southampton was one of the principal points of return for the injured soldiers, and from there they were dispatched all over the country. Some of them came to Highclere. Later on, when the hospital’s fame had spread, strings had to be pulled to gain admission, but at the start of the war, you simply had to be in the right place at the right time. This was an era before public healthcare, when all hospitals were funded by wealthy individuals or charitable organisations. Women like Almina and the other Society ladies who stepped in to help with the huge numbers of war wounded were not just on some vainglorious mission; they were fulfilling a need that wouldn’t have been met without their actions.

  In September 1914 there were just a dozen patients at Highclere. Lady Carnarvon greeted everyone at the front door. She showed the men to their room and, having seen that they were settling in, her next course of action was to send a telegram to their families to let them know that their son or husband was safe. Almina loved these moments of being able to give people the news they were desperately waiting for. Given the length of the telegram she sent Winifred about Aubrey’s whereabouts, you imagine that she didn’t skimp on her words, wanting to tell the family every possible detail that might reassure them.

  The patients knew they had arrived somewhere special from the moment they opened their eyes to realise they were no longer in a dugout in Belgium, but surveying an English park. They spent their first few days at Highclere in their rooms with books, home-brewed beer from the Castle’s brewery and exquisite meals. One patient, Basil Jones, wrote later to Almina, ‘You get on as well as they do in fairy tales, however grievous your hurt may be.’ He was the first of many soldiers to comment appreciatively on the charming nurses, singling out one Sister Bowdler, whom he thought ‘just wonderful’. The patients couldn’t thank Almina enough for giving them her home and, as one man, John Pollen, put it, ‘personally attending to the many things that make a house a real home.’

  Lady Carnarvon assigned a nurse to each patient to bathe their feet, dress their wounds and offer comfort. She wanted to be very much a hands-on nurse herself,
though, and enjoyed her rounds enormously, making sure she knew exactly what was going on with every man in her care. She also brought the Earl round to see her charges. Patients whose ‘nerves … were utterly wrong’, even this early in the war, wrote to her later of their enjoyment of the Earl’s calls. Almina always encouraged their own families to come to see them. Saturday was visiting day. It was all part and parcel of the deliberate attempt to resist the anonymity of big hospitals and to look after the men in every way possible.

  Almina’s approach might have been exemplary, but it was also expensive; in fact it was turning out to be a constant drain on the Rothschild coffers. Not that Alfred really minded. Quite apart from the family commitment to philanthropy, not to mention Alfred’s keen patriotism, he was also a hospital administrator, being Treasurer of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for 31 years by the time he died. When, after a few weeks of Highclere being up and running, Almina took a day off work to travel again to New Court to ask her father for more money, Alfred’s protests were nothing but routine. ‘Darling, it was only last month I gave you £25,000, what on earth have you done with it? I know it’s all in a good cause, but please do be careful.’ Almina reassured Alfred, pocketed another £10,000 and returned to the Castle to put her plans into action. Given the way the war was going, she needed everything she could get.

  On 22 October Lord and Lady Carnarvon lent their support at a stirring mass meeting in Newbury to encourage men to join the Army. There was a ‘mood of gravity’ in the country and, although the pace of recruitment was brisk, more and more troops were needed. The Carnarvons were joined on the platform by Lord Charles Beresford, Admiral and MP, who was a great naval hero and never appeared in public without his bulldog. Lord Carnarvon, as High Steward of Newbury, opened the meeting and expressed the belief that, although the war had been forced upon Great Britain, it would all be over soon, provided the nation stood firm. Then Lord Beresford exhorted the crowd to do their bit, and echoed the sentiment that any boys joining up now could do their duty and be home in time for Christmas. Beresford stayed at Highclere that night; as yet, not quite all the beds were occupied by patients.

  By this point the British Expeditionary Force was taking part in the first battle of Ypres. The pressure on the Western Front had increased since the Russians suffered a heavy defeat on the Eastern Front. The Allies were holding the line, but it was already abundantly clear that with more than a million men on both sides dug in across Belgium and northern France, this war was definitely not going to be over by Christmas.

  The Carnarvons heard that Winifred’s nephew, Bar Maitland, had been killed by a shell. His brother Dick, a delicate boy who had pneumonia most winters and was an artist, volunteered to take his brother’s place and obtained a commission in the Scots Guards. Then came the news from even closer to home. Two of the young lads who had volunteered from the estate, Harry Garrett and Harry Illot, had died while serving in India and France respectively. They had both been gardeners under Augustus Blake who had succeeded Pope in about 1908, and Harry Illot’s family had been working at Highclere for the past twenty years.

  The casualties were high, much higher than the men in charge of strategy had ever allowed for. As Almina could have testified, the wounded and the dead were frequently experienced soldiers. The cream of the Allied professional fighting forces was being shipped home in bits.

  Almina seems to have responded to the horror in a very characteristic way: by using her money and determination and contacts to keep up the pressure to get more done. She decided that they needed more expertise at Highclere and so, by mid-October, Robert Jones was operating in the Arundel room on a succession of men with broken bones.

  Jones, who was later knighted in recognition of his work, was already an experienced orthopaedic surgeon who had learned how to treat fractures from years working as the surgeon-superintendent on the construction of the Manchester Shipping Canal. He devised the first comprehensive accident response service in the world, and implemented it along the length of the canal, so he was accustomed to treating lots of people in stressful conditions. By contrast with the on-site service he provided for the canal labourers, the damask curtains and carpets of the Arundel bedroom must have made a surreal backdrop. Jones was fifty-seven years old and felt a huge duty to do his bit on the home front, given that so many of his younger colleagues were in the field hospitals, battling with conditions that made the ship canal look like a Sunday stroll around Highclere’s gardens.

  Two-thirds of all casualties during the First World War (those who survived long enough to reach a hospital) had injuries to bones from shrapnel and gunshot wounds. There was a lot of work for orthopaedic surgeons. (Abdominal wounds, by contrast, were considered too complex to treat and these men, like Aubrey Herbert, were simply dosed on morphine; and, unlike him, most died.) Jones was adamant that by using a particular technique called the Thomas splint, which had been developed by his uncle Hugh Thomas, in the treatment of compound fractures, the mortality rate could be brought down from 80 per cent to 20 per cent. It seems odd to us now to imagine that a broken leg could kill you, but on the battlefields of the Great War, it frequently did. The femur is the longest bone in the body and the muscles surrounding it are correspondingly strong. When the femur breaks, the muscles contract, pulling the bone ends past each other, causing additional injury, dangerous loss of blood, nerve damage and a lot of pain. Jones’s idea was to use traction to ensure that the two broken pieces of bone were held end to end so healing could take place. It was a brilliantly successful treatment and saved countless lives at Highclere and throughout the war. The patients who benefited were so grateful and so conscious of others’ needs that they frequently returned their splints to Almina’s hospital once they were done with them.

  Almina and her team got to December before having to deal with someone dying in their care, which suggests that someone at Southampton docks was making the right decisions about whom to prioritise for their attention. Robert Jones left Highclere, having instructed Lady Carnarvon and Dr Johnnie, who assisted at numerous operations, how to carry out the more straightforward procedures themselves. The next eminent medical man to come down to the hospital was Hector Mackenzie. He was a renowned specialist in chest surgery but, despite all his best efforts, one of the patients he operated on, a man called Thompson, died. When it became clear that her patient was not going to recover, Almina sent a wire to his daughter and invited her to come to stay at Highclere. Agnes Thompson wrote to Almina later. ‘I will never forget my few days’ visit to Highclere and that I saw the death of Daddy and the very kind treatment that he received from your hands. I do hope you are feeling better … you looked very ill.’

  The family spent Christmas 1914 at Highclere. Almina did her best to decorate the house and create a special Christmas for everyone. There was the usual enormous Christmas tree in the Saloon, beautiful winter flowers scattered on the tables and garlands of greenery. The visitor book records that the house was full to bursting with wounded soldiers as well as a few close friends. Those who could leave the house attended services at the village church, along with the entire household, from the nurses, who would not be taking any holiday, to the maids and estate staff. The kitchen staff had been preparing for a celebratory dinner for days. Lord Carnarvon’s worries about securing enough food for the hospital were getting more acute, but this was not the day for stinting, and Streatfield and his team of footmen served the patients soups, then roast goose followed by a plum pudding, in the north Library. Lord and Lady Carnarvon joined them in the Library afterwards and they shared a brandy in front of the fire.

  Out on the Western Front, there was a strange meeting taking place, an event that has assumed an almost mythic status. It began when German and British soldiers called out Happy Christmas to each other across No Man’s Land. Tentatively, disbelieving, the soldiers negotiated their own totally unofficial truce for a day. Unarmed soldiers from both sides went over the top to collect their dead and
, when they met in the bog of blood and mud that lay between them, they shook hands and agreed to bury their fallen comrades together. Somebody suggested a game of football. Provisions were produced and exchanged: sauerkraut and sausages for chocolate. That night, as the men at Highclere thanked their lucky stars they were tucked up in warm beds, comfortably full of brandy and pudding, the sound of ‘Silent Night’ being sung in German and English rose from the trenches. For almost twenty-four hours there was peace on the Western Front.

  It was the tiniest respite. The first battle of Ypres in October and November had left the British Expeditionary Force scrambling to adapt its tactics in the face of morale-devastating losses. The following year, 1915, was set to deliver loss of life on an even greater scale.

  At Highclere, Lord Carnarvon invited a few friends, including the stalwart Victor Duleep Singh to stay on for a week between Christmas and New Year. There is a dejected scrawl in the visitors’ book. ‘Seeing the New Year in … the saddest and most trying owing to the awful war.’

  In early January the household readied itself for the arrival of more patients. Most of the twenty men who arrived for treatment were from the 9th Bhopal Infantry and the 8th Gurkha Rifles, but not all of them. In a letter to Winifred, Lord Carnarvon related the story of one patient, a sailor, who had arrived in the first week of January. The man was called S. W. Saxton, and he had had an extraordinary escape. He had been serving on HMS Formidable, which was out on exercises on New Year’s Day when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. As the ship went down, Saxton clung to the propeller, despite his injuries and the immense waves, strong winds and hail that threatened to wash him away. When he lost his grip on the blades of the propeller, his instinct to swim pushed him to head for a distant trawler boat, but when he eventually made it, he found he was totally incapable of hauling himself up the side of the boat. He was about to give up and let himself drown when a huge wave caught him up and swept him on deck. Saxton arrived at Almina’s hospital with broken bones, shock and hypothermia – but he was one of the lucky ones. The Formidable was the first dreadnought sunk in the war, and only 199 men of the 750 on board were saved.