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

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  Almina washed and dressed David’s foot every day, and came at mealtimes to check that he had everything he needed. The excellent nursing paid off – after a week he was encouraged to go and sit outside and then he progressed to crutches. Some friends came to visit and hardly recognised him because his frame was so shrunken and his face so hollow from the effects of the dysentery and the mental fatigue. But he was healing in mind as well as body. He wrote to his family, ‘there can be no better solace than to wander over the cool green grass and sit under the cedars.’

  Actually, David wasn’t quite right about that. One lucky patient received even greater solace, in the form of the attentions of Highclere’s sweetheart, a particularly pretty auburn-haired nurse. Porchy, by that time a seventeen-year-old schoolboy who had fallen slightly in love with her himself, delighted in recounting the story of how one evening, on her patrols, Almina stumbled across the fortunate Major George Paynter, from the Scots Guards, in the nurse’s embrace. Almina tactfully withdrew from the bedroom, but the following morning she called the nurse to see her. Apparently, Almina’s championing of holistic care had its limits. ‘Look here, my dear, I’m afraid you’ll have to go. I cannot have my nurses behaving in this fashion. It must have put a great strain on the patient’s heart. He might have died as a result!’ The flame-haired beauty left, much to the patients’ sorrow.

  David was soon considered well enough to be discharged, and was ordered to appear before the Army Medical Board on 4 November. He was loath to leave Highclere, but he had to make way for other patients and report to the authorities. He was given one month’s leave before he had to report again, so he set off for Ireland. The journey proved to be too much too soon for his foot and he ended up back in hospital in Dublin. David spent a month there before he was discharged and finally made it home, but it was only two weeks before he received another telegram telling him to attend for assessment by the Medical Board. This time David was passed fit and ordered to report to the Irish Rifles for active duties immediately.

  13

  Hospital on the Move

  Christmas 1915 arrived and Almina had no spare energy to devote to festivities. The hospital was a success: she could see the good it was doing her patients; could read the gratitude in their letters. She was training a select band of nurses, engaging the most eminent doctors of the day to perform pioneering operations that saved countless lives. She had the means to enable her staff to treat all their charges with every possible care and attention. She was gaining the respect of the Southern Command of the military authorities, who came to trust her judgement completely – so that if she said a man was not yet well enough to attend the Medical Board, they believed her. By any account, Almina’s hospital at Highclere was thriving; she knew for certain that she had found her life’s work. Still, she was exhausted and frustrated that she couldn’t do more. And there was nothing but bad news, from all directions.

  Reports of another Highclere death had filtered back. George Cox, a groom, had been killed at Ypres back in May but it had taken six months for the authorities to inform his mother. There had been no system in place for registering casualties when the war started, and the scale of the losses meant that it wasn’t until the end of 1915 that what became, two years later, the Imperial War Graves Commission managed to establish a workable system. Following the French government’s gift of land for war cemeteries for Allied soldiers on the Western Front, the task of logging graves began. Army chaplains had used bottles containing slips of paper with the soldier’s name scrawled on it to mark graves, and these could now be replaced by wooden crosses. George Cox’s body had lain in the fields of France for six months while his mother waited with dwindling hope for news, but none of that deterred two more Highclere men from joining up.

  Maber and Absalon were both gamekeepers who elected to join the newly centralised Machine Gun Corps. They handled guns every day of their working lives, so were presumably regarded as an asset. Despite the strategic failures, the lack of progress and the morale-sapping casualty rate, the public mood at the end of 1915 was still determined. There was, as yet, no shortage of recruits.

  But the last few months had been depressing for even the most vehement and positive patriot. On the Western Front the Allies had lost nearly 90,000 men compared to the Germans’ 25,000, and Sir John French, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, continued to dither and to fall out with both his own colleagues and the French command. In December he was recalled to Britain and replaced by Sir Douglas Haig.

  It was the same story in the Dardanelles. Kitchener finally gave permission to evacuate; ironically, that part of the operation was the only success story, with relatively few casualties. But the ANZAC and the Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces lost nearly 35,000 men between them, up to 70 per cent in some regiments, and total casualties – including the horrific effects of illness – were close to half a million. The whole thing was such a disaster that it triggered the collapse of the Liberal government. Winston Churchill, who had been one of the Gallipoli campaign’s principal and earliest cheerleaders, was forced to resign his position at the Admiralty. As Secretary of State for War, Kitchener was hit hard by these two failures and the great hero never recovered his reputation for invincibility. The country was at a desperately low ebb.

  One of the few bright spots for Almina was her relationship with her daughter. Almina had been getting a lot of help and support that year from Lady Evelyn. She was fourteen in 1915 and still being educated at home by her governess. She missed Porchy, who was away at Eton, terribly; although unlike her brother, Eve was close to both her parents. She often tried to mediate between her brother and her parents but with only limited success. As Winifred commented in another of her letters to her husband, Lord Burghclere, ‘Almina was a genius when organising a hospital, but not so with her first-born.’

  But then, Eve presented none of the difficulties that Porchy did. She was more diffident, so she didn’t rub her flamboyant mother up the wrong way. They had a tremendous amount in common since they both enjoyed parties and fashion and possessed a restless energy that meant neither of them could sit still for long. Almina and Porchy, on the other hand, clashed partly because they were such wilful personalities, who both liked to be the centre of attention. Eve was also harder working and more scholarly than her charming but feckless brother, and had a genuine enthusiasm and curiosity about her father’s explorations in Egypt that Porchy never shared. Perhaps the weight of expectation on both sides was also a little less, since Eve would not inherit. Whatever it was, she was never short of family affection. Lord Carnarvon doted on her throughout his life, as did Porchy, and she and Almina adored each other. They looked remarkably similar; Eve was tiny, just fractionally more than five foot tall and very slim. She grew up to be a beautiful girl, all rosebud lips, high cheekbones and dark eyes.

  When war was declared and her mother decided to make the Castle into a hospital, Eve was plunged into a very different routine from the one she had enjoyed in her girlhood years. Rather than quiet days at lessons and occasional expeditions to town with her mother to see Alfred and visit the Wallace Collection, where her grandfather was a trustee, she found herself living in a house full of grievously injured soldiers. The atmosphere could change from tense to triumphant, depending on how well things were going in the operating theatre or how many names of friends there were on The Times’s daily list of casualties. It was a sharp jolt out of a very privileged life and forced Eve to grow up fast. Almina’s philosophy of the desirability of public service extended to her daughter’s leisure time. Once she’d done her lessons, Eve used to help Almina on her rounds, chatting to the patients and doing basic nursing tasks. This sweet pretty girl was understandably a great favourite of the patients. One of them had smuggled an Alsatian puppy back from France with him, which he gave to Eve. The dog slept in her room on the second floor of the Castle and became absolutely devoted to her. Eve was a good horsewoman and often went out riding
in the Park with the head stable man, Arthur Hayter. The puppy always went with her, racing to keep up.

  Even Lady Evelyn’s assistance couldn’t conceal the fact that Highclere was reaching the limits of what it could achieve. The team of Almina, Dr Johnnie and Mary Weekes, backed up by Streatfield and Mrs Macnair, was running at maximum efficiency, but Almina was still tortured by the sense that she needed to do more. By the beginning of December she had decided that they had outgrown Highclere and it was time to move the hospital to London. She could have converted the downstairs rooms into huge wards, of course, and been able to house up to twenty men in each, but she was convinced that a great part of her success hinged on the fact that the nurse-to-patient ratio was high, and the men had the luxury of peace and personal space. The hospital was run as a personal labour of love and she wanted it to stay that way. It would be a wrench: there was something uniquely healing about Highclere. Almina was particularly sorry to lose the wonderful gardens and the abundant supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, so she decided that her new premises would at least have access to a garden, and that she would continue to source food from Highclere and have it sent up to the hospital.

  Almina secured the lease on 48 Bryanston Square, a delightful town house in Mayfair overlooking a peaceful garden behind railings. The Cadogan Trustees noted in their minutes that ‘they were loath to entertain the application’ from Lady Carnarvon but, if they declined it, the War Office might use their powers to commandeer the premises. So they agreed to Almina’s request. The house had two distinct advantages over Highclere: specialist doctors were never more than half an hour away, and it could be far better equipped to treat a wider range of injuries than the Castle ever could. Almina installed a lift, a purpose-built operating theatre and an X-ray machine. Then she transferred all her staff from the country up to town and put them under the charge of Sister Macken, the head matron.

  The London hospital was not only going to be better, it was also going to be bigger: Almina sacrificed her cherished notion of individual bedrooms in order to double capacity. There were now 40 patients at a time, with some single rooms but, more usually, two to four men to a room, and she gave the mini-wards the same names as the Highclere bedrooms: Stanhope, Sussex, Arundel, and so on. It still felt to the patients like a home away from home, with comfortable beds, the best-quality bed linen and spare pyjamas and clothes until their families could send their own. Almina continued to make liaison with family a priority, sending telegrams and letters with regular updates when patients were themselves unable to do so. True to her vision for the new hospital, the men could spend time in the residents’ garden in the square, and they still dined on the vegetables and cheeses sent up every day from Highclere.

  The London hospital had barely opened when it was honoured by visits from two of Almina’s earliest supporters. On January 4 Lord Kitchener came to inspect the new premises and pronounced himself very impressed. Two weeks later, Sister Keyser, who had been instrumental in providing inspiration and advice at the start of the war, also came. Almina was almost bursting with pride as she took her guests around the building.

  The Castle returned to something approaching normal life, except of course that even if the hospital had gone, the war was still raging. The nurses had transferred to town, as had Mary Weekes, but Dr Johnnie was based between London and Highclere. Almina had engaged the additional services of Dr Sneyd for Bryanston Square. Streatfield, Mrs Macnair and the rest of the staff stayed at Highclere – after the frantic pace of the last sixteen months, they well deserved to take a breather. Lady Evelyn and Lord Carnarvon would continue to live between their house in Berkeley Square and Highclere, and Almina visited for weekends when she could take them. There would be precious little grand entertaining for the foreseeable future, but of course the Carnarvons had no desire to see anybody let go, so the staff simply had fewer jobs to do.

  It was a sad crowd of mostly women who kept up appearances at Highclere during 1916. All the talk in the servants’ hall was of the war, and of the fortunes of the Highclere men in particular. Florence, one of the housemaids, had left because she had married the gardener Tommy Hill. They had planned to make a different sort of life. Now she was terrified that her Tommy was going to enlist and she didn’t think she could stand it if he did. They had been married for less than two years and Florence wanted to start a family.

  The only news that filtered back was of those on the casualty list or killed in action. There was always tension between the sincere sense that sacrifice was required from everyone and the entirely natural terror of losing a loved one. The public’s stomach for sacrifice varied throughout the war, with a general feeling of revulsion growing over time. Blessedly, Florence couldn’t know that Tommy would be caught up in the events of 1916 that tipped the mood of the nation into furious despair.

  Another long-running romance between staff members came to a happy end later in the year. Minnie Wills had been working her way up through the kitchen ranks since 1902, when she had started as the most junior maid. By 1916 she was the cook, first at Highclere, and then, when Almina moved the hospital to London, at 48 Bryanston Square. Minnie wore a long white apron over her uniform and a tidy white cap, and swore by the powers of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management: A Guide to Cookery in All Branches. Having reached the pinnacle of her profession, she decided that now was the moment to accept Arthur Hayter’s proposal of marriage. After the wedding they left the Carnarvons’ service and bought a pub. The female staff at Highclere were all delighted for her but said it was such a shame that it wasn’t a restaurant: they couldn’t visit her in a pub as they were very much men-only places.

  The urge to join up gripped Porchy just as much as it did Tommy. In early 1916, Porchy was only seventeen, but he was absolutely desperate to leave Eton and enrol at Sandhurst. Both Lord and Lady Carnarvon had grave misgivings on the grounds of his age, but their son was insistent and they also felt it was wrong to try to dissuade him from doing his duty. Porchy went to take the entrance exam and scraped through every subject except maths, which he failed spectacularly. It was mentioned that Lord Kitchener was a close friend of the family and, mysteriously, Porchy’s shortcomings seemed to fade from sight. So he went off to Sandhurst and left his sister and parents fretful on his behalf. Porchy was destined to be a cavalry officer, which was fortunate since he had fallen arches and flat feet.

  Almina needed the distractions of work more than ever and flung herself into life at Bryanston Square. She had brought much of the hospital equipment from Highclere and spent her own money on topping it up with more beds, linens and crockery. But Alfred was continuing to pay for staff costs, both for the nurses and the household staff. There was a cook, a dozen maids and several footmen. Even more crucially, he supplied more reserves to install the state-of-the-art equipment and essential medical supplies that Almina needed to save more lives.

  Alfred was by this time a broken man. He had been something of a hypochondriac all his life but now he was genuinely suffering. He was plagued by the combined effects of years of high living and emotional fatigue. He had been sick at heart ever since the declaration of war, and nothing that had happened since had done anything to relieve his gloom. His closely knit but far-flung extended family had found themselves on opposing sides, just as he feared. There were branches of the Rothschilds in central Europe that were now lost to him, and the world in which he had lived his life – the banks, the family holidays with Continental cousins and the social whirl – had been comprehensively destroyed.

  Alfred’s only consolation was his support for the Allies’ war work. Later in the year, once the bloodbath of the Somme got under way, he offered the glorious beech trees from Halton House to the Timber Control Board, to be used as props in the waterlogged trenches of northern France. For now, he concentrated on maintaining Almina’s hospital.

  Almina’s X-ray machine was her pride and joy. X-rays had been discovered in 1895 and their relevance to military
surgeons was immediately obvious: being able to locate a bullet precisely without messy interventions was incalculably useful. Bryanston Square now had the means to carry out cutting-edge procedures on fractures and gunshot wounds. There was no shortage of patients in need.

  In February, the Battle of Verdun, which eventually claimed 306,000 lives, got under way, and a man called Bates arrived at Almina’s hospital. Harold Bates was a padre, an Army chaplain, a reserved and stoical person who, even forty years later, refused to discuss what he had seen and done in the Great War. He had been on the Western Front since August 1914 when he was sent out with the 6th Division. At some point late in 1915 he was wounded at Ypres, shot in the leg.

  There have been Army chaplains for as long as there have been armies, but their role expanded, of necessity, in the Great War. For the first time in history, large numbers of men were living on the battlefield in atrocious conditions, for weeks and months at a time. They were in desperate need of comfort and guidance, and the padres, while being unarmed non-combatants, were often in the thick of the horror. Clearly Mr Bates was close enough to take a hit, and quite a nasty one, since he ended up spending seven months in Almina’s care at Bryanston Square. He was a dedicated churchman who went on to serve the Church of England until his death in the 1960s.

  At the hospital he carried out his duties with determination and dignity, accompanying Almina on her rounds from the moment he was able to get out of bed and limp. Despite the X-ray machine, the operation and excellent nursing, Bates, who was a tall, broad man, was lame for the rest of his life. He used a stick and always struggled with stairs. When he was finally well enough to leave the hospital, he was discharged from the Army. He was an excellent padre, but his days of wading through mud to comfort injured soldiers were behind him. He had got out just in time.